Total Recall - Ghosts part 1
Monday, August 7th, 2017 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ossobucorenshai. This one gives some more of Lena's backstory, plus how she actually, y'know, ends up back with new!Overwatch in the first place.Fandom: Overwatch (mostly)
Characters in this bit: Lena McCarroll, Jack Morrison
Word count: 2630
Rating: Soft teen for swearing and punching
Summary: Mercenary company boss (and former Overwatch brat) Lena McCarroll is unexpectedly, and unintentionally, rescued from police custody.
Also here @ AO3, here @ tumblr.
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Well, thought Lena McCarroll, handcuffed in the back of the Stilwater PD armored van, the Saints are not likely to bail me out of this one.
It was her own stupid fault, what had happened—picking a fight with a couple of gang members operating well outside of where she usually let them, and not paying enough attention when the police sirens started up in the distance. She wondered, as the vehicle accelerated from the city grid onto the freeway out of town, if this was how Jack Morrison had felt when the Blackwatch scandals had started breaking, knowing that you had irretrievably fucked up and there was no way to dodge the consequences.
She wondered if this was how Gabriel Reyes had felt when her mom had died under his watch.
She and Max had been in the rec room when the call had come in—when a chilling silence had fallen over the whole compound, and Commander Morrison and Captain Amari had run to the command center faster than if death were on their heels. In the end, it was Ana who broke the news, probably since she’d been such a close friend of the now-deceased operatives Maddie McCarroll and Lilah Eshkibog.
It felt like how she imagined being shot in the stomach would feel, agony and emptiness all at once, and at the mercy of adults who knew the facts of what had happened and who wanted to help, but who couldn’t come close to understanding how much it hurt. They debated whether to try and find a relative for her to live with, or send her to a boarding school, and couldn’t understand what Maddie must have wanted for her, training her in marksmanship as soon as her hands were big enough to hold a gun, teaching her hand-to-hand combat and tactics and rules of engagement alongside the subjects in their homeschooling packets. She thought Commander Reyes would understand, he had always seemed to know them best, aside from their moms—but just like the rest, he was ready to send her packing, and in a few short weeks, both she and Max were boarding planes destined for opposite sides of North America—Lena to the Recruit Depot in San Diego, Max to a military academy in South Dakota.
Basic training came and went, then Marine Combat Training, then MOS school—all of which she excelled at in their physical and technical aspects, while earning the perpetual ire (and not infrequent disciplinary action) of almost every one of her superiors. At every milestone or ceremony, a part of her still hoped that someone from the old crew might appear out of the crowd, maybe even invite her back as an official recruit—and for months after her first deployment, she imagined all the faces that she’d grown up thinking of as family and wondered how long they’d wait to come and find her again.
She and Max wrote to each other as often as they could, at least for a while; Max’s last letter came about eight months after they’d been sent away, ending with the postscript, “don’t go anywhere” (not that Lena had been planning to), and after that—nothing. Lena wrote a few more times, but her best friend had vanished, just like their mothers.
Then, only a few months later, the news broke that Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes had been killed and Overwatch HQ destroyed, and the organization was buried so deep in scandals (some that she couldn’t imagine were true, others that she’d known about first-hand) that the commanders would’ve wished they were dead anyway. Lena found herself losing interest in military life when it looked like it would be her whole career, rather than a kind of temporary holdover until she could go back to the life she’d actually wanted.
She was dishonorably discharged a few months after the Petras Act passed.
Briefly, she entertained ideas of trying to locate Max, or Jesse McCree, or any of the other agents she figured she could trust, but she had no money, no fuel, nowhere permanent to stay—she had to focus on finding steady work. As it turned out, there were plenty of mercenary companies who didn’t ask why you’d been discharged as long as you knew how to handle a gun, and if nothing else, the work was a welcome distraction from (and, at times, an effective outlet for) the bitterness and anger and aching loneliness of knowing she’d been left behind.
Between jobs and the occasional impromptu shootout, life with the Third Street Saints was surprisingly relaxed. They were closer to a street gang than to mercs in most respects, at least until she came around—it wasn’t difficult to work her way up the ranks, given her sharpshooting skills and tactical knowledge. Before long, the other lieutenants were looking to her for instruction, and damned if it didn’t feel good to be respected.
As the Saints’ unofficial leader, nobody expressed objection to her picking up outside work on occasion, as long as she kept a lower profile. Her kill count increased, as did her asking price, and between this and the Saints’ suddenly becoming a major player in the east coast’s mercenary economy, just as many people wanted her jailed or dead as wanted to hire her. Avoiding the police wasn’t difficult, and most of the enemies she made could be neutralized one way or another as long as she was careful. But now and then, there were signs that someone (or something) else had entered the picture—a team of two or three tailing her so well that she almost didn’t notice them until she was mere blocks from the Saints’ penthouse, or an ambush on a paid job that was definitely neither rival mercs nor legitimate soldiers, and who used tactics that were nothing like police or military and everything like what her mama and Max’s mama and Gabriel Reyes used to discuss before missions when they thought she was sleeping soundly in her bed.
The fact was that Lena should have had the foresight necessary to avoid scenarios like this one, and yet, here she was being driven to lockup, with two disheveled Los Muertos lieutenants strapped in (and quite understandably panicked) beside her.
The cuffs on her wrists and ankles were too strong to break with brute force, not that it was prudent to try while in militarized police custody. They’d managed to find and confiscate all of her weapons, too, so she couldn’t even try to jimmy the latches with a knife. Resigning herself to captivity was about as far from her nature as possible, but there was no immediate way out. The cops were all up front in the cab, well out of reach, and besides, she didn’t really want to kill them if she didn’t have to. It’d just make her life more difficult.
So, she sat in relative quiet in the back of the van, chains jingling as the vehicle rattled along the empty highway towards one of the few facilities in the state that had been deemed secure enough to hold her.
They were about an hour out of the city, rumbling through rolling hills of pockmarked red dirt, when the van skidded and shuddered to a sudden halt, the metal frame groaning, everyone inside jerking forward.
Lena couldn’t see anything from her narrow view out the windshield, but the cops all drew their weapons, their eyes trained on one target in front of the truck—a moment later, visible panic crossed their faces.
“Oh, shit, it’s him—”
The driver’s side door was ripped open, and then there was an ear-splitting hail of bullets in the cab. Lena turned as flat against the wall as she could, ducking her head, but the spray was targeted—it didn’t seem like the attacker had interest in anyone other than the cops, at least not yet. Through the ringing in her ears, she could hear return fire, then vaguely detect the sounds of punches and kicks against body armor, occasionally a grunt or cry when a blow landed on flesh. She chanced a look.
The driver and one of the guards were lying still and bloody on the floor of the cab. Likely they’d both been caught in the initial spray, guns drawn but with no time to use them. A pump shotgun lay next to the pedals, far out of her reach, but a pistol had fallen and bounced a little closer, and maybe, if she stretched just right—
The two Los Muertos boys jumped and cursed when she fired at the chain linking her ankles to the floor, but she couldn’t have cared less about them anymore—two shots were enough to split the chain, and then she was out of the van and into the glaring white sunlight, pistol clutched in her still-cuffed hands. Half-blind, she staggered two steps towards the far side of the road.
Something—someone—hit her from the side like a speeding truck. The force knocked her clean off of her feet and just about sent her flying, but she tucked her head and converted the momentum into a roll. She’d dropped her gun, but her assailant had also lost his at some point, and she sprinted to him before he could pick it up—she spun a roundhouse kick into the side of his ribcage that should have knocked him flat, but it hardly even staggered him. Another kick, which he deflected like it was a child’s flailing, and he went immediately for a cross—she weaved, but she must not have been fast enough because the next thing she knew, she was flat on the ground, and the man was going again for his rifle—
She locked her legs around his ankle just in time and twisted. He fell heavy and hard, and now she was on her feet, and she jammed an elbow at the side of his head as he scrambled to stand. He turned it to one side, so she spun and struck with the other, and as he threw both hands up to block it with his palms, he growled, “Lena?”
The sound of her name in that curt, gravelly voice clicked. It was Morrison. Commander Jack fucking Morrison.
“You dead motherfucker,” she spat, and went in for another hit.
“Easy, McCarroll,” he grunted as he jerked away, throwing his forearms up in pure defense, “it’s me—”
“I know it’s you, you goddamn son of a bitch.” She feinted, then elbowed him square in the left lower jaw so hard that, this time, he staggered back. She had half a mind to kick his legs out from under him for good measure, but held back the urge, more or less content with the sight of him reeling a little and testing his jaw to make sure it wasn’t broken.
Lena could recall only scattered gray in the former Overwatch commander’s blond hair, but now it was all silvery-white and growing thin on the top of his head. Beneath the visor that covered his eyes and much of his face, his skin was wrinkled and scarred, the once-sharp lines of his face beginning to sag. He looked twenty years older than the man she remembered, which would have been surprising enough on its own, except…
“Everyone thinks you’re dead,” she snapped.
Jack bent to pick up his assault rifle and grunted quietly as he straightened back up. “Good.”
That left her almost as gobsmacked as his right cross. “Good?” she repeated a second later, and maybe just finding out that he’d cheated death and been hiding all this time was forgivable, but that he was so fucking blasé about it? “The actual fuck, Morrison? You and Reyes ship me off to fucking boot camp and you just leave me there while you go and blow each other up, and all you’ve got for me is ‘good’?”
“You were too young to understand,” he growled, “disappearing was the only way I could keep doing what had to be done—”
“What, like killing cops and stealing Helix tech? You’ve been all over the goddamn news, and I swear to god, if I’d known that was you—”
“You’d have turned me in? Told them how to get to me?”
“I’d have hunted you down my-fucking-self,” she snapped, and now that she’d raised her voice, she couldn’t bring it back down—it felt good to yell at him after so many years. “Hell, I should bring you in right now! Abandoning Max at that piece of shit school? Do you even fucking care that she disappeared—”
“You still don’t understand,” he dismissed, turning his back, and as if that weren’t enough to make Lena see red, “there are more important things—”
She was not going to let him just walk away from her. He was making a beeline for a beat-up motorcycle that lay on the ground in front of the van. She ran beside him; if her hands hadn’t still been bound, she would have grabbed him, but all she could do was keep shouting.
“Did you even know that she’s gone? Who else was supposed to look out for her, our moms? Oh, wait.” He didn’t stop, so she jostled his side as she kept pace. “What’s so fucking important that you couldn’t even keep an eye on us? Are you gonna tell me that Reyes faked his death, too?”
That one actually made Jack flinch, and she relished just a little in seeing him turn his head away. Behind him, the narrow road rippled in the heat, the dry sagebrush shivered on the rolling red hills.
Jack sighed. “Go get your gun, McCarroll.”
“Are we gonna shoot this out?” The pistol glittered like a diamond in the sun where it had fallen out of her hands. “Do you want a five second head start?”
Jack said nothing, for which she was a little grateful. Likely, if he’d responded, she’d be right back to yelling at him.
She crouched by one of the cop’s bodies and fished in his pockets for a handcuff key—not easy while cuffed, but it wasn’t the first time, and she suddenly had to wonder, did Jack have any idea what she’d been up to all this time (apart from finding her in police custody, which was a completely inaccurate representation of the last few years, thank you very much)? She couldn’t see his eyes, but she could feel him watching from behind the visor like the sun beating down on them. It was like being watched by a machine, and made her even less inclined to turn her back.
Once the cuffs were off, she chucked the key ring into the van—the two other prisoners could sort themselves out. She grabbed the pistol, checked the magazine (about half full, but better than being totally unarmed), and looked back expectantly.
“C’mere,” he grunted as he lifted the bike and straddled it. He sounded about as thrilled about the idea as Lena felt as he added, “get on.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Not gonna tell you twice, McCarroll.”
The way he barked her surname was a little like her old drill instructor, but with the memory overlaid of what Jack used to call her mother. Not with the same grouchiness or impatience, of course, he wouldn’t have dared—but it was just close enough to make Lena want to bite her cheek. She slung one leg over the motorcycle and grabbed onto Jack’s waist.
“Dropping me off at the nearest police station?” she jabbed.
“We’re going to the new Overwatch HQ.” He lifted the kickstand and started the engine. “Winston initiated a recall.”
no subject
Date: Tuesday, August 8th, 2017 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, August 9th, 2017 04:17 am (UTC)I, too, wish I'd written them in a sensible order... this is the piece I've been repeatedly complaining about, and my history with writing is such that I didn't want to wait on part 2 on the chance I never was able to finish this one at all. Thank you for reading them anyway!
no subject
Date: Wednesday, August 9th, 2017 06:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Saturday, August 12th, 2017 07:15 pm (UTC)