The Overwatch vampire AU fic!
TW: vampires, blood, non-consensual sexy biting
***
Jack groans and feels
cold stone against his face. Tries to remember why he’s lying down and
aching like a horse kicked him in the back. His mouth tastes of dirt: not
the good, clean earth of green growing things, but rotten, fouled like
graveyards and places gone too long without light or warmth.
He’s been doing this too
long, if that strikes him as normal.
Another groan beside
him, in a familiar voice, makes him open his eyes and try to push himself up.
His arms stay behind his back. Well. That explains a lot.
“Gabriel…?”
“Yeah. Shit.”
Gabriel sounds as strained and sore as Jack feels. Struggling up to
his knees without the use of his hands, Jack discovers that he’s chained to the
floor with hands bound behind his back, with just enough play to let him kneel
and rise no further. Gabriel is next to him, groggy and ungainly as
he too struggles upright, chained the same way Jack is. They’ve been stripped
of weapons; stripped of everything but their boots, trousers and undershirts.
The room they’re in is
small and old, built of rough-hewn stone worn smooth with age. It smells
like a graveyard. The dim light comes from torches—not gaslight but
actual pitch-soaked wooden flambeaus. As bad as things look for them,
Jack can’t resist curling his lip at the theatricality.
He spots the man
watching them when he moves. He’s silhouetted against the light of the
barred doorway, although he wasn’t there a second ago.
Attuned to one another
as always, Gabriel catches Jack’s flinch and tenses as he spots the cause.
It isn’t really a man, of course. They were hunting a vampire, but
it seems to have found them first.
“Where the fuck did you
come from?” Gabriel growls, more offended than afraid. He doesn’t mean
where it came from just now. Vampires are dangerous prey, intelligent as
any human and often moreso, with lifetimes of experience to draw on. But
as hunters go, Gabriel and Jack are as good as they come. Every hunter
fails eventually, and it usually means their deaths, but it burns that they
hadn’t seen this trap coming.
The vampire steps
forward and the light catches him. They’ve been stalking this one for a while,
but this is the first time they’ve seen him, at least in human form. He’s
dark of hair and eyes, with skin paler than Jack’s. Powerfully built, but
that hardly matters. He could be built like a twig and he’d still be able
to throw a horse. He smiles at them, fangs long and menacing, arrogant
poise all but rippling in the air around him. “The infamous Reyes and
Morrison. You have been a menace to me.”
“Damn right,” Gabriel
answers, baring his teeth in return.
The vampire’s face
twists. Another step and he’s in front of them. He catches Jack by
the hair, forces his head up. Gabriel’s snarl clearly pleases him.
“Yes, it warms your hearts to hear that, I’m sure. You can consider
it a parting gift, then. It’s long past time that someone ends your
meddling.”
Jack tosses his head,
trying to shake off the touch that drifts exploringly down the contours of his
face and throat. The vampire simply tightens his grip till it threatens
to rip Jack’s hair out. At the collar of Jack’s shirt, he grabs and
wrenches. The rending cloth jerks Jack’s body as it tears off him.
Gabriel sucks in a
breath. Jack’s jaw tightens; they’re both beginning to suspect where this
was going. Vampires are sadists. It runs in the blood.
They’re at his mercy and he has no reason not to take his time.
“I’ve killed many
hunters,” the vampire murmurs, leaning down over him. “But you two have
been a plague on all my plans. For what you petty little mortals have
cost me, I think you deserve something more than death.”
Panic bubbles up.
Jack jerks at his bonds uselessly, trying to thrash out of the iron grip
the vampire holds him in. Next to him, Gabriel’s chains ring and clatter
in a duet, his rough voice hurling curses and profanities. There are
worse last things, Jack thinks as those fangs stoop down toward his neck, than
the sound of Gabriel’s voice.
“Hey, fuckwit,” Gabriel
snarls.
The vampire pauses.
He’s so close that Jack can feel him tense in surprise.
“Get your shitty hands
off my partner, you gaudy tick. And stop talking like you’re anything
more than a jumped-up grubby parasite. You’re not a conqueror.
You’re a leech in grandparent clothing.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Jack
hisses. Dread ties knots in his guts as he realizes what Gabe is trying
to do.
The vampire straightens
and releases Jack with a laugh. “I know what you’re doing. You
think it will change anything for either of you if I turn you instead of your
lover?” The pallid lip curls and he turns to grab Gabriel’s jaw, gripping
hard enough to blanch his dark skin. “Oh yes, I can smell you on him.
Do you think perhaps your love will protect
him?”
“Gabriel!” Jack throws
himself against his chains, ignoring the wrench in his wrists and shoulders.
“Let him go, goddammit!”
Gabriel just stares up
at the bastard with his teeth bared, such hostile challenge on his face that he
doesn’t need to say anything.
It’s an expression
that’s never failed to intimidate or piss off anyone Gabriel turned it on.
It doesn’t fail now. The vampire hisses in fury—an inhuman sound,
like a pot boiling over—and then pushes his mouth against Gabriel’s ear,
speaking just loud enough for them both to hear. “Do you know what I’m going to
do? I’m going to turn you. And then I’m going to leave you to each
other.”
Gabriel roars and
heaves, but the vampire ignores him like a fitful child. He pulls
Gabriel’s head back till his throat is taut and then bites down. Blood
spills instantly. The vampire doesn’t even bother drinking most of it,
just lets Gabriel’s blood pour and spread along the joints between the stones.
Jack can hear his own voice ringing off the walls, but he doesn’t know
what he’s saying. Gabriel’s beautiful face twists in anguish, and then a
moment later, horribly, in pleasure. His whole body quivers in a way that
makes Jack sob. The vampire forces him back till he’s on the floor.
After that, Gabriel can’t stop the moans.
It takes a long time.
After Jack has exhausted himself battering against his chains, ripped his
voice threadbare, all he can do is lie there and watch, on the floor next to
the man he loves only a few unreachable feet away.
Gabriel meets his eyes
for a while, till they slip closed. He mouths something, words meant only
for Jack, before his body goes slack under the vampire.
Jack keeps watching,
even when his sight blurs to uselessness and his own breaths tear at his throat
like claws.
But when the vampire
slits his own wrist and parts Gabriel’s lips to pour the blood into his mouth,
Jack turns his face into the bloodied stone floor.
Jack’s arms and
shoulders burn with every breath as though he tried to rip them off his body.
Blood tickles his fingers as it drips. His nerves are a red hot wire
strung inside his arms, searing and freezing. It’s a bad sign. He
doesn’t care.
Gabriel lies on his back
a few feet away, lifeless and still. Jack knows what a dead man looks
like, and he’s looking at one now.
But he won’t stay that
way.
After one rising and
setting of the sun, Gabriel will wake. His eyes will be red and lit with
a hellish light. He’ll be frenzied with hunger. His strength and
speed will be supernatural, but newly changed and confused by his own body and
senses, he’ll be as vulnerable as he’ll ever be again.
If it’s possible to
catch a vampire in that state, it’s the best time to kill them. Before
they can learn to use their power. Before they can escape into the world to do
damage. Before the demonic taint in the blood turns them entirely from the
person you loved with every fiber of your being into something monstrous.
It’s what Gabriel would
want.
The vampire did
something to their chains before he left. Eventually Jack tests them and
finds they come loose easily this time. He isn’t surprised. Their
captor wants to watch them kill each other. There’s not much in the way
of potential weaponry in the room, but there are the torches, heavy flaming
wooden staves thick with pitch. A perfect tool against a vampire, in the
right hands. And Jack has been killing vampires with great proficiency
for a long time.
He crawls over on bones
that feel ground to powder to rest his head on Gabriel’s horribly still
shoulder and wait.
In the intervening
hours, he daydreams. Remembers. Gabriel’s sleeping breaths
next to him. Gabriel’s laugh. The grumpy crinkle of his eyes when
he spilled beer into his beard and Jack laughed at him. The savage joy of
feeling Gabriel at his back in a fight, strong and immovable. The
sweetness of Gabriel’s body vibrant, warm and bare against his own. He’d
think of it as saying goodbye, if he could do that. He can’t. Half
his soul has been ripped away. When he kills Gabriel, he’ll be killing
them both. It’s a relief to think of it that way; better than thinking of
how he’ll be left here to live and breathe alone.
He knows it’s nearly
time when the vampire comes back. He doesn’t come into their cell this
time, just leans against the wall of the hallway so that he can watch what
they’ll do to each other.
Jack considers saying
something to him. Vowing his death maybe. But he’s empty of words.
If he survives this, that vampire will die, no matter what it takes.
Let him learn that truth at the moment of his excruciating end.
This close, he easily
spots the first flutter of Gabriel’s eyelashes. It’s time, then.
Getting up is excruciating. His beaten body howls at every movement, and
he has to literally rip himself away where Gabe’s drying blood glued Jack’s
cheek and hair to his chest. He takes a couple of unsteady steps back as
Gabriel opens his eyes and sits up, torchlight gleaming black across the dried
gore on his chest.
His eyes. Blood
red and glowing with a hellish light.
Gabriel sniffs the air,
catches the scent of Jack’s blood, and pauses. “…Jack?”
Jack’s heart breaks.
He feels it go. “Gabriel?” It isn’t true. He knows it,
but it’s a knife in his chest anyway.
“You’re…bleeding.
I.” A shudder wracks him. “I’m so hungry.”
He lunges so fast that
he’s a blur. The chains holding him shriek as they break, but they catch
at him enough to break his momentum. It gives Jack the time he needs to
get the torch down and deflect him. Even so, Gabriel’s blow is strong
enough to slam his shoulders against the wall. His body tries to seize up
from the pain; he wills himself not to just buckle to the floor. He hears
the vampire laugh from the doorway.
“Gabe, goddammit!”
His shoulders scream as he whirls the torch around him like a staff,
weaving a wall of flame that makes Gabriel flinch back with a wordless shout.
“It’s me.” Stupid thing to say.
Hollow. But Gabriel is still in there, still fighting, and Jack
aches to reach him, to touch him for just one more moment before the end.
“You smell so good,”
Gabriel whispers like it’s being forced out of him. “I want. Jack.
I need.” He takes a step forward and then a step back, panting as if he’s
just run a race. “I need you to do it now. Before I can’t stop.”
That’s when Jack knows
he can’t.
It’s a lurching,
staggering realization. Not all of him catches up to it at the same time.
He snaps the shaft of the torch across his knee, giving him a shorter
stake with something like a point on one end. He flips it in his hand to
hold it jagged end out and steps toward Gabriel…and then his body simply
stops.
He meets Gabriel’s eyes,
sees horror dawning in the hellfire. “Jack.”
He’s begging. He’s begging.
And Jack can’t move.
Of course he can’t. If he’d been able to kill Gabriel, he would
have done it in the hours they lay together in Gabriel’s drying blood. He
would have done it in the moments between Gabriel’s first waking twitches and
his rising. He draws in a shuddering, sobbing breath, and gives in to the
ache in his hands. The pieces of the torch clatter to the floor.
He’s failed. He’s
failed in the most important task he will ever face.
“God damn you,” Gabriel
whispers. His deep voice shakes with venomous sincerity.
“I suppose he will,”
Jack whispers back. Words burn in his ruined throat. He doesn’t
even have the right to say them, but he has to. “I’m sorry.”
“Not yet,” Gabriel
breathes. “Not yet, cariño. But you will
be.” Gabriel has tugged Jack into his arms so many times, but this time
his hands grip mercilessly hard, pull at him with whiplash ferocity. From
inches away, Jack watches the last light of the good man die in Gabriel’s eyes,
choked out by rage and betrayal.
Gabriel’s kiss is
brutal. Jack doesn’t resist, opening his mouth and not flinching as those
fangs cut at the insides of his lips till he tastes blood. Gabriel licks
it out of his mouth with a swipe of his tongue. His moan of pleasure
reverberates through Jack’s body and then Gabriel surges against him, drinking
from his mouth, shuddering. Jack discovers he’s crying when Gabriel
releases his mouth to lick at his tears. Jack closes his eyes and lets
him have all he likes.
Fingers lace into his
hair and then tighten, pulling his head back till he’s all but immobilized.
Jack shivers, remembering his hell from just a few hours ago—the hell
he’s still in, the hell he’s trapped them both in—but there’s nothing left in
him to fight with.
“God damn you,” Gabriel
murmurs again against the pulse point of his throat, and then he bites down.
Jack arches against him
with a strangled cry.
Hunters are taught to
avoid the vampire’s bite at all costs. It’s the most insidious of all
traps: once a man is caught in it, he no longer wants to escape.
“Gabriel,” Jack groans
despairingly, because Jack has never wanted to escape him.
But it hurts first, and
he welcomes it. It blends seamlessly with the black agony of regret in
his chest. He wants to apologize again, to keep repeating it until the
sheer force of it brands into the air and erases all this. He traps the
words behind his teeth because they’re a mockery of everything they’ve become
and all that’s happening. An attempt to deny his own fault in this.
It’s almost a relief when Gabriel wraps a powerful hand around his neck
and cuts off his air.
Gabriel uses the grip to
force Jack to his knees. His teeth tug dangerously in Jack’s throat as
they move together. It’s an invasive, threatening pain that fizzes in
Jack’s bloodstream and then spills over, flooding him in intoxicating waves.
He moans against Gabriel’s shoulder.
Gabriel straddles his
lap, keeps pushing him back till Jack’s shoulders touch the floor, pinned with
his back forced into an arch. Jack rolls his hips against him, unable to
stay still with that aching pleasure surging through him. Gabriel pulls
his teeth away to brush his lips against Jack’s ear, murmuring in a parody of
his lover’s voice. “It feels good, doesn’t it, Jack? Does it ease
your conscience, to know I’m not suffering?”
There’s nothing Jack can
do but wrap his arms around Gabriel and pull him close. Gabriel bites him again, just beneath his
collarbone where the swell of his chest begins. Jack rises up pleadingly
against him, fingers skidding against the bare curves of Gabriel’s shoulders.
Gabriel catches his wrists
and pins them to the floor.
“Beg me, Jack. Beg
me for more.”
Jack cries out and
writhes for him. He wants more. Each lick and swallow rolls through his veins,
pain followed by shattering pleasure. Even
more than that, he wants Gabriel—every touch, every lying wave of bliss, every dwindling
moment. He sucks down poison because it
tastes like his lover and begs Gabriel for more, begs for Gabriel to stop.
Gabriel laughs bitterly and carves
retribution into Jack’s flesh with one ecstatic bite after another till crescent marks cover his shoulders, throat and chest,
blood trickling over his skin like butterfly kisses.
He’s going to die.
Gabriel is going to kill him this way and it’ll be no more than he
deserves, but something in him splits open with rot at the thought of Gabriel
left alone like this, with no one to help him.
Gabriel knows his mind, because
he always knows. “You’re just the first, Jack. There will be so many
others after you. How does it feel, to know you could have saved them?
You could have stopped this.”
It feels like having his
heart ripped out. Jack lies beneath his partner, panting and shaking.
Everything’s gone airy, fuzzy at the edges. How how much blood has
Gabe taken? He shakes with the force of wanting him to take more. Jack
squeezes his eyes shut, because if Gabriel let him up right now, he would stay
right here. Where the fuck else would he
ever want to be?
Above him, Gabriel
exhales, deep and hard, his breath shaking with rage and… Jack opens his
eyes a little to see Gabriel’s face is twisted with grief.
Jack pushes against
Gabriel’s grip on his wrists, instinctively trying to reach for him.
“Gabe. Please.”
Gabriel doesn’t let him
up. He stares down at Jack, a terrible hopelessness on his face, and
gives a full body shudder. Then he lifts one hand to bite at his own
palm.
Jack’s eyes go wide.
Horror spills over inside him. “No…” He hates himself for
saying it, for refusing what Gabriel’s already had to suffer.
Gabriel hates him for it
too. The venom in his laugh will haunt Jack’s nightmares. “You’ll
watch, Jack,” he whispers. “You’ll watch what I become. What I do.
If you won’t stop me then you’ll suffer with me.” He lowers his
hand to seal his palm over Jack’s mouth. “Drink.”
He can’t refuse, and
Gabriel knows it. He can’t leave Gabriel alone like this; can’t do that
to him along with everything else. Jack squeezes his eyes shut, and then
immediately opens them again. He can’t bring himself to look away.
Holding Gabriel’s eyes, he parts his lips and lets the blood spill in.
Lets Gabriel mark him as his own.
Gabriel’s face twists in
agony. They’re both damned.
It hits his tongue and
pours into his body, a poison that feels like the breath of life with each
swallow. The air is crystalline. The scents are clouds that almost have
their own color. He can feel the injuries knitting and fading from his
body, but most of all he’s aware of Gabriel. He can feel him from the
inside out.
He could die happy like
this, the two of them pouring into each other till there’s no separation left
between them. How many times have they wished for this?
Laughter.
It’s ugly, arrogant.
Not his. Or Gabe’s. He turns his head dreamily, follows
Gabriel’s glowing eyes toward the torchlit corridor. The vampire.
He’d forgotten about him.
Gabriel’s face darkens
like a thundercloud. A part of Jack manages to nudge through his
enthrallment to note that Gabriel’s face actually darkens,
a dark mist rising like living shadow around him. He pushes himself up
from Jack and starts toward the doorway, violence in every line of him.
He doesn’t even slow down for the bars; simply stalks right through them,
spreading into a blur and solidifying again on the other side.
Jack rolls over and
reaches for the improvised stake he dropped. His head is still cloudy
with Gabriel’s influence, but like hell he’ll let Gabriel kill that
motherfucker alone.
The vampire tries to
run. Gabriel streaks after him and pounces like a wildcat. They
roll around on the floor, hissing and snarling, till Jack sees his opening and
takes it, driving the wooden shaft into the vampire’s heart from behind.
A vicious thrust pierces the ribcage, and he takes his time driving it further
in increments, a few inches at a time till it’s fully impaled the heart.
Gabriel holds the vampire in an iron grip from beneath him, keeping him
from escaping while he howls and thrashes.
When it’s done, Gabriel
kicks the shriveling body off him. It crumbles into charcoal-like pieces
as it strikes the wall.
Jack holds his hand down
to help him up—Gabriel feels so light now, his blood boosting Jack’s strength beyond
normal human limits—and then they stand there, looking down at the remains of
their torturer. Killer, Jack guesses.
After a bit, Gabriel
turns around, and raises an eyebrow. The cell door is hanging crookedly,
torn off its hinges.
“Huh,” says Jack.
He can’t remember coming out of the room, but it was still intact when
Gabe walked through it. “I suppose we’re both thoroughly fucked, then.”
Jack isn’t a vampire,
but he has a vampire’s blood in him.
“Your eyes are glowing,”
Gabriel tells him. Jack turns back to him questioningly. “It’s
faint but you can see it in the dim light down here.”
His tone is cool,
analytical. Jack’s anger boils up, because he recognizes Gabriel’s ‘fuck
you’ tone.
“You’ve done away with
any possibility of me dealing with you,” he snaps.
“You were never going to
be able to,” Gabriel growls back, low and vicious. “I saw your face.
I know that look.”
Jack spins around to
face away from him and spits a curse at the wall, then swings back. “And
tell me you would’ve done any fucking better if it was me! This asshole,”
he kicks at the dust that used to be a vampire. “Might have miscalculated, but
he knew exactly how to punish us. Are you going to let him get away with
it?”
“He didn’t.”
Gabriel’s voice is cold as the stone around them. “You did this.”
Jack gapes at him, not
sure whether what he’s feeling is hurt or fury.
“He turned me into a
goddamn vampire, Jack! I’ve spent my life hunting monsters like this, and
now look at me!” He lifts his arms wide. His voice drops to a
poisonous hiss. “I’m still ravenous, Jack. The only reason I’m not
killing you right now is because I marked you. But I am going to kill, and I will do it well, and often, and unchecked, because I was a
hunter and I know all the tricks and there is no one out there who is good
enough to stop me. Except you. But you won’t, will you.”
Jack can’t meet his
eyes, because no, he won’t.
“So tell me, will you,
how this isn’t your fault?” His voice twists till it doesn’t sound human.
“Tell me how every life I take isn’t on you just as much as me.”
Jack closes his eyes and
inhales. The first swirls of anger begin
to nudge aside the torrent of grief and self-hatred he’s been drowning in.
It’s a goddamn relief, and he lets it come. “Those lives are on me,” he says slowly, “and
I did fail you. And I’m sorry. I will be sorry for the rest of my
life for that. But you’re the fucking asshole who took this on yourself.”
He opens his eyes and glares at Gabriel. “It would have been me.
But you couldn’t live with that, could you. You stand here calling
me a coward when you’re the one who let yourself get turned into a goddamn
abomination so that you wouldn’t have to be the one to make the choice.”
Hands balled into fists,
Gabriel quivers so hard his outline almost blurs. He turns away from
Jack, takes three paces, stops, shakes again.
Jack knows this routine.
It’s his variation on counting to ten. He’ll turn and come back in
a moment. But now that his blood is up, Jack is too angry to let him.
“But you know what, Reyes? If it were me, I wouldn’t have fucking
marked you.”
He’s Gabriel’s now.
He can feel it in his blood and bones, a tug pulling him to a place at
Gabriel’s feet. He can resist it because he’s always felt it, in a way.
There hasn’t been a moment since they began working together that he
hasn’t ached to have all of this man that he could get. Theoretically,
with practice, Gabriel could use it to compel him. Some vampires are
better at that than others. Maybe they’ll see.
It’s the end of Jack
Morrison, though. The changes are subtle, but any vampire hunter will
spot them. They’ll kill Jack as readily as they will Gabriel.
Jack’s lost his partner and his lover, all his ties and resources, and
the society of his kind. The job he’s done for the past 20 years, the one
he was better than anybody at. Anybody but Gabriel, anyway.
All because Gabriel let
revenge consume him. Because he wanted to punish Jack so badly that it
overrode even his hunger.
It’s been one day and
everything they ever were has fallen apart. It’s Jack’s turn to shiver.
“Do you really hate me that much?”
Gabriel says nothing for
a moment. Then he says, “Yes.” He doesn’t turn around.
Jack does. He
turns around and walks away. He knows
Gabriel too well to entirely believe him, but there’s no room left in him to
fight for Gabriel’s forgiveness. He hates
them both right now.
He doesn’t say goodbye.
After all, they’ll see each other again soon enough. Gabriel has
made sure of that.
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