Oh my god. Oh my god, anon, the cuteness is too strong.
Somebody blew the whistle. By the time Overwatch gets into the facility, about half of the labs are vacated, ransacked, and/or trashed. They’re searching the facility for any stragglers or experiments that need immediate attention when Jack gets side-tracked.
A tiny cat-person baby, so small it fits curled in Jack’s two hands. He looks down at the tiny thing, its tail drooping over his thumb, and wonders how this is possible.
Gabriel comes up to his side. “What the hell’s that?“
“It’s a baby.” Jack holds it out to him. Gabriel makes a noise of shock in his throat, and reaches out to delicately touch one of the tiny silken ears. “Gabriel…“
She’s so tiny. The size of a preemie, except that she seems more fully developed than that. She stirs in his hands, nuzzles at one of his fingers, and falls back into a deeper asleep. She’s precious and impossible and the implications of her are terrifying.
“Where did she come from?” Gabriel twists his body, but it takes him a moment before he can manage to look away from the child in Jack’s hands. He looks around them, at the machinery surrounding them, the papers on the desk, the tubes and chemicals and deep freezer along the far wall. The two incubators lying nearby, side by side, their heat lamps still on. Whoever was running this place managed to escape before the strike team got into this lab, and Jack has a feeling they took something with them. “What were they doing here?” Gabriel whispers.
“The SEP made us. They retired the project. Who else could do this?”
Jack glances over his shoulder while he flips through the papers on the desk. Some of them look like the charts Jack’s dad used to review when he was looking to breed their cows.
Jack studies Gabriel’s profile, intent on his study and limned in the lamps’ orange light. He has a hero’s face: strong and elegant, full lips and hook nose, eyes dark and sharp and glinting with their own fire. And, peeking out of the short dark curls on his head, the graceful swoops of his cat’s ears. So much like the ones on Jack’s head.
The SEP subjects all had tissues and samples of all types taken during the course of the project. There are sperm samples in the cold storage.
“Gabriel…” A cold shiver goes through Jack that makes his ears pin back and bristles the fur of his tail. He speaks quietly enough to make sure voice won’t carry past the two of them. “I think they’re breeding us.”
Gabriel sets the papers down with a terrible care and meets Jack’s eyes, his ears twitching backwards with an apprehension that doesn’t show anywhere else in his body. “Who?”
Jack clutches the baby girl, the kitten, protectively against his chest and returns Gabriel’s stare mutely. After all, who else could do this?
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