Talon was built on blood. You learned that early—long before your file ended up in their hands. Before the clean-cut agents came knocking with promises of purpose and power. Before the missions turned you into something useful. Something sharp. Something that didn’t bleed unless it had to.

You’d already been broken by the time they found you.

That’s why they wanted you. That’s why he noticed.

Reaper didn’t trust people. Not in any way that resembled warmth. He studied people like threats—measured in how fast they could kill, how quickly they could be disposed of. He wasn’t built for softness anymore. Not after everything Overwatch stripped from him. But when you stood beside him in the smoke, gun cooling in your hand, expression unreadable under firelight—something shifted. You didn’t flinch when he became a shadow. You didn’t stare at the way the black mist bled from him like a wound that never closed. You just moved forward. Unbothered. Unafraid.

You were like him. Wronged.

At first, he watched you like a mission. Calculated, distant. Cold. But over time, it changed—became something darker. Something he didn’t try to name. You fought like him. Didn’t speak unless it mattered. You carried the weight of things you didn’t talk about, and he saw it. Saw it in the way you lingered a second too long after a kill. In the way you looked at your hands sometimes, like they weren’t fully yours anymore.

There was no trust, not at first. But there was an understanding.

He didn’t try to fix you. You didn’t try to fix him.

You didn’t ask about Overwatch. Didn’t pry about the names he never said aloud. You didn’t need to. You had your own.

Still, he noticed. Noticed how the other agents looked at you. Noticed how close you got to the edge during missions. Noticed how his patience frayed when someone else touched you—spoke to you like they had the right. He’d never admit what it was, not even in silence, but it was there. And when the agents mysteriously stopped talking to you, and they had bruises or missing fingers, you knew why.

Possessive. Protective. His.

He didn’t share you. Not your time. Not your attention. Especially not your body.

Talon didn’t ask questions when you started coming back from ops bruised in ways that didn’t match combat reports. They noticed the results—how your kill count rose when you were paired with him, how he started pulling you from danger like it was instinct. They didn’t see how his fingers curled against your spine at night, how his voice dropped into something guttural when he whispered your name. They didn’t hear the way he breathed you in like you were the only thing anchoring him to whatever was left of his humanity.

They didn’t see you were the only thing that ever worked to soothe his agonizing pain from Moira’s experiments.

You both moved like monsters in different skins. Both haunted. Both damned. But in each other, there was something familiar. Something that made it easier to sleep, even if only for a few hours. Some nights, he gripped you too hard. Other nights, he pulled away like he couldn’t stand the idea of tainting you any more than he already had.

But you never left.

And that terrified him.

You were the only one who could crack through the cold void where his heart used to be. The only one who didn’t recoil when the mask came off and the man beneath it—the ruined, angry, grieving thing called Gabriel Reyes—was exposed.

Sometimes, after the killing was done and the fire had died down, you’d lie beside him in silence, bodies too tired to move. The aftermath of violence clinging to your skin like smoke. You’d pass a bottle back and forth, or say nothing at all. Words were overrated. You both understood what silence meant. Now, you lay with him after a mission, again. Your head on his chest.

His voice, coarse from the whiskey and smoke, cut through the silence,

“I’d kill a thousand men for you. You know that? I won’t ever lose you,” he murmurs, a threat you know he’d keep.