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The Omnic Crisis is officially over, although the relief efforts for the damage done will be necessary for years more at least. The fate of the Overwatch strike unit is up in the air; there’s no word yet from the UN on whether they’re going to be disbanded now that the day’s been saved or officialised into a proper organisation.
With their jobs in bureaucratic limbo they’re all basically on leave, and they’ve been told they’re free to do whatever they want as long as they keep in contact. Jack wants to use the time to do something, something that’ll make it feel like the war that’s consumed their lives for years is really over, but it’s Gabriel who suggests a road trip.
They pack up their stuff and just go, starting at one of the more northern beaches on the west coast of America and following the coastline down before swinging in to LA to visit Gabe’s family. Call it taking the time to see the world they saved.
When it was first formed, in the darkest days of the Crisis, no one expected the Overwatch strike unit to succeed. Jack and Gabriel had good reasons to sign on – because it’s the right thing to do, because the world’s ending and someone’s got to try to save it – but thinking they’d win wasn’t one of them. They’d both walked into the first Omnium they’d tackled fully expecting to die, and it was the same in every battle after that. It had taken a heavy toll; people aren’t really themselves when they’re constantly having to brace for death. They’re reduced down to whatever survival mechanisms they’ve developed to keep themselves running while everything else they are gets buried so it stays safe.
Now that it’s over they can both truly unwind from the constant fatigue of being pushed to the limit over and over. Can begin to figure out how to be human again, rather than the person shaped weapons they had to become to survive the omnics.
It’s almost like meeting each other for the first time again; rediscovering all of the quirks and personality traits that got them to like each other back when they were in the SEP, now framed by the calm of highway driving and wandering around little seaside towns. Gabriel slips at the edge of a rock pool and gets soaked and half tangled in seaweed, Jack’s too busy damn near laughing himself sick to help him up. (Neither of them mention that split second where Jack’s hand had flinched for where his gun would have been, the motion as ingrained as the flash of searing panic at seeing Gabe go down).
They exhume the soft parts of themselves and it’s terrifying in a way that walking into enemy fire never has been. Gabriel feels like it would only take a careless knock to crack him open. Jack feels like he’s shaking apart. It’s too much, trying to hold themselves together, like trying to hold a fistful of broken glass. So they don’t. They let themselves fall apart and focus on each other, they cradle each other’s hard won vulnerability in an unspoken promise to protect it. It’s easier to face another person’s demons.
It’s the question that faces every soldier who gets to come home; after everything you’ve had to survive, how can you even begin to remember how to feel safe again?
For Jack and Gabriel as they sit together on the hood of their car, tucked up against each other and warm under a blanket while they make up increasingly ridiculous constellations to point out to each other, figuring out the answer doesn’t seem quite as impossible as it did before.