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Jack Morrison has a problem. It’s a problem that started during a recent fight, another battle in his one-man vigilante crusade against whatever thugs, mercenaries, and miscellaneous bad guys threaten public safety and civilian lives.
The mission was simple, at first. Intercept a group of Talon agents, secure the shipment of guns they’re escorting, appropriate whatever will help him, and destroy the rest. Nothing Jack hasn’t done a thousand times at this point. It’s more of a warmup than anything.
It’s simple, until he shows up.
Jack hides in wait at a chokepoint in the road he knows the agents will have to pass through. The night is dark, but with his visor’s nightvision and infrared settings, the shadows are a helpful ally rather than a hindrance, allowing him a precious few extra seconds to take out the party of five before they realize where they’re being fired at from. His rifle is hardly a quiet weapon, but it doesn’t matter when the agents drop in a matter of seconds, pulse munitions shattering the windshields of the truck and escort car, splattering blood and grey matter on the backs of the seat.
There’s gunfire and screaming for the briefest moment before it abruptly cuts off, leaving nothing but silence and the acrid smell of smoke. Jack wrinkles his nose, and tries not to look at the corpses he’s left behind. As much as they might deserve it, it never makes him feel good to sneak around and kill from the shadows. Even if keeping his head down is necessary for him to keep his head.
He slinks out of the darkness, approaches the truck quickly and quietly. The convoy was traveling through the shipping district when he intercepted it, and this late there’s almost no one around, but he can’t count on the relative emptiness of the surroundings to prevent any type of local law enforcement from investigating. It only took one concerned citizen to report strange noises.
Timeframe in mind, Jack bashes the lock off the back of the truck with the butt of his rifle, and opens the door as quickly as he can.
Instead of the usual crate or two containing guns, ammo, or other supplies, he’s greeted by a bone-white mask, and a clawed hand wrapped around his throat, lifting him off the ground.
“Hey,” Reaper says, and Jack has exactly enough time to think that someone at Talon is definitely on to him before he’s pulling back his rifle and smashing it against the inside of the man’s elbow. He doesn’t have much leverage, but his strength and the unforgiving metal of the gun is enough to make Reaper recoil, loosening his grip just enough that Jack can yank himself out of it, dropping to the floor with slightly less grace than he would have liked.
His windpipe isn’t crushed, though, so Jack considers it a victory.
The fight that follows is quick and brutal. Reaper opens his coat, reaching for a shotgun, and Jack sweeps his legs out with a well-placed kick. It doesn’t send him sprawling, but it throws him off balance enough that Jack can kick him again, square in the chest this time. Reaper’s back hits the ground, head turned to the side and Jack can see him fading around the edges, trying to escape or gain an upper hand by dissolving into smoke and it’s now or never. Whatever the man’s motivations are, whomever he is, he works for Talon, and he’s been a pain in Jack’s ass since he started this brutal, slow-moving war of attrition. Jack can’t afford to let him go.
He takes careful aim, and squeezes off a burst of pulse munitions right into Reaper’s temple.
The silence is deafening. The body on the ground twitches once, twice, and then starts to ooze a strange black substance that Jack can only assume is blood. Jack prods it with his gun, but Reaper’s corpse remains steadfastly corpselike, limp and unresponsive.
After all their fights, each one ending with one or both of them escaping by barely the skin of their teeth, it ends after a short tussle in a dark alley. Jack isn’t even hurt, besides a soreness at his throat where he was gripped hard enough to bruise.
The rush of relief that comes over him is almost druglike.
Jack leaves the scene as soon as he can, rushing off into the darkness. He leaves the corpse of his former enemy alone, mask still resting on his face. Some mysteries are better left unsolved.
-
That’s not the problem. The problem is the next time Jack runs a mission, simple reconnaissance of a Talon outpost staffed by a skeleton crew, and he’s there.
One second Jack is crouching on the roof of a nearby building, peering through binoculars at a dozen or so black-clad agents milling about on guard shifts, and the next there’s the telltale click of a gun, and he ducks out of the way just in time to prevent his head from being blown off by a point-blank shotgun blast. The sound rings in his ears, and Jack winces as he rolls to the side, leaping to his feet. The binoculars clatter to the ground, likely broken, but Jack doesn’t care, staring open-mouthed at the dead man standing in front of him, seemingly perfectly alive and healthy.
“I shot you in the head,” he says, disbelieving.
“Did a shit job of it, apparently,” Reaper replies, raising his gun again.
There’s no cover on the roof, nowhere to hide from the blast and fire back, so Jack does the one thing he can think of, and leaps backwards off of the edge. It’s three stories to the ground, and he hears his bones creak in complaint as he lands heavily on his feet, but nothing’s broken. It hurts, but it won’t slow him down. There’s a soft whoosh from behind him and Jack twists his head around to see a cloud of black smoke rush to the ground and form into the shape of a man.
Jack has experienced Reaper’s powers before- his ability to dissolve and reform, to turn to smoke, to slip silently through the night, through cracks in doors and seams in walls. But coming back from the dead is something new. It’s got to be a gimmick, or a fluke. No human being, regardless of how fucked up their body was, could just shrug off a killing blow like that.
He ducks behind a dumpster, switching the setting on his visor from infrared to nightvision as he pulls his rifle from its over-the-shoulder holster. He’d learned the hard way on a previous mission that Reaper’s body didn’t show up on the former type of scan, and Jack suspected it was due less to his equipment and more to the fact that whatever was behind the mask and cloak and frankly ridiculous amounts of black leather just doesn’t give off body heat.
“Why aren’t you dead?!” He yells, spraying suppressing fire over the dumpster’s metal rim. There’s a sharp intake of breath, and Jack takes aim, squeezing off his rockets in the noise’s direction. A small explosion echoes down the alleyway when they connect, splintering a few wooden crates and setting them alight.
Peering over the dumpster’s edge, Jack squints, the nightvision’s light equalization making it hurt to stare at the fire for too long. There’s no answer to his question- no sound- and he thinks he may have killed the monster again before he feels a yank on the back of his jacket and finds himself thrown violently backwards into the wall. Jack hears a sharp crack as his head connects, feel his ears ringing and his vision going blurry, and oh, that’s not good, especially when the thing he thought he’d killed twice already is stalking towards him, one clawed hand pointing a shotgun at his face, the other drawing a line across a leather-clad throat.
“Like I said.” There’s a smug note to Reaper’s speech, as if he’s privy to an inside joke that Jack will never know the punchline to. “You did a real shit job.”
He fires. At the same moment, Jack brings up the butt of his rifle, swinging it violently, and catches Reaper’s wrist. There’s a twin crack- shotgun pellets hitting the wall, and bones shattering, crunching under the force of Jack’s blow. Reaper curses as the shotgun drops from his now-useless hand, throwing open his cloak to grab his other one, but Jack, despite his probable concussion, still reacts faster. He springs up, bodily tackling the other man, throwing his entire weight into pinning him down.
This time, Jack doesn’t shoot. He brings his rifle down on Reaper’s head, again and again, until he’s coated in sticky black blood, and there’s nothing beneath him but mangled pulp mixed with shards of mask and of bone. He’s breathing hard, harder than he realized, and the pain lancing through his skull just minutes ago has faded to a dull roar. With a dawning sensation of horror, Jack realizes that he feels good. He looks down again, blinks once, twice at the face that’s been rendered utterly unrecognizable by his brutality.
He staggers to his feet, and tumbles as fast as he can manage out of the alleyway.
-
Shitty motels aren’t the most comfortable places to stay, but they’re the best places to avoid detection, most of the time. Jack stumbles back to his room, body tacky with fluid that looks like oil, but isn’t. As soon as he’s inside, he shuts the door, and sinks down onto the filthy carpet, entire body shaking with emotion that he isn’t quite able to identify.
He sets up his biotic field, feels cracked bones knitting themselves back together and bruises healing. The pain of his concussion fades away bit by bit as he contemplates what exactly just happened.
Jack frowns. To say all he had done was killed was putting it a bit lightly. He’d killed plenty of people before, and they hadn’t ended up like… that. Part of staying above everything and of ensuring he didn’t become like what he was hunting was facing everything he’d done. He hadn’t just killed someone- he’d brutalized a man, beaten him until there was nothing left, and loved it. Adrenaline is pumping through him, making his limbs tingle, his pulse race, and-
His thoughts come to a screeching halt as the cataloguing of physical sensation heads below the belt, and finds him hard. How long has he been this way? Since he returned to the motel? Earlier?
If he’s been like this for as long as he thinks… oh god.
As soon as his body has finished healing, Jack goes to take a long, cold shower. He tries not to think about how his hands had trembled with something that wasn’t fear as he caved Reaper’s skull in.
-
They keep meeting, and it keeps ending the same way, Jack’s entire body pumping with adrenaline as he stares wildly at the mangled, black-clad corpse. He’s killed Reaper more times than he can count at this point.
There’s a rush when they’re fighting that thrills him in a way that nothing has in years. A surge of feelings and stimuli that come with him truly believing that at any moment he could die, shredded to pieces by claws or shotguns, life throttled from him, crushed under a boot, danger which should be nightmarish but leaves him dizzy and aroused every time. The power that accompanies coming out on top from these encounters is addictive, and Jack is sickened by it.
He finds himself desperately trying to sublimate, sitting on the edge of his shitty motel bed, hunched over a laptop with his pants around his ankles, browsing deep web sites for borderline illegal porn, extreme S&M, graphic sexual torture, snuff, but the rush he gets from that is nothing compared to how he feels after putting a clip into Reaper’s head, or into his stomach, watching his breath come shallow and harsh as he bleeds to death slowly.
When he jerks off, Jack tries not to think about the sounds he could pull from the undying monster of a man if he was given the chance, little whimpers of pain that would slowly graduate to screams as Jack breaks him bit by bit. He comes raking his nails across his chest hard enough to draw blood, and washes himself off almost immediately, hating himself.
-
One mission, everything suddenly goes to shit.
Jack’s snooping through an “abandoned warehouse” that functions occasionally as a Talon base, trying to see what information he can glean from the databanks there. There have been rumors that the organization is starting a larger operation, maybe more than he can handle alone, and he needs this intel, badly. He’s so engrossed in his work, he doesn’t notice the 30-odd soldiers that weren’t there before until they open fire.
He barely, barely makes it to cover on time before the desk he was at is shredded, ducking and rolling behind a concrete pillar as bullets- all real metal ones, Talon never half-assed their murder- whiz by his head.
“Shit,” he says, pulling his rifle out of his holster. Talon was many things, but bad at planning was not one of them. They’d known he was going to be here, somehow, known he would be distracted, and he’d neglected to cover any of his exits. The entire place is swarming with heavily armed men and women wearing full body armor, and Jack has no way out.
Unless…
The standard Talon agent was always equipped with an assault rifle, small-caliber handgun for backup, and grenades of both concussive and fragmentation varieties. Talon was many things, Jack thinks for the second time that night, but inconsistent was not one of them. He has a chance, and a plan, stupid and potentially life-threatening as it was.
As if on cue, Jack hears a clattering sound, and sees the small green shape of a grenade land by his feet. Standard practice to flush someone out of cover- he really can’t blame whomever had done it. Just as they can’t blame him for kicking the grenade as hard as he can, sending it skittering over to the wall of the warehouse, made of decades-old wood and yellowed, brittle fiberglass.
The grenade explodes with a deafening bang. Bits of wood, glass, and concrete fly everywhere, and the blast leaves a ringing in Jack’s ears that he knows means nothing good, but he’s alive, mostly uninjured, and there’s a gaping hole in the wall that no one’s covering. Praying to whatever deities he can think of that the agents behind him are confused or distracted by the blast, Jack makes a run for it.
Bullets whizz by him again after a second, one tearing his pantleg over and leaving a deep gash in his calf, one embedding itself in his shoulder, but he makes it, grimacing in pain as he full-body leaps out of the building, rolling onto the street beyond and springing back to his feet. His body makes an ugly cracking sound and Jack winces, but he keeps going. It isn’t long until the agents will be in pursuit, and he has to be as far away as possible by that time.
Sticking to alleyways and side roads, Jack hurries as fast as he can with his injuries. He has to get back to his room, grab the five or so possessions that he won’t be able to make it without, and get out of this city. He needs to get somewhere safe, stay under the radar for a while, hope that whatever wheels Talon has set in motion won’t require him to act immediately. He needs to-
Jack’s train of thought is interrupted as a figure materializes right out of the shadows of the alley and punches him square across the face. The view from his visor goes fuzzy for a second from the force of the blow, and Jack feels himself reel backwards, head snapping to the side. His rifle drops from his shock-loosened grasp and goes clattering to the ground as he’s punched again, on the other cheek this time. The third time, it’s in the stomach, and Jack feels the air whoosh out of him as he drops to his knees, coming face to face with steel boots that are all too familiar.
“Going somewhere?” Reaper asks, nonchalantly. He kicks Jack in the stomach, sending the man sprawling, coughing as he tries to regain his breath. Jack rolls away to get out of Reaper’s range, body spasming with the effort of dealing with the new pain on top of the gunshot wounds.
“Fuck you” is his only response, as soon as he manages enough air to spit it out. Reaper laughs, cracks his knuckles, and leaps at Jack, arms outstretched.
There’s no finesse in this fight, no strategy or elegance as they both try their damndest to beat the absolute shit out of each other. Reaper undoubtedly has his shotguns, Jack thinks hazily as he drives his elbow into the man’s neck, but he doesn’t bother to pull them out, preferring to tear long holes in Jack’s jacket with his claws, metal glistening red.
Eventually, Jack gets on top, straddling Reaper with his thighs. He wraps his hands around Reaper’s throat, and squeezes, doesn’t let go even as Reaper claws his wrists and forearms to bloody shreds. Jack breathes in deeply, breathes out in a shuddery moan, and freezes.
He’s hard. He’s been hard since they’d started brawling. The wrongness of it hits him like a train, and Jack lets go, disgust making him tremble from head to toe. As he starts to scramble away, a hand shoots out and grabs his wrist.
“Don’t stop,” Reaper murmurs, deep voice rendered creaky and harsh by the abuse Jack has put his throat through. “Please. Don’t stop.” He tugs Jack’s hand down to his neck, curls fingers around the leather of his jacket and the place where the neckline has shifted slightly, revealing a stripe of dark skin.
Jack squeezes, tentatively, and feels Reaper’s body tense up underneath him. Unbidden, his other arm joins the first, closing around Reaper’s throat, tight enough to cut off airflow, and the man beneath him groans and bucks, muscles rippling.
“Harder,” he manages to get out, and Jack obliges, pants getting uncomfortably tight as his heart beats faster and breath comes shorter. Jack thinks about what the face underneath that mask must look like right now (if there is a face at all), skin turning blue and purple, mouth hanging open, tongue lolling, eyes red with broken blood vessels and popping out of their sockets, and moans.
His hips hitch, rolling and rutting against Reaper as the man twitches in the last throes of life before he falls completely still, and Jack can’t take it anymore. His hands, slick with blood and covered in lacerations, fall to the zipper of his pants, tugging them open as quickly as he can as he struggles to pull his cock out. He’s painfully hard, head bright red and shiny, and Jack strokes himself to completion faster than he thought was possible, letting out a series of frankly embarrassing noises as he comes all over the chest of the still-warm body underneath him.
For a few moments, he just sits there, catching his breath, coming down from his high. His cock is soft in his hand, covered in blood that’s not completely Jack’s, he’s sweaty, tired, in pain, and more than anything, disgusted with himself.
What the fuck is wrong with you, he thinks, standing and tucking himself back into his pants. What did you just do? You jerked off onto a corpse, Jack Morrison. There’s no coming back from this.
As soon as he can, Jack leaves, the sour taste of bile bubbling in the back of his throat as he does. He doesn’t look back.