Work Text:
2040
Mako Rutledge is twelve when the omnium turns back on.
He doesn’t really understand what it means, but from the way all the footage on the news of the massive structure is as shaky as the voices describing it, he knows it’s bad. His parents try to explain that it’s where all the robots come from and Mako, having met a handful of omnics whenever the Rutledges made weekend trips into Sydney, doesn’t understand why it’s bad.
But soon he can smell the smoke on the air - the oil and blood-thick smoke, not the typical wildfire shit - and he gets something of an idea.
The fighting never gets far enough from the coast to affect the Rutledges much, so for the most part they ignore it. Mako and his older brother Kahi continue to go to school and the Crisis sort of blends into background noise, another meaningless war fought too far away to mean anything.
2041
Everyone is shocked when Kahi drops out of school, one year shy of graduating, to join the army. When Mako asks why, he says it’s his duty - to his home, to his country, to humanity. Mako tells him that’s a load of shit.
Kahi tells him the truth - he’s scared that something might happen and they’ll all die having done nothing. He’s scared the world as they know it will end and they’ll just be casualties.
Mako doesn’t cry or hug him or tell him he loves him, and regrets it. Kahi’s broad back boarding the bus out of town is the last he ever sees of his brother, alive, even if he doesn’t realize it yet.
2042
Mako starts high school as tensions are getting higher. Kahi phones home every other weekend, or at least, he tries to. The Crisis - that’s what they’re calling it now, the Omnic Crisis - has claimed millions of lives, and the Rutledges never say anything about it, but they’re all just waiting for word that Kahi is one of them.
When it comes, somehow they find it in themselves to be shocked.
Amiria doesn’t leave her bedroom for two weeks, describing the pain of losing a child as akin to losing a limb.
Isaac cries for the first time Mako has ever seen, broken down at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. “We should have stopped him,” he says. “I should have stopped him.” Such a show of weakness from his father is terrifying to Mako.
Mako still doesn’t cry, a hollow space in his chest and huge fists clenched. The omnics took his brother from him. One day he’ll pay them back in kind.
2043
With Kahi gone for good, Amiria and Isaac vow to do their damnedest to keep their remaining son from the war. They make him promise over and over and over that he’ll stay with them, and he does.
He’s lying.
2044
He never had a lot of friends, and after Kahi dies, Mako cuts himself off from everyone. School is exhausting and feels pointless - what will any of this matter when the omnics decide their time is up? The omnium isn’t that far; if- no, when they decide to attack, there’ll be no time for a warning. They’ll be wiped out in days.
His grades fall and he realizes he’s just going through the motions, automatic and emotionless like the enemy.
Something’s gotta give.
2045
Mako Rutledge is seventeen when he follows his brother’s footsteps out of the outback.
His parents can’t decide between devastated and furious, betrayed and disappointed. Amiria cries, screams, terrified of- “I can’t lose you, too!” she says, face flushed and eyes wet.
Isaac settles for the comfortability of stony rage, shouting about disappointment and promises and shitty fucking decisions with a thickness to his voice that betrays his true feelings.
Mako doesn’t listen. He boards the bus at dawn, their voices ringing through his ears.
Basic training is fucking hard, and even moreso with everyone giving him shit for his size. When it’s over, he’s bigger and stronger than ever and has a sour enough mood and short enough temper that no one gets any further than “Hey, ugly!” before shitting their goddamn pants.
2046
Everyone knew Sydney had the worst of it. Mako had seen it on TV - all screams and fire and the unholy screech of metal, the rumble of buildings collapsing in on themselves
It’s worse up close.
The smoke is thick and suffocating and burns Mako’s throat, the stench of ruin and death cloying in his wide nostrils. He felt sick. It was hours of senseless violence, blowing omnics to hell with pulse weapons the higher ups made damn sure they knew were worth more than their lives were. At the end of it all, Mako is exhausted, but somehow still standing. Only a few of them are, and he counts it as a blessing.
Told to search out survivors, Mako picks his way into a nearby hospital, half-collapsed and smoldering. Somehow he’s surprised the sterile hospital smell has been eplaced with that of death, walls either lying in crumpled piles or blackened by soot. Another soldier clears her throat behind him, and he realized he’s blocking the only viable entrance. He moves.
He’s on the third and penultimate floor and about ready to give up when he hears a whimper.
“Hello?” he booms as gently as he can muster, careful not to scare whoever’s there.
A gasp, and something like a sob of relief. “I- In here!”
Mako manages to follow the voice down a hallway and opens the door. He’s hit in the face by the fresh air, the wall and ceiling missing enough to light up the room with fading evening sunlight.
“Oh, thank god.” Mako tears his eyes from the bright spot to the pieces of steel and concrete at its feet. A woman is lying there, dark hair dust-lightened and brown skin similarly filthy. She manages a pained, lopsided smile. “Well, aren’t you somethin’ else.”
“You’re stuck?” He ignores her comment.
She nods, glancing at her buried lower half. “Yeah. Nothin’s broken, but both ankles are- oh, whoa.”
Mako clears most of the rubble in one great heave, warm pride blooming in his chest at the genuine awe it elicits. “Why’re you by yourself?”
“I was on a supply run,” she says, watching him clear the remaining debris raptly. “There’s survivors in the maternity waiting room, but we were out of clean bandages and stuff. I didn’t- I didn’t realize the fighting was so close.” She huffed a sigh. “It’s been a couple days. I’m thirsty as hell.”
“We have water,” Mako says. In a matter of moments she’s completely free, and he reaches out a hand to help her to her feet. Her ankles look pretty bruised, but they’re bent right and not bleeding. She’s staring at his face with an expression like awe and curiosity and he hopes he’s not blushing at the attention. She doesn’t take his hand.
“I don’t think I can walk,” she says. “You’ll have to carry me, uh- what’s your name?”
RUTLEDGE is plainly visible on his uniform. “Mako,” he says, more of a grunt than anything. He leans down to lift her up inelegantly by the armpits until she settles into his arms bridal-style. She’s not small by normal standards, tall and thick and soft, but everyone’s small compared to Mako. Not a problem.
“It’s April,” she says abruptly, halfway to the stairwell.
Mako frowns. “It’s May. You hit your head?”
She laughs. “No, my name’s April. April Harrington.”
“Mako Rutledge,” Mako says, and immediately realizes its redundancy.
When he runs into the soldier from before, who’d cleared her throat, April tells her about the survivors in the maternity ward. All in all, they save nearly a hundred people - seventy-something from the hospital, and the other twenty-something from the rest of the surrounding area. It’s more than anyone had dared to hope. Most of the survivors are sent to government safehouses and camps. April requests she be allowed to help - she was a nursing student at the hospital, and she refuses to sit idly by and do nothing when she can help.
When Mako finally sets her down, she wobbles only for a moment before walking normally. No limp, no sign of pain. She winks at him before leaving to meet with his commander.
2047
The war goes on. Mako refuses two leadership positions, preferring the thrill of the front lines. April doesn’t like it, as she’s usually the one who has to patch him up afterward. She makes sure Mako knows, complaining loudly the whole time, lecturing, brow furrowed and lips pulled into a frown. Sometimes when it’s particularly bad, she looks like she’s going to cry, but she never does - if anything she just gets angrier.
It’s during one such tirade that he kisses her for the first time, and she hits his arm. “Don’t interrupt me!” she says, but she’s smiling.
2048
He gets news in September that his hometown was destroyed in July. For the first time, he almost cries.
2049
Things feel desperate, like they’re culminating, like something has to give, and soon. Mako admits that he’s terrified that that ‘something’ might not be the end of the war in their favor.
April refuses to listen to that kind of talk, of the belief that peace is inevitable. Part of Mako is frustrated by her unyielding optimism, but a greater part of him is soothed. He has to remind himself that hope isn’t childish - it’s human. She calms his terror, if only a little.
In October, she tells him she’s pregnant. The terror comes back.
2050
Mako Rutledge is twenty-two when it finally ends.
Somehow, a group of dozens does in a matter of months what armies of thousands couldn’t do in nearly ten years. Overwatch are heroes, international icons, and Mako is as grateful as anybody.
He and April marry in May and move into the outback, another small town so reminiscient of Mako’s old home. She works at a clinic in town, and Mako leaves the military to work in a mine closer to home. Their daughters, Amiria and Maya, are born in July. If this is peace, it’s something Mako could get used to.
2051
Of fucking course it couldn’t last.
The instant the government makes the announcement to give a great swath of the outback surrounding the omnium to the omnics, Mako nearly shatters the kitchen table. It startles the girls, Amiria staring at her father with wide brown eyes and Maya beginning to cry, and he stops before he starts.
“They can’t just do that,” he says, eyes still fixed on the TV as he brushes a hand over Maya’s thin curls to calm her.
April looks worried. It doesn’t suit her. “Should- Should we start packing?” She focuses on that one issue, pointedly ignoring the others - where would they go? Where would they work? This was their home.
“We should do something,” Mako says, and April shoots him a look he doesn’t reply to. Even he’s not sure what he means.
The Australian Liberation Front is founded in the first week. Mako catches word and joins by the end of the month, despite April’s protests.
“I’m pretty sure this is domestic terrorism,” April says, and that worry still hasn’t left her face. Mako can’t stand it.
She doesn’t understand. He’s doing this for her, for their family, for everyone else who is in their situation - the outback isn’t some wasteland void of civilization! There are families about to lose their homes, people who have already lost so much in this damned Crisis and who the government expects to hand everything they know over to the enemy.
(“They’re not the enemy anymore,” April says when Mako tries to articulate this. He ignores her.)
The ALF decides their best bet is to destroy the omnium. No one thinks about how that would work, or what the aftermath might be, or whether it would be a better idea to try diplomacy. They’re angry and feel betrayed by those who were meant to protect them.
Besides, part of Mako misses the war.
2052
They blow the fusion core in February. Thus begins the summer that never ends.
Nuclear fallout and radiation is so much worse than Mako had dared imagine. Everything is ruined and the air itself seems stained rust-red, hotter than ever.
April is furious when he gets home, finally, but she can’t bring herself to yell at him. Instead she cries, clutching his sweat-drenched shirt like it’s a lifeline. “I didn’t know you were- I hoped, but-” He kisses her quiet and she manages a laugh. “What did I say about interrupting me!”
It’s one of the longest years of their lives, but they manage it, together.
2053
They’re really lucky for a really long time, somehow. It’s incredible, a feeling neither Mako nor April are able or willing to put into words, watching everyone around them succumb to sickness and waste away while they didn’t. If they had to try, horrific , maybe. Powerful . Mako is thankful for whatever it is keeping them alive.
Gangs have sprung up all over the outback, recruiting or killing off those few sorry souls the radiation didn’t take. When a small patrol of them rolls through town, Mako kills one with his bare hands and takes his shotgun as a precaution. It’s almost too small for his hands, and there’s very little ammo on the guy’s body, but Mako feels just that little bit safer. April hates it.
(He can’t get the sound of the guy - hell, the kid, he was likely no older than twenty - screaming, choking on blood while Mako crushed his head into the dirt, out of his head. It occurs to him that he’s never killed a human being before. He physicaly feels a part of himself slip away and he laughs like it tickles.)
They’re safe, they’re well - that’s all they can ask for.
And then the girls get sick.
April had been so careful - quarantined their bedroom, watched their food intake, the works - but both she and Mako knew it was just a matter of time. Amiria and Maya are two years old, walking and talking in that stilted, awkward way toddlers do, except... worse. They degenerate to barely walking, crying constantly from what April says are headaches, running fevers and throwing up what little they eat. Their dark hair falls out on their pillows until they’ve hardly any left.
“What do you need to fix this,” Mako asks. April balks, shrugs - this isn’t her area of expertise, she can’t- But Mako insists until she makes him a list, all drugs with long names and common pain killers and ‘clean water,’ and he leaves in the night to try and avoid the most of the heat.
What he hopes to be at most a week turns into a month, walking and driving abandoned cars and motorcycles until they ran empty or got stolen. He left the shotgun with April, just in case, and in a couple days he’s armed with another.
He finally, finally, starts heading home with a bag of supplies slung over one shoulder, no shirt, massive new steel-toe boots, a surgical mask, sunglasses, and his hair pulled through the back of a nondescript baseball cap. He strikes quite the intimidating figure, all seven-foot-something of him, and he has very little trouble on the way back that he can’t get rid of with a harsh look.
The last ten miles from home, he notices there’s a lot of people milling about - more than before by a huge margin, and a vehicle that seems to be held together by duct tape and sheer force of will rolls up beside him, it occupants arguing over who should talk to him. He waits impatiently.
“Er, where’d’you think you goin’?” one of them, a man probably in his thirties, asks.
“Home,” Mako grunts, jerking his head toward town.
“Ain’t nobody there for you, mate,” a younger guy says. “‘S best you fuck off. Whole town’s property of the Junkers now, an’ we don’t like outsiders.”
“You got a family? Somebody waitin’ for ya?” the first guy asks, and Mako doesn’t respond. Looking uncomfortable, he goes on. “Well, er, if you did, they’re long gone, now. They was all dead or skedaddled when we got ‘ere. It was real nice, not havin’ to kill anyone, really. Makes me sick, it really does.”
Mako can barely hear him over the blood pounding in his ears. He nods absently and turns around, heading back the way he came, aimless.
He’s too dehydrated to cry properly, but damn if he doesn’t try.
2054
He has his own bike - a massive Junker thing he threatens somebody into fixing up for him until its sturdy enough to take his weight for as long as he needs it to. The surgical mask is thrown away in exchange for a gas mask. Breathing gets difficult, but the mask helps a little.
He goes back to Junkertown and takes what little is left in his home - most notable a photograph of himself, April, and the girls.
2055
He overhears the word “roadhog,” and starts giving that as his name, when compelled. No one needs to know who he was.
2056
Someone calls him a Junker behind his back - probably out of ignorance. Mako might have corrected him, or ignored him.
Roadhog makes sure it doesn’t happen again.
2057
He crosses the outback a couple times, restless. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he keeps going anyway.
2058
Breathing gets worse. Sometimes he nearly goes blue in the face because his lungs won’t cooperate. He ransacks a hospital for asthma medication and that does the trick, for now.
2059
He loses the photograph.
2060
Stopping by Junkertown for fuel and a drink, he watches someone spend the better part of an hour working up the nerve to talk to him. When they do, they shove a piece of paper at him across the bar. It’s- he’s not sure what it is, an illustration of an engine and a pig and WILD HOG POWER on a flowing banner.
“I- I, um, heard you’ve got painkillers,” they say, shaking. “It’s a tattoo. I just- I, um, I thought-” They swallow, staring at the expressionless gas mask. They shake their head. “Shit, it was a dumb-”
“Where?” he asks, and half the bar snaps to look at him. They’ve never heard him speak.
The artist flinches, but they’re shaking a little less. “Your, uh. Stomach.”
Roadhog stares at the illustration, then at the kid. He grunts, nods. “You gotta stop shakin’ first,” he says. It’s the longest he stays in one place in years, the couple weeks he stays in town to have it done. He gives the kid a couple big bottles of ibuprofen as payment and they nearly start crying.
2061
He finds a massive metal hook in a junkyard. It’s as good an improvised weapon as any, when a handful of Junkers decide they’re sick of his mug. He keeps it.
2062
The artist finds him again, in some other seedy, run down town that’s more of a disorganized mess than Junkertown, somehow. Roadhog’s about to bed down for the night, in the public garage full of Junker cars, when what little light there is is blotted out.
“Roadhog?” Roadhog grunts. “I- Um, it’s me. I d-did your tattoo?”
“What’d’you want?” His displeasure is apparent.
“I, um, I- I need more painkillers.” Lasted two years. Menstruation, then, probably. Not an addict. “I-I don’t have a tattoo planned but-”
“Spit it out.”
Another figure appears in the dark, heaving a heavy bag. “Armor,” she says. “New mask, shoulder pads, knee pads, gloves. Doesn’t cover your stomach, not too hot. And a machete in a back sheathe. For three times as many painkillers.”
Roadhog sits up. “Why me?”
“You’re easy to find,” the second figure says. “Hard to miss. Kept your word last time.”
He doesn’t have the pills to pay them upfront, but they give him the armor anyway. The mask has a pig snout, and he snorts an ugly laugh at it before slipping it on. In a couple weeks he meets the pair in Junkertown and gives them the rest.
“Don’t do this again,” he says. He’s not a goddamn pharmacist.
He never sees either of them again.
2072
Back at that Junkertown bar, ten years later. His hair is graying now, though he’s only, what, forty-five? He blames the radiation and the stress of life as it is, out here.
Another shaky kid approaches him. The kid keeps laughing at nothing, fingers twitching and hair on fire, and says something like “an offer ya can’t refuse.” Roadhog refuses.
A month later, he’s back in that bar and the kid is still there - less a leg. He begs Roadhog to be his bodyguard, introduces himself as Junkrat.
Roadhog’s heard of Junkrat. Heard half the goddamn outback is out to get him. Heard he’s got treasure.
“Half your treasure,” Roadhog grunts. “Whatever it is.”
“Deal!” Junkrat squeals, grin almost inhumanly wide, erupting into giggles. “Oh, Roadie! You won’t regret this!”
2073
Roadhog regrets it.
2074
Part of him forgot the rest of the world existed. Things are normal when they leave Australia - the kind of normal that Junkrat has never seen, the kind Roadhog hasn’t seen since he was a kid. The crime spree Junkrat drags him on is almost fun.
He regrets it... less.
2075
Roadhog isn’t sure he’s ever gonna get any of the treasure he was promised, but the crown jewels make up for it. He realizes he’s not really in this for the treasure anymore.
Junkrat is unlikeable, dangerous, filthy, and annoying as all get out, but Roadhog wouldn’t trade his company for anything.
2076
Mako Rutledge is forty-eight when Overwatch is recalled. Part of him remembers feeling grateful to them, way back when. He doesn’t take a lot of convincing.