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It wasn’t the worst mission Cassidy ran with Overwatch, either old or new, but it certainly placed among the highest one could rank without any allied fatalities. The intel that brought the team in turned out to be not only outdated, but also compromised. Consequently, they walked in and found themselves outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and out of luck.
It was a testament to their fortitude, skill, and sheer bloody cussedness that the six of them didn’t die outright. As it stood, they managed to get out of the killbox, but not unscathed.
Mercy took a lucky-unlucky shot to the head that only hit the halo-like part of her Valkyrie suit; the impact still knocked her unconscious, but it didn’t kill her. A dedicated trio of Talon agents took out D.Va’s MEKA in a pincer attack. She narrowly escaped capture, but a replacement suit had yet to make it through Talon’s defensive lines. The remains of Soldier:76’s tactical visor hung uselessly by his chest, the other pieces marking the bloody trail of their retreat after a concussive burst sent him head first into a wall. The visor’s sacrifice was probably all that kept him from joining Mercy in unconsciousness. Hanzo was in the worst condition of the six of them. An enemy sniper caught him in the side, and his blood dyed his obi red where they tried to staunch the bleeding. Cassidy did not like how pale the archer looked; it filled his head with terrible possibilities and lost opportunities they didn’t have time to consider.
Cassidy and Reinhardt held the frontline, but between the two of them, only Reinhardt could actually do much of anything. Cassidy spent all his bullets and flashbangs covering their retreat to the hollowed out little shack that currently masqueraded as their shelter. The only thing that stood between the team and two dozen Talon operatives was Reinhardt’s energy shield - and, when that failed, Reinhardt’s body. Already the shield showed cracks around the edges where the enemy took pot shots to keep them tense and test their resolution. If the opposing force opened fire in earnest, the barrier would only last a few seconds.
It did not bode well that twenty-four well-armed terrorists sat outside, waiting for some kind of signal. It meant someone in the upper echelons of the enemy organization was looking over their files, picking and choosing whom to kill and whom to convert. It meant they thought they had time to play.
“Enemy count?” Soldier:76 grunted quietly.
“Same,” Cassidy muttered through his teeth.
“Waiting?”
“Yup.”
Another perfunctory shot flattened against Reinhardt’s barrier.
“Don’t worry, my friends!” The mountain of a man exclaimed, though even he sounded strained. “I will be your shield!”
“What’s taking so long?” D.Va checked her comm for any sign of a new MEKA ready for deployment. Something in the distance exploded, and several Talon agents laughed.
“Dragons,” Hanzo grunted, straining to sit up straighter. Cole took it as a bad sign that the stoic man couldn’t even try to keep the grimace from his face. “I can-- I will --” He struggled to raise his arm, but no light flickered around his skin.
“Easy, Sunshine,” Cassidy crooned, kneeling over him. “Keep pressure on that wound, okay? Gotta keep enough blood inside you for Mercy to get you back up to snuff.”
On the other side of the shield, the squad leader turned in the distinctive manner of someone receiving complicated orders from someone higher up that they didn’t particularly like.
“Cassidy,” Soldier said. Cassidy looked up and saw Jack holding out his pulse rifle.
“What the -- I never used one of these before--”
“Cole,” Jack said, lower, “You just hold down the trigger and aim .”
Cole jerked as if stabbed.
“I can’t,” he hissed. “Not with an auto, not with more than six--”
“I’m not ordering you,” Jack stated. “I’m just saying if you don’t, that’s it for us here.” He tilted his head towards Hana, who glowered back at him full of defiance and bravery.
“Speak for yourself, old man.” She straightened her shoulders and raised her pistol. “I don’t need my MEKA to kick these guys’ butts.”
The Talon squad leader motioned to his troops, holding up three fingers and swiping them into a grab before drawing his thumb across his throat in the gesture for “execution”.
Cole and Jack locked eyes for less than a second. Cassidy swung up and around, hefting the unfamiliar weight in his hands as his finger caressed the trigger.
The sound of gunfire drowned out Cassidy’s catchphrase, but nothing could hide the deadly light in his eyes.
One second.
Two seconds.
Bullets cracked into Reinhardt’s shield, spiderwebs of impact spreading across the glowing grid.
Three seconds.
Four seconds.
Cassidy let out a little gasp, but everything else about him was lethal focus and tension.
Five seconds.
The shield shattered.
Six seconds.
Cassidy pulled the trigger. The pulse rifle was too long and heavy to fan the same way as Peacekeeper; he had to make a wider arc to catch his targets, and he had to move a lot faster to keep up with the automatic fire, too. It almost looked like he was in one of the cheesy classic western films where people spun dramatically when they got shot, but in this case, it was the twenty-four Talon agents who fell down dead, each with a bullet hole right between the eyes.
“Wow,” whispered Hana. “Now that’s a play of the game.”
“Cassidy,” Hanzo hissed, noticing that the cowboy still held the pulse rifle so tightly that his muscles corded. “Cole!”
Cassidy shifted, but only slightly. He cried out and dropped the gun as he fell to his knees.
“Cassidy? Are you hit?” Reinhardt leaned over him. “ Mein Gott… ”
Blood streamed down from Cassidy’s eyes like tears. His sclera were black, his irises red, and his pupils contracted strangely as his gaze rolled over his team.
“I can’t turn it off!” He snapped, burying his face in his hands. “I can’t turn it off! Don’t get in front of me!”
“It’s okay. It’s over now.” Jack said, limping over to him. He put a hand on Cole’s shoulder, but the cowboy bucked him off, still covering his eyes.
“It ain’t over , Jack, there’s still one more bullet!” He snarled. “One’s all I need. Get that thing away from me before I hurt someone!”
“Cassidy, you need to calm down.”
“I stared down Death himself,” rasped Cole, “and he blinked first.” He pushed his palms against his eye sockets. The bloody trails down his face smeared as his shoulders shook. “You remember that, Jack. He blinked first!”
Things got a little better once Angela revived, but not for Cassidy. She stabilized Hanzo, got Jack cleaned up, and helped lead Cassidy to the extraction point, but there was little she could do for him without more specialized equipment except to wrap bandages over his eyes.
Her gentle questions in the shuttle were met with short, brusque answers.
“Have you ever had this problem before?”
“No.”
“It’s always been a conscious ability?”
“Yes.”
“Have you experienced bleeding before?”
“No-- wait, no, not in years, since before -- no.”
“Cole.”
“I don’t remember.”
“What about the discoloration?”
“Hell, how am I supposed to know? I can’t even see it now. If I look in the mirror, I’m like as not to shoot myself .”
“I unloaded your gun and the safety’s on.” Jack said from somewhere deeper in the shuttle.
“Forgive me if I don’t take your word as much consolation right now.”
“ Cole .” Angela said sharply. “I’m trying to establish a medical basis for this, but you have to tell me so I know what to look for.”
Cole exhaled, shoulders drooping.
“I dunno how to explain it to you, Angela. No one taught it to me. It’s just something I do, like being able to roll your tongue or crack your knuckles or something. I just don’t blink, and I can see Death closing in on people like a noose.
“Deadlock used to give me automatics sometimes, when they needed an ambush. Stashed me up somewhere I could see the enemy coming, have me wipe ‘em out all at once. Usually about six to ten guys, not more than twelve. Used to bleed a little, nothing like this. Dunno if it did anything to my eyes; no one lived who saw.” His voice was low, almost relaxed except for the unnerving lack of emotion. “Last time I ran with them, during the sting, they cuffed me to a gattling and told me to hold the door. Gattling would have taken out anything Overwatch could throw at ‘em, if I could just aim it.”
Mercy gasped. Jack stiffened.
“I couldn’t do it. Got fifteen lined up, sixteen, maybe, and I couldn’t pull the trigger. I just dropped it. Reyes found me, and I was a right mess. I think it might have been something like this.” Cole gestured to his blood-stained face. “When he recruited me, he gave me the six-shooter. Said I’d never have to do automatics again, nor more than six shots, neither.”
“I didn’t make you take the gun,” Jack said, too soft to be any more defensive than surprised. “I didn’t make you pull the trigger.”
“You gave me two options, knowing full well that one of them I can’t abide,” Cole drawled back.
“I gave you the chance to save yourself. To save all of us.” Jack snapped. “And you did. We’re all still here, thanks to you.”
“Shit, Jack, are you gonna thank your visor next?” Cole’s lip curled back. “I’ve been a tool before; I know when I’m being used. I don’t need your thanks, just don’t break me.”
Jack held still a moment longer, then huffed and nodded. Hana elbowed him, and he grunted.
“Acknowledged.”
Cole wore bandages for the next three days. What time he didn’t spend enduring countless medical tests faded into a blur of stillness and aching silence, waiting for results. Even with his gun unloaded and locked away in another room, he was still uneasy without his eyes covered. He couldn’t hold still when Mercy took them off; the closing target took precious little time to lock onto her, and his anxiety for her safety increased exponentially whenever DeadEye didn’t time out.
“At least the bleeding stopped,” she sighed, reviewing his file. Cole shuffled awkwardly, pulling the gauze to try and tighten it. “Stop fidgeting. They are secure.”
“I don’t want to accidentally throw something at someone just ‘cause my blindfold slipped,” he grumbled. “I feel as jittery as an unbroken colt, and I don’t much care for it.”
“Nothing came back as a possible cause.” Angela went to show him the chart out of habit and stopped herself, blushing. “When this goes back to normal, I’d like to run some tests on you while you train to see if I can establish a better baseline.”
“ If it goes back to normal,” replied Cole, glumly. “I don’t plan on doing this to myself again.”
“Even if it saves lives?”
Cole sucked in a breath that stuck in his chest like it planted barbs in his lungs.
“I’m not good, not bad, but I gotta be more than just a weapon,” he said.
Angela squeezed his shoulder with an approving smile. Cole jumped at the sudden contact, but she held firm, and eventually he relaxed.
“You are much more than just a weapon,” she said. He laughed, without real humor.
“Even Bastion’s got his birds, Angie. Me, I just got my judgment. This,” he touched his fingertips to his bandaged eyes, “takes that away. Can’t tell friend from foe. Ain’t much use to y’all like this. If I can’t pull my weight--”
Her fingers tightened.
“You are much more than a weapon,” she said again.
Cole let out a bitter sigh.
“Well. We’ll see.”
Freedom from the medical wing did little to comfort Cassidy. He hated the cane Angela gave him; he always forgot where he put it, or it rolled away because he wasn’t paying attention and set it down at an angle where the grip couldn’t catch on anything. Even more than that, he hated having to rely on other people to help him get around. He couldn’t see their faces, but he was certain there was pity there, and it ate away at his pride like acid.
Worst of all, however, was his body’s sudden determination to register every stimulus as hostile. His eyes were the most extreme, tracking everything that moved with the intent to kill whenever the bandages came off. His hearing made an attempt to compensate for his restricted vision and didn’t help in the slightest. Every footstep reminded him of the battlefield, too heavy, too sudden, and too loud. Every time one of his teammates came near him, his hand reached for the place where Peacekeeper normally sat. The empty space only electrified his battle-ready nerves.
He almost clocked Lena when she accidentally blinked too close to him.
After that, they started announcing their approach, calling out well before their footsteps could reach him.
It was Hanzo who noticed the odd flinch Cassidy made as he turned towards those coming closer to him. The archer’s eyes caught the momentary pause whenever Cole moved to face someone, how he stopped halfway through his turn so that his body rested at an angle minimizing the exposure of his core vitals. Cole never stayed in the defensive stance for long; he forced himself to completely face whoever addressed him, but the strangeness of vulnerability inspired Hanzo to action.
“Cassidy,” he called out, catching the man at the other end of the hall. Cassidy waited for him to approach. Experience taught that Hanzo, Genji, and Zenyatta had to alert him of their presence much earlier than the others because their footsteps were the hardest to hear. In Zenyatta’s case, there were none at all.
“What can I do for you, Hanzo?” Cole turned. Hanzo caught the half-pause and frowned.
“Your eyes are still... “ Hanzo hesitated, trying to find a word for it. “Compromised?”
Cassidy huffed.
“Yeah, still messed up.”
“I would like to try and help.”
That caused Cassidy to stiffen.
“No offense, Hanzo, but I didn’t think this was really your thing?”
“I am no doctor, but I understand aiming as well as you, even without a hammer to fan.”
Cassidy’s mouth thinned to an unhappy line. Hanzo recognized battered pride as clearly as if he was looking in a mirror.
“Your eyes saved my life,” he said quietly. “Please allow me to attempt to repay the favor.”
Cassidy finally gave a short nod.
“May I lead you?” Hanzo asked, watching Cole chew on his lip instead of answering.
“Do I have a choice?”
“If you would be more comfortable in your own space--”
“As long as no one’s likely to walk in on whatever we’re trying, I’m not fussed.” Cole sighed. “Don’t much care if they see, only that they don’t get seen, you know? I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Hanzo hummed agreeably, then laid his hand on Cole’s arm. The muscles below the skin tensed briefly, but then relaxed.
“We will go to the practice room,” Hanzo said. “I will put it in lock-down mode, so no one comes in by accident.”
He led Cassidy to the waiting area of the practice room and helped the man ease into a sitting position against one of the crates.
“Wait here. I will set the lock.”
“There’s stairs out there I’m not eager to meet, so…” Cassidy snorted. “I’m not going anywhere at this rate.”
Hanzo entered a quick command to the panel by the door and came back. He sat down directly across from Cassidy, close enough that his knees touched the insides of the man’s ankles. Cole tensed a little at the contact, but he froze right up when he felt Hanzo lean into his space and reach for the bandages.
“No,” he said, and Hanzo’s hands stilled, just barely touching his cheeks. “It’s not safe.”
“You have no weapon to fire,” Hanzo said, calmly. “Your hands are empty. So are mine. There is nothing you can use to hurt me.”
“Are you sure about that?” Cassidy’s voice came out in a bleak rasp. “I watched Death loom over Angela, just waiting for me to blink. I don’t think I could bear to see him over your shoulder, too.”
Hanzo reminded himself that there was no one to see the blush that crept along his cheeks. He cleared his throat and squared his shoulders.
“Cole,” he said. “Do you trust me?”
“Of course!” The answer came immediately.
“Will you trust me when I say I think this will help?”
The response this time was not as swift, nor as sure, but eventually it still came.
“I trust you, Hanzo. It’s me I don’t trust that much.”
“Then will you trust in the faith I have in you?”
“I-- what?”
“Take my trust in you as your own.”
“Hanzo--”
“Do you trust me?” He asked again. Cole’s mouth pressed into a bloodless white line in his tanned face. Hanzo let his hands rest against Cole’s cheeks. The bristle of stubble tickled his palms.
Cole said, “Yes.”
Hanzo removed the blindfold.
“Open your eyes.”
Cole’s irises were still red circles on black fields, and his pupils contracted almost immediately as his vision locked on Hanzo. He gasped, trying to look away, but Hanzo held on fast and kept their faces together.
“Look at me,” he said, “and don’t blink.”
One second .
Two seconds.
“Hanzo,” Cole choked, eyes wide enough that Hanzo could see the entire circle of his iris. “Hanzo, it’s there--”
Three seconds.
“Don’t blink.”
Four seconds.
“You are safe.”
Five seconds.
“ We are safe.”
Six seconds.
“ Don’t blink .”
Seven seconds .
Cole blinked, and the darkness passed from his eyes. The bloody red faded to earthly brown, and the tears that ran down his face were clear. His pupils dilated to adjust to the light in the room, then further dilated as he realized how close Hanzo was to him. His breath caught in his throat.
“What -- what did you do?” Cole asked. He blinked a few more times and let his gaze roll over the room before resettling on Hanzo.
“I did nothing,” Hanzo said, although he seemed a little smug for someone who had nothing to do with the accomplishment. “ You focused.”
“‘I’ focused?” Cole frowned. “Are you telling me I spent three whole days in medical and a week stomping around in a blindfold on account of me being unfocused?”
“Not unfocused,” Hanzo shook his head. “Too focused on everything at once. When Soldier gave you his gun, you had to make everything in front of you your enemy. You overextended - like a sprain - and could not pull back. Now you are back with me.”
Cole swallowed.
“Awfully dangerous way of getting me refocused,” he said. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but you could have just told Angela.”
Hanzo didn’t reply immediately, at least not verbally. His hands still cupped Cole’s face, and one thumb brushed over the bronzed cheekbone to wipe away the tear track.
“Would you believe,” said Hanzo softly, “that I did not even think of such a thing? I thought I could help, and acted on it.”
“And here we all thought Genji was the one without any chill,” Cole murmured.
Hanzo made a sharp noise of annoyance.
“If you are thinking of my brother at a time like this, then perhaps we need to refocus you again.”
“Darling, I’d be happy to look into your eyes all damn day if it meant you’d--”
Hanzo leaned forward and kissed him.
Cole closed his eyes.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
The End.