Overwatch: Jinxed

Chapter 13: Well Then

"Well now we're in a right mess, aren't we?"

Isabell groaned, and rubbed her head. She had a throbbing headache and the rib that she'd cracked while falling off the building a few days ago hadn't fully healed, and was giving her hell for not remembering to ask Angela to fix it.

She slowly opened her eyes. It was still dark, but - from the few shards of holoscreen left in her goggles - it was around 3am. She cursed herself for not checking the suit for integrity first - Mei didn't know the complete composition and how Isabell's radiation would affect it. She must've been going off the notes Isabell had left on her desk, but those were only half-finished, so it was no wonder her suit had been unable to combine the radiation and energy effectively.

Isabell found herself under the canopy of some unfamiliar-looking trees. She was lying on solid earth that smelt of a warped kind of rain, and she was cold. Isabell had lived in an irradiated outback and a tropical rainforest, so this kind of cold was new to her.

She took a mental catalog. No broken bones, except that rib, a few bruises - but those were mostly from the plane. It seemed that the shock waves had been the perfect strength to not just slow her fall so that it wouldn't be fatal, but to land her exceptionally softly - she'd actually stood on two feet as she landed. Before passing out, of course.

"Well now you're just being rude."

Isabell hauled herself into a sitting position and glanced around. She checked her belt and sighed with relief - her spare pair of goggles. She carefully removed the shattered ones and replaced them, marking any cuts on her face, and looked around. Both nunchucks, thankfully, were only a few feet away each.

Then she glanced towards the trees, and wasn't sure whether to stare, laugh, or run.

Everything came flooding back to her. The fall, the plane, the grenade launcher. 

She stared at the person hanging from the trees.

And finally, she recognized him.

His right arm was gone, replaced with a clunky mechanical one that looked like it was made in the 1980s. He had a makeshift right leg as well. His hair was blown back in stiff locks as if a cartoon bomb had blown up in his face, and the ends were grey with smoke. He wore camo shorts - torn here and there and with ragged ends - and two thick belts of whatever explosive he could carry. He was hanging upside-down from the tree, his head at Isabell's eye level if she stood. His almost explosive brown eyes were shining with mayhem, that touch of insanity which made him so dangerous. His gun was hanging from another tree a few meters away. And Jesus Christ, he was tall.

Enter Jamison Fawkes.

Junkrat.

"Well shit then," Isabell breathed. "You."

"That would be me," Jamison bowed. Or at least he tried to, hanging upside-down from a tree with what could very easily be a broken fibula. He did his best not to move it, that much was obvious.

Isabell's goggles finally blinked to life, bringing her better night vision. She looked around. She knew her friends would find her, she knew they would - she just had to stay in the same place. Tracer would have remembered where she fell, or at least when, so that Winston would be able to find her.

But how long would that take?

"They're coming," Isabell said, and she hated that she was saying it more to herself than to anyone else. "My friends are coming."

"Well, I'm fucked then, aren't I?" Jamison grinned lazily. "All them do-gooders just don't appreciate a soul like me."

Isabell bit her lip. She had to build a fire. A smoke signal would help her friends find her, plus, now that she looked at her goggles, it was well below 0 degrees Celsuis. But she couldn't just leave Jamison there - with hardly anything to defend against the cold, he'd be dead in hours. Then again, there was always the chance that he'd blow her sky high. She had to get through to him, make him need her. She glanced at his leg.

She'd have to promise what she couldn't give.

"I'll make you a deal," she decided, walking over and standing under his tree. He grinned at her, and wiggled a finger in his ear as if to clear it.

"I'm all ears."

"I'll get you down," Isabell said carefully, "I'll get your gun and I'll get my friend to heal your leg. Then you'll help me get dry wood for a fire to keep us alive and you don't explode my ass. Deal?"

"A fellow Aussie, eh?" he mused, before grinning and sticking out his mechanical hand. "I love it! Deal."

Isabell looked at it, and grinned back. She shook, and scaled the tree like a monkey despite her cracked rib giving her hell. She hooked both legs around the pine tree's branch - shivering already - and brushed the snow off it. That would have broken her fall when she passed out, and now that she was up here, she could see a big Isabell-shaped snow puff in the untouched snowy ground.

She found that his mechanical leg was sandwiched between two branches at the knee. His other leg was resting against the same branch, and Isabell winced. Yeah, that was broken. He wouldn't be able to walk on it on his own.

Isabell surveyed the tree. There was no way she was wedging that thing out, not with her fingers already red with the cold. She leaned over and saw Jamison's face grinning up at her lazily, swinging a bit in a sudden frigid breeze.

"I'm going to have to separate your leg at the knee and then remove it in two pieces," she explained. "I'll let you know when to hang on to something so that you don't hit the deck and break your leg worse."

Jamison frowned. "That leg took me, uh..." he counted three fingers. "Eight months to perfect."

"I can make it better, even, if you want. But for now you're just going to have to live."

Isabel pried off the casing on the end of one of the nunchucks, and got to work.

"Just puttin' it out there," Jamison thought aloud, "But could you define 'explode'? I mean, is the deal still on if I use a grenade instead of a shrapnel bomb?"

"No," Isabell growled, but couldn't help smiling.