Overwatch: Jinxed

Chapter 32: Not Mine

Junkrat

Jesus, it was quiet.

The klaxon had stopped going off a few minutes ago. It had been almost soothing, in a way - the sound of destruction and mayhem still lingering in Jamie's mind. Music to his ears.

He was annoyed with the corridors, though. He'd need a thermite mine to get through all of that metal if he had to force his way into anywhere and it irked him. There'd never been a problem one of his concussion mines couldn't solve.

That was until he'd met Isabell, and a whole host of new problems that concussion mines didn't fix turned up. At first, he was just surprised that he'd actually made a friend. With a head like his and the shit that had everyone after his blood, friends were hard to come by out here. But Isabell understood him straight away - and she didn't want the information he had, so she'd just clicked with him real fast. It also helped that her old man got along well with his family before that bloody explosion came and ruined everything.

Then the problems started cropping up when Tayanna appeared. Jamie started wondering if he could trust Isabell, because she was with those dipsticks so often that they would have had an influence on how she acted. So she was pretty likely to ditch him, send him to jail, take Tay away from him when he'd just found her. When Tay had been captured, of course that had been his first line of thought.

Then, after she'd saved his life time and time again, understood when he couldn't talk about some things and when he needed to talk about others, when she noticed that there was more to him than explosives (although there were a lot of those)...

That was when the real problems started appearing.

He started caring. Too much. He cared what happened to her, cared that she lived through this, and he cared that she was alright. He was genuinely scared that if she lost it again, she might never be sane again. He had more worries about her than he had about the rest of the world's population combined.

Jamie opened the door. Another empty room. No Talon, no Tay.

The worst part was that he cared if she was happy. The worst part was that she was going to have to choose, when this was all over, between him and Overwatch.

And he knew which one would make her happier, and he hated himself for wanting her to pick the other option.

Next room. Still nothing.

Then again, Jamie hated himself a lot already. For being the only blasted one to see that dumb thing that had everyone after his blood. For being right there at the facility and not having done anything to stop the explosion that destroyed his home and his life. For being a helpless kid who watched as his sister broke the laws of science and physics and was taken away from him. Yeah, there was a long list for why Jamie hated himself.

Going insane had been easier than facing that list.

"Jamie, stop being a dipstick," he told himself, opening the next door. 

Out of nowhere, a dizzying shiver went down his spine and his hand instinctively went to his riptire. He had a creeping feeling that something wasn't right; something had changed the game. Like a sixth sense - Even I know when the shit's about to hit the fan.

"Get your shit together," he growled at himself, and opened the door to the next room. His eyebrows lifted as he beheld the scene before him - not an ordinary room.

Half of the room's equipment was smashed up. There were deep scratch marks in the floor, like someone had carved them out with something sharp, and perfectly circular dents in some of the metal walls. The tang of Tay's radiation-energy-whatchamacallit was lingering in the air, but most interesting of all was something glinting in the corner of Jamie's eye.