Ashes of Mercy
The first thing Gérard felt was heat.
It bloomed behind his ribs like a brand pressed to wet flesh, yanking him awake in the dark. He sat up gasping, skin slick with sweat, one hand already clawing at his bare chest. The seal was there—always there—spiraling beneath his skin in faint blue light. But tonight the edges were cracking red, pulsing like a second, furious heart.
He's stirring, Gérard thought.
Jay was waking up.
Another wave of pain rolled through him, deeper this time. Not just heat—presence. Something ancient shifting in the abyss inside his chest. He closed his eyes and saw it again: the void, endless and burning, and at its center the skeletal figure wreathed in cold blue flame. Jay. Not speaking. Never speaking. Only watching. Waiting.
A fist hammered the door.
"Commander Gérard! Explosion in the med-wing—Sir, you have to come now!"
Angela.
Gérard was already moving, yanking on pants, boots, jacket, anything. The seal flared hotter with every heartbeat. He didn't wait for details. He slammed the door open and ran.
The corridor was hell.
Flames licked the walls. Smoke choked the air. Overwatch agents shouted over the roar of collapsing steel, but Gérard heard only one name echoing in his skull.
Angela.
He sprinted through the chaos, the seal burning like a coal pressed to his lungs. Every step made the cracks widen. Jay stirred beneath it, restless, hungry, pressing against the failing barrier Angela herself had helped forge.
Stay with me, Gérard begged silently. Not yet. Please.
He rounded the final corner and the med-wing opened before him like a wound.
The far wall had been blown inward. The roof sagged, scorched black. Shattered glass glittered across the floor like frost. The smell hit him first—burned steel, blood, cooked flesh.
He stumbled through the ruined doorway.
Bodies lay scattered. Some shredded by neat, precise holes. Reaper's work. Others reduced to ash. And there, half-buried beneath a collapsed slab of ceiling, was a flash of white.
A lab coat.
"No…"
Gérard dropped to his knees and began tearing at the rubble with bare hands. Concrete scraped his palms raw. Rebar sliced his fingers. He didn't feel it. He uncovered her boots first, then the curve of her hip, then the blood-soaked uniform.
Then her face.
Angela's eyes were open, empty. Three perfect wounds punched through her—abdomen, shoulder, just above the heart. Her golden hair was matted dark red. Her lips were parted, as if she'd tried to speak his name before the end.
Something inside Gérard shattered.
He pulled her into his arms, cradling her against his chest. Her head lolled into the crook of his neck. The seal screamed against his ribs, blue light fracturing into violent red.
"I should have been here," he whispered, voice cracking. "I should have stopped him—"
Her body was already cooling.
Tears burned down his cheeks and fell onto her hair. The seal cracked wider. Blue fire leaked between his ribs like blood.
And then the memory took him.
Months earlier. The lab.
Angela stood close, palm pressed to the glowing seal on his chest. The air shimmered. Gérard's eyes flared with unnatural blue light, and when he spoke, two voices layered over each other—his own, and something ancient beneath it.
"You're not afraid," Jay said through him.
Angela's smile was soft, unafraid. "Should I be?"
Cool blue flame rippled down Gérard's arm. His fingers lengthened, skeletal beneath the skin. Jay reached for her. She met the touch without flinching. The fire brushed her fingertips—warm, not burning.
"You're warm," she laughed, quiet and genuine.
Jay's voice rumbled, almost wondering. "You don't recoil."
"Because I don't see a monster."
In that moment, something ancient inside Gérard had felt something it had never known before.
Relief.
Back in the ruins, Gérard's arms tightened around her lifeless body.
The seal finally gave way.
A sound like a whipcrack of thunder split his chest. Blue light exploded outward. Deep inside the void, Jay howled—a soul-deep roar that didn't touch the air but tore straight through Gérard's bones.
Angela's body slipped from his arms.
Gérard stood.
It wasn't him anymore.
His skin peeled away in burning strips. Flesh blackened and crumbled to cinders. Bones snapped, lengthened, sharpened. A cloak of living blue flame erupted across his shoulders, coiling like smoke from another world. His jaw unhinged as the scream became a low, cruel laugh. The seal detonated off his chest, leaving a burning sigil hovering behind him like a halo of vengeance.
What remained was no longer human.
A skeletal figure of white-blue fire. Eyes like twin suns. A grin carved from death itself.
The med-wing collapsed around him. Steel beams liquefied. The floor melted beneath his feet. Jay turned slowly toward the ruined skyline, flames curling from his shoulders like wings.
And he laughed.
Not joy. Not madness.
Judgment.
From her sniper's perch on the shattered comms tower, Widowmaker watched through her scope.
Overwatch HQ burned blue against the night. Reaper had promised a quiet strike. He had lied.
Then she saw it—the thing standing in the crater of the med-wing. Tall. Cloaked in living flame. A skull grinning beneath a hood of smoke. No heartbeat. No heat signature. Nothing human left.
It turned.
Its burning gaze locked directly onto her scope.
Widowmaker's finger tightened on the trigger. She fired.
The bullet struck true.
The figure dissolved into smoke.
She exhaled, relief flickering for half a second—
—until the fire behind her flickered.
She spun.
It was already there.
Towering. Looming. Skeletal hand reaching out. One burning finger traced her cheek. The heat was deliberate, intimate. Not enough to kill. Just enough to make her feel it.
Widowmaker gasped, skin blistering.
The demon leaned in close. Flames danced behind hollow eye sockets. Then it vanished.
She dropped to her knees on the tower, rifle clattering beside her, breath ragged.
Far below, in the heart of the inferno, Jay began to move.
Not running.
Hunting.
Blue fire licked ahead of him like hunting hounds, tasting the air for the scent of black smoke and shadow. Reaper's trail. The coward who had taken the only light Jay had ever known.
Memories burned hotter with every step.
Angela's soft laugh in the lab.
Her fingers brushing his flame without fear.
Her voice, gentle and certain: "Even devils can be soothed."
Gone.
Stolen.
Jay's skeletal hand clenched. Fire bled between his knuckles like veins of lightning.
The street cracked beneath him. Lampposts bowed away. A parked car ignited without touch.
He closed his eyes and let the rage become pure.
You remember how she looked, don't you?
The way her eyes went still.
The blood on your hands.
He didn't speak the words.
He was the words.
A ripple of white-hot fire surged outward like a sonar pulse made of grief. In the distance, black mist flickered—Reaper, trying to run.
Jay tilted his skull.
No smile.
He stepped forward and simply moved—through walls, through fire, through memory itself.
The hunt had begun.