GABRIEL REYES + MARINA ANDRIESKI
NO TRIGGERS | COMPLETE
This couldn't be happening. She didn't leave Atlantis, she didn't, she didn't, she didn't. But here she was, strapped to a chair in front of Reynard. She watched as he'd turned Cupcake, her cat, inside out and dropped him in her lap. How he'd monologued about all the things he could do to her and no one would care. She could die here and no one would notice. She was terrified, rooted in place and didn't understand what was going on. She thought she could avoid this by staying in Atlantis.
Marina glanced around the room, looking for anything - anything - that she could use to fight back but without her hands… he was right. She'd die here. No one would care.
Gabriel Reyes had sat through enough of ‘Star Wars’ to dig the connection between fear and anger, and right now, he was on the distinctly pissed off side of the Force. Waking up anywhere without Jack was an automatic way to put him in a bad mood, but waking up in some nebulous weird smokey creepy place was a one-way ticket to him sporting Scary Commander Face.
So when he walked in on what appeared to be some scary looking fuckhead torturing a vaguely familiar woman, he wasn’t in the mood to be diplomatic. “Hope you’re the good guy,” he said briefly to Marina as he thrust a punch at Reynard’s head.
Reynard effortlessly turned his head out of the way and offered a bloody smile down to Marina. "Oh, I see we have an unexpected guest. First man you've had in this apartment in a long time, I bet." He stepped out of the way of a few more punches, smirking. "I'll just have to kill him, too, then."
Marina just kind of stared in shock. How did this guy get past her wards? Reynard was only here because he'd managed to sneak in before she'd locked the place down. Had this person been here, too? Was he another fucking god? This was getting a bit ridiculous.
Gabriel may have been out of the field for a little while, but in his experience, few were faster than either him or Jack (Jack was faster than he was, but only because he jogged every few days like a weirdo). That meant that the bloody guy in front of him wasn’t the typical human being or Omnic, but one of the many variants in Atlantis that potentially had super powers, magic, who knows what else.
“Yeah, try,” Gabriel invited, never having been one for extensive smacktalk in a fight, and pulled out a knife he kept in his pocket and tossed it underhanded Marina’s way with the hopes she had her shit together enough to use it to get free. It landed in her lap, but her hands were tied, so it’d be a tall prospect for her to get free immediately. “Who the fuck are you?” Not that Gabe cared. Crazy white boys loved talking about themselves. Talking usually made them sloppy.
"The god who is going to end your simple and short life, of course," responded Reynard, smirking as he drove his hand through Gabriel's chest, expecting to rip out the man's heart and showing it to him as he died. Only-- only his hand simply passed through Gabriel with no effect whatsoever.
"Well, this is an unexpected development," mused the trickster, failing to notice that during this exchange Marina had wedged the knife between her knees and was now using the blade to free her hands. Reynard licked blood off his hands and frowned at the man in front of him. "My turn. Who the fuck are you?"
Gabriel answered the question by attempting to slam Reynard’s head into his knee. Once again, it didn’t work - the guy just danced away, as if Gabriel’s quick reflexes and strength were nothing to him. ...on the flipside, Gabriel’s heart was still fine, if beating a little faster than usual, so apparently he and Psychopath were at an impasse.
Gabriel didn’t want his attention going back to Marina - since it seemed, at least, that he had some power over her. It looked like he could offer a distraction, not a straight-up rescue, but as Jack could attest, Gabriel could be really, really annoying when he wanted to be.
“You know, kill me,” he said, arms going wide at his sides in invitation. “I wanna see you really go for it. The kind of mess that it takes a whole department to clean up. ‘Cause I gotta be real with you, I don’t think you can do it. ‘Cause I don’t think you’re real.” At least, not in the way he and Marina were.
Wasting no time or words, Reynard just tried every trick in his book to injure Gabriel but nothing seemed to be happening, which just made him more feral and angry. By the time he realized that Marina had positioned herself behind him, knife at his throat, it was too late. She knew what he'd do to her. She'd read about and seen clips, so it was a bit of poetic justice that she slid the blade across the mad god's throat and let the corpse fall to the ground.
Tears mingled with blood had poured down her face, but she felt calmer than she had for the last... How long had it been, in that chair? It felt like days. Could it have been less? She couldn't even keep track of the time. Exhaling through her nose, she cleaned the knife on Reynard's shirt before tossing it back to Gabriel hilt-first.
"Thanks. Whomever you are."
“Reyes. No problem,” Gabriel answered, catching his knife and putting it back in its rightful place. She seemed shaky but reasonable; she clearly wasn’t a typical civilian but given her place at Atlantis, that wasn’t a surprise. “Where the hell are we?” he asked, not that he expected her to really know the answer, especially as the half-formed apartment around them appeared to be shifting, somehow, into something nebulous but familiar. Gibraltar, he realized. He’d seen enough of the base to know it in his sleep, but it looked a little more dinged up than he remembered.
“We need to find others,” he said, because it stood to reason that if they were here, other residents of Atlantis had to be here too. Jesse. Jack. It was old hat to ignore the worry creeping up his spine, to focus on the specifics of the situation, but he wasn’t immune to it, even so. “What’s your na--” he started to ask, but the question was interrupted by the sound of shotgun fire. Two shotguns, to be exact. A body - unidentifiable, Gabriel could only see a hand fall uselessly to the floor - collapsed into view, and then the Reaper came out of nowhere, literally, forming from a mass of shadow and smoke only a few feet from them, laughing lowly as he did so.
“Get behind me,” Gabriel said to Marina, going for his own shotguns, his voice uneven for the first time.
"Friend of yours?" quipped Marina, stepping up beside Reyes and moving her hands into a complex motion before a shimmering shield appeared between the shrouded figure and the two of them. Shields and wards were her specialty and the calm that had washed over her was allowing her to focus. She'd be damned if she wasn't going to carry her weight.
"Marina," she offered, glancing at him over her shoulder. "And I don't do hiding behind someone." She didn't even flinch as shells bounced harmlessly off her shield. She could tell this unnerved 'Reyes' somewhat, but he was still willing to put himself between her and this specter. So that did him some credit. Still, the shield wouldn't last forever unless she stood here maintaining it.
Gabriel wasn’t certain what Marina had done, but it clearly was some sort of barrier between them and the Reaper. The phantom had yet to speak, but it didn’t have to - malevolence shown through despite the mask on the Reaper’s face. It dissolved again, likely to get away from Marina’s shield, and rematerialized behind them, guns at the ready.
“The future,” the Reaper growled, “is now.” Guns rose and shot, but Marina had already managed another shield.
Gabriel himself was working through the problem at hand, a luxury he intended to enjoy quickly given that he wasn’t sure how long Marina could handle her shields. The psycho torturing Marina hadn’t been real, and had clear limitations. Would the Reaper be forced to follow the same rules?
“Lower the shield,” he said, not looking back at her to see if she did so. “I wanna see if this Ghostface rip-off has any bite behind his bark.”
"Not just your funeral if you're wrong," she muttered. In the back of her mind, she was already digging through her mental catalog of spells. The smoky dissolving teleport thing, while edgy and cool, had to have limitations. If she could somehow put a stop to that, it'd be easier to redirecting shields endlessly until she wore out or he got through. There were rituals to stop even gods in circles, after all. She just needed to find the right one.
Reluctantly, she let the shield dissolve and immediately started working through the first binding ritual that came to mind. With luck, she'd entrap him while Gabriel engaged. Without luck, she'd either get shot or have to try another one. Come on, Luck.
“Your future awaits,” the Reaper rasped, voice as mocking as it was disdainful. “Why fight it? You’re dissolving by the day. Headaches getting worse. It takes a little more effort to come together again.”
“Shut up.” Gabriel had had better witty quips, but the Reaper’s words hit more than just a nerve. It was like they were attacking his nervous system, and every blow that landed caused doubt to swell.
“Jack. Ana. Jesse. In the sights of your gun. You’re marching straight toward me.” The Reaper laughed, low and unhurried. “Day in. Day out. Just a little closer.”
“Yeah? And yet, with all that noise, you’re not even gonna try to shoot us?” Gabe was still shaking, just a little, but the lack of attack hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“Kill me,” said the Reaper, “and you’re killing yourself.”
“Let’s test that theory,” Gabriel said, raised his gun, and shot the Reaper square in the mask. At the last second the Reaper made a move to dissolve, but failed - Marina’s magic had found its luck. The phantom shrieked and turned to smoke, then ash, at their feet.
Gabe gave the ash like a little kick with his boot, and turned back to Marina. “To answer your earlier question, not a friend, no. Thanks for all that.”
Releasing the magic, Marina turned to her 'partner' and regretted that she'd given up smoking. "Your future looks just as fucked up as mine, Reyes." She gave him a little upturned smirk and looked around the place, honestly having no idea where the hell they were but at the same time ready for whatever came next. If this thing was going to keep throwing doubts and fears at them, at least they were ready now.
"Beers when this is over?"
“Beers,” he agreed succinctly, and holstered his guns. Marina, magic-user. Now that they weren’t being tormented by embodiments of their private terrors, he vaguely remembered her giving Jack some snark a couple of months back. Whatever. If they made it out of here, he had a feeling Jack would be a-okay being on the receiving end of any of Marina’s sense of humor. “What’s coming next, I wo-“
A light flickered and then flooded the universe. Gibraltar faded like an exposed photograph. And in a hospital bed in Atlantis, Gabriel Reyes’s eyelids flickered once, twice, and then opened.