#junkmetra
The tired trope of one’s soulmate written somewhere on their body, the handwriting unique and from the match’s own hand. Sometimes it doesn’t appear right away. There are those who age into their twenties, thirties, forties before it appears. Sometimes there are multiple names that appear for poly folks. Sometimes they don’t appear at all for those who aren’t romantically and/or sexually inclined. But for most, names show up around mid-teens to early twenties.
Satya’s appears at seventeen when she is studying in Vishkar’s academy. It is on her left shoulder, printed in chicken scratch capitals: JAMiSON. It’s a very English name, Anglican, certainly something none of her peers would be called, and she hasn’t the faintest who might have such a name. The day it appears, she puzzles over it long into the night only to suffer the following morning in her early classes. In her spare time in the following months, she researches the etymology of the name and pores through companies and people who bear it. It has become a part of her without her consent, and she feels that in order to be prepared, she must discover as much about it as she can. Despite her efforts, nothing feels familiar or gives the so-called “heart skip” her friends describe, and so she is left wondering.
Jamison’s appears when he is fifteen. Orphaned, he’s hidden himself in the less savoury parts of Junkertown and scavenges to keep himself fed. It’s difficult, more than difficult, but he manages well enough, even if it means going a day or two without meals. Almost half of his right arm is missing from a particularly brutal encounter with the big bosses, supplemented by a very bare bones prosthesis one of the kinder mecha pilots had put together for him. On the side of his right thigh reads Satya in a flowing, elegant script. He doesn’t know who Satya is or where they might be from, but knowing they exist somewhere in the world makes the nights easier to endure, and he takes solace in the fact that he is no longer alone.
Overwatch is where their paths finally cross, just over a decade later. Satya is “lent” from Vishkar, and the pair of junkers are travelling mercenaries for hire. They are introduced to one another by their monikers, Junkrat and Symmetra, and neither is fond of the other upon first meeting: Satya finds him too coarse, and Jamison is too wary of her position within a powerful corporation. Their interactions are brief, encompassing stiff and cordial hellos and occasionally talk centered around missions at hand, and that is the extent of their communication—
That is, until one very late night post-mission under the dim lights of the workshop. Jamison is wide awake, half dressed, concentrating on wiring together a new set of stock to keep his mind from dwelling on the past. Satya is still composing herself after combat and lets the comforting familiarity of work and routine guide her away from the cacophony that lingers at the back of her mind. The room is silent except for their respective movements, the sounds of sketching and gathering parts, and despite their disagreements and differing views, their tentative agreement to remain cordial and professional staves off the awkward tension—there is no grasping for small talk or incessant bickering; just two sleepless individuals finding comfort in their crafts.
Eventually, Satya sees her name splayed across his right thigh. His prosthesis is resting a foot or two away on the floor (its crude structure must be too uncomfortable for floor work, or so she assumes), and the fabric of the shorts he wears is half shimmied up his leg. There is no mistake: Satya is written in her handwriting across pale skin, the white lightning of a scar crackling between the letters. It jolts a surge of shock through her nerves, and she finds herself gripping onto the table to keep herself steady.
After all these years of researching and wondering and travelling across the world, thisis the person she is destined to be beside? This man is Jamison? It’s this man whose writing is scrawled over her shoulder? No, surely not. It can’t be. But that is her handwriting. There’s no doubt about it.
“Junkrat,” says Satya, keeping her eyes very focused on the set of blueprints before her.
“Yeah?” The scuffling sound of him reaching across for another tool or piece of his inventory comes from across the room.
Tentatively, she lets her gaze sweep over to him. “When exactly did you get your mark?”
“Mark?” His eyebrows pinch together in thought, bewildered, but when he follows her eyes to the strip of black letters on his thigh, he taps his hand over the casing he’s stuffing with explosives and breathes a loud, “Oh.”
“That long ago?” asks Satya, somewhat amused. “I imagined everyone remembered when their mark appeared.”
Junkrat shakes his head and bites down on a coil of wire to free his fingers. “Nah, s’not like that,” he mutters through the metal. “Was a good while back. Not too long. Probably… I dunno. Eight years? Maybe. Something like that. Memory’s not the best, but I remember that night. Remember it crystal clear. Just been so long you sorta forget about it sometimes, y’know? Nobody ever showed, so s’not like I got some breathing reminder of it near me all the time. Right, just got a bunch of letters down where the rest of me leg used to be. Reckon that’s as good a reminder as any, but…” He shrugs, tugging the coil out of his mouth and guiding a pair of clippers to snap off a piece. “Eh. I ain’t worried.”
She absently traces the knuckles of her prosthetic hand. It gives her something to focus on. “I assume you never found the owner of the name,” she says.
“You’d assume right.” Arching a brow, he glances over to her. “What about you, then?”
“Me?” Satya supposes she should have expected the question. That is where the natural progression of the conversation was headed, wasn’t it? “It’s been almost eleven years. I never found the person it belongs to, either. I searched when I was younger, of course. Curiosity. But my efforts were fruitless. It was strange seeing my peers discover their significant others during the academy or in their first few years of employment at Vishkar. At the time, it felt like I was missing something important.” She lifts her right hand and settles it on the metal that covers her shoulder. Beneath, the letters seem to burn. “I think I might understand now.”
Jamison offers a terribly puzzled look. “What? What’s that mean? You find ‘em or something?”
Her heartbeat becomes a drumming in her chest. It hammers by her lungs and she can feel it swell with every swallow. The spacious workshop room now seems too cluttered, too close, too narrow, and she takes a steeling breath to calm herself. Her eyes keep drifting to the script across the side of his thigh, and she can imagine penning each curve of every letter.
“Yes,” she says.
Slowly, Satya begins to undo the latches by her shoulder that keep her prosthesis in place.
“I do believe I have.”
Water sluices over her in hot sheets and drowns out the din of the world.
Legs drawn up to her chest, Satya sits on the shower bench with teeth clenched and jaws set. A prickling headache beats through her temples and behind her eyes. Toes tucked together, she rests her weight into the balls of her feet before pushing up and coaxing her movements toward the cool tile of the shower stall. She lets her body ease into a repetitive rhythm of forward and back, forward and back, the undersides of her feet against the very edge of the bench. Continuous pattering drums across her shoulders and over her head, and even if it isn’t like when she’d retreat to her instructor’s studio and dance until her legs stung, it feels just as safe, calm, controlled.
Sometimes she wishes she could handle the battlefield better.
The droning puncture of gunfire, the familiar crack of explosives, the creaks and clatters of Reinhardt’s armor, the heavy thump of each teammate’s footstep, the moan of machinery, the bellows of her lungs, the pounding swell of her heart—everything is so tightly meshed into an environment she cannot control. The years have taught her to compartmentalize combat into a separate niche; she must make decisions that decide the fates of many, and she ushers the clamour down into a faraway place in the hollow of her chest so that she can do her duty and perform as best she can.
Only afterward does it come splitting up out of her like black tar, coating her throat and carving at her eyes and splintering through her eardrums. It consumes and smothers and wrenches her consciousness out of her body and makes her watch as she sits alone, composure frayed, watching as buckshot plies Jesse open or as Genji’s cybernetics are shorn away or as Lena rewinds from the reach of rocketing shrapnel. Angela breathes life into them and Ana erases the marks of war, but all of it does little to scour dark whips of blood from her mind’s eye.
Satya continues to rock. Her throat hurts, a tight and twisting knot.
Her missions given by Vishkar were nothing like this. Some were clandestine, hushed, and others were confrontation in broad daylight. Combat never escalated to this scale. She had thought herself prepared, and even after all these months of immersing herself into Overwatch and its endeavors, there are still times when she realizes that she may never be.
“Symmetra?”
She flinches at the sound of her moniker. There is no mistaking the accent.
Jamison must have recognized her belongings. The case for her prosthesis must have been a dead giveaway, and if that hadn’t been the culprit, he must have noticed her clothes. Her elegant dress has its telltale blue bordered with golden trim, and as of this moment, a sizable portion of it has been stained with blood. She’d nearly torn it off herself as she’d clambered for the shower, the stark imagery of him trying to breathe with a crushed lung branded against the undersides of her eyes.
“You… you all right in there?”
It’s hesitant. He never sounds hesitant. Amused, yes. Cocksure, yes. And on the rare occasion, somber and sincere. But hesitant? No. That isn’t like him at all.
Satya doesn’t answer. She digs her fingers into the meat of her thigh and bites at her lip, eyes stinging under the water. If she could talk, she might tell him no, no, she’s not all right, that she’s a right mess and she feels like screaming and punching a wall but all of that leads to bad memories so she’s cooped up naked in a shower stall trying to keep things bottled up; she wants to tell him she doesn’t know why he’s even in here despite their stupid talks in the workshop and his wonderment at her craft and their mutual apologies concerning first impressions because none of that means he should be here, not when she’s like this, and she doesn’t want to drag him into any of it but a part of her desperately wishes for something to keep her grounded—
“Right, look, I—well, I don’t know what’s happened, but I ain’t never seen you disappear like that. Don’t seem like you.” He then pauses, as if unsure, and she thinks she can hear the scuffing sound of him picking up her dress off the cold floor to set over top of the wooden bench outside her stall. “S’just… different, I guess. Not like usual. Not the normal alone time thing. I know how that is.”
She supposes he does. He’s been around her enough. More than enough, perhaps. She shouldn’t know his personal routines like she knows her own.
“I got something new I been working on,” he says, a lower timbre among the tile walls. “Just a gadget. Nothing special. Nothing explodey, either. Just reckon you might be interested. Y’know, if you wanna take your mind off things.”
Satya sinks her teeth into her tongue as she rocks. Steam fills her lungs with every breath. Her hair drizzles down over her eyes in wet strands and the heat of the water stings her shoulders and the drumming echo of pattering drops fills in the spaces she cannot. Too many things crowd the back of her mouth, too many you almost diedandwhy are you so unaffectedandJamison you truly almost diedandyes please anything let me focus on anything, but no matter how she works her throat, the words will not come.
“Right.” Jamison’s steps shift outside of the stall, granting a greater distance between himself and her sanctuary. “Right, so, if you need anything, just give us a shout, yeah? We’re around.”
His departure is marked by the uneven shff-click of his boot and peg, and then the thrum of running water drowns it out under its hands. She remembers the wheezing noise he’d made with each breath, the wild panic steeped in his eyes, the way the tendons in his left hand tensed as he’d tried to reach for someone, something, anything, and she slams her back against the shower wall.
“Stay,” she says. It isn’t her voice, not this hoarse and shaking thing, but she pulls it out of her and hums it against the back of her tongue and forces it still: “Stay.”
At first, she thinks it’s too quiet for him to hear. His hearing isn’t the best, especially with white noise encompassing the room, and she has little faith that her request managed to find its way over the drone. But a moment or two passes, and then she can hear his familiar gait returning over the pathing water below her feet. When he stops, it’s still a good distance away as if he suspected he’d been hearing things, and it’s another few moments before he replies.
“Hold up. You did said stay, didn’t you? S’not the acoustics in here or anything, is it?” A brief pause, considering, and then, “Two hits ‘gainst the wall for yes, one for no.”
Slowly, Satya uncurls her arm from around her leg. Balling her hand into a tight fist, she knocks twice against the metal stall.
Jamison laughs, sounding pleased. “And here I was thinking me right ear was bad.”
She isn’t sure where, but she thinks he sits down on one of the benches outside the stalls. All she has to gauge his position is the continuous sound of his peg tapping against the floor, and with how sound is handled in the washroom, that could be almost anywhere. Still, it provides something else she can turn her attention to, as his presence is a tangible, anchoring thing, something far more concrete than the heaving memory splayed on the ground with broken ribs.
“Did I ever tell you ‘bout the biggest mecha fight in Junkertown? Don’t remember if I did.” He makes a thoughtful noise, and she imagines him shrugging on the bench, his elbows propped up by bowed knees. “Eh, either way, it’s a good one. Was about five years ago, they put together this real ripper tourney. Had all sorts of big ones, pilots from all over the Outback. Not sure if you’d be too keen on all the explosions, oh, but it was perfect.”
The water continues to pour, the heat sinking into her skin and down the curve of her spine. Jamison’s voice wells up over the constant rhythm, boasting of cannons and machine guns and the clash of metal titans, and it paints a vivid picture to oust the lingering tar clinging to the inside of her ribs and pressed over her mouth.
Swallowing down the pain in her throat, Satya shuts her eyes, rocks, and listens.
Hi, here’s more of the Bloodborne AU nobody asked for! And here’s some tunes for the mood.
Jamison wakes to a pale sky and hard stone splayed beneath his back.
Sweet smelling flowers cluster by his head. The surrounding garden breathes with the passing winds, soft blades of grass whispering unintelligible secrets by his ears. The air is cool, gentle, the breeze a welcome touch, but no matter how many times he’s come back, everything has a sticky sort of dampness that clings to his clothes and burrows down through his marrow, the kind that hangs around the riverside or amongst weathered gravestones.
Death, he supposes. Not that it ever truly comes.
Slowly, he digs his elbows back into the cobble path and lifts himself into a sit. All of his gear is still present, although his weapons lie in a scattered heap beside him. He doesn’t need to sift through his pouches to know that all of his blood vials are gone. The pain is gone, too, he realizes, just as it always is. It’s always gone when he wakes. And while that would be a good thing, the pain is what lets him know he’s not dreaming.
Jamison flexes his hands through his leather gloves. Even his arm and leg are back in this place despite their absence in the waking world. It’s surreal, like the Dream somehow grew an empty doppelganger when he was young, long before he’d contracted his childhood illness, and now that he’s begun to hunt, it’s decided to let him use that vessel here while wrenched away from the waking world. While he does not presume to know anything about the Dream or its intentions, he does know that it is sanctuary. From enemies. From reality. From beasts. From death.
It is always quiet here. It is always peaceful. It is always at some indistinct time between sunset and twilight on an overcast day, and it is always shrouded in a thin layer of mist. The moon always hangs overhead, and there are always ethereal pillars stretching skyward in the distance. And as always, there are the soft undercurrents of prying whispers.
Combing his right hand through his blond hair, his missing hand, his phantom hand, he leans over and grabs a hold of the boom hammer’s haft. It’s a heavy, comforting weight, corporeal and mortal and grounding, and he plants the head against the cold stone and leverages its strength to heave himself upward. The bulky form of the cannon lies at his feet, and it occurs to him that he’ll need more ammunition before he wakes again. The last of his reserves had been spent on the Vileblood and that slavering beast, and while bloodmade bullets will do in a pinch, quicksilver is far more effective. A better bang, he thinks, and without the mess of drawing blood to shape down the barrel of a cannon.
As Jamison hefts the hammer over his back and dredges up the cannon from its nest of flowers, his brow knits in thought, trying to recall what brought him hurtling back into the Dream. It’s a liquid blur at first, shifting somewhere back beyond the edges of his consciousness, and then he remembers, he does, quite clearly: the beast had lunged at him, snarling with jagged teeth and flaps of severed skin sagging from its body, and it struck the final blow down his back after a too quick feint; it tore through fur and flesh and muscle and let its poison seep down through him, coursing into his veins with every heartbeat.
Not the best way to go, if he’s honest. Fawkes the Hunter has died far better deaths.
But the Vileblood finished it off, didn’t she? She did. She must have. Or at least he thinks she did. The last thing he remembers is her staring down at him as he died, knelt over his body with fierce gold flickering in her eyes. He can’t imagine the bloodstarved monstrosity would have left her alone long enough for her to watch him bleed out, or even to witness the poison still his heart. She must have eviscerated it with the strange magic blades he’d seen slice from the construct integrated into her prosthetic arm. She was certainly skilled enough to bring it down; he’s sure of that, especially with how swiftly and brutally she’d cut at him during their own battle before the beast intervened. If she really had finished it off, that must mean she’s still alive somewhere in the forest—waiting.
The whispers follow him as he walks down the cobbled pathway. His boots crunch against small pebbles and soft earth, stamping over faint voices murmuring up from beneath small headstones. The path winds past gated gardens encircled by black spiked bars and trails up to the dilapidated house perched atop the far hill where the gifts of the Workshop can be found. If he plans to go back and meet her, he must be prepared. The silent pact they’d made to pause their skirmish and destroy the beast was only temporary, or so he assumes, and he expects nothing but her full ferocity upon his return.
Jamison tightens his grip on the cannon at the memory. Truthfully, her full ferocity had been a sight to behold. No other beast had tested his abilities in such a way; her presence alone had nearly been enough to reduce him to bloodcraze. He felt it sing through him as he came at her, a deafening chorus spilling from between his lungs, the hammer’s spark a smear of red lightning in the inky night of the forest. He has no doubt she’s different from all the rest: she is cold, calculating, intelligent, and most of all, she is breathtakingly vicious. She granted him no quarter, allowed him no free swings, dodged every cannon blast, and for every inch he let her take, she punished him for it dearly.
She is not new to the Hunt, it seems.
Clusters of malformed messengers watching from worn headstones follow Jamison’s movements as he scales the hill. Their droning murmurs overcome the whispers beneath the wind; sometimes he can discern what he thinks might be words, but he can’t be certain. The cannon becomes easier to carry as he ascends, his strength pouring back into him from the Dream, and he finds himself drawing a deep breath in shivering anticipation.
Absently, he wonders if she will come after him again. It is true that he had stumbled across her by mere chance, but he is the Hunter, and he is bound to hunt like the rest of his brethren. From the measure of her skill and whatever strange blood fills her veins, it seems she must require a hunt as well. The thought of her scouring the forest for him lights a pyre of excitement against the undersides of his ribs.
Yes, yes, he remembers now—with chips of iridescent gold burning in the fading dark, she watched him die, watched the life leak from him onto the forest floor, and with a bloodgem clutched in one palm, her voice carried with him into the Dream: “You madman.”
Jamison slings the boom hammer from his back and cracks it onto the wooden floor of the old house. He grins under the stare of the dusty spines of old books and the shrouded benches by the altar.
“Well, you’re not wrong,” he says.
The Workshop awaits.
Consider:
Junk and Sym get sent on a mission together in a wilderness area.
It starts storming.
They find an old hunting cabin, unoccupied, with a supply of dry firewood.
They have to take off their clothes to dry them in front of the fire.
There’s only one bed.
…go on, give me more to consider.
