mhm, short break, trying to crystallize an old idea.
*
After locking the door behind himself with the personal override that cut off all the outside communication, Gabriel turned to face the thing wearing Jack Morrison's skin sitting behind the Strike Commander's desk.

He watched the pretense of any human emotion bleed out of Jack's face to be replaced with impersonal curiosity.

"If this is about the discourteous United Nations representative, in my defense, I was hungry, and he irritated me."

Great. Time for breathing exercises.

And Gabriel wondered, somehow, where his developing drinking problem was coming from. He crossed the distance to the desk and leaned on it with both his hands gripping the edge.

"You can't eat people only because..." Hell, who was he kidding, they had this argument rehearsed.

"Is there anything left I have to worry about?"

"It's not one of your operations," Jack smiled, teeth showing, and without the usual mimicry the expression could look downright terrifying, "or one of your inconvenient detainees. I'm always careful."

"Yeah, about that..."

The real Jack Morrison has been dead for the better part of three decades, a victim of a hit and run left to die in a ditch whom something else found and crawled into - if Gabriel were to trust anything this Jack Morrison told him. “You gave me some kind of eldritch std.”

"I did?" Jack craned his head to the side, the reaction almost impossible to gauge. Gabriel let go of the desk, slowly, and pulled up his jacket together with the shirt underneath. The skin on his side still pulsated with immaterial liquid blackness coming apart. "So I did."

"That's all you have to say for yourself?"

"This situation is far from exact science, Gabe. To this time, you're the only human that has survived in full health." Jack brushed his fingers against the undulating mass trying to cling to his fingertips.

"You have no idea, then."

"No. But I think I know who might prove helpful, you will only have to put on your charm after I'm done with her." Jack brought up a profile on the screen. "Just say the word."

Gabriel had no need of reading it, he had prepared the dossier himself, and advised caution.

"Do it."

Two months later, Moira O'Deorain was inducted into Blackwatch.

*

The first Blackwatch's best kept secret was the fact some occupants of the holding cells sometimes disappeared without a trace, only leaving behind the unusually bloody mess splattered even on the ceilings.

Awful stuff no-one wanted to be stuck cleaning up so everybody kept their mouths rightfully shut.

Gabriel flicked the ash off the cigarette he'd been barely smoking in front of one of such cells.

"Are you done? You have a party in an hour, and if I can't get out of it..."

The door opened with a high-pitched whine of one of the hinges - he should have someone to look at it later - and Jack, looking pristine in comparison to the gory mayhem inside, stepped out, slowly licking the tips of his fingers.

"...then neither can I?"

"Then neither can you." The wet sounds of the blood dripping from the ceiling still held their unnerving quality. "Did you learn anything useful?"

"Only a bunch of religious nonsense. Tell me," Jack turned to face him inside the hidden elevator going straight to his quarters.

"Why do you all find a merciful god when faced with me?"

Because there has to be something to balance out the existence of whatever you are, Gabriel answered him the first time the question had been asked. A rehash of an old argument, Jack being facetious and playful.

Always leaving him wondering how much of those interactions were purely for his benefit, and what he was exactly to Jack: a pet, a project, an interesting specimen?

'One that didn't try to run' was an exponentially poor explanation to Gabriel's liking, and the only one he got.

After all, running was of no use, and that night he snuck out to smoke on the roof of their compound, Gabriel decided he might as well finish his cigarette before he got devoured like Mason, or driven insane by the sight of the thing that wore Jack Morrison's skin.

Funny how spontaneous explosion due to unexplainable internal buildup of unknown gases got on the list of some more baffling SEP side effects.

"My turn?" Gabriel had asked when Jack turned to him, face slack and expressionless like one on a corpse - but put on something living.

He raised his half-burned cigarette up for Jack to see.

"Give me a minute, or two."

With Jack slowly circling him, far too close for it to be of any comfort, he got to finish his smoke.

"I like you. You might do."

It took him two more cigarettes in the company of the splatter of organs, bone, and blood Mason had become to realize he was alone, and around half an hour before he called the whole mess in, avoiding any mention of what had actually occurred.

An elaborate hallucination, Gabriel had assumed. God, was he wrong then, and on the next placement rotation, Jack made sure there were no doubts to be had about the authenticity of the roof incident.

The ding of the elevator arriving was enough to bring him back to the present.

"What were you thinking about?"

"Mason."

"Always the romantic." Jack moved deeper into the suite, ordering Atena to open the windows but lower the blinds - getting the security 'expert' in Gabriel wince before he eventually remembered he had no idea if Jack could even be killed

He had seen the body pull itself back together more than once, the pulverized muscle and bone popping into its proper place with visceral slurps and cracks, the perfect image in one's mind's eye to be undressed to.

Not that he minded, particularly, not at all.

But seeing Jack feed always brought something out of him - and being satiated always made Jack prone to indulge in more pedestrian matters, like having Gabriel spread painfully over his lap and speared on his cock, tendrils of void keeping him bound and upright, and immobile.

Dissecting him with clinical precision and then putting him back together, all while observing Gabriel with a professional disinterest one might wear during a specimen’s autopsy. Honestly, the thought itself made his dick strain for release against his thigh.

Nothing like bending Jack over Strike Commander's desk for a quick fuck, or having him on his knees with his scary pretty mouth on Gabriel's cock - sometimes even playing along in a fashion making him appear almost human, and so much more horrifying for making Gabriel doubt.

He was jostled out of his unconscious train of thought by something pressed hard against his side, sinking into the flesh turned black. With his neck craned, Gabriel observed in morbid fascination the tentacle as it moved deeper in - soon joined by another one following the suit.

"...what?" Gabriel managed to gasp out before slick mass forced itself between his lips and surged down his throat, choking him with its girth, and for a moment took his mind off the sensation of becoming increasingly - inconceivably - bloated for all the wrong reasons.

To his rising panic, the intrusion blocking off his air remained still and rigid, making it impossible to breathe around it until it eventually moved and contracted, slipping slowly further along. The first few breaths Gabriel took produced embarrassingly wet wheezing gurgles.

Becoming frantic again with the growing awareness of something stuck in his gut, poking and prodding where nothing should, the feeling of things inside squirming alien and impossible to to ignore.

He strained futilely against the bonds keeping him in place.

This was it, finally, the moment Jack would devour him because he’d become bored with him, or Gabriel had lost his usefulness to him - the moment Gabriel would become a pitiful smear of flesh and blood painting the walls and the ceiling - and maybe even Jack himself.

The thought should scare him. Instead, Gabriel felt his dick hop up in excitement as his balls tightened and heat pooled between his legs - leaving him trying to fuck the air in vain hope of creating any friction while still held in the vice of unyielding tentacles.

Pleading with his eyes not for his life, but to be let to come.

Jack pressed his palm to his chest, lips on his scary pretty face curled up in either amusement or sneer, or something entirely else, and the sensation of something popping inside reverberated behind Gabriel's ribs.

Peritoneal rupture, the still functioning analytical part of his mind supplied. Internal bleeding, infection, immediate medical intervention needed. But Jack was only smiling up at him while something contracted his lungs, leaving his chest fluttering desperately.

"She has outdone herself, his time," Jack mused, breaking away the eye contact as his lips closed around Gabriel's nipple - teeth scraping over it - biting into it - just one of the myriad of sensations breaking through the descending fog of lightheadedness.

His body fighting for its life, Gabriel focused on just - as much as - staying conscious - while the animal inside clawed and whined, maddened with fear. Until something was squeezed - from the inside - almost an explosion - and, screaming, he tasted the bitter ichor.

Slowly coming to and laid out on the bed, Gabriel was simply amazed to be alive - still. Sore, hurting, spent - but neither in pain, nor dying. His hand, held to his side, rested on solid unbroken skin while his addled mind tried to come up with any explanation at all.

Fucked within an inch of his life, definitely.

Confused as fuck in the end why - somehow and inexplicably - he was still breathing and existing? That too.

Something brushed his fingers and the tendril receded back to Jack, folding back into his form with unhurried neatness.

"Being fashionably late is back in fashion, I hear," Jack, in his dress attire, laughed before walking out and leaving him to his own devices. Gabriel glanced at the digital clock on the wall and swore.

He made it to the party an hour late already hating everybody there.

And with any function like this one, nothing more was expected of him but to be an intimidating wallflower - allowed to be almost as rude an uncouth as he truly wanted to be when telling people to fuck off while he nursed his undiluted vodka, eyes on Jack flitting around the room

All smiles and sparkles, and sweet words of social conventions and contracts he had no care for save for keeping up the appearances.

Gabriel was happy with the silent arrangement, the small talk exhausting and pointless - and what was he supposed to even say?

'Dear ma'am, I murder people, and when I don't, I find people for your precious devil-sent Strike Commander to eat, and by the way, ma'am, you look simply enchanting tonight!'

Gabriel set the empty glass on a windowsill and grabbed another one from a passing waiter.

'Sir, so nice to meet you, I'm Gabriel Reyes, this is my partner who happens to be an unholy abomination, and our kid literally popped out of me on the battlefield, yeah, I'm still trying to figure that one out' also never seemed like it would do well as a conversation starter.

Gabriel knocked back the drink - gin and tonic this time - leaving the glass standing next to the other one, and walked to the balcony, hand already reaching for the pack in his pocket, fingers itching to feel the weight of a lighted cigarette between them.

Turning around, he came face to face with Jack bringing up already burning lighter for him, his back to the crowd in the room. Gabriel leaned against the balustrade and lighted his cigarette, drew in the smoke slowly into his lungs - savoring it - observing and waiting.

Jack pocketed the lighter, and then tampered with Gabriel's tie, his fingers sliding lower after, splayed, with a smile of something that had never learned what a smile was really about.

The ride or die kind of smile, all teeth and malice, the last thing for anyone else to see.

"It's coming along all nice," Jack mused.

"You put another one in me?"

"Maybe." Coy and teasing, the answer sent shivers down Gabriel's spine.

"When."

"Not today. Would you have said no to me?"

The choice he didn't have aside, Gabriel knew he wouldn't have refused.

Curiosity was the first step on the stairs leading all the way straight down to hell, and he had gladly taken a tumble down, his sanity forfeited with the knowledge he never wanted but couldn't get enough of.

They say curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.