"What are you doing here?" Mercy spoke, stepping back from Reaper to her desk as she realized just how close she had gotten to him; her common sense screaming to her that this was an act set to lure her in and lower her defenses. Reaper took in several more strained breaths before responding.

"Because I need your help," he weakly said.

"What?" she asked, raising her blaster again. "Why on earth would I help you?" To this, Reaper lowered his head and thought for a moment.

"Please..." he said, though his words sounded more begrudging than dire. "Something's wrong with me... I can feel myself rotting away. Withering into ash. It's been gradually getting worse until it's become so bad that it won't even go away now..."

"But why should I help you?" With one hand still on her blaster, the Swiss doctor placed the other on the com sitting at her desk, preparing to press a finger down on the red button; ready to alert the whole watchpoint of who was standing before her. "You're a fiend. You've hunted down my friends - my family - for nothing more than sick sport! You've killed them in cold blood, and left nothing but terror and death in your wake!"

Reaper was silent at her tirade of just a few of the many vile things he had done came out of her mouth. That silence didn't last long though, as a hideous, guttural chuckle reverberated from the deepest, darkest recesses of the killer's throat. "Because, Angela, you owe me."

Her brow lifted in vexation, but her hand held firm. "What?"

"You heard what I said," he replied. "You owe me. And what you owe me is my entire, miserable existence."

Mercy didn't understand, and seeing that she still seemed lost, Reaper went on with a sigh. "Don't you remember? It was exactly five years back... there were a pair of soldiers that had a little fight at a base in Switzerland that ended in an explosion. You were on the scene, conveniently enough with a prototype resurrection device of your own making. And, after all, what better way to test such a machine than in a situation such as that?"

Mercy's lip quivered the second the memory came to her in its full, horrid glory. It was here that she wanted to tell him to stop his explanation, but she failed to find the words in her shocked state, and still he went on. "You activated it over the body of your fallen comrade, now nothing more than a smear of red paint and mangled limbs sitting below a mound of burned rubble. And it worked. Not in the way you, or I, or anyone would have wanted, but it worked."

The com forgotten, Angela stumbled back until she fell into her chair's seat; her blaster falling from her grasp and clattering to the floor below. Reaper saw her stunned expression, and finding much amusement in it, slowly stepped closer to her.

"Looking like something that had been thrown into a microwave set to broil, he ran off, screaming in agony as his body began to rapidly deteriorate and rebuild itself from the cellular level in a repeating fashion, and that was the last you ever saw of him. Ring any bells, Doc?"

The bell had been rung. Mercy was in pure disbelief over who it truly was standing in front of her, and while she had her vague suspicions about who this enigmatic murderer was all these years, they were all realized in that moment. In a constrained voice trembling with horror, she uttered his name and cast a look of both newfound concern and pity toward him.

"Gabriel?"

Reaper grunted and nodded his head in confirmation.

As he lied down on the examination berth, Reaper watched from the corner of his eye as Mercy rushed throughout the lab, setting up multiple stations and equipment. Coming back to where he was and turning her attention to the machine nearest to him, she focused the arm of the device that had been hanging over her patient, and pointed it at Reaper.

"What's that going to do?" he asked, curious despite his intense pain.

"It's something that will keep your body mass stable in the time it will take for me to pick a sample from your being and devise a cure," she replied. "You may fall unconscious, or just get drowsy, but this will hold you together until I find out what's wrong."

He seemed skeptical. "I haven't had any need for sleep in over five years. This shouldn't be anything I can't endure."

She bit her lip as she fixed the last of the machine's adjustments, easily stifling back the urge to chuckle at his sureness. "It would take me half the night to explain to you why you're wrong. Now hush, and relax your muscles."

She tapped a blue, square-shaped button on the side, and a solid stream of green energy steadily left the end of the robotic device. As the beam touched Reaper's dark and malignant form, his tense posture seemed to slowly mollify until it went still. With a final gasp, his entire body fell limp.

Taking this time to really look him over, Mercy began to examine Reaper from boot to hood. As her blue eyes reached his head, her view became almost completely transfixed on his mask. The white-as-bone, scratch-covered object that had become the unbridled terror sewn into the minds of thousands was an intriguing sight on its own, especially to see it up close. Yet, it was whatever that could lie under it that started to beckon Mercy's interest. Slowly, she stretched her gloved hand out to pull it off. To see what lied underneath. But her effort to perform this action was suddenly halted, and she gasped in surprise as a claw shot up and wrapped its long, steel-edged fingers around her wrist.

Her hand stopped in mid air, caught fast in Reaper's strong, icy grasp. Looking back to his face, she could see he had turned it slightly and was now staring at her.

"Don't... touch... the mask," he sluggishly grumbled to her, clearly showing that the machine was having the desired effect on him. Finally opening his hand, he released Mercy's own, which was promptly pulled back by its owner.

"Vell, I'm going to have to remove it if you want me to see what's underneath," she stated, rubbing her now-sore wrist.

He muttered a small laugh that sounded more like a demented growl from a dying bear. "A fair warning Doc: You won't like what you see."

Mercy placed a hand on her hip. "If you are so sensitive about it, then fine, I will not remove it," she muttered, her expression appearing annoyed before it turned inquisitive. "But... while you're still conscious, may I ask you something?"

"Hrm. Okay," he grumbled. Mercy took a second to take in a deep breath, before speaking.

"Gabriel, why-"

"That's not my name," Reaper suddenly spoke, interrupting her. "Gabriel Reyes died five years ago. Only Reaper remains. It's only proper to refer to others by their real names, you know."

Not being one to argue over matters such as names with patients of a questionable mental state as she worked on them, Mercy ignored the sardonic tone he used in his last sentence and inputted a final directive into her device before looking to him again. "Alright then, Reaper, why have you been hunting down your fellow Overwatch agents?"

"You... really want to know, Doc?" he asked her, clearly even woozier than a few seconds ago as the machine's calibrated function took full effect. A confident expression came over the doctor's face and she nodded. With that, Reaper obliged her in a voice befitting of a drunkard more so than a mass murderer.

"Because... they all left me to suffer..."

Reaper's voice trailed off with his response, and his body refused to move any more than it was at the moment. As he finally, and apparently fully succumbed to the device's refined energy, Mercy thought over his words with a scowl. Then she thought about why she was doing all this for him in the first place.

She wanted to turn Reaper in. She wanted to tell her team of who was currently on her examination table. She wanted nothing more than to just rid herself of this foul guest and never see him again.

Yet, she could not.

Mercy's mind traveled back to the past. Back to the aloof, but well-meaning man named Gabriel Reyes. She knew he was a man whose ambitions were to just be noticed and praised for the goals he put his blood and sweat into accomplishing. He was also quite distanced of others and disagreeable at times, which was something she thought was a flaw their old team could get past, but that would prove in the end to be his, and the entirety of Overwatch's downfall. That fight between him and his fellow soldier Jack Morrison was the utter and final breaking point after it was confirmed a while before then that the latter was to become the first official commander of the organization, and the results of that fight spoke for themselves. She knew deep down that the confrontation was inevitable, but her pacifistic nature prevented her from interfering as well as she could have. Looking back to Reaper's prone form, she let out a small sigh before returning her attention to the work at hand.

Poking around for a few minutes with her gloves and tools, she sifted through Reaper's heavily clothed body, prodding and searching for anything she could extract and inspect. After taking several bits of Reaper's coat and putting them away for examination, finally, she pulled out something she knew she could use from deep within.

It was a piece of the dark slime-like substance that she had previously seen fall off of Reaper when he arrived, but the stuff from before had long-since evaporated. A small, smoky haze appeared to radiate off of it, and with the green beam of energy having kept it stable, Mercy set to work. Quickly but carefully placing it inside of a test tube, she absconded to her workplace at the other end of the lab.

Looks like it's going to be another sleepless night... she thought to herself dejectedly as she began her first round of analysis and experimentation. And it wasn't just the new work she now had on her plate that prompted the idea, but the crippling fear that her new patient would get up and attempt to slit her throat while she slept.