#you already have your media acting like he's a terrorist on the pitch bc he shoved that cry baby

[ikram1909]

The way an 18 year old kid has "the greatest football club of all time" on actual strings

[saiyanshewolf]

*slides into your ask box* Yes hello maybe #80 for Meihem!!?? :D

Eeeeeeeep Jamie and Mei being married gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies, so naturally I got really carried away and wrote this angsty dramatic ten-years-later thing and kind of ended up not doing the prompt exactly right, but hopefully you enjoy it anyway! (Also 35 year old Jamie has the half-shaved head from that one Junkrat art that I saw going around awhile back…just…bc reasons.)

Yin & Jin belong to @fire-shadow-dragon-god Quinn belongs to @aly-the-alligatorLin belongs to @rinshi-chan Written for @poisonous-angel

Full of my own headcanons (Blackwatch Junkrat) and me making shit up (bionics and biotics).

The Outback has gotten worse.

Jamie has been in and out countless times over the past ten years, acting on behalf of Blackwatch to maintain some semblance of stability, so he knows the reasons why, can rattle them off like a kid reciting his ABCs: The Second Omnic Crisis. Continuing repercussions of climate change, like the Warrender Tsunami. The emergence of rival factions besides the Junkers in the Outback. An Australian government as ruthless as it is useless. The rest of the world turning a blind eye - some in selfishness, others in guilt.

The Warrender Tsunami had altered the coastline, pushing it inward and effectively giving the Outback its first seaport. Not long after that, new factions began to spring up in the wastelands. Scattered remnants of terrorist organizations long thought to be defunct regrouped in the desert; new ones began to form as well. The Junkers were forced to band together in order to protect themselves. Some of the new factions began to push outward, capturing towns, villages, even small cities. The Australian government responded with bombs, chemical weapons, biological agents, and no regard for its own people.

The Australian government calls it the Outback Territory. News media refers to it as the Outback Wasteland. Australian citizens on the coasts try not to mention it; if they do, it’s referred to with disdain as wasteland territory.

As far as Jamie is concerned, however, the Outback is still the Outback.

Just worse.

His current situation is a testament to just how much worse.

Jamie snarls around the gag in his mouth; it tastes like sweat and smoke and blood and it turns his stomach, but he refuses to give these ex-military mercs the satisfaction of watching him choke to death on his own vomit.

Well, that, and if he dies he’ll never get the chance to see his wife again.

Or their kids.

His mind rejects that idea so violently and absolutely that for the first time in a long time he feels the mania creeping up on him, feels the mad laughter bubbling up in his throat like acid.

After everything he did to get out of this hellhole and everything he did to make it less hellish…trust him to go and find a way to fucking die there anyway.

The mercs have been debating what to do with him over a campfire for hours now. Half of them want to turn him in to some faction full of ex-Talon, certain they’ll be rewarded for delivering a Blackwatch agent.

The other half just want to torture him to death.

Jamie has no preference between the two. If he can’t get away, or if he isn’t rescued, it’s a matter of being tortured to death sooner rather than later. He is pretty sure his situation already qualifies as torture, anyway.

He has been bound to some Frankensteined vehicle with duct tape for the past…Christ, he doesn’t even know how many days, he keeps passing out in the hellish Outback sun, but the monstrous thing seems to be part ute, part tank, and part torture device, covered in spikes made of sharp hunks of scrap metal. The biggest spike of them all points out from the hood, and it is that one that Jamie is bound to, with his wrists behind his back and his ankles taped to the roo bar.

He is dehydrated and feverish, nearly to the point of delirium. His skin is blistered. The shaved half of his head is the worst - it is so raw that even the feeling of his hair growing back in is painful. Everywhere but beneath his ragged shorts the gritty spray of sand is like having his skin rubbed with ground glass. It’s in his eyes, eyes that are half-blinded already from the glare of the desert.

His metal arm is twisted, smashed, near unusable, and Jamie wishes he had never let Dr. Ziegler upgrade him to an integrated model; his stump keeps sending agonizing bolts of pain all the way up into his shoulder, far worse than anything he ever endured with the malfunctioning nerve cap system.

His left shoulder is dislocated. It also has goddamn bullet in it; there are angry red lines spidering out from the point of entry and and Jamie will not let himself wish it had struck lower, he will not, just like he will not let himself think about how he doesn’t even know what happened to Mei.

They had not even working for Blackwatch or Overwatch when they were ambushed; they were on leave, for fuck sake, none of this was supposed to happen.

Mei had never been to the Outback despite asking God knows how many times over the years, just like she had asked him to marry her God knows how many times before he finally stopped holding himself apart, because he has never in his heart of hearts felt that he deserves her, or Yin and Jin, or Quinn and Lin…but whether he deserves them or not is irrelevant because God he loves them so much and he is two inches away from losing his mind but he is dying and if he has to die, if he has to die in the middle of a hellscape like this without ever even seeing 40, he wants to die thinking of them instead of the sun and the pain and the blood that reminds him too much of all the reasons why he does not to deserve them in the first place.

She’d wanted soil samples, water samples, wanted to know exact temperatures, exact radiation levels, wanted to know so much about Jamie’s hell-on-Earth of a homeland that he both hates and loves and Jamie had never understood why -

“Because this is where you came from,” she had said, “What brought you to me, when you think about it. I want to help save it.”

She had been smiling up at him under the light of the moon, and even then, even there, here, her bangs stuck to her forehead with the heat, with her shorts and hiking boots and pale blue tank top, with pink sunburn spread like frosting over her nose and shoulders and chest despite Jamie’s insistence on scheduled applications of sunblock…she was still his Snowflake.

He doesn’t know what happened to her. He doesn’t remember. There was gas - some kind of struggle, a fight, but it all blurs into a terrible ethereal nightmare in his mind.

Engines roar in the distance.

Jamie cringes. He knows that the mercs are either going to move on and run away or stand and fight, so he braces himself; if they run, the pain of being strung up and jogged around will knock him out, and as dehydrated as he is he may never wake up. If they fight he’ll either die or end up worse off than he already is…and he can’t get much worse without being dead.

The Outback is unforgiving like that.

The rumble of the engines grows closer and the mercs are laughing and the pit of Jamie’s stomach is full of lead.

Fighting, then.

He is going to die.

The mercs will kill him before they let anyone else take their fun - or their reward - away.

Gunshots. Laughter. The mercs are shouting, cheering -

Something explodes.

It is close, close enough that Jamie feels the heat from the blast, and he cranes his neck to see but all he can make out are shapes, shadows, blurry images; he is painfully glare blind and his eyes are full of sand and grit.

But he can hear, and he hears screaming, he knows screaming, knows agony when he hears it and the mercs are all shouting at one another, scrambling, and then there is another explosion and sand blasts into Jamie’s side, scouring his blistered skin like steel wool, and the realization that he is never going to see his family again, that he is never going to know what happened to Mei, settles like a stone in his throat.

More screams. The mercs are losing it. Jamie hears Kill him, kill the Junker, kill the fuckin’ Junk -

The voice chokes off into a thick, wet gurgle, like too much water draining too fast down a pipe.

He is going to die.

He is going to die and he doesn’t know if Mei is even -

She is! He bashes his skull backward against the spike until his ears ring and the blood runs down his neck. She is, she is, she’s gotta be, ya hear me?

Jamie does not  much believe in a higher power, but all he can see in his mind are Yin and Jin’s devilish faces, little Quinn and Lin with books spread open on their laps and this is the last time he will ever see them again, the only way he can see them, and he holds on to that and he prays, it isn’t very nice or polite or reverent but he prays -

She’s gotta be all right, ya hear me? He tunes out the screaming, the gunfire, the heat and the pain and blood and the sweat and every other hellish thing going on around him. She’s gotta be all right, damn it, ya can take me from ‘em but for god sake don’t take her don’t ya take her away from ‘em too let her get back to ‘em let her be all right -

He hears the familiar fwoosh of flames, hears more agonized screams, and he wonders if he is already dead because this must be hell -

“Hái méi dǎ wán ne!”

- it must be, because he’s hearing things, hearing Chinese and Mei is -

“Qīfu rén!” FWOOSH. “Zhè kěyǐ zǔzhǐ nǐ!”

“Oi, what’s she sayin’, mate?”

“No idea, but she’s bloody terrifyin’ and I’m glad we’re on her side - oh no ya don’t!”

Gunshots. Smoke, so much smoke, and it reeks, the stench of burnt hair and charred human flesh is so thick that Jamie can scarcely breathe and the tumult is at fever pitch, voices screaming and snarling and shouting, gunfire and flames and heat and that smell and his mind cannot seem to take it -

He wakes to strange hands on his body, lowering him to the ground, lowering him onto a makeshift stretcher of some kind, and he is so out of it that when his eyelids are pried open he tries to fight the shadow-figure off, certain that it’s some demon from hell, and then something is dropped into each of his eyes and they go numb.

“You’re safe. It’s okay, you’re safe.” There is a sharp prick in the crook of his left elbow. “I promise you’re safe.”

Maybe he’s in heaven after all, if he’s hearing his wife’s voice…

“Oi, li’l Trash Panda, ya need ta be still - !”

“Stop calling me that. I’m fine, take care of him.”

Before Jamie hears anything else the world goes very soft and quiet…and then it goes black.

When he comes to again he wonders if he has been reincarnated as himself, or if his life has been nothing but a fever-dream, because he has been here before, can tell by the smell that he’s been here before, can never forget the rotgut moonshine and charred flesh reek of Junkertown’s excuse for a hospital, and it terrifies him, sickens him, he still can’t see and the stump of his right arm is still firing agony into his shoulder and he panics, flailing, screaming, suddenly fifteen years old strapped to an operating table with ragged leather belts and rope, confused and nauseated -

Another pinch in the crook of his left arm.

More softness. More silence. More black.

The next time he wakes, he can see.

He is in a hospital - a real hospital - and his bionic arm has been repaired. He glances down at it, flexing the fingers, the wrist, the elbow, and there is no more pain.

His skin smells like biotic burn gel, which explains why his shoulders are barely pink instead of scorched red. The buzz-cut half of his head still aches, but compared to how it had felt, the ache is more than bearable.

His left shoulder and the left half of his chest are the worst; he is so sore that he feels as if he has taken a sucker punch from Mako, or maybe Zarya. The bullet wound has been bandaged rather than healed via biotics, which strikes him as odd until he remembers those creeping red lines.

Infected, then. Jamie flexes his left arm, looking down at the IV. Lucky I ain’t dead.

“Jamie?”

Jamie sits bolt upright at the sound of Mei’s voice; she is in the room and nearly in his hospital bed almost before he can blink, and when she throws her arms around him Jamie finds himself clutching her as if he will never, ever, ever be able to let go of her again.

“Jamie, oh my god,” she murmurs, her voice breaking, “I’m sorry, I’m probably hurting you I’m sorry I was j-just so scared -”

“Snowflake.” Jamie only distantly registers the ache in his shoulder. Tears are streaming down his face, landing on Mei’s skin; she pulls back a little and swipes her thumbs beneath his eyes.

“No more dehydration,” she says softly, giving him a tiny smile. “That’s good.”

Jamie can’t breathe.

Across Mei’s throat is a stripe of raw, burned skin, clearly the result of hamfisted cauterization. It has not been treated with biotics, either, meaning that some sort of infection was present when she came in, may still be present.

He glances up at her face. Fading bruises are shadowed beneath both her eyes. There is a burn on one of her cheeks, a minor one that has been treated biotically, but it is a burn nonetheless and there are more down her arms.

Jamie grabs her hands; her blue nail polish is chipped and faded and a couple of her fingernails are missing entirely. When he turns her hands over in his he finds that her palms are burned as well.

He feels sick, sick and ashamed and guilty, so intensely guilty that he is shaking.

“Mei, love,” he mumbles, “I’m so sorry - I’m so fuckin’ sorry.”

“Jamie, it isn’t your fault,” she says softly.

“I shoulda protected ya,” he says, tears pricking his eyes again. “Why’d I marry ya, I’m so fuckin’ useless I can’t even fuckin’ take care of ya like I’m s’posed to…”

“It took a lot of convincing,” Mei answers, her lips quirking into a small smile. “And the day you said yes was the happiest day of my life and still is. So hush.”

He leans in and kisses her, not trusting himself to speak; she kisses him back with a heated intensity that soon has him forgetting everything except how lucky he is to have her in his arms again.

She is perched astride his lap when she finally pulls back, her cheeks flushed pink beneath the burns and the bruises.

“Down, boy,” she murmurs, breathless. “Angela hasn’t cleared you for any kind of strenuous activity just yet.”

Jamie snorts. He leans back against the propped-up mattress, both hands on Mei’s hips.

“Kiddos all right?” he asks.

Mei nods. “They’re still with Ana and Reinhardt. They know we got into trouble and got hurt, but they don’t know how close it was.”

“Good.” Jamie reaches up and tucks Mei’s hair behind her ears. “I know how close it was with me, but…Mei, love, what happened ta ya…?”

“The mercs gassed us. I got my shirt over my nose and it kept me at least semi-conscious, but.” Mei smiles. “Well. You don’t wear shirts. The mercs knocked me around a little, then tried to kill me by cutting my throat. It didn’t work well. I played dead. They destroyed everything in camp, left, and took you with them, yelling about Ex-Talon. I panicked, ran…I blanked out for a little while. Probably a fever from the infection. I got lost. A Junker found me, and I…um…”

She flushes scarlet. Jamie cocks an eyebrow, waiting.

“I, er…might have punched him in the nose,” she murmurs. “And, um…stolen his laser rifle…okay, I threatened his life. I made him take me to Junkertown. They tried to kill the infection that had set in by cauterizing the wound in my throat, but I wouldn’t listen to them when they told me I needed to rest. When I told them that Junkrat had been kidnapped that got them moving, but I…I don’t think I ever actually told them I was your wife. I couldn’t think straight. don’t think I ever even told them my name, I was so preoccupied with finding a weapon in Junkertown I could actually use and when I found the flamethrower I had to get it working again, that’s how I got my nails ripped off, where all these other burns came from -”

Jamie remembers the whooosh of flames, the smell of burned flesh, the screams of the mercs, the nervous voices that sounded much like his own.

His mouth drops open.

“Snowflake,” he says, “Did ya - was that - ya led a bunch’a armed Junkers inta the Outback? Ta hunt down mercs?”

“No,” she answers. “I led a bunch of armed Junkers into the Outback to save my husband.”

Jamie opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He hides his face against Mei’s chest and she holds him close, quietly stroking his hair.

And when Dr. Ziegler comes in a couple hours later to find them curled up together in Jamie’s hospital bed, she leaves them be.

Bonus:

“Okay, but what did they call ya?”

“Jamie, I don’t see why it matters.”

“‘Cause it’s me culture, Snowflake, c’mon -”

“Culture?!”

“Oi, I never said they was cultured.”

“…*mumblemumble*…”

“What was that?”

“It was because of the black eyes…ugh, they called me Trash Panda, okay?”

“T-trash…oh my fuck, that’s bloody perfect, I love it -”

“Don’t you dare start -”

*smeck* “My li’l Trash Panda!”

“…shut up, Junkrat.”