"In the morrow," he specifies. The ritual grounds don't open up until then, and he's perfectly fine with that. The rest of the day can be spent doing whatever else they want around here without obligation, and even though free time doesn't necessarily equate to something fun and safe for everyone else when Junkrat is involved, he's not too worried. Not when he's got just enough of a buzz to chill him out.
She's not alone in wanting a lot of her memories to stay stuck where they already are. He's hoping that there will be some kind of way to cheat the system, get a distraction going, something to keep his few well-kept secrets undisturbed. He takes a seat in the circle, much more casual than Fareeha with his legs crossed and slouching forward with his hands on his shin (and shin analogue).
There's a moment of stillness, and he feels his mind wander against his will. That's not particularly unusual - his mind is usually swimming in a million half-coherent thoughts all at the same time - but where it ends up is unexpected. The person that manifests is a taller than average, well-built woman with ashen blonde hair, long and mildly curly hair pulled forward over her shoulders in loose, low-hanging pigtails. She's dressed in just a tanktop and shorts, shoulders and thighs riddled with tan lines.
Junkrat laughs nervously. This is going to be a lot harder than he was hoping for. "They're goin' real far back, huh..."
She's spitting mad. Jamison! she seethes, standing over him, and he giggles - his perspective changes to look at the mess before him: an entire solar panel, yanked off the array and dismantled to what looks like beyond repair. It's not destroyed, just taken apart with an aggressive thoroughness, and his lack of organization makes it seem a lot worse than it actually is. But this is what she does for a living, she knows what she's looking at, and it's nothing she can't fix. She won't need to.
She puts a hand on his head and the anger soothes away, but she still gives him a stern look. Ya can't just take down our equipment like that, Jamie. If ya can't put that back together before supper, ya won't get any.
Okayyyy!
Two tiny hands reach out and start picking at the tools and parts from the dusty red ground. They couldn't belong to anyone older than four or five years old. It gets put back together, and Jamie gets up and dusts himself off, and goes inside; the rickety screen door slams behind him and he hears whispered conversation in the dining room. He peeks around the corner and finds Mum and some other woman with black hair -- he can't remember what she looks like -- talking to each other in hushed words that they think he can't hear.
There's got to be something we can do, Mum utters. People live here.
We tried protesting in Perth, her conversational partner offers weakly. Just a couple hundred of us could get there. Most of us can't afford to get to the cities. Everything falls on deaf ears, and the government doesn't care.
He knows what they're talking about. The "factory". Mum doesn't talk to him about it because she doesn't want to scare him, but he figured it out a long time ago on his own, talking to the other neighborhood kids. A robot factory.
They won the war. He doesn't get it. Why would they want to make more? Jamie looks at a portrait on the mantle. It's of Mum while she was still round with him, and Dad, his buzzcut strawberry blonde hair and the smile Jamie inherited, dressed in his RAN uniform. Chief petty officer, from his colors. He remembers that. They had this picture taken because there was a chance that he wouldn't come back from his deployment.
They were right.
And now they were making more of the things that killed him, in their own backyard. Jamie can see it being built, not that well, in the distance when he looks out through the back porch windows.
Junkrat looks away, even though he wasn't really looking at Fareeha to begin with, hiding his watering eyes with his warmer hand. He really doesn't want to have to relive this.
He remembers the day of the explosion. Two older neighborhood kids are using rugby as a front to beating the weird kid, and he never really gets any help even through the tears because ah, kids'll be kids, and it's ironic that the flash of white that momentarily erases the red earth and levels their forgotten village is the first thing to ever have saved his skin. They're out on an open expanse, so they all get tossed a harmless some hundred feet away from where they were. It's what finally gets the bullies to run away, and Jamie goes to the only place he could: back home. He wishes that he hadn't.
Oh, thank God, you're safe, Mum gurgles out. She's pinned between two mangled solar arrays. He can't see the blood through his tears, he can't see the wounds that are seeping the life out of her. He clings to her arm, begging her not to die, and Junkrat doubles over as he screams too, tears pouring out between his fingers. He didn't have to watch his father die, and part of him wishes he didn't have the memory of what it feels like to hold someone while they took their last breaths.
Yer a strong, smart boy, she says, trying her hardest to smile for him. Keep fighting. Survive. Y'll prove them all wrong, my Jamie...
So he does. The next few years are a horrid blur, a combination of radiation and brushes with starvation. He proved them all wrong, all right - living out of his mangled house and utilizing anything he could find in the name of survival. It wasn't easy to start with, but everything got worse. Jamie takes his first life when one of those bullies shows up on his porch with a shotgun, politely asking for all of the food stored in Jamie's still-working fridge.
He'd been just a few weeks too late, because Jamie had already figured out how to safely dismantle and reassemble a fragmentation grenade. Junkrat remembers that it was the first time he'd laughed in a long time when he painted the porch walls with the bully's entrails. And destroyed the porch in the process. The second time an explosion had saved his life - but this time, it was his own.
Time passes. Puberty hits, he loses his mind, he loses his hair, he loses his teeth. After a few days of no sleep and one far too ambitious project later, he loses his limbs as well. Ah, that's why stabilizers exist. He laughs hysterically like the audience of stand-up bit that doesn't know how to quit, amazed that the blast hadn't knocked him unconscious. His blowtorch is still primed, still hot from warping metal, and he uses it to cauterize his wounds as best he can before the blood loss finally takes him out for the count.
His first prosthetics aren't that great, but they're enough to get around. They're enough to pilfer goods from anyone stupid or cocky enough to leave them unsupervised without a trap or a weapon, unlike his own wrecked home. Each successful hit gets him braver, gets him better materials for better prosthetics, gets him fed, and eventually people are begrudgingly showing up at his doorstep for weapons, for vehicles, for limbs, and he makes a new name for himself: Junkrat.
With the kind of skills that has people both coming for his goods and for his neck, he eventually makes his way to the front door of the wrecked omnium to see what he can find.
"No!" Junkrat protests in reality, clawing at his head in desperation. "Not this, not this, she can't--"
Most Junkers wouldn't be well-read enough to really understand what he stumbled across, deep inside the seed of Junkertown. A veritable treasure to some, a plague to others, a burden to him for having no use for it but the knowledge that it exists.
Life becomes a lot harder. There are more than just his fellow Junkers that want to tan his hide now. Even with his quick thinking and reflexes, he knows there's going to be an inevitable moment where he screws up. He needs some kind of authority on his side - in a place that stopped recognizing authority years ago, delegating the responsibility to Enforcers. Someone that people feared, even him.
So, he started getting under the skin of the scariest badass in Junkertown: Roadhog. It's originally just a game of cat and mouse until Roadhog can finally get his hands around him, expecting that Junkrat will cough up reparations for all the damage he caused. He pays forward, not with repairs, but the truth, a job, and a getaway plan.
Several jobs.
It doesn't take Roadhog long to laugh too. They gain momentum in their exploits quickly enough to escape out of Junkertown, cause a fuss in Australia's coastal cities, and eventually escape out of the country itself.
Life becomes easier.
And a lot less lonely.
Junkrat is in a shaking, vulnerable heap of a fetal position in front of Fareeha when the whole thing is over.
no subject
She's not alone in wanting a lot of her memories to stay stuck where they already are. He's hoping that there will be some kind of way to cheat the system, get a distraction going, something to keep his few well-kept secrets undisturbed. He takes a seat in the circle, much more casual than Fareeha with his legs crossed and slouching forward with his hands on his shin (and shin analogue).
There's a moment of stillness, and he feels his mind wander against his will. That's not particularly unusual - his mind is usually swimming in a million half-coherent thoughts all at the same time - but where it ends up is unexpected. The person that manifests is a taller than average, well-built woman with ashen blonde hair, long and mildly curly hair pulled forward over her shoulders in loose, low-hanging pigtails. She's dressed in just a tanktop and shorts, shoulders and thighs riddled with tan lines.
Junkrat laughs nervously. This is going to be a lot harder than he was hoping for. "They're goin' real far back, huh..."
She's spitting mad. Jamison! she seethes, standing over him, and he giggles - his perspective changes to look at the mess before him: an entire solar panel, yanked off the array and dismantled to what looks like beyond repair. It's not destroyed, just taken apart with an aggressive thoroughness, and his lack of organization makes it seem a lot worse than it actually is. But this is what she does for a living, she knows what she's looking at, and it's nothing she can't fix. She won't need to.
She puts a hand on his head and the anger soothes away, but she still gives him a stern look. Ya can't just take down our equipment like that, Jamie. If ya can't put that back together before supper, ya won't get any.
Okayyyy!
Two tiny hands reach out and start picking at the tools and parts from the dusty red ground. They couldn't belong to anyone older than four or five years old. It gets put back together, and Jamie gets up and dusts himself off, and goes inside; the rickety screen door slams behind him and he hears whispered conversation in the dining room. He peeks around the corner and finds Mum and some other woman with black hair -- he can't remember what she looks like -- talking to each other in hushed words that they think he can't hear.
There's got to be something we can do, Mum utters. People live here.
We tried protesting in Perth, her conversational partner offers weakly. Just a couple hundred of us could get there. Most of us can't afford to get to the cities. Everything falls on deaf ears, and the government doesn't care.
He knows what they're talking about. The "factory". Mum doesn't talk to him about it because she doesn't want to scare him, but he figured it out a long time ago on his own, talking to the other neighborhood kids. A robot factory.
They won the war. He doesn't get it. Why would they want to make more? Jamie looks at a portrait on the mantle. It's of Mum while she was still round with him, and Dad, his buzzcut strawberry blonde hair and the smile Jamie inherited, dressed in his RAN uniform. Chief petty officer, from his colors. He remembers that. They had this picture taken because there was a chance that he wouldn't come back from his deployment.
They were right.
And now they were making more of the things that killed him, in their own backyard. Jamie can see it being built, not that well, in the distance when he looks out through the back porch windows.
Junkrat looks away, even though he wasn't really looking at Fareeha to begin with, hiding his watering eyes with his warmer hand. He really doesn't want to have to relive this.
He remembers the day of the explosion. Two older neighborhood kids are using rugby as a front to beating the weird kid, and he never really gets any help even through the tears because ah, kids'll be kids, and it's ironic that the flash of white that momentarily erases the red earth and levels their forgotten village is the first thing to ever have saved his skin. They're out on an open expanse, so they all get tossed a harmless some hundred feet away from where they were. It's what finally gets the bullies to run away, and Jamie goes to the only place he could: back home. He wishes that he hadn't.
Oh, thank God, you're safe, Mum gurgles out. She's pinned between two mangled solar arrays. He can't see the blood through his tears, he can't see the wounds that are seeping the life out of her. He clings to her arm, begging her not to die, and Junkrat doubles over as he screams too, tears pouring out between his fingers. He didn't have to watch his father die, and part of him wishes he didn't have the memory of what it feels like to hold someone while they took their last breaths.
Yer a strong, smart boy, she says, trying her hardest to smile for him. Keep fighting. Survive. Y'll prove them all wrong, my Jamie...
So he does. The next few years are a horrid blur, a combination of radiation and brushes with starvation. He proved them all wrong, all right - living out of his mangled house and utilizing anything he could find in the name of survival. It wasn't easy to start with, but everything got worse. Jamie takes his first life when one of those bullies shows up on his porch with a shotgun, politely asking for all of the food stored in Jamie's still-working fridge.
He'd been just a few weeks too late, because Jamie had already figured out how to safely dismantle and reassemble a fragmentation grenade. Junkrat remembers that it was the first time he'd laughed in a long time when he painted the porch walls with the bully's entrails. And destroyed the porch in the process. The second time an explosion had saved his life - but this time, it was his own.
Time passes. Puberty hits, he loses his mind, he loses his hair, he loses his teeth. After a few days of no sleep and one far too ambitious project later, he loses his limbs as well. Ah, that's why stabilizers exist. He laughs hysterically like the audience of stand-up bit that doesn't know how to quit, amazed that the blast hadn't knocked him unconscious. His blowtorch is still primed, still hot from warping metal, and he uses it to cauterize his wounds as best he can before the blood loss finally takes him out for the count.
His first prosthetics aren't that great, but they're enough to get around. They're enough to pilfer goods from anyone stupid or cocky enough to leave them unsupervised without a trap or a weapon, unlike his own wrecked home. Each successful hit gets him braver, gets him better materials for better prosthetics, gets him fed, and eventually people are begrudgingly showing up at his doorstep for weapons, for vehicles, for limbs, and he makes a new name for himself: Junkrat.
With the kind of skills that has people both coming for his goods and for his neck, he eventually makes his way to the front door of the wrecked omnium to see what he can find.
"No!" Junkrat protests in reality, clawing at his head in desperation. "Not this, not this, she can't--"
Most Junkers wouldn't be well-read enough to really understand what he stumbled across, deep inside the seed of Junkertown. A veritable treasure to some, a plague to others, a burden to him for having no use for it but the knowledge that it exists.
Life becomes a lot harder. There are more than just his fellow Junkers that want to tan his hide now. Even with his quick thinking and reflexes, he knows there's going to be an inevitable moment where he screws up. He needs some kind of authority on his side - in a place that stopped recognizing authority years ago, delegating the responsibility to Enforcers. Someone that people feared, even him.
So, he started getting under the skin of the scariest badass in Junkertown: Roadhog. It's originally just a game of cat and mouse until Roadhog can finally get his hands around him, expecting that Junkrat will cough up reparations for all the damage he caused. He pays forward, not with repairs, but the truth, a job, and a getaway plan.
Several jobs.
It doesn't take Roadhog long to laugh too. They gain momentum in their exploits quickly enough to escape out of Junkertown, cause a fuss in Australia's coastal cities, and eventually escape out of the country itself.
Life becomes easier.
And a lot less lonely.
Junkrat is in a shaking, vulnerable heap of a fetal position in front of Fareeha when the whole thing is over.