Work Text:
It was strange, to Jack, how easy it was to find a family, especially if you weren’t looking.
Almost as easy, looking back, as it was to lose one.
He’d lost his birth family - not to death, because that would be too easy; he’d lost them to his father deciding that Jack kissing a boy at a graduation party was just Far Too Much and that if Jack didn’t give up That Lifestyle he would be Tearing the Family Apart.
Jack had a football scholarship to an out of state college and an apartment already leased. He was gone the next day, and other than the occasional call from his mother - never answered, and he felt a little guilty about that, but she would just try to plead him into bending, and...no - he had absolutely no contact with his family at all from the minute he walked out the door.
He’d spent too many years dying slowly inside, denying an essential part of himself; he was done with that.
If that meant his parents were done with him, so be it.
College was easier, too, and safer - people didn’t care if he liked boys, and if anything it opened more doors than it closed. The coach didn’t give a shit, neither did the team; who Jack loved didn’t matter as long as he kept up his performance on the field, and he worked hard to be as good as he could be , because he really did love football, even if it was just one more reminder of home because he played because Dad played, and because he really, really loved the scholarship that kept him in Berkeley, California instead of Bloomington, Indiana.
Anything that kept him out of Bloomington, Indiana was a good thing, if you asked him.
He met Gabriel his second semester at UC Berkeley, in a history class that was required for Gen Ed.
Gabriel was fucking perfect. Jack was, in fact, a little angry about how perfect Gabriel was on first glance, with his perfect curls and his perfect muscles and his….and his perfect smile that nearly made Jack fall out of his chair when he turned it on him, along with a quiet request to sit down next to him.
Jack said yes, of course; he had no idea, in that moment, what it would mean for him, but he did know that he’d never fallen so hard or so fast for someone before.
Love at first sight, Jack discovered to his chagrin, was very real, and could apparently happen when a cute boy decided the seat next to you looked like the best possible place to be.
It was lucky for Jack, really, that Gabriel seemed to feel the same way about him. It took a few weeks, but he eventually worked up the courage to ask Gabriel out; it was just coffee after class, the first time, but that was absolutely not the last time.
On the third date, Gabriel kissed him, and Jack felt like he’d grown a pair of wings and learned to fly.
It was the kind of first kiss movies lingered on - he swore that if he listened hard enough he could hear some kind of swelling orchestral, though that was probably just in his head because there was nowhere it could be coming from.
Gabriel had taken a step away to leave, but Jack drew him back in for a second kiss, and then a third, and they ended up spending the night in Jack’s apartment, together, and Jack decided that if this was what he could have, everything he’d given up was worth it.
He didn’t meet Gabriel’s family for a long while; he did know that Gabriel talked to his mother regularly, and that he had several younger sisters, but that was all. It seemed nice, really; the kind of family Jack dreamed of, when he let himself imagine that kind of thing.
But really, it was fine, he had enough.
When Gabriel found out he had no plans to go anywhere for winter break, months after they’d started dating, he insisted Jack come home with him once the bowl games were done. That wasn’t much time, maybe a week and a half, but it was enough.
The minute Jack walked through the door and Gabe introduced him as his boyfriend, Gabriel’s mother's eyes lit up and she pulled Jack into a warm hug.
She decided maybe three days into the trip that if her Gabi really liked Jack enough to bring him home, then she was happy to welcome him to the family, with an eagerness that was completely beyond anything Jack had even begun to expect.
And that was how Jack got the first of his new family.
The ghost hunting thing, Jack admitted, was not what he’d expected he was signing up for when he started dating Gabriel, but….well, it did mean things were never boring. Besides, it wasn’t the worst hobby; Jack was surprised how useful a knowledge of libraries and research was, and it...did sort of explain why Gabriel was a Lit and Folklore major, and why he knew so damn much about the undead in all of their varied forms.
At first, it was just a hobby, with a paranormal club at school - and that was where they met Jesse McCree, Actual Medium.
(Or, mediator, Jesse insisted. It was different, somehow, in a way Jack didn’t quite understand; all he knew was that there was a lot less automatic writing and seances and ouija boards and a lot more yelling at and, sometimes, physically fighting with things he couldn’t see.)
It was genuinely surprising to him how easily Jesse took to him, and how quickly the snarky kid from Santa Fe with a cowboy hat permanently affixed to his head became like the little brother Jack never had.
When Overwatch Paranormal began, it was the three of them - but it didn’t stay just the three of them for long. It was almost serendipitous, how quickly they attracted new members - Fareeha and Jamie, mediators like Jesse; Lena and her little flashes of precognition; Torbjörn and his knack for building new equipment designed to work with the mediators’ abilities; the Shimada brothers and their strange past, of which both refused to speak but which Jack was certain left them as much in need of the surrogate family Overwatch Paranormal, Inc became.
There was a certain sort of hope in it, in knowing that he had come from having nothing - from practically running away from home, flying halfway across the country to get away from a family that didn’t want him once he stopped being exactly the son they wanted him to be - to having….
To having all of this, to being able to look out from the back office of their headquarters and see Zarya laughing with Lúcio about some movie or other, and Hana and Zenyatta having what Jack was pretty sure was a Pokémon battle on their 3DSes, and Jesse leaning on the wall next to Hanzo, dropping some cheesy pickup line or other if Hanzo’s fondly exasperated expression was anything to go by, and to know that this was his family now.
The rest of it didn’t matter; not when he had all of this.
And it all started with Gabriel.
A pair of arms slid around Jack’s waist, and Gabriel rested his chin on his shoulder.
“Something wrong, cariño?” Gabriel asked.
“No,” Jack said, “just thinking.”
“About what?” Gabriel asked, warm and affectionate and everything Jack hadn’t realized he was allowed to have until he had it.
“About how I might just be the luckiest person alive.”