The black smoke had almost engulfed him now. His view was obscured of everything but the looming hammer and the edges of the smirk on Reinhardt’s drawn face. The wraith could not help but laugh in hoarse whispering tone. The strain on his voice more prevalent than it usually was. “It’ll never be over.”
They’d kill him again. He would reform. He would kill. It was a cycle now. Neverending.“Shetook that from me.” Took his ending away back in the rubble of Swiss Headquarters.
All there was left was to wait for the hammer to fall.
“She took nothing.” Reinhardt bellowed in reply, shocking even himself with the anger in his voice. Behind the impassive mask of his helmet, his teeth were bared in an ugly snarl.
The hammer, when it does finally fall, comes down with every last scrap of force Reinhardt can muster. His own immense strength amplified by cold rage and his power armor, rendered into something practically unstoppable. But more than that, the hammer falls with all the weight and gravity of Reinhardt’s own crushing sorrow. Gabriel had been a good man, righteous in his own way. They had never exactly been close, but Gabriel had deserved so much better.
The impact fractures the concrete like glass, rattling the nearby buildings to their very foundations, and for a long moment Reinhardt’s world is gone, lost in a cloud of hot dust and a hail of debris. When the mess is finally swept away by a breath of wind, he finds himself alone. The crater in the shattered pavement where the thing had been is empty, devoid of any indication it’d ever been there in the first place.
The victory feels… hollow. Not entirely unlike Reinhardt himself. Inside his thick carapace of steel he shudders, thankful for the tight embrace of his uniform. Without it, he feels, he would be a creature wrought of ash, in danger of collapsing into nothing at a touch.
The wraith is gone, but Reinhardt cannot shake the feeling he took something with him.