#I woulda done give someone a concussion by now with no regrets

[chaunceydollz]

I wish I actually got paid for the shit I have to deal with instead of a piece of paper saying “hey you made it yipee, get fucked”

[jessemccowbae]

🔪

🔪- A memory about a dangerous situation

[[ CW for graphic violence and bloody injury under the read more. ]]

“Deadlock, huh?”

The comment came over Jesse’s shoulder with an audible sneer. He looked up from his scotch, his surprise completely absent from his face. He was halfway to goddamn Salt Lake – who the hell around here even knew who those scrub fucks he’d grown up with were?

“Not hardly,” he grumbled. “Fell in with ‘em when I was a kid. Got out in a hurry. Where you from that you know of ‘em?”

The stranger’s lips curled into a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes. “Around.”

“Well, if they’re operatin’ this far north, they’re clearly gettin’ on just fine without me.” His mind spun briefly, acclimating to the new information. If they were operating this far north, he needed to get the entire hell out of town. He took another sip of his drink. “No hard feelings, I knew a few good guys in there. Just work better on my own.”

It was as bald-faced a lie as he’d ever spun in his life; the few superiors he’d had in Deadlock had sent him and the few ‘good guys’ he’d had on a suicide mission, with the dual intent of baiting out Blackwatch and getting rid of the upstart crack-shot kid who could have come for their jobs at any second. They’d gotten shut down with extreme prejudice, and he’d been so spitting angry at the betrayal that he sold them all out to stay out of prison without a moment’s regret.

It was the biggest blow the gang had ever taken; the consequent busts crippled them for nearly a decade. The last he’d heard, twenty years later, he was still a no-questions-asked, kill-on-sight target. It was the only thing that had kept him from going home after Overwatch collapsed. ‘Hard feelings’ didn’t even begin.

The stranger laughed derisively, and a chill shot through Jesse’s veins. Yeah, he needed to get out of town yesterday. “Fair enough,” he said, turning back to his own drink. Jesse nodded briefly, and nursed his scotch just long enough to make it look like he wasn’t turning tail and gunning for the nearest horizon, before doing precisely that.

It was still in the wee hours when he got back to the shitty hotel he’d crashed at, shoved the few things he’d bothered unpacking back into his bag, left enough cash to generously cover his stay on the nightstand, and headed out. He was halfway to the train station – a couple of old-fashioned slow freighters came through every night that he could probably catch without too much trouble – when a booming voice interrupted him from a side alley.

“Jesse goddamned McCree.”

He kept walking. The dramatic stop and turn shit was straight out of the movies. No reason to set the bastard’s shot up for him.

There was no shot; he was grabbed by the shoulders, and as soon as he spun around to swing, tackled by the legs by someone else. He hit the ground unceremoniously, and his arms were immediately jerked behind him. He snapped his head up, trying to get an eye on – fuck, there were at least six guys, count on Deadlock to be the only outfit on earth that didn’t underestimate him – and then he felt a needle plunge into the side of his neck.

Well, shit.

—

When he came to, they were far enough outside of town that he couldn’t see it anymore, and his arms were tied securely behind him.

“Ol’ man McCree,” somebody sneered, tutting and shaking his head, walking around to face him – nobody he recognized; he’d been out far too long. He could sense the rest of them still crowded around behind him. Odds said the stranger from the bar was among them, or else had tipped them off to curry favor. “Never took you for the nostalgic type, but here you are still flyin’ our colors after all these years.”

“Soap that strong’s expensive,” he barked back, gritting his teeth. “Look, I ain’t no threat to you jackasses anymore. You all know what happened, I’m on the lam from every government on the planet, I ain’t had a decent night’s sleep in two years and odds are I never will again. Y’all want me to suffer, I’m already there, and you know damn well none of you can call in that bounty the feds got on me.”

He wasn’t sure where all the words were coming from, why he still felt any drive to escape with his life. He’d been the walking dead since the shutdown, ambling from place to place, taking whatever work would keep him fed and not grate on his conscience too much, nothing left to drive him on but the most base human instinct to continue living. Hell, if he’d been able to specify who the reward money went to, he’d have turned himself in by now. Forty million was the least he could do for the family he’d walked away from… what was left of it, at least.

The man in front of him just laughed low in his throat, shaking his head. “Don’t that just figure,” he growled, grabbing Jesse by the front of the shirt and hauling him to his feet. “You still think this is about you.”

Right. That was why he was arguing. Because these fucktrucks didn’t deserve the satisfaction of killing him.

The first punch came from behind, the next from the front, the third was a kick to the side, and the rest quickly became a blur. Definitely the most thorough ass-kicking he’d ever gotten in his life. He did what he could to block shots, to minimize the damage, but their only threshold for being ‘done’ was that he got too weak to fight back, so struggling would only prolong it.

There was blood dripping into both of his eyes by the time they slowed down. He was definitely soundly concussed, had several broken ribs, something he couldn’t identify was seriously wrong with his right shoulder, and his knees were finally giving out from under him.

The ringleader stepped up, making a show out of pulling a pocketknife slowly from his belt. For the first time since Overwatch fell, Jesse could feel tears pricking at the back of his eyes. This was it, then. Everything he’d overcome, everything he’d been given, all the trust that had been put in him… and this was all it came to. Bleeding out slowly in this same shitty desert by the hand of this same shitty gang.

The eastern sky was beginning to lighten, the stars fading into the twilight. Maybe he’d at least get to see one more desert sunrise first.

“You know,” the man drawled, kneeling next to him, “the plan here was to slit your throat and leave your ass for the coyotes. Woulda been nice and simple. But you…” He reached back, cutting off the ropes around Jesse’s wrists, then pushed him back and knelt hard on his chest. “Your showboatin’ ass just had to change my mind.”

He grabbed Jesse’s left arm, wrenching it upwards, a near-lecherous grin spreading across his face. “There’s a whole lot of other arteries you can bleed to death from, you know.”

By the time Jesse’s muddled mind managed to make the connection, the blade was already sinking into his forearm, just below his elbow. It didn’t even occur to him to try not to react – the blood-curdling scream shot straight from his nerves to his lungs, bypassing his brain entirely. He sawed in deep, nearly to the bone, before turning the knife and sliding it down. Jesse’s mind wasn’t even processing the pain anymore; he was nothing but nerve endings and reactions, shrieking himself hoarse, tears streaming down his face. The pain didn’t end so much as change once the work was done, a grotesque mass of skin and muscle falling into the rivers of blood with a sickening, wet noise.

If they said or did anything else, he didn’t notice; all his other senses had shut down in the wake of the blinding pain. By the time he could even properly look around, they were all gone.

The pain definitely wasn’t gone, but it had gotten so intense that his brain seemed to be muting it somehow. He blinked slowly, taking a few deep breaths, glancing at the softly lightening sky and around at the horizon. The town he’d been in was just south of the mountains, so they must have gone south out of town. It was situated on the west side of the interstate, which ran on to the southeast.

If he walked towards the sunrise…

He hadn’t been Angie’s favorite field medic for nothing. It wasn’t anything you could rightly call a tourniquet, but he managed to wrap his serape as tightly as he could around his arm and clutch it against his chest with his other hand, keeping as much pressure on it as he could manage. The ground lurched under him the first couple of times he tried to stand up, but slowly, surely, he got to his feet.

It was slow going, the world swimming before his eyes, his legs threatening to give every step of the way. He stopped for a long moment to slouch against a rock, gasping for breath.

I didn’t let you die for that shitty ink the first time around, vaquero. You better not die for it now.

“Who the fuck said your grouchy old ass could haunt me, fuck off,” he growled, a bit startled by the sound of his own voice, and continued walking.

The brightening navy blue of the sky was streaking with pink and gold by the time he reached the interstate. His serape was more blood than cloth now, still dripping onto the dusty ground as he dropped to his knees next to a mile marker, leaning heavily against the metal post. Just had to stay upright enough for some passing driver to recognize he was human. Or at least a body. He’d done what he could. Lady Luck would have to handle the rest on her own.

—

The headlights just barely woke him.

“–even alive? I can’t – oh holy shit, his arm–”“Alex, what’s going–”“No no no don’t look, it’s awful – just, get in the backseat with the kids and pull up directions to a hospital!”