#sort of like when i walked in on arden's dead body in amogus w somebody after i was seen walking out of the room

[vastiitas]

NPC RELATIONS: ASHE & DEADLOCK.

A base outline of events I go off of when i'm not interacting with other Ashes and/or characters with plotted-out affiliations with any Ashes; this also applies to Gabriel's - an NPC agent can be substituted in. I am always willing to explore different takes and relationships, so please don't let this dissuade you if you had other ideas in mind. This includes what also goes down in his Modern Verse, and it can be found at the end. A tldr is located in the tags.

for the most part, i'll play it as it occurred in the book, though i'm more than willing to plot out a different development in accordance to other ashe's.

So what this entails is that he meets 17 yr old ashe at 15 in a county jail cell after being picked up from a scrap with the boys at a mega farm, and proceeding to lose said job after being released. She offers a proposition to run heists on her parents' firearm business; intercept the deliveries and turn around and sell them to other distributors.

I keep this relation vague for plotting, but for the most part i will write him with a love for Ashe that can be either romantic or entirely platonic.

In the two years following the book, DL gets a little wilder, gets a little bigger, gets prone to more troubles than it'd originally set out to be. They expand past just the interceptions of Ashe's parents' goods, teetering into gunrunning military-grade weapons, and it starts feeling a little greedy, a little too ambitious for all the trouble they're causing as reckless teens. there's shoot-offs not with just rival gangs, but also local law enforcement and just plain regular folk with an investment in the 2nd amendment.

People get hurt on both sides of the conflict. Jesse eats a bullet once. He also eats car windshield and asphalt at another point that leaves him in a medically induced coma along with broken ribs. The danger doesn't bother him too much, he's lived it too many times that it's a norm and he'd be lying if there wasn't a certain thrill to it. Sometimes you have to be a little bit of an asshole to bait a chase with the cops, just to play that game of outmaneuvering them in turn. It's the unfortunate part of him that enables this, this wind-swept glory that dulls the vision of just how much things get out of hand. The little blindfold that says "us against the world" doesn't help too much either.

For him, it's never been about the money. As much as Jesse enjoys the fat load of cash, he's never wanted more than he needed.

Ashe's head, on the other hand, is naturally business oriented, looking for bigger and better things; it's a birthright, almost. There's an ambition seeded in her to show that she's more than just a disowned rich kid and she's more than capable of being independent from her parents' reputation as tycoons - that she's far beyond and better than their neglect and lack of love. Whether she realizes it or not.

The pathway to causing harm unto others comes in small steps, missteps, and Jesse starts feeling a sort of suffocation and claustrophobia as they go deeper down the path of it; a sort of alienation from the self. Cognitive Dissonance.

There are arguments that are tentatively bridged over but never quite resolved. There's a fuck-up down the line; this isn't any art you just pick up one day and become a master at. There's more than a fair share of shit going off the handle by a hair-brained panic, frazzled nerves and itchy trigger fingers.

All these firearms aren't just for show anymore and while Jesse will never have scruples about defending somebody with the discharge of a bullet, there's something souring in the mouth about its frequency; there's a certain part of it that's growing into throwing their weight around for the sake of throwing their weight around. Deadlock is gaining notoriety. They're starting to show more than just on the local news. People are watching. Your instincts are telling you that you are hurtling towards something terrible.

And it's hard, because sometimes their arguments devolve to 'you can just leave if you don't like this' and he doesn't want to because, fuck, for once in his life since the War, you've got some place you want to be and people that are willing to stick you out. And it's hard, because why the hell don't you trust her enough to pull this off, to carry them through. Much of this becomes a mutual feeling of, "don't i matter enough for you to listen/put your faith in me/put your scruples/ambition aside/etc."

The crux of the issue is that they have different visions and wants for DL and their downfall is in their similarities, in what lets them get along so well; they're both too obstinate about the things they care about. There's enough of an overlap in their mentalities/personalities that allows them to make temporary truces, but their priorities differ. Jesse is more oriented towards DL as a community and doesn't much care for the expansion; Ashe loves the dopamine hit of success, the act of 'conquering'. But Ashe also believes in this family element enough that it's not entirely lost -- though this definition of family may not be the best; even if she finds what she never found from her parents, her closest family is arguably a butler and there is a subservient relationship to this that may inform her schema with how she relates to the 'family' she makes. She may have the best intentions, but there may be some subconscious faults to how she treats them; re: her mentality that it's her way or the highway. On the flip side, jesse also enjoys celebrating DL; he likes winning - so if Ashe throws in a little ego in some of their actions, or if it's about responding to a slight against them or one of its members, jesse's right there with her and not exactly innocent in all this either.

that isnt to say all of it was bad. The kids got into stupid shenanigans, they got high off the adrenaline, shared the celebration of a good success w heavy drinking and off-key group singing. There was love, but the love wouldn't save anybody.

Jesse starts withdrawing. Starts feeling itchy inside himself that he dismisses for that part of him that's always been prone to roaming.

It starts getting sus, how distant he's acting. People start whispering that they don't know where he's gone, where he's fucked off to while they're busy trying to haul goods in, while they're being chased by law enforcement. Wasn't he the one that was friends with the guy that betrayed you at the very beginning? How much do you really trust him?

In reality, jesse's just off by himself. Takes to shooting, takes to wandering off to remote parts of town and the nearby red rocks. Finds himself this elderly amputee woman on the outskirts; lost more than just her arm in the war, lost all her family too. He helps fund her a new prosthetic with his share of the blood money, helps her out with the chores. She teaches him to crochet. He sucks at it, but he sticks around cos he can tell she's lonely. They start talking. He never tells her about the gang, but she comments on how all these waves of violence are all the same when it comes up on the news. He changes the channel. They talk about other things.

(When the violence starts culminating to a peak, starts coming closer, jesse places the weight of a gun into her palms. Self defense, he says. She shakes her head and pushes it back into his hands, I don't want it. Please, he murmurs, por favor. She looks at him, then, like she's realized something. Her eyes flick to the inside of his left arm, ink poking through a chewed up sleeve. Jesse sees the movement. No, she says. He wonder how long she's known, how much she's been indulging him as he has with her. She invites him inside for dinner, feeds him a recipe of her's she'd promised to show him over one of their talks on spices and groceries.

It's the last time he sees her.)

Jesse doesn't talk too much about the causes of his distant behavior cos they've argued themselves in circles so many times before and by now he's learned it's never gotten anywhere. The kid starts defaulting to spinning any and all conversations in routes of deflection that it starts to paint him dodgey. He doesn't want to tell them about his new friend, the alcoves he'll sometimes set camping trips to. They feel like secrets. They feel like his and they're untouched by the growing muck of shit that's staining Deadlock's actions. It's Reprieve. Fresh air that doesn't feel like scum making home in the lungs.

Ashe tries to defend him here and there, but it gets harder and harder when he's pulling more away. Sometimes people try to follow him. Ashe does, too. Jesse takes obfuscating routes, though; knows how to lose tails. It's not intentional - more subconscious habit dating back to a 12 year old dodging other outlaws. For what it's worth, when he's not skirting off, she likes him when he's there, by her side, and it almost feels like the good old times when they first started, but it's only lasts for when he's around. Other times talk feels strained - it's cue to give each other space. She tells him she misses him. They don't see each other anymore. He tells her that he misses her too. She's getting busier with managing more people. Wryly muses that maybe he'll write to her since they're missing each other all the time. It breaks into comfortable banter. She makes him promise: Write me. You have to.

Tentative truce.

When Overwatch starts digging their nose into Deadlock, the response times following up on their heists gets too quick. The law is doggedly on their heels. The news talks about Deadlock more frequently than ever and while the greener folk seems to puff their chests out as though it were a badge of honor, there's a paranoia that starts welling; there's apprehension slithering in the air.

Ashe tip-toes a conversation about this with jesse; tries to get her own read on him, on this. Jesse muses it's been awhile since she's asked him his thoughts on anything, tells her it's the speed of which they're getting bigger. They're doing more shit than ever that's taking blatant shits on people's door steps; they've graduated and escalated from their smaller scale robberies. Small towns board up windows when they hear the roar of hoverbikes. They're scared.

And it's not just that - they've been recruiting other orphaned kids that got nowhere else to go and it's like they're discount Peter Pan and Deadlock's some fucked up Neverland. (There's some other folk edging in their 20's here and there, not-so-weirded-out on following some 19 year old girl who's proven her plans in her weight in gold. they try their hand with some folk in their 30's; never turned out well - always turned into some pissing contest or another; one man turned out gross. Was always better terms when they were left as business partners. DL makes some enemies by letting omnics join - but they see BOB and they see a crew who aren't going to treat them like scrap metal cos some of these towns have war scars that just run too deep to see a face plate without seeing blood.)

More people, more moving parts.

Sure, they've started investing in quieter schemes, seeding loans amongst businesses aching a little too much for money, still caught in the fall-out of war-salted fields and economic dry spells, but DL is still Very Loud. Haven't the appetite to out-grow their roots, though they might be branching. Jesse trawls his eyes over to the expanse of desert and sage bush, to memories of running from bandits. He says, we lay low. No more military train hits, no train hits at all; heat's boiling the high waters. Best to let it die off. Infamy is one thing, having the arrogance to declare everyone your enemy another - he won't deny the appeal - but there's a time for playing it careful. His eyes flit up to the sun, he extends a shadow puppet of his hand towards it. Wax wings, he thinks. He thinks of his mother: If you are going to cause trouble, mijo, you must be clever.

His gaze falls askance to the grown crew milling around and, jesus, he wants to laugh because it looks so familiar, like those orphan homes all those years ago, weaponized to some rag-tag team of gunhands in their teenage years and there's a sudden coming-of-to and a still frame of self-awareness of what this looks like in all the technicolor motion blur of chasing all that adrenaline. A dark weight sinks the stomach and he feels the bile press thick against his throat. Wax wings, he thinks, and river routes drying up. Just a buncha fucking kids with a buncha fucking guns shoving barrels into the chests of folk they don't fucking like.

How the fuck, he thinks, did we get here?

They were just supposed to just be a group of forgotten kids outwitting the fucking law. Now they're on the news just as much as the goddamn politics. They're a posterchild of the boogeymen, turned into one, anyway, for everything that's gone wrong with this part of the US since the war decimated the infrastructure and let crime fester unchecked. They become a calling for reform. The Dragon to be slain. Every suit-wearing candidate calls for their heads to be made an Example.

We have lost civility, somebody laments. Deadlock is everything that's gone wrong.

And Jesse ain't so sure. Deadlock's more a festering wound of a symptom of everybody's who's ever been displaced. The epidemic of orphaned kids never got better after the war; those kids just grew up and they grew up angry and they funneled their fates to this. Bellicose clawing at whatever they can get their hands on to spite the hand that's been dealt. Deadlock felt like an open-hand for the lonely and hateful; wearing their regalia made them feel all these burs a little less, empowered them to spill the storms thats been choking up in their chests for so long. Hell, you could even say snagging their teeth on military-grade weaponry's just paying the government back for their failures, a giant middle finger to the systems that let folk slip through to dust in the desert. (It's ego, too. Vanity. Kids hopped up on pushing envelopes to the brim and seeing how much further they could push. Making names for themselves while showboating and claiming a resource no other gang's dared to hoist. Well, they've pushed. And clever isn't going to do much for an oncoming dead-end tomb clickity-clackitying its way down the railroad tracks.)

They've been spawning copy-cats, on top of that, trying to claim their name after pulling two-bit robberies that are too damn messy, too half-thought-out and sloppy. Despite the little hiccups defining their first months, there's a reason Deadlock hasn't been caught. Jesse and Ashe know how to stake out their marks, they plot out their escapes; Ashe covers contingencies when shit hits sideways and covers contingencies over those for when shit continues to hit sideways into a capsize. Jesse is better at reading rooms, navigating hostages to directives and knowing just when someone's itching to play hero; he's better at improvising when none of those contingencies covers the human irrationale.

Overwatch approaches different folk in the gang trying to worm their way in. They try different tactics, trying to set up disguised arms deals and catch em in the act, trying to plant candidates who could act as moles. Reyes ends up approaching jesse as a false civilian. Jesse tells him, ultimately, nothing, weaving circumventing answers that he's grown to be too good at to his own unfortunate detriment; but somebody sees them conversing and the rumors sprawls - bursting open like a ruined flood gate when a bust actually manages to go through and a familiar Commander is spear-heading the sting.

Reyes approaches Jesse once more after that; jesse tells him to cut the bullshit. They talk, seated on the opposite ends of a diner table, later to be emulated in an interrogation room, to be relived in many diners-to-come. Jesse tells him he knows who Reyes is. Reyes points to jesse's inner arm where the DL tattoo is inked, and tells him he knows about DL, too. He doesn't try to leverage information from jesse, only tells him that there's a way out. Kid's baffled, "Why the hell would I want a way out?" "Then why're you here, kid? You sure as hell aren't with those amigos of your's. You know who I am." A back and forth. Stalemate. Jesse tries his best to fish out information from Reyes, Reyes just fans out a deal of cards in front of him. "You help us and this doesn't have to go down dangerously. No one needs to get hurt." Last part gives him pause. Reyes sees it. Jesse knows he does - squares his jaw and shifts his gaze to the hands he's got fisted into each other on the table, clenched against each other in some sort of white knuckled prayer. He shoves himself up and out of the booth. Takes two steps then pauses. Scuffs his boot against linoleum, scraping at a scratch mark glinting dim from the kitchen light, "There's a woman. Up in the hills. She ain't got nothin' to do with none of this, but I'm worried for her."

"Negotiation usually means you give something in return, kid."

Jesse huffs, brows knit, shoots him a wary look, "She a civilian, ain't she? Ain't that your job? Protectin' folk like her?"

Reyes doesn't answer. Crossed arms and a rigid posture that's impossible to get a real read off from. Jesse scoffs, turns, and leaves.

It blows up; another successful bust against DL followed up with another. They might be trying to be quieter, but someone's tracking their caches being moved in the dead of night. Panic starts to set in, palpable and pulpy.

Ashe has Jesse join her and a handful of gunhands to personally oversee a cache being moved. Best to see it to themselves this time, but it's really a guise for confrontation. She doesn't kill him, but she thinks about it, hovers the barrel of her rifle over him after they knock the wind from his lungs with fractured ribs and leave him discombobulated with a split head wound. Tries to demand the truth. Tells him she had Frankie track his location and they saw him talkin to Reyes. That they got grasps of their conversation. That where you've been disappearing off to all this time?

Jesse just manages to croak, head spinning in the free-fall vortex of it all, "you fucking bugged me?"

Not much room to give an answer after that. Alarm goes off. People are approaching, people they don't know. A decision is made, he sees it in her eyes through the haze. There's a stark clarity to them he's never going to forget, or the way his stomach bottoms out to it. His words come out sluggish, he has a protest that's too heavy on the tongue to come out coherent. Wait presses out on a wheeze, but there's no fucking waiting for this. Someone else takes a shot that Ashe hesitated a beat too long on. Kid sees stars and warehouse ceiling on a blurry vision going black; red spilling out on concrete floor. Flourescent lights halo, but you sure as hell know those aren't fucking angels. There's yelling, fighting, but it grows distant and swallowed by panicked footsteps dimming in the volumes of retreat.

Combat boots flood his vision and some distant part of him is still screaming fight. There's a palm against his shoulder as he's levelled up; Jesse smears blood over tactical gear as he tries to steady himself against it, other hand making a last ditch effort for a knife he sees strapped to the vest. Doesn't make it. Guy catches him by the wrist, tells him, "Stop fighting, kid."

He chokes up blood, slurs on copper tasting slurry, "Guess somebody got hurt after all, huh?"

Reyes doesn't say anything. Not for a beat. Looks at him, eyes bearing down on unfocused ones.

"There's a price to pay for living like this. Did you really think you were above all of it?"

And, maybe. Blinded by the bellied arrogance of youth, feeling invincible when you've got the people you loved right there hurtling onwards into the void, drunk on narrow escapes. Hell, maybe you did. Who the hell knows. Deep down, though, maybe you'd also known it'd end like this. You've lived out there on your own much longer than you'd spent your time with Deadlock, seen plenty of untimely ends. Memento Mori. You are not so naive, but you sure did buy into hope and let it roll into a fantasy. Caught up in it all - you lost sight.

Yeah, you lost sight.

"Fuck."

All you make is a choked noise, strangled on a blood clot. Something wrenched between a sob and a laugh as you slump against this asshole of a stranger. This is the deathrattle of a dream vanishing into the dark.

They thought you were a traitor.

DL goes into hiding aftet that. Waiting for the fallout of rats to start talking. There's a few, from the busts that they'd successfully made prior. Jesse doesn't talk. Thinks to; never does.

They crop up again some years later, bold and steadfast. Turns out their seedling investments managed to keep em floating through the tight years and Ashe's business acuity got them sorted well, plunging fingers in the pies of white-collared crime as a passive sort of income. Expansion, truces, and conquest over rival gangs becomes a large part of their activity as their gunrunning starts to wake up again. Despite everything, they'd taken to his suggestion. The hiatus gives them enough time and space to ditch their stupid ass status as the posterchild of young folk crime; the strangled chokehold of attention on them fading into myth. Ashe learns from this, doesn't let it happen again. Talk on hunting Deadlock always comes with retaliation, insinuated threats on the status and position of everyone close to you.

They prosper without him.

the modern verse:

cole joins the gang sometime in his 20's after losing his arm to some heavy farm machinery falling on top of him. he still maintains his string of shit luck to shit luck of being unable to get and keep a job - except this time it's 10x harder where he can't always even get his front foot through the door to be considered and keeping it doesn't even manage to last 6 months to when he used to be able to at least manage to average a job for 9 months to 1.5 years.

Way he gets in contact with the gang is that he outshoots a loud-mouthed loser; leverages a bet cos he's running low on funds again. Shit nearly flings into an outright brawl. Woman with white hair tracks him down to a diner some days later: "Grady tells me you put my shootist to shame. Y'got a name?" They talk. She feels him out for his appetite for law-breaking. Tells him, "Might have a job offer for you."

Unsurprisingly, he gets along with her all too quick. Whatever professional veneer dissolves quick to friendships to fooling around. It's a fledgling gang, same origin story just that Cole comes in a little later after they've established. There's some politics with the kid he'd out-shot - comes to bite them in the ass later when that kid pulls a judas to a rival gang.

Cole's muti-faceted in the roles he plays, has to be when the gang starts out so small. Not too different from wearing different hats in a small business. Getaway driver, bodyguard, gun-runner, etc. He doesn't do wet work, but has shot down the people he needed to in an active shoot out. Most of the time he plays one hell of an enforcer.

the way it falls apart: deadlock begins to expand territorially. ashe negotiates trades, truces, and bullies/leverages other gangs via extortion and intimidation (talk soft, carry a big stick.) cole doesn't agree w deadlock expanding sm - but is relatively convinced to go along with it with the argument that if they can expand their territories/create a monopoly, they can control the gang violence that occurs there and minimize it; no competition fighting over shit, no collateral damage caught in the cross-fire, etc etc. but the expansion sets him off; they start getting involved in things that gives him pause. it gets bigger than their original small group of splitting the earnings amongst each other. it's not about the cut being made smaller (and boy do some folk try their damnest to misconstrue it that way), but the type of folk who are being brought in; the type of work they get involved in (some from a background of trafficking.)

cole speaks up, as he's prone to do, as he's always done, as he's been doomed to do, and most of them don't like that. because what they originally had was a sort of round table, a set up of equals, and you're trying to feed him this idea that they want to be on level with wolves? to traffickers? and to be amongst wolves who are always sniffing out weakness, cole throwing concerns out into the wind starts bringing questions to ashe's authority, her grip of power - and, it becomes apparent, at some point, that to wrangle with these wolves, she needs to be on top as a leader and not someone on the same level as a grunt. whatever illusion of a round table has been dissolved, bearing mostly the leaders of the gangs that they've absorbed to maintain pre-existing hierarchies and placate them in their merging.

it's easy to set him up for failure, eventually convince ashe that he's a rat in the midst with so many dissenting opinions.

The day he gets arrested is the day they disown him; left in the belly of a carcass of a warehouse with broken bones, bruised organs, and internal bleeding.