Chapter Text
It was just after midnight when Jesse McCree finally made it back to his room after wrapping up the plans for the morning team exercises with Athena.
There was a ghost waiting for him.
He felt it as soon as he walked through the door and it slid shut behind him. A deep, unnatural cold chilled the air of his room and raised the hair on his arms in gooseflesh. There was a sudden, suffocating pressure against his lungs, making it difficult to draw breath, and a feeling of creeping dread that trickled up his spine.
Jesse scowled, clenching his teeth against an urge to chatter, and surveyed his room in an instant. The ghost wasn’t hard to find. It had fully manifested, and in doing so, had sucked away both heat and light. The corner of his room near the closet was preternaturally dark, deeply shadowed in an otherwise well-lit room. Within the darkness, a tall, void-black humanoid figure stood facing him.
“Huh,” Jesse said, glaring at the figure through narrowed eyes. His fingers twitched and, had Peacekeeper’s holster been strapped to his body, he would have had a hard time suppressing the desire to draw and shoot. Unfortunately, bullets wouldn’t make this particular unwelcome visitor go away. Nor would his Deadeye, which, ironically, only worked against the living.
“So who the hell are you supposed to be?” he asked, not expecting an answer. The few spirits he had encountered in the distant past had barely acknowledged him before fading from sight.
But this thing… it hated him. That was obvious in the way that the heavy, frigid air practically crackled with negative emotion. It was chʼį́įdii, the spirit of a dead human, and two prime candidates of who it might be came to mind. The thought that this spectral manifestation of hostility might be either of them made his stomach twist.
Then the dark figure reached a hand toward him, grasping in his direction. Alarmed, Jesse felt his strength seep out of him, sudden weakness leaving him dizzy and making his limbs feel too heavy.
“Oh, hell no,” Jesse snarled, nearly staggering. “You ain’t inflicting me with no ghost sickness, bastard.” His legs wanted to fold under him, but he forced himself to stay upright as he reached under his shirt to pull out his medicine bag.
The medicine bag was small and soft, made from tanned elk skin, and it hung from a leather thong around his neck. He didn’t always wear it. More often than not, he left it in his sock drawer – a fact that would have horrified his great-grandma, were she still alive, since she taught him to always have it on his person. But he usually only wore it when things were particularly rough; when life threw him an unexpected curve ball that he didn’t quite know how to handle.
Like Ana Amari showing up at the Watchpoint, alive and well and most definitely not dead, after he’d mourned her like she was family. Or Genji running off to Japan to try and recruit the infamous brother who tried to kill him.
Now, as this damn ghost tried to drain the life from him, he was grateful that his troubled feelings over Ana and Genji had made him reach for the fortification of his medicine bag this past week, because if it had been sitting in his sock drawer instead of hanging around his neck, he would have been completely screwed.
The medicine bag held his personal items of power and protection. A sprig of white sage. The toe bone of a small dog. A smooth piece of bright blue turquoise from the Cerrillos mine that originally belonged to his Grandma Sadie. A bullet from the first gun he ever owned. And, liberally coating the inside of the bag, tádídíín – corn pollen gathered just for him by Gigi, his great-grandma.
The ghost made a wrenching motion at him, clenching its hand in a fist, and Jesse felt his heart stutter inside his chest. Quickly, hands shaking as he spread the pouch opening with thumb and forefinger, he dipped his forefinger into the corn pollen. He touched the pollen to his head, then tongue, then gestured east, south, west and north to honor the four sacred directional mountains, sprinkling a touch of the pollen at each point.
Immediately he felt the suffocating pressure ease. His strength returned, and with it came a rush of fury at this thing that sought to subdue him.
The dark figure stopped reaching for him and seemed to shrink back, as if surprised.
Jesse smiled mirthlessly, straightened, and stepped toward it, staring into the void of its featureless face. “Leave now,” he said, his voice low and dangerous, “or I’ll make you leave, and trust me, you won’t like what that entails.”
Moments passed, and Jesse felt the dark thing push against his protections, no doubt searching for weakness. He grit his teeth and prayed that they held long enough for the apparition to fall for his bluff.
He was no medicine man. Hell, he was only one quarter Diné on his daddy’s side, with his daddy being half Mexican, and his momma being one of the whitest white women he’d ever seen. If this shadow creature decided to stick around and torment him, there wouldn’t be much he could do about it.
That is, unless he could somehow get back to the rez and contact a real Hatałii who could perform an Enemy Way ceremony to banish the dark spirit for good. But the ceremony would take days to complete, and the odds of him getting it done without putting the Hatałii, and anyone else who might help him, in danger for just associating with him, were pretty damn low.
And what would he tell the others? He’d only been here at the Watchpoint for a couple of weeks after busting his ass just to get here from the States and answer the recall. He could just imagine telling Winston, Lena and Genji that, sorry, he had to disappear for a while because he was being haunted by some dead thing with a vendetta.
It wasn’t that he thought they wouldn’t believe him. Overwatch had seen its share of weird crap over the years. What was a vengeful ghost against a hyper-intelligent scientist gorilla, a time-displaced test pilot, and a cyborg ninja with an ancient spirit dragon?
But he didn’t want to have to leave them so soon after committing to be part of the new fa—the new team.
So he stared unblinking into the black void of the creature’s face, daring it to take him on, praying that it wouldn’t.
It vanished before his eyes. A moment later, the unnatural shadows dissipated, and the cruel, cold bite in the air faded.
Jesse stood, tense and alert, waiting for some last trick, but the minutes passed and it didn’t return. He let out a slow, deep breath, forcing the muscles in his back and shoulders to relax.
“Athena?” he called.
There was a soft chime, and she answered. “Yes, Jesse?”
“You mind scanning my room for any anomalies? I, uh, want to check something.”
A moment passed, and then Athena said, “Your room temperature has dropped from twenty-two degrees Celsius, to eight degrees Celsius, and yet I cannot find anything wrong with the temperature control for your room that would account for the drastic drop in temperature.” She sounded almost thoughtful. “You knew I would find this anomaly,” she said. “Do you know the cause?”
“A ghost,” Jesse said, matter-of-factly.
“A ghost?” Athena said. “Are you speaking metaphorically?”
“Nope.” Jesse sank down onto the edge of his bed with a sigh and shucked off his boots. “A ghost, as in the spiritual remains of a dead person. Someone from my past, come to haunt me, I guess. Got rid of it for now, but I’d be much obliged if you could monitor my room and let me know if any other, uh, temperature anomalies show up.”
“Fascinating,” said Athena, and Jesse could hear a hint of awe in her synthetic voice. “Would you like me to increase the heat in your room until the temperature normalizes?”
“That would be great, Athena,” Jesse said. He smiled as the room immediately began to warm. “You’re a peach.” He briefly considered hitting the shower before attempting to sleep, but something in him balked at the idea of being naked and vulnerable so soon after his little supernatural encounter.
Instead, without turning off the lights, he climbed under his blankets still wearing his jeans, t-shirt and flannel. He put his hat in its usual spot on the bedside table. As he sank down into the sheets, his medicine bag rested over his heart, and he clutched at it, staring at the ceiling.
He immediately knew that sleep wasn’t coming. Hell, sleep wasn’t anywhere near him. Probably wasn’t even in the same country.
A ghost. An actual, freaking chʼį́įdii, in his room, just waiting for him. What the ever-loving hell. Though… to be frank, he’d been expecting to encounter one a lot sooner, considering his past.
Why now? Why today? Ana’s unexpected return from the dead earlier that week had already thrown him off kilter. And then he had prepared himself to chase Genji all the way to Japan and avenge him if his brother even looked at him wrong…
Genji’s brother, Hanzo Shimada.
Hot damn, Hanzo Shimada.
Jesse closed his eyes and groaned. Now there was a whole new tangle of confusion that he couldn’t cope with at the moment, so he pushed those thoughts away. With immense difficulty.
He was so tired, but he couldn’t turn off his brain. Ana Amari, alive and well. Genji leaving on a possible suicide mission, then coming back with his unreasonably hot, and surprisingly repentant, brother.
Wow. His thoughts had taken all of four seconds to cycle right back to Hanzo It-should-be-illegal-for-a-man-to-be-that-beautiful Shimada. No, Jesse thought. Bad brain. Think of something else. Anything else.
But his brain wasn’t having it, and he realized he needed to turn Hanzo – turn the complication of Hanzo Shimada, over in his mind.
First, there was the whole “killing his brother,” thing, and even though Genji had pleaded with him to keep an open mind, for the longest time the only things Jesse could think of in association with the name Hanzo were the months of agonizing surgeries Genji had experienced to cybernetically piece him back together because of Hanzo’s handiwork, and the bitter hatred he had seen in those glowing red eyes whenever Hanzo’s name crossed his lips.
Now, though, Genji spoke Hanzo’s name with warmth and hope, and Jesse was having difficulty switching mental gears in regards to his friend’s brother.
Meeting Hanzo in person for the first time that very morning had not helped things. First, Genji had interrupted his workout to introduce him to his brother, and boy howdy, he just loved meeting new people when he was all sweaty, smelly, and gross. He had made some poor first impressions in his time, but this undoubtedly took the cake.
Genji had also told Jesse about Hanzo’s dragons, and Jesse thought he knew what to expect because he was so used to seeing Genji’s dragon light him up from within like green fire, whenever he used his eye to see such things.
But he could only look at Hanzo’s dragons for a moment, because they shone like blazing blue stars under Hanzo’s skin, and they were scrutinizing him, and Jesse could admit, that was pretty damn unsettling.
Hanzo himself looked like a prince, and the cold, imperious gaze he turned on Jesse only reinforced the impression.
But then, icy expression notwithstanding, Hanzo had given him permission to call him by his given name, which puzzled Jesse, considering how intimate a thing that was in Japanese culture.
Then Hanzo gave Jesse the world’s briefest handshake, snatching his hand away like he had been burned the moment they touched, then turned on his heel and left, leaving him and Genji staring after him before Genji hastily apologized and raced after his brother.
Jesse had gone back to his workout, but the only thought that spun through his head for the next hour or so was, What the hell was that?
If that was how it was gonna be, two could play that game, he had thought. Hanzo wanted to treat him like some impertinent peasant, well, he’d give as good as he got. By the time the conference rolled around that afternoon, Jesse had himself good and prepared to be cool as a cucumber when it came to dealing with the elder Shimada.
Then, Hanzo had to stand up and give a sincere, heart-felt, and strikingly humble speech about Genji’s unconditional forgiveness, and his personal quest for redemption. The effort of baring his soul to this group of virtual strangers showed in the pallor of his skin and the trembling in his hands.
Jesse, leaning against the wall and watching everything from beneath the shadowed brim of his hat, couldn’t help but be moved by Hanzo’s words. That had obviously not been easy, and yet Hanzo had expressed himself without hesitation. That took a rare kind of bravery, and Jesse found himself internally echoing Reinhardt and Torbjörn’s expressions of support and welcome, even if the guy didn’t seem to like him in particular. But that was okay. He could deal with Hanzo not liking him, as long as he was good to Genji.
As Winston moved on with the meeting and everyone’s attention, including Hanzo’s, was on the screen showing the dossiers of the new recruits, Jesse, suddenly more curious than ever, decided to take another look at the dragons.
With Hanzo and Genji sitting next to each other, he could see all three dragons at once. Genji’s dragon was paying attention to the screen, just like everyone else.
Hanzo’s dragons were staring right at him, bright, unmoving, and intent.
Startled, but trying not to show it, Jesse had shifted against the wall and pushed his hat down more over his eyes.
That was seriously creepy. Why, out of everyone in the room, were the dragons staring at him? He hadn’t done something to offend them, had he? Maybe he had. Maybe that was why Hanzo had been so eager to get away from him.
And then, Morrison had to go and throw him a curve ball by asking him to teach Blackwatch tactics to Overwatch. He agreed readily, of course, because Talon wasn’t playing by any rules, and they were going to have to fight fire with fire.
But he had always gotten the impression that Jack had never fully trusted him. Huh. Maybe his days as a vigilante had given him a new perspective on things. Jesse decided not to read too much into it.
The rest of the day should have gone smoothly. He was going to have dinner with the group, then confer with Athena for the rest of the evening on the team exercises scheduled for 0700 the next morning.
Then Genji asked him to take a dinner tray to Hanzo’s room, and everything pretty much went to hell.
Jesse felt his face heat again as he thought about how Hanzo had drunkenly praised his, uh… physical attributes… all while simultaneously rebuking him for coming to his room expecting, as Hanzo put it, “to indulge in meaningless physical pleasure.”
Jesse had stood in the hallway, holding a dinner tray, staring at Hanzo’s closed door, feeling more confused and embarrassed than he could ever recall being in his entire life.
But at least now he understood that Hanzo… didn’t hate him?
Or maybe Hanzo did hate him, precisely because he found Jesse attractive? He had seemed pretty much against anything that went against “professionalism,” though it had been hard to take him seriously with the way he was barely standing upright, glaring at him blearily when he finally opened the door. Jesse would have bet anything that if he held up one finger, Hanzo would have counted at least three.
Then, when he had tried to reassure the completely-wasted man that, while he was flattered, he wouldn’t hold a drunken man’s words against him, Hanzo had stubbornly insisted that a “drunken man’s words were a sober man’s thoughts.”
Okay.
Jesse was fine. He was fine. He was not letting those words, and all their implications, spin endlessly in his head on repeat.
Well, at least he had managed to get Hanzo to lie down so he could sleep it off, and had left him with a note, some water, and some of Angie’s special hangover meds.
Jesse blinked. Shit. He had left a note. Why in the hell had he left a note? The water and the meds were self-explanatory. A note was completely unnecessary! What had he written in it? He couldn’t even remember.
He was only trying to be helpful, but what if he came across as too flirty? Or worse, too needy? What would Hanzo think when he read it?
Dear lord, he had to work with this man. He could have handled it before… that. Now he was having thoughts that were anything but professional. And it was all Hanzo’s fault.
He had tried to plan the team exercises with Athena afterward, but, to his immense frustration, he was having a hard time focusing. Finally, he had suggested that they spend the first team exercise just doing individual scenarios so that everyone could watch each other and familiarize, or re-familiarize themselves with each other’s fighting styles. Athena had agreed, and had promised to get things ready for them.
He thought about going out into the night air and pouring himself a shot of whiskey or two, to ease himself into sleep. Then he thought, a drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts, and changed his mind.
And that was how he walked back to his room, completely, depressingly sober, and entered to find himself face to face with an angry ghost.
What the hell was his life, he wondered, not for the first time.
He needed to tackle his issues, hit them face-on, get them resolved so that they wouldn’t spin endlessly in his head like this, keeping him awake and unfocused.
He needed to talk to Ana. He needed to do something to close the rift between them, but before he could do that, he had to figure out how to forgive her for…
For what? Surviving? Not being dead after he had struggled so hard to come to peace with his loss?
He sighed. Stared at the ceiling, all too visible with the lights still on.
Now, Jack Morrison being alive hadn’t surprised him. He had recognized the former strike commander’s handiwork in the vigilante attacks against Los Muertos in and around Dorado. And who else but Jack would break into the defunct Overwatch Grand Mesa facility to steal back his favorite weapon?
Jesse found it wonderfully ironic that, after all his harping about rules and protocol, the big Boy Scout had gone rogue, and he wholeheartedly approved.
When he first realized that Morrison was still among the living after the destruction of Swiss Headquarters, he had held out hope that Gabe had also survived. And since Jesse had been the one who walked away from Overwatch and Blackwatch, he doubted that Gabe would look him up, so he decided to go digging, hoping to find some trace of his former commander. Hoping to somehow reconnect.
He came up with nothing. He looked for any report or rumor of a vigilante that possessed Gabe’s shadow-step ability, but the only thing that came from those searches were reports of Talon activity. The fact that Talon had somehow duplicated Gabe’s abilities was old news, ever since Rialto, and Jesse was left with an extinguished spark of hope.
Captain Amari, though… she hadn’t died in the headquarters explosion. She had been killed in a completely separate Overwatch mission to free hostages from Talon operatives. Or rather, that’s what he had been led to believe until seven days ago, when she and Morrison waltzed into the base like nothing was wrong.
When he had gotten over his shock, Jesse asked Amari if Fareeha knew, and… of course she did. She was Amari’s daughter.
And he… he was no one, apparently.
He was surprised at how much it stung. But then, what did he expect?
He was the one who walked away from Overwatch, not Ana. He saw the signs of the stressors, inward and outward, that were tearing the organization apart. Gabe and Jack, once closer than brothers, were at each other’s throats, with hardly a single civil word passing between them as they fought over ideology and where the source of the corruption was coming from.
Then people started to choose sides. Ana stood by Jack, and against Gabe. Friends were becoming vicious enemies before Jesse’s eyes, and dammit if it didn’t hurt. He couldn’t stick around to watch the only semblance of a family he had left be destroyed.
But it wasn’t like he had completely cut himself off from them, he reasoned. He wanted nothing to do with their conflict, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want anything to do with them. They had encrypted phones, messaging, and email. Before the Fall, he checked on Ana and Fareeha often enough that Fareeha told him that if he was so worried about them, he should come back.
He didn’t, of course. But he didn’t stop calling, and finally, Fareeha stopped asking. Whether it was because she got tired of needling him about it, or she finally saw the writing on the crumbling wall for herself, he didn’t know. She ended up leaving and joining Helix Security.
Genji never tried to talk Jesse into returning, but instead had kept him updated on all his efforts to lead the ever-deteriorating Overwatch in the complete destruction of the Shimada clan. He had messaged Jesse to let him know when he was leaving Overwatch to try and find peace, hinting that he, too, was growing weary of the infighting. After that, they exchanged calls and messages on a regular basis.
So Jesse knew when Genji reached the monastery in Nepal and decided to stay. He witnessed, from a distance, his friend transform from an angry and self-loathing young man into someone who knew and accepted what he was.
Jesse, always on the move, never stopping in one place long enough to make an impression on the locals unless he was in disguise, made the choice to not be jealous of his friend’s newfound stability and sense of purpose.
As for Morrison, he wasn’t on such personal terms with the Strike Commander that he warranted a phone call or a message, but Jesse kept an eye on him all the same, scanning the news for any mention of him. And there was always some mention of him somewhere, in any number of global publications.
And then there was Gabe.
Jesse could never bring himself to call Gabe, knowing that the sound of his commander’s voice – the voice of the man who had pulled him out of Deadlock and had saved his life in more ways than he could count – would weaken his resolve to stay away. Still, at the beginning of every month, he sent Gabe a short text message letting him know that no one had yet managed to collect on his sixty-million-dollar bounty; that he was still free, alive and kicking.
In the two years that passed after Jesse left, Gabe only responded once. The message was short and concise: Wish you were still here to watch my back, mijo.
Three days later, the Swiss Headquarters exploded and went up in flames, taking the Overwatch and Blackwatch commanders with it.
That final message was still on Jesse’s phone somewhere, buried under five more years-worth of saved photos and messages from the others. Every now and then, usually around the anniversary of the explosion, he would pull it up and look at it. The sharp, stabbing ache behind his breastbone that manifested at the sight of it never seemed to lessen, and he always ended up drowning the sensation in whatever alcohol he had on hand.
One of these days, he always lied to himself, he would look at it and feel nothing.
After the destruction of Swiss Headquarters and the passing of the PETRAS Act, the rest of his friends had scattered to the winds. Jesse had forced himself to push through his shock and grief by making a greater effort to keep in touch with the others. After all, who knew when any of them could bite the dust? Any day could be their last. He had learned that lesson long ago, but losing Gabe and Jack in one fell swoop drove it home all over again.
So he knew when Lena fell in love with Emily. He had smiled at the seemingly endless stream of pics she sent him, showing off her newfound happiness. He didn’t have anything to send in return except his genuine gladness that she had found someone to love.
Winston was the hardest one to keep track of – not because the hyper-intelligent gorilla was wandering the world, but because he kept losing himself in his scientific experiments, each of which he hoped would bring some measure of peace to the world. After the fall of Overwatch, he dove even deeper into his work, and his bouts of radio silence stretched out longer and longer until he had finally initiated the recall just a few weeks ago.
Reinhardt had Jesse on an Overwatch group email list, so he, along with everyone else, was bombarded with blurry, enthusiastic selfies whenever he attended a David Hasselhoff Tribute HoloConcert – something that happened more often than Jesse thought reasonable, to be honest. But hey, he wasn’t about to rain on the big man’s parade. If anyone deserved some carefree frivolousness after all the battles he fought, it was Reinhardt.
Torbjörn regularly invited him to end-of-the-year holiday festivities, which he always politely declined for reasons he could never quite articulate… until one particular year when he found himself desperately in need of a prosthetic left arm.
Angie, angel that she was, didn’t ask him how it happened. She merely gave him that look, and he gave his look right back to her in silent communication. An unspoken agreement to leave the subject alone.
And so, as she tended to the rapid healing of his stump, and surgically implanted the nano-tech neural-nerve interface that would allow him to have a fully functional prosthetic arm, they talked about pretty much everything except how he had lost his arm.
Torbjörn wasn’t so easily put off, and asked him how it happened, of course. When Jesse flippantly answered that he lost the arm while wrestling an entire congregation of fifteen-foot-long alligators in a Louisiana swamp, the engineer snorted in disbelief, but didn’t ask again, though he did insist that Jesse visit during the holidays. That suited Jesse just fine.
When Jesse arrived in Sweden, Torbjörn’s large family welcomed him whole-heartedly, to the point where he felt genuinely overwhelmed. The rich food was delicious (even though he took a hard pass on the traditional lutefisk). The tree was like something out of a story book. The wrapped presents, the decorations, the lights, the laughter…
Leaning against the wall, content to just observe, he looked out over Torbjörn’s cheerful brood and felt like he’d fallen into an old Christmas movie.
It was… nice. And Jesse unexpectedly found himself feeling very much the outsider in spite of the warm welcome.
It was too much. It was a taste of what a real family was like – parents, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. Having them all together was absolute chaos, yet there was an undeniable warmth to it all.
It made clear to him just how much a real family was not just some collection of folks he’d decided to mentally adopt as his, whether they knew it or not.
It also sparked the faintest, misty recollections of something he had, once, long ago, but now would never have again. Memories long untouched, purposely buried in the depths of his mind, rose to the surface against his will.
A warm fire keeping out the chill of the high desert. The smell of white sage, piñon pine, and cooking fry bread.
Momma’s fiery red hair, her sparkling hazel eyes and mischievous smile.
Daddy’s large, calloused brown hands, carefully measuring his head for a new eyepatch because the old one was worn out, then affectionately ruffling his hair.
Gigi’s voice, cracked with age, but strong and lively as she tells stories of the Four Worlds. Of First Man and First Woman. Of the Sun and White Shell Woman. Of Coyote First Angry and his many exploits and monster offspring. And his very favorite stories of the Hero Twins, Naayéé’neizghání, Slayer of Alien Gods, and Tóbájíshchíní, Born From Water.
He loves visiting Great-Grandma Gigi on the rez, and tells her he wishes he was full blooded Navajo like her. But Grandma Sadie married a Mexican man, and Daddy married probably the whitest white woman he ever did see, with Momma’s easily-burned pale skin, red hair and freckles, so he’s only one-fourth Navajo. Gigi tells him that’s enough Navajo blood to be considered Diné, but he’s still unsatisfied.
Daddy tells him to not worry about it. Be tough, Daddy says, smiling. Laugh a lot. Share with your family. Never take life too seriously except when you have to take it seriously. This is the Diné way. And even though we don’t live on the rez like your great-grandma, it’s still a good way to live life.
He agrees.
His life is one of peace. Of love. Of belonging, if only to Momma, Daddy and Gigi. He wants it to last forever.
But then….
Cold.
Dark.
Momma and Daddy whispering in hushed, urgent voices. He keeps his eyes closed as Daddy lifts him out of bed, sets him on his feet, then slips his eyepatch over his head and into place. Only then does he open his good eye. Momma picks him up and carries him against her side, even though he’s getting too big to be carried.
Sorry to wake you, baby, we’re going for a ride, you can sleep in the car, she says. Daddy’s face is pinched and tight around the eyes in the glow of the dashboard.
The steady, lulling sound of old-fashioned tires on asphalt. Out the car window, the blazing stars in the moonless night fail to shed light on the desert landscape. All he can see are the black shapes of hills and sparse trees cutting into the sky.
Then… from outside, all around them, the terrible noise, a laugh too deep and guttural to be human. A glimpse of a tall, bipedal crooked form with ill-fitting, grey-furred skin.
The car swerves, rolls.
He didn’t mean to close his eye or fall asleep, but somehow he did. He startles awake and opens his eye at the sound of Daddy’s gun, cracking the silence six times. His arm hurts, his head hurts. He’s lying on the roof of the car because the car is upside-down.
He realizes that Daddy isn’t in the car when an unearthly snarl is followed by a shout. A scream cut short. And then Momma is there, touching his face, bringing her forehead to touch his, and she’s whispering at him, Don’t leave the car, Jesse, whatever you see, whatever you hear, you don’t get out of this car, you hear me, baby?
He nods, and she kisses him on the cheek. Before he can kiss her back, she’s shimmying out the shattered passenger-side window, then reaching back in to pull her pulse rifle out from where it rested on the bottom of the upturned seat.
He shouldn’t look, but he does anyway. He can’t see anything but the shrubs and dirt lit by the car headlights. Momma screams, a sound of raw fury, and the flash of her pulse rifle blinds him, leaving him seeing spots.
He hears growls and that snarling laugh. He hears Momma curse as her pulse rifle fires once, twice…
The sound of a scuffle in the dirt.
A solitary gasp.
Silence.
And then, the sound of wet tearing.
He can’t see, blinking against the spots in his eye. Just as well. He can suddenly smell blood.
He stays in the car. Silence falls again.
He stays and stays and stays until—
Until Torbjörn cleared his throat loudly enough to startle Jesse out of the memory.
Jesse blinked, looking around, almost surprised to find himself leaning against the wall, looking out over the chaotic mass of Torbjörn’s family. Everyone seemed to be bundling up in winter clothes for a big sledding activity. Out the windows, the sky was bright, crisp blue, and snow lay heavy and deep on the ground. He was decades and thousands of miles away from where his memories had taken him.
“You all right there, McCree?” Torbjörn asked, giving him a narrow look. “You had a pretty good thousand-yard stare going.”
“’M fine,” Jesse lied automatically, because even with the overpowering smell of the hyacinth flowers decorating the room, the faint scent of blood still filled his head. He could still feel the soft leather of his old patch covering his Deadeye. And, until he looked down at himself, he could have sworn he felt his left arm. The one he’d broken in the crash almost thirty years ago.
Jesse truly appreciated Torbjörn and his family, but he felt like he couldn’t leave the festivities fast enough, especially if they continued to evoke long-buried memories.
On top of everything, Torbjörn refused to take payment for the prosthetic, which just didn’t sit right with him. He ended up leaving the payment, along with a thank you note, in the engineer’s lab, before disappearing into the frigid Nordic night. He had only stayed three days of his intended week-long visit.
He crashed at a cheap motel in Stockholm, and woke the next morning to a gently chiding message on his phone in which Torbjörn expressed his disappointment at Jesse’s premature departure, but he also said he understood. You’re a good lad, Jesse, Torbjörn sent. Never doubt that.
Jesse stared at that message for a long while.
And then, less than four months later, he received a message from Reinhardt that Ana Amari had been killed in an Overwatch mission-gone-bad.
To Jesse, Ana had been more than a superior officer, more than a friend. She had done more for him than anyone else ever had. More than Gabe, who pulled him from the burning remnants of Deadlock and saved him from a life in prison. More than even his beloved great-grandmother, gone nearly nine years now, who secretly taught him everything she could about his Diné heritage before –
Nope, he thought, forcibly cutting himself off. Not going there. He was sorting through memories within memories, and if he had any desire to keep what little sanity he had, he refused to go near those darkened places in his head that were even worse than the car accident.
Not without a good, stiff drink or six, at least.
But Ana… she was the woman who had taken a thoroughly wrecked seventeen-year-old conscript, and had convinced him that he wasn’t a monster. Ana had taught him how to focus, how to find stillness within himself; how to find his mark, and only his mark.
Ana had taught him how to tame his Deadeye.
When Gigi died, Jesse found himself strangely at peace. Maybe it was because she had passed away quietly in her sleep at home, after living a long and full life.
When Ana died – murdered by Talon’s sniper who turned out to be a physically altered and brainwashed Amélie Lacroix, and wasn’t that just an unexpected horror – he had drowned his grief with cheap whiskey for over a week before he found the wherewithal to drag himself out that pit.
And now Ana was back. Not dead, never had been dead, just missing her cybernetic eye, and he should have been happy. If he were a better person, he would have been happy. Instead, he felt nothing but a deep, hollow ache in his chest.
It was a hard truth to face. No matter how attached his younger self had become to her, the feeling wasn’t reciprocated.
And how foolish was he, for ever believing it was?
Groaning, he rubbed his hands over his face, scratching at his unkempt beard. He felt stupid for hurting. He wasn’t a child. He hadn’t been a child for literally longer than he could remember. What did it matter that Ana, who probably didn’t even know that he had once thought of her as a parental figure when he was at his weakest and lowest, didn’t bother to tell him she wasn’t dead? She hadn’t told anyone else, either, except Fareeha, which only made sense.
He just had to pull himself together and get over it. Just like he had with all the other shit in his life. Get over it, move on. Patch things up with Ana. Keep plugging away, trying to do some good in a messed-up world.
He thought he had done pretty well at the conference earlier. He had been polite to Ana, and he really had been comfortable leaning against the wall. Still, the bare hint of pain in her expression when he turned down her offer to sit next to her was like a shiv in the gut.
Which might have hurt more, were it not for the extremely distracting fact that brand new Overwatch recruit, Hanzo Shimada, was sitting at the conference table between Genji and Lena…
And here he was again, thoughts back to Hanzo, full circle.
This was getting ridiculous.
He sat up in bed and reached to open the drawer of his bedside table. He pulled out the bottle of sleeping pills Angie had given him. They put him to sleep just fine, but tended to give him really vivid nightmares. But at this point, he reasoned, his subconscious could hardly do worse than what his conscious mind had been doing to him. He opened the bottle, took two pills and swallowed them dry.
As he fell back into bed, he finally acknowledged that it might help him sleep if he just turned the damned lights off. He had thought he could sleep with them on. Wouldn’t be much different than taking a nap in the sun, right?
Besides, his hindbrain was screaming at him that if he turned off the lights, the ghost might come back. It might come back, comfortable and unseen in the dark, where it could stand over him and drain his life away while he slept….
Jesse scowled at the thought. He was being paranoid, and he refused to let himself be ruled by fear.
Still, he didn’t think he would be leaving his medicine bag in his sock drawer any time soon.
“Athena?” he called, he called drowsily. The pills were already hitting him hard.
There was a chime. “Yes, Jesse?”
“I’m as worn out as a pair of five-hundred-mile boots. Could you get the light for me, doll?”
“Of course.”
The lights went out. “Thanks, babe,” Jesse said into the darkness. “You know that you’re the only girl for me, Athena.”
“That’s because I’m an unembodied artificial intelligence, and you’re gay,” Athena answered mildly.
“Yeah,” Jesse said, sighing wearily as he rolled onto his side. “I know.”
He was asleep a moment later.
Jesse didn’t dream.
He woke slowly, muzzily, to the sound of Athena calling his name, an unusually urgent tone in her voice. He shivered, somehow chilled even under his blankets, and managed to open his eyes in spite of his lids feeling too heavy to move.
“’thena?” he said, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth. What had Angie put in those pills he had taken? They had never affected him like this before, but his body felt sluggish, even as his mind raced to figure out what was happening.
He heard footsteps running down the hall toward his room, and then his door slid open, Angie rushing at him with her Caduceus Staff glowing gold. It was only when he felt the relief of its warm, healing influence that he realized how much his whole body had been aching. He sat upright and went to stand, but Angie stopped him with a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Just a few more moments, Jesse,” she said.
“You’ll have to heal me while I’m moving around,” Jesse said, grateful when she acquiesced and moved her hand. He stood and grabbed his hat. “I need to see what it did.”
“See what what did?” Genji asked as he entered a moment later, then he stopped in his tracks. “What the hell? It’s freezing in here!”
“Athena,” Jesse said, as he noticed that his closet door was conspicuously wide open. “Please tell me you didn’t alert the entire base.”
“Just Angela and Genji,” Athena replied, somewhat primly, “and only after you failed to rouse at my voice.”
“Jesse, what’s going on?” Angie asked, frowning and insistent. “What happened to make your vitals crash like that? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Jesse didn’t answer as he closed his closet door.
On the door, words were scrawled in large black letters that seemed burned right into the wood.
TIME’S UP, BOY
NO MORE SECRETS FOR YOU
“What the hell?” Genji repeated, standing just behind Jesse.
Jesse stared at the words grimly, then heaved a sigh.
“Well, shit,” he said.