Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jesse waits until the practice room is empty. It's late, and a few brightly-dressed Overwatch agents are ambling around on the other side of the hall, making idle conversation, laughing at each others' casual anecdotes while they pack away their equipment. It's relaxed and pleasant, and the clock tells him that it's about twenty minutes until the time that Reyes told him they'd be serving dinner. He remembers that it'll be lasagne tonight, but he won't be eating with them.

He's looking at his feet when he hears the swing of the doors that indicate that they're finally leaving, and the warehouse lights on his end of the hall are already dark when he hears the faint click of a switch and the other end of the hall goes dark too.

He's been sitting on the bench for a long time now, but somehow it still feels cold underneath him. He keeps staring at his feet until his eyes adapt to the darkness and their shape becomes visible again. Then he looks up towards the open door of the equipment closet, towards what he knows is inside.

His skin prickles. He stands up.

The cord is sturdy; it's made for mounting athletic equipment onto metal hooks in the ceiling, tires and the like, and for literally carrying the weight of a gorilla. It's one of those hybrid cables with a plastic jacket, near impossible to snap and even more difficult to cut. He stands in the doorway and sees it there, innocently coiled on the top of a plastic crate.

He takes a moment to get familiar with it, passing it between his hands. It feels suddenly like a sinister business deal - in his mind, he's staring down a malevolent giant and being offered an out for the mess that he's got himself into, but it will cost him his soul. He doesn't have any other options.

The length is more stiff and awkward to handle than the old ropes he's was used to handling back in his teens, but it's workable. He throws it over a supporting beam in the closet, and secures it. He clears the floor, and pulls up an empty crate. He unholsters his gun, and for a moment doesn't know what to do with it. The floor doesn't seem like a kind place to put it, but then, tonight's not a kind night. He settles with hanging it up by its trigger guard on one of the empty equipment hooks, and then he turns back to the rope.

Tying the noose is the last thing he does.

The realisation of that - the existential bizarreness of it - makes his hands shake as they work. It's the last thing he'll do... the last thing he'll ever do. He doesn't tie a real hangman's noose, and it's not because he doesn't know how - he's seen enough of his old gang-mates tie them for people whose faces have burned themselves into his memory - but because he's got this looming, threatening feeling that it would take too long, give him too much time to think. Instead, he loops it into a lasso.

It'll do the trick, and at least this way he doesn't have to face the irony of imagining it's Deadlock who are tying his noose for him. The lasso is friendlier, and he smiles a bitter smile as he realises that he'll finally be ruining that for himself, too.

The loop doesn't stay open when he releases it to hitch the rope up on the support, so after he's stepped up onto the crate, he opens it again. Holds it in both hands. Stares through the centre.

His heart is racing, but his whole body feels numb. It's almost like an embrace, but his insides feel like they're pushing out against it, like he'll explode. When he does register a sensation, it’s the feeling of a cold, wet trail on his cheek, and he realises he's crying. The vulnerability of it makes him panic, suddenly hasty, and he puts his head through the loop like a race against time.

He can't persuade his hands to let go of it, so they stay there, even as he pulls experimentally down and feels the loop close onto the back of his neck until his fingers are trapped between the cord and his throat. He listens to his breathing - it's stuttering and interrupted by choked sobs, afraid.

He thinks that this is about the time that he's supposed to see his life flash before his eyes, or something. Instead all he sees is his gun on the wall, stares at it, and watches it stare back as his toe taps on the side of the crate, begins to tip--

All at once, his resolve breaks. The feeling of his own weight pulling on his neck is too much, too soon; it's like a switch, something inside his body that's built to save him from this, a feeling like none he's felt before, and pulls his head out of the noose urgently with a fearful sob. The crate scrapes jarringly against the floor with how quickly he steps down from it, and the sound echoes out into the hall as he falls to the ground, back to the wall.

And he cries.

His knees pull up to his chest, he presses his face to them, and cries, gripping his shins until his knuckles turn white. He feels all at once like a survivor and a coward, a crockpot of emotion bubbling over. He thinks about his gun, still hanging on the wall expectant of something, and thinks of what Reyes would be saying right now. 'Can't even do one thing right,' he'd say, snap his fingers towards the floor. 'Drop and give me twenty'. Sleep, wake up, eat breakfast, try to find a reason. Repeat.

The sobs catch in his throat until he can barely breathe, and starts to think that maybe he'll die anyway, just from this. He wonders if prison would have been any kinder to him. Probably not. He can't decide if he'd care, but that would be someone else, a different Jesse.

He hugs his shoulders; the room feels colder than it was before, chilling him to the bone. He can hear his hiccupping breaths echoing into the hall, and he can't stand it - he turns to the open closet door, to close it.

But someone is standing there.

He scrambles up, wide-eyed and terrified. The lasso hangs in his own backdrop, and before he can even make out the person's identity in the darkness, the cogs are already turning in his head to try to find an explanation or an excuse for what they're seeing. He comes up blank, and just backs up until his heel hits the toppled crate and makes another horrible noise that startles him so hard that he sobs again.

"Fuck," he mutters. The figure steps into the room, and he recognises the movement and knows who it is. His fight or flight response has kicked in, and he snaps desperately, "Fuck! Get away from me!"

"Idiot," Reyes snarls, grabbing Jesse by his collar and jerking him towards the doorway. Jesse couldn't get out of the man's grip even at his best, so there's no chance of him doing it in this state, but he fights anyway. "Don't fucking give me this shit now, McCree!" Reyes booms, starting up a dizzying ring in Jesse's ears. He feels sick, and the shock is beginning to set in. He yields.

Reyes dragged him to the medical bay, furious. Jesse didn't risk a glance at his face for the entire journey, nor a glance at any of the faces of the other agents they passed in the halls. To any of them, nothing about the pair's demeanor was anything unusual - the commander being furious at him, for some reason or another, and dragging him somewhere by the scruff of his neck, was a common sight. They were none the wiser to what had happened, but Jesse knew that any of them could go back to that equipment closet now, and see the shitty noose still hanging there, next to his gun on the wall - an old-fashioned model that nobody else would use - and they'd know. It made him feel sick with shame.

When they reached the bay, none of the doctors asked any questions as he was pulled past them to an examination room and sat down onto the bed. Reyes left the room, and Jesse thought, during the short time that he was gone, that he might not be coming back, that he had been put there in lieu of a padded cell to rot with his thoughts. But he did come back, and by the time he did, Jesse had passed beyond panic or fear, and into pitiful despair, silently crying as he watched his commander handling the contents of a tray. There was a bottle of pills, and an electric syringe.

"I hate needles," he lied when he was approached with one.

"Tough shit."

He didn't even flinch when it was jabbed into his arm. "What the hell is it."

"Sedative."

"You gotta be kidding me," he tried to laugh, but it came out bitter and gurgled from tears. "You're just gonna…just put me to sleep? Ain't you even gonna ask me nothin'?"

"Oh, don't worry, I'm not done with you yet," he replied through gritted teeth. "It's not strong, just enough to dissuade you from pulling some more stupid shit."

"Fuck you."

Jesse's words betrayed his feeling, though. He had no fight left, so when he was handed a plastic cup half-filled with water from the sink and a couple of white pills, he took them without any complaint. Reyes clicked his teeth when it took him a couple of tries to swallow them down, and pulled up a stool to sit in front of him.

Neither of them said another word while the drug cocktail kicked in; they just sat in silence while the world started to go blurry around the edges. Eventually, Jesse looked up at his boss - he was leaning forward onto his knees, heels hooked up onto the bar of the stool, watching him with an unreadable expression.

“What,” Jesse said. No answer. “What’re you lookin’ at.”

“You.”

Jesse sighed with exasperation, but it was shaky. He was trying not to cry again. “What d’ya want from me,” he said in monotone.

“Names,” Reyes said, and it made Jesse look up at him with confusion. “Who did this to you?”

Jesse scoffed as though it was a stupid question - but it wasn’t. He played it off anyway, with shame, averting his gaze from fear that he’d crack. “I- I did it t’myself, y’saw--”

“Jesse.”

He stopped, then, and looked back up again with all the appearance of a scolded child.

You did this to me, he thought bitterly.

“It’s nothin’,” he said instead. “M’just… it’s nothing.”

Reyes stared him down interrogatively - but gladly, he didn’t press further, and everything got a little hazy from there.

He remembers Reyes talking to a female doctor, with him in the room, but he wasn't really listening. He remembers her leading him to a different room, away from the man's pressuring gaze, and asking him some questions, but he doesn't remember what answers he gave her. He doesn't remember laying down, or falling asleep, but when he wakes up, he's somewhere else.

It's dark, and he's comfortably drowsy. There's a television on, the sound of it so quiet that it might as well just be muted. When he focuses a little, he notices it's playing a telenovela that he thinks he's seen before, and the subtitles are on in Spanish.

He realises they're in Gabriel's own living room, and a moment later he also realises he's laying on his couch, and his commander is there with him. He's smoking like he knows he's not supposed to in personal quarters, just out of view, with Jesse's head in his lap.

For a moment, he pauses the show as if he's listening for something. So Jesse sniffs to let him know that he's awake, and he unpauses to watch in silence again for a few more minutes. It's a comfortable silence.

"You were just standing there," Jesse croaks eventually. His throat is sore. “In the doorway.”

Gabriel doesn't reply for half a minute or so, but when he does, it's with oddly-placed pride. "Knew you wouldn't do it."

Jesse only manages to pay attention to the television for another minute before he falls back to sleep.