#sample only

“Huh.” It’s more a snort than an identifiable response, hooked so close to dismissive McCree expects him to leave it at that. But old Morrison surprises him, stringing together a few words into an almost sentence in his scratchy, scarred voice. “Which part?”

Casual coats his words with slippery ease. “Heard you got into a little Dance Macabre while you were mingling with the locals.”

Moments ticked by, until Morrison managed to condense his irritation into a single syllable. “And?”

“And nothing.” Though they both knew he was far from done. “Los Muertos, huh? Ran into them a few time. Left a few true to their name.” His eyes cloud over. “Closest anyone came to collecting my bounty ran with’em.”

He glances over to Morrison’s corner and isn’t surprised to see the soldier glaring daggers at the healing device that’s keeping him immobile. But the tension in his shoulders, the ear directed at McCree, tells him he’s still listening. “It was luck, mostly. I fell asleep in the wrong safehouse, woke up to shackles.” Another unimpressed huff from the peanut gallery. Morrison knew, the only way to catch a former Blackwatch vet off guard was if the aforementioned vet was totally insensate. “Turns out it was a group of’em. A few wannabes following around an old hand in order to prep for initiation. They got lucky, found me off guard and knew how to completely incapacitate me. Then, I got lucky.”

Bingo. Morrison knew a plot twist like he knew the handle of his rifle, and it played him every time. McCree could see the glow of the visor in his peripherals, now attentive where he had feigned indifference before.

“The old hand, he let the other two rough me up a bit, but never jumped in. Spent his time sitting in a chair, watching. And when the others were done, he sent them away. See, he was old for the demographic, so ‘round 25? 26? Anyway, that made him barely older than a toddler when the Omnic Crisis ended, and barely older than I was when I joined Deadlock when Overwatch fell. But this kid sat there, backwards in his ratty plastic chair, dripping ash from one of my cigarillos over the cracked backing, and stared at me like I was the hand of justice itself and he had sins to confess.” Morrison twitches in enclosed spaces by nature, but that description earns a full jerk. Too close to home for comfort. Good. “After some time, he seemed to remember he could do more than blow smoke. Told me he had a little sister Before. That she used to love cowboys. Then he got up and unlocked my shackles, told me to make it look like  I forced him.”

Going misty-eyed is no problem. Gabe taught him. Unfocus your vision, refrain from blinking for over a minute. Your tear duct respond automatically. Morrison choses not to break the silence.

“So I did. Must not’ve been convincing enough, though. Found him hanging off an old turret wall. They flayed the glow fro his skin before hangin’ ‘im.”

Silence. Silence on silence. The red visor is hidden behind Morrison’s thick skull and receding white shock as he examines everything that isn’t McCree. Finally, scratchy, like putting a needle to a record half disintegrated with age, he asks, “What did you do the ones that killed him?”

Jesse laughs at that. Full gut, cut off by an anticipated (but never received, since the one who usually delivered it was long dead) reproachful glare. Sane eyes had closed (the flash, momentary, of two boys barely into manhood, kneeling in the unforgiving desert heat, bleeding from where the stakes impaled both palms and pinned them to the parched earth, battered everywhere else, too weak to break free, too weak to ward off the buzzards, much less the lurking coyotes), open again overbright, pupils at a pinprick. “Nothing you need worry about, Comman- Soldier. Nothing a former gang member wouldn’t understand, anyway.”

This time, the silence lasts as long as Morrison’s hard stare, then a few minutes of his Look Away. “I should have known you’d bring this up. Deadlock was never far from your mind.”

McCree laughs this time, a low chuckle. “Deadlock? No. That life was and is dead an buried. I was referring to Blackwatch.”

The visor may cover all of Morrison’s face, but it can’t mask the way the tips of his shoulder draw up, or the twin prominences of a furrowed brow. Jack Morrison, the hurricane of rage, perfectly contained. Was this the moment, McCree wonders, when the former Strike Commander’s control snaps? Would he be honored with the brunt force if it were?

Alas, the device strapped to Jack’s torso withdraws its gold glow, and beeps to confirm completion. The Soldier rips it off, and stalks out, never sparing McCree a second glance.