Work Text:
The leaders of Deadlock had been too short sighted to realize the weapon they’d been keeping around, unhoned. They’d given McCree a gun and realized he was a good shot, then treated him with all the finesse of using a grenade to hammer in a nail.
Gabriel had caught a glimmer of potential when he’d overseen the aftermath of the mission. His team had dragged the fool in dust-covered and parched from the New Mexico desert, and the flat resignation on McCree’s face while going through the motions of interrogation and sentencing just barely covered simmering violence. Gabriel made sure the kid’s file had a note for four-point restraints; he’d seen the results of that same murderous, cornered-animal look plenty of times before, had written proof of it in the casualties of the report.
He saw the security footage from the prison too, when McCree had been dumped into general pop for the first time a couple weeks later. A skinny, ragged thing, still banged up pretty good, an easy target for anyone who needed to make a point. He’d gotten approached in the yard by some low-rank mercs from one of the cartels on his second day, no doubt the ink on the inside of his forearm made all the introductions anyone cared to see.
On camera in black and white it barely looked like it would be a fight, four against one. McCree had been frowning at the beginning, then as the leader of the little group kept talking and looming into his face the kid started grinning and he didn’t stop grinning even when he got shoved into the chain link fence, just grabbed the guy by the shirt and slammed his fist straight into the guy’s throat.
The guards hauled him off the next guy only a minute later, that grin transformed into a triumphant sneer through the black mask of blood running down his face from getting kicked in the head with a steel-toed boot. They’d had him in solitary for another week before Gabriel got over there and plucked him from the jaws of a many-life sentence. The first guy hadn’t made it.
Gabriel wanted that, the way McCree channeled every ounce of fire and fury in his body with the single-minded focus to prove himself fearless, dangerous, victorious. McCree didn’t know what to do with it besides get himself into gangs and out of prison yard brawls, neither of which would ever get him very far, and nobody else did either.
But Gabriel had a vision that went deep and wide, plus the ability to follow it through, and he could imagine how useful McCree might be with the right incentive and perhaps a heavy hand. The kid was young, he could still be molded, trained to follow orders. It was worth the effort to find out.
After bringing the boy on while he was still half-feral there was no way to get through to him with appeals to a greater sense of purpose, though. Trying to chain him to intangible ideals and values for why he was being taught to fight and kill with greater efficiency, or what they were trying to accomplish, would only leave him untethered, an unreliable tool for the cause.
So Gabriel bound him to himself, through fear first then later on respect. It worked, the kid had excelled, and now the way McCree followed him could be mistaken for loyalty but when seen in the right moment it was too vicious, too fanatical for that. He still had that rabid streak in him, something left behind that only wanted to bite and bleed and not let go.
McCree would kill for him easily, as intended. He would also die for him, the side effect of bringing an untamed man to heel.
It bordered on worship, and wasn’t that such a terrifying, beautiful thing.