Chapter Text
That old man’s intel was good after all, and Jesse found his quarry slumped under her stupidly huge hat, splayed limbs sagging against the wall of a booth in an ancient trucker bar at 11AM. She had the place to herself, unsurprisingly. The only witness to this not-un-precedented debauchery was an ancient omnic bartender, and he seemed stuck in a loop, polishing a yellowed-by-time shotglass with a yellowed-by-something-else rag.
Regardless of the situation, Jesse Bartholomew McCree knew his p's and q's, and he tipped his hat at the omnic as he entered. He received a nod accompanied by a metallic wheeze; the omnic was nearly as run-down as his bar, but Jesse found the omnic much more welcoming. The wall behind the ancient bartender's head was lined with high-backed booths that would have been tacky a century ago, and the bar itself was a particularly unpleasant shade of oak that had hit its hayday in the 2040s. The foosball table in the corner was missing enough players that the only strategy for winning was likely to involve fisticuffs, but Jesse was never one to judge.
His quarry was camped out in the farthest booth from the door, and he respected her for the tactical decision – the booth had the best sight-lines towards the exits – but she'd definitely fallen short in execution by making the rookie mistake of passing the fuck out in a publicly-accessible bar.
Now, Jesse McCree knew how to treat a lady, and he could reign in his expressions as well as he could reign in a metaphor, but Ashe weren't no lady, so as he sauntered up to her table, he could not hold back his grimace. The dim ochre light through the greasy windows glanced off her mostly-empty bottle of whiskey that sat sure as hell next to a mostly-full glass of whiskey. From the smell around the table and the sticky feeling under his fingers as he slid into the booth opposite her, he’d happily wager that a good amount of that whiskey never made it from a vessel to anyone's mouth.
She hadn’t moved a muscle since he walked in the door, but as he adjusted his holster, he glanced up and found that she was watching him; one of those uncanny maroon eyes peering blearily out from under the brim of her (frankly egregious) hat.
He smiled into the glare. “You’re a long way from home, Ashe. Unless Deadlock’s got new business in Beaumont I don’t know about.” His delivery would've been charming, to anyone who didn't know him. Unfortunately, Ashe did know him, and to his disappointment, she definitely remembered that she did not care for this particular brand of bullshit.
She sneered, a vitriolic, drunken display of a single white canine. She'd always had the best orthodontists.
“Oh get fucked, Jesse. Deadlock’s got plenty of business you don’t know about.” She spat the words in a plume of whiskey, and he had to force himself not to flinch at the smell, or the weird semi-belch she'd expunged as she said his name. He'd initially figured that she'd come in for an early-morning pick-me-up drink (as one does), but from her breath, he was willing to wager his finest pair of boots (they weren't worth much, but he knew it was the thought that counts) that this bender of hers? Oh yeah, this had started the day before. She must've paid the bartender his weight in gold (admittedly the feller was a slim omnic, and gold was not worth that much these days, but again, thought that counts) to keep the place open for her.
Before he could dare to even begin to think about pitying her, Ashe sighed loudly (and smellily), swung her legs off the booth, and sat up straight across from him as she leaned her head against the wooden backrest. “Well, hell. I guess that’s something we got in common now, ain’t it?” She raised the glass at him in a mockery of a toast, and he frowned.
“Well, wait, what?” He said, flummoxed.
Her eyes narrowed. "We're alike, Jesse. In this regard."
Jesse hadn't thought the conversation was hard to follow, but she was clearly riding a trail he hadn't yet mapped out. "In the regard of...?"
If she hadn't been slightly crosseyed from the drink and he hadn't known her for 20 years, her would have called her stare scathing.
"In regards to Deadlock? Business that you don't know about? Well. I don't know about it", she hiccuped, "either." She flapped her hand back and forth between them. "We, you and I?...same".
She hadn't expressed herself particularly well, but Jesse McCree never went in on any op without the appropriate intel: he knew all about the Deadlock coup, but he wouldn't've been Blackwatch if he couldn't fake it with the best of them, so he put on his most concerned frown, and he said, "Well what do you mean same, Ashe, I just saw yall try to do that whole heist–"
She cut him off, leaning forward, and slammed her glass onto the table, sloshing whiskey onto her perfectly manicured fingers.
“B.O.B’s dead, Jesse.”
--- (not a real chapter break i'm just leaving this here because i've edited up to this point SORRY I'M DOING THIS LIVE)
He blanched and leaned back, avoiding her breath and the accusation in her eyes. He had connections these days, and his intel had been good: he’d known she hadn’t been running the Deadlock Gang for a while now, but he hadn’t known this. He felt his stomach turn over, and he wasn’t sure if it was from her breath or his own sadness at the news. They’d never been best friends, but he’d liked B.O.B. The big omnic had been Ashe’s right-hand machine since he’d known her, and even though Jesse’s relationship with his maker had gone from tense to tenuous to terrible, Bob had always had a friendly wave for him.
He softened his voice and leaned forward, back into her whiskey cloud. “Ashe, what happened?” She snorted, a distinctly unlady-like sound that sounded as new to her throat as it did to his ears.
“What happened? What happened? Don’t ask me what–.” She hacked out a noise between a laugh and a growl. “Jesse, you were there, you asshole. You killed him, Jesse.” She tilted her head back, incredulous. “‘What happened’, Jesus. And I thought you couldn’t get any dumber.”
“I killed – what, wait, in the canyon? No–”
“Yep. You blew him right to shit.”
“That’s bullshit, he was fine, he was totally functional when I left you–”
“Oh yeah that’s right, when you sent me off on a train car going nowhere in the middle of nowhere with only PIECES of B.O.B –”
“He looked fine! You said you were gonna re-build ‘im!”
“Yeah, well I fuckin’ couldn’t, okay?”
She slammed her hands down on the table again, then brought them up, leaning her face into them. “I tried over and over, but something was wrong with his connection matrix, something got a bit too fried in that explosion, and I just...I couldn’t bring him back.” She massaged her temples as she talked, voice cracking with fatigue and something new that almost sounded like emotion. “I sat out there in the desert for two weeks, Jesse, and I did everything I could to put him back together, and goddamnit, nothing worked. And then when I dragged my dead sick ass back to HQ a week later, there’d been a goddamn coup, and fuckin' Razor’d crowned himself the new ‘King of Deadlock’ and without my guns and without B.O.B, there weren’t a damn thing I could do but scurry on out of there before they killed me. Or worse.” She smiled and picked up her drink again, tipping it towards him laconically. “So hey, cheers to you, Jesse McCree. You killed B.O.B, you ruined my life, and now you’re here to see me in my lowest moment yet. I hope it’s just like what you’ve always imagined.” She took a swig of the whiskey, exhaled slowly, and tilted her head against the back of the booth, closing her eyes. When she spoke again, it was quieter. “You might as well go ahead and kill me, Jess. I can’t imagine any other reason why you’d show your face around me.”
Jesse leaned back against his own side of the booth, mirroring her position as he processed what she was saying, and what the saying of it meant for the woman in front of him. Ashe had always kept herself locked down tight; the only emotion she regularly showed was an impressive range of and variation on ‘fury’, but when he looked at her again, what he’d written off as signs of drunken dishevelment revealed themselves as grief. The light was behind her, but he could tell that her normally stick-straight white-blonde hair was tangled and curling at the ends, and the bags under her eyes were two thumbprints of purple against her fair skin. He didn't think Ashe was capable of crying, but her eyes were red-rimmed and bleary with more than just the fumes from a night and morning of spilled drinks. Most notably, she was draped in an oversize linen button-down only a few shades darker than her skin, which was normal enough, but her Deadlock jacket was nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t seen her without her jacket since he’d seen her naked, and that had been more than twenty years ago.
There was no doubting that she'd always loved her whiskey, but Elizabeth 'Calamity' Ashe did not, on principle, wallow. Yet here she was, knee deep in it. In the ten years they'd spent side-by-side, ten years of highs and lows and everything in between, he’d never seen her like this, and he wasn’t sure if it was the strangeness of the whole situation or his own cursed heart turning soft as he edged closer to forty, but for the first time in his life, he truly felt bad for her. She was sitting there, eyes closed, holding her half-empty tumbler against her forehead, and Jesse felt bad for her.
He whuffed out a breath and cleared his throat. “What did you do with him?”
She opened one eye to look at him. “B.O.B?” He nodded, and she sighed. “I left most of him in the desert where the cart stopped...I couldn’t carry much of him, just some wires and his memory chips.” She put the glass down on the table and stared into its contents, swirling it as she continued. “He wouldn’t’ve wanted me to waste any of him, so I used some of the pieces to get an old bike I found running. Some asshole stole my old one.” She didn’t even look at him when she said it, and Jesse grimaced to himself.
“Well...is there any hope of putting him back –”
“Oh fuck off Jesse”, she snapped, glaring daggers again, “it’s been three months since you dumped me in that desert, and if you haven’t noticed, I’m in fucking Beaumont. If there was any chance in hell to bring him back, I wouldn’t be here, now would I.”
Jesse nodded, looking down at his own hands, and they sat in silence for a moment, punctuated only by the soft wheezes of the bartender's joints as he polished another yellowed glass. Ashe sipped her whiskey and Jesse worked up his courage to make what had the potential to be his most self-destructive move yet in a long, long career of self-destruction. He was many things, but Jesse McCree was no coward, so he took a deep breath, dug in his heels, bit the bullet, leaned forward, and gingerly placed his hand atop Ashe’s.
Her eyes snapped up to his, nostrils flaring, and he fought back the mammalian impulse to retreat before a snake poised to strike. Ashe didn’t rattle, but she was venomous, and he was in uncharted territory now.
He spoke quickly, “Ashe – Callie , listen I – I’m sorry.” Her eyes widened at the ancient nickname, but her stare stayed suspicious, the red rims around her eyes making them look even more unnaturally bright in the dim bar.
“And what are you sorry for, Jesse McCree?” she hissed, not breaking eye contact. Her hand was damp and sticky with liquor, and her breath probably would have registered on a Geiger counter, but he returned her gaze as sincerely as he could.
“For Bob, and for...for everything. For stealing your bike, and for leaving you out there...it weren’t the right thing to do, and I’m sorry.”
They sat a moment, faces barely a foot apart as she searched his eyes. When she'd found what she was looking for, she sighed and looked down at their hands.
“I think you mean that", she said, so quiet he barely caught it.
He looked down at their hands, and gave hers the tiniest squeeze. “I really do."
The omnic bartender had gone quiet, and her response carried in the silent room.
“Good."
He looked up at her change in tone, and blinked in surprise at the expression on her face. Gone were the wrinkles of consternation; her eyes were now sharp and focused, and she was smiling at him in a much more familiar, positively wolfish way. He yanked his hand away from hers and leaned back, freezing instinctively as his head hit something cold, hard, and recognizably gun-barrel-y.
“Now that we’re done with that”, Ashe was mirroring his posture, leaning back against the booth with her arms crossed, wearing a decisively smug smile, “what the fuck do you want Jesse? Hands up, by the way”, she smirked, wiggling her fingers at him.
“Nothing’s ever simple with you, is it?” he grumbled as he reluctantly obeyed, using the movement to take a peak over his head at his captor. When he spotted the chrome head and jaunty bowler hat, he couldn’t help but grin. “Hello, B.O.B”, he said, smiling up at the omnic’s smooth faceplate, “I knew you were made of tougher stuff than all that." The omnic’s cheery green optics flexed warmly, and Jesse grinned back. “It’s good to see you too”.
“Oh, don’t butter him up, he was a pain and a half to put back together. Do you like the new stealth mods? They’re pretty fun, dontcha think, Jess?”, the old nickname now a mockery.
“They are definitely effective”, he admitted.
“Damn straight they are!”, she crowed, smirking as she made tiny adjustments to her apparel that took her look from ‘drunken mess’ back to her standard of ‘classy bitch’. “Turns out there was a lot more on those train cars than your buggy friend." He’d been sure she’d been long gone by the time he’d activated Echo, but he brushed it off, trying to narrow in on her angle. Ashe was cunning, but her downfall was that she knew it. She often let things slip when she was gloating, and it wasn't hard to get her gloating at all.
“This all a setup then, huh? Skitter on your payroll again?” The old man had been so happy to pass on the rumor that the disgraced Deadlock leader had been spending her days in a shithole like Beaumont; Jesse’d assumed the ancient gun-runner had been hoping to see Ashe finally get some comeuppance (she’d never been particularly kind to him (or anyone) during the old man’s years with Deadlock), but in retrospect the old coot had just been looking forward to a paycheck. Hindsight twenty-twenty, once again. Ashe chuckled.
“Skitter’s never not been on my payroll. Old fart got your timing wrong though, he figured you wouldn’t make it here ‘til the morrow."
“I got a real fast bike”, he smirked.
“Not for much longer”, she smirked, smirkier.
He grunted, shifting against the metal barrel of Bob’s gun.
“This is one hell of a show you put on, Liz, just to get me to make a damn fool of myself. That ain’t even real whiskey, huh? What’d you do for the smell, cause goddamn, you nailed that." She ignored the barb, smiling at him over the glass.
“Oh no, darling, this is real booze. I’m sloshed as all hell right now, and I still outplayed your cowboy ass.”
He laughed out loud with surprising warmth: Ashe was a manipulative, theatrical nightmare, but even after twenty years, he still had a soft spot for her particular brand of bullshit.
“You’re a hell of a woman, Liz."
“You’re a hell of a dead man, Jesse.”
“You seem awful sure of that."
She stretched her arms above her head and popped her neck with a satisfied smile. “And why wouldn’t I be?”
It was Jesse’s turn to smile now, warm, slow and crooked. Ashe watched him, eyes narrowing.
“I’m not the only one who brought a friend.”
“Wh–”
The arrow hit before she could finish the word, catching the fabric of her shirt and drilling into the wooden wall with a satisfying thunk. It knocked Ashe’s breath out of her as its momentum slammed her shoulder into the wall, her right arm pinned neatly above her head. He heard Bob’s motors whirring, but before the omnic could finish reconfiguring his arm, a second arrow had curved in and pinned the sleeve of Ashe’s left hand to the table, arresting her attempts to fumble out her coach gun. Jesse felt the barrel against his head shift as B.O.B’s configuration finished, but a third arrow flew, and everything stopped.
The only sound in the room was Ashe’s ragged breathing, as the three of them, frozen in tableau around the table, stared at the arrow that quivered in the wall barely a hair’s breadth away from the bridge of her nose. Her eyes slowly slid from the arrow to meet Jesse’s, her right palm open, signaling B.O.B to hold fire.
“Alright, Jesse. We’ll do this your way."