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“Wha—What the hell are you doin’, y/n?”
You’re caught quite literally red handed. You’d cut a little deeper than intended in a long line on your calf, and were wiping blood up into your cupped palm so it wouldn’t spill on the floor. That’s how he caught you, blood in one hand, long, sharp blade in the other, some angry red marks still welling up with blood, some sprouting crusted red trails dried down your legs. He stands in your doorway, stock still, face plastered with worry, and you can’t think of anything to say. You’ve never been caught before.
“What—” He stumbles in and the door hisses shut behind him. His mouth hangs open as his eyes roam over what cuts he can see, his eyebrows drawing closer and higher the longer he stands there. The silence hangs heavy between you. Blood pools in your shaking palm. You drop the knife.
Suddenly—“what the hell!”
He’s on you in an instant, angry and cursing, kneels in front of you and pulls your arms away from your legs just to see, just to see what the damage is. To see exactly what you’d done.
“McCree—”
“What the hell is this!?” His anger almost threatens to burst your careful numbness. He’s shaking with it, glaring up into your eyes. “What, you don’t get cut up enough on missions you gotta do it to yourself!? ”
He has your wrists in his hands, trembling and gritting his teeth and breathing hard. You aren’t sure what to do with it, with him, like this. Part of you has disconnected, part of you thinks this can’t be real, this has never happened before, maybe it isn’t happening now…
He shakes you, hard, his voice a grating roar. “ Answer me! ”
“I-I don’t—” You’re struggling to come up from it, can feel something prickling you from the other side of the wall between you and reality. It will come for you soon. For now all you can do is blink at him, watch as the blood on your palm slips thickly down his forearm. You shake your head.
“What do you mean, no?” He crows the word no like an indignant mother. You grit your teeth, can feel your heart hammering in your chest. “Just what in the hell are you doing here, y/n?,” he growls, “Yer gonna hafta explain it to me real goddamn good cuz I sure as hell ain’t gettin’ why you’d be sittin’ here doin’ this shit to yerself when we got plentya other perfectly good nonsense to deal with.”
The numbness pops like a balloon. Your rage draws back like a building wave, then crashes.
“You don’t know a GODDAMN THING, JESSE MCCREE!”
He snaps backwards, some of the anger is flung off his face as though slapped from it. His grip slackens just enough from your wrists that you can pry yourself free of them.
“You don’t know what you’re looking at and you sure as hell don’t know what you’re talking about!” You look at the blood on his arm and the rage boils higher, unreasonable, your voice trembles, “Get the fuck out of here! Get the fuck out of my room!”
He sits up straighter, reaches again for your arms, anger returning, “I ain’t gonna leave you here t—”
“Oh yes you fucking are!” Then you’re kicking him, hard, wherever you can land a kick. To his knees, his thighs, his ribs when he turns away from you, his ass as he stands
“I ain’t—”
“Get OUT!” You kick and hit and scream at him all the way to the door. He clutches the frame to keep you from tossing him out but you pry his hands off with one hand while you kick him hard and he stumbles through. He turns to face you for just a moment, wide-eyed as though scared, while the door hisses closed and you growl, “Stay the fuck away from me.”
The door locks. The room is quiet. You slide to the floor. Looking back at your bed you realize two things: one, the knife is gone; two, you got blood on the floor. For some reason, this is what makes you cry.
You don’t hear the hand pressed to the door, or the boots that scuff reluctantly down the hall.
You couldn’t avoid him forever, though you weren’t trying that hard. He seemed to want to stay out of your way as much as you wanted to stay out of his. So you hadn’t been expecting him to find you some two days later in the empty dining hall at the end of a long day. You’re looking over specs for an upcoming op and drinking lemon ginger tea when he just...sits down.
You look up at him, squint a glare, huff, and turn back to your work.
“I-I know,” he stutters, almost embarrassed, “I know ya prolly aren’t all that pleased to see me but I—”
“I thought I told you to fuck off,” you reply, curt and venomous.
“Well,” McCree almost laughs, smiling anxiously and tipping his hat towards you, “actually you told me to ‘get the fuck out’, and ‘stay the fuck aw—”
“What do you want , McCree. I’ve got shit to do.” Your guts twist and squirm. You know what he wants. Why can’t he just leave? Why do you have to do this?
“Well I, uh,” he fidgets with his belt buckle, then a strand of hair just behind his ear, looks up at the rim of his hat, “about the other night I—I just wanted to apologize—”
Yup. There it was.
“Congratulations,” you say, not looking up, “You’ve done it. Now leave me alone?” You hadn’t meant to pose it as a question, but that’s just how it came out. It was a hope. That that was really all he wanted. That he’d done it and he’d go now and you wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.
His shoulders slump, “I—y/n.” Tension draws up into your arms. You clutch your too-warm cup of tea. It’s not over. “Look I just...I’m sorry ‘bout the way I acted. I shouldn’ta treated you that way an’ I— ‘m just worried ‘bout ya sugar.”
When you look up at him, his expression is sheepish, like you’ve caught him at something embarrassing. You sigh.
“I’m fine, Jesse—”
“Ya ain’t fine,” he fires back, indignant, “yer—”
“Jesse.” It’s almost a plea. His eyes lose their angry glare.
You sigh again. Close the file in front of you. Look up at him. “Jesse, look. I get it, ok? I get that you’re worried. I do. But you do not know anything about this. You don’t. You just don’t. We’ve all got our shit, alright? You, me, and everybody. We’ve all got shit to deal with. I’m gonna deal with my shit. You deal with yours. Ok? It’ll be fine, just...leave me be.”
You gather up your file and your tea, step out of the dining hall bench and head for the door. You don’t catch a glimpse of his face under his hat as you pass. You think maybe you hear a sharp inhale, like someone about to speak, but you’re already out the door.
He doesn’t follow you.
You think that might be the end of it. You hope that’s the end of it.
Weeks go by and things start to go back to normal. You see each other around base, nod, smile even. McCree does some particularly fine shooting on an op and you can’t help but whoop praise into the comm. One night you, McCree and a few other underlings find yourselves drinking in the commons and complaining about your commanding officers. You and McCree inact renditions of Jack and Gabe, respectively. Your performance is applauded and, later, reenacted behind Jack and Gabe’s backs when they’re being particularly feisty. When McCree goes out on a supply run, he brings you back your favorite foreign candy. “‘S not like I went outta my way or anythin’. They just had it in stock and I thought shoot, that’d be nice wouldn’t it? ” Things go on like normal.
Also normal is the fresh cut hidden just under your sleeve. After the...incident, you’d stopped for a while. But the ops wore on you, training wore on you, base wore on you, people wore on you. It was too much, like always. It was fine until McCree decided he wanted to use the shooting range at the same time as you.
You’re concentrating intently, gun held loose and deadly in your hands, earmuffs shutting out all noise, all distraction. Firing, you don’t hear him walk in, saddle up to the booth beside you, ready his firearm and then, suddenly, stop. It isn’t until a minute or so later, when you turn to reload, that you see him there, staring at you.
“Oh. McCree,” you say, lifting one of the muffs from your ear, “I didn’t—”
“Your arm,” is all he says, his face knotted up, mouth twisting down into a sad grimace.
The sleeve of your left arm had rolled up from where you’d carefully laid it. Two of the many new marks glare red and straight against your skin. You yank the sleeve down.
“It’s not—”
“You can’t keep doing this!” He interrupts. Emotions churn in his expression: anger, guilt, sadness, distress. “You can’t…” He looks around him, like he might somehow find the right words somewhere on the ground, only to look back up at you, voice tight and high, “you can’t!”
“Jesse, please.” Your hand covers the bulk of the marks, even though they’re already hidden beneath your shirt.
“I don’t understand,” he says earnestly, taking a step towards you, “I rightly don’t. I don’t get it at all, sweetheart.” His hands fidget in front of him, his eyes wander from your face, to your hand on your arm, to the floor. He grits his teeth. “But I jus’ can’t sit around watchin’ you do yourself this way. It ain’t…” He looks up at you again, almost begging. “It ain’t good, sugar. It ain’t good.”
You sigh. “We talked about this. Everybody’s got their shit.”
“Yeah, but mine ain’t literally hurtin’ myself!”
Hackles raised, you shout, without thinking, “you think drinking and smoking and pretending to be a fucking cowboy all the time isn’t hurting yourself!?”
He flinches. His mouth drops open. Guilt pools sickly in your stomach. You open your mouth more than once to try to cover up what you’d said, but nothing comes out.
When he speaks again his voice is steady and deep, like a warning. “This ain’t right, y/n. I’m not gonna just sit on my thumbs about it. It ain’t right.”
“There’s nothing you can do!” Your anger, your fear, spikes through the guilt.
Jesse scowls and, tight-lipped, he turns on his heel.
“Fine,” he says thickly as he walks out the door.
Less than a day later, Ziegler calls you in for an eval.
You’ve been in your room for a few days. After the eval, after being suspended from duty, after a therapist is flown in specifically to see you, you know that being anti-social isn’t earning you any brownie points. You just can’t bring yourself to go outside. The embarrassment threatens to eat you alive, the pitiful look on Ziegler’s face when she confronted you, the particularly disappointed glare you’d gotten from Jack later that same day. You can’t. You can’t face them. Instead you sit on your bed, knees pulled tight to your chest, staring numbly at information on a op you’d no longer be going on. You knew they would do just fine without you. Rather than comforted, you just feel expendable.
He knocks and you don’t answer. You don’t know it’s him, but you aren’t allowed to lock your door anymore so it’s not like it matters. Anybody could come and go as they please. Doesn’t even matter if you’re there or not. You might as well say nothing, the room might as well be empty.
But the door slides open and he stands there in it. You don’t look up but can tell from the shadow who it is. You burrow your head and little further behind your arms.
“How...how’re ya doin’?” He says it softly, as though to an animal he’s worried might bite him.
You can think of nothing good to say, no appropriate response, nothing that would preserve your dignity and respect your anger and display your betrayal all at once. You tug your sleeve further down towards your wrists, just in case.
You hear the door hiss closed, his spurs jangle nervously on the floor. “I haven’t seen you ‘round base in a while. Wondered if things, uh, went alright with—with Angie.”
“I got suspended.” You say it faster than you can think of it. It springs out of you like a confession. You didn’t realize you were close to tears until you felt the tightness of your own throat around those words.
“You...what?"
“Suspended. Three weeks. No ops, no travel off-base. She...she told Jack. Told Gabe. Took my weapons. Can’t lock my door. Protocol.” A venom seeps in half-way through your speech. You don’t look up at him.
“Protocol,” he repeats flatly.
“She had to. You filed a report.”
“I was just talkin’ to ‘er!”
“And what!?” You spit, finally glaring him down, “You thought she wouldn’t do anything about it!? She’s a medic in a government operation, Jesse! She has to follow-up with and report on this shit! How fucking dense are you!?”
He steps back, eyes wide. “I didn’t know—”
“NO!” you scream, “no you didn’t know! Just like I told you! Just like I fucking told you!”
He takes a step forward, defensive and angry. “What exactly did you want me to do!?”
Your voice is high and pierced with rage. “You should have asked me, you shit!”
He stares at you, stuck.
The tears finally come through the anger. “You should have asked me what I wanted, me what I needed, Jesse! If you were thank fucking worried, you should have fucking asked me how you could help me because this?—” you fling your arm out at him, “—this isn’t help! This is bullshit. I feel like embarrassed, useless garbage because of you! Because you thought you knew what was good for me. You thought you knew me better than I did. It’s bullshit. It’s fuckin bullshit, Jesse. Get the fuck out of my room.”
He’s standing there, stuck in shock. Both of your hands are shaking.
“Get the fuck out of my room!” you repeat, and you swear the echo of your screech will stick in these walls forever.
His mouth opens. In a tiny, whispered voice he asks, “What…what can I do? What do you want me to do?”
You sigh, shake your head. Your breath hitches in your chest as you begin to cry in earnest. “I want you to leave. Please, l-leave me alone.”
He does.
You go to therapy and you eat and sleep and don’t talk to anyone. You don’t even see him, not even a glimpse of him, and wonder numbly how he can avoid you so completely. It’s what you wanted.
Nothing changes. Your suspension passes and you’ve managed to convince the therapist of progress, the incident report is put away, you go back on duty. Still, you can feel Gabe’s disappointment, your peer’s confusion, Ziegler’s persistent pity. You go back to duty more lonely than ever. Nothing changes. You don’t see him anywhere, even when you look. It’s what you wanted.
One night you find yourself naked in the communal showers at around 0300. The water’s long gone cold. Beside you is a mostly empty bottle of scotch and a pocket knife. Beneath the running shower head to your left are your clothes in a wet mound, slowly leeching vomit. You’re curled up into yourself, knees to your chest, head resting on your forearms over your knees. Blood leaks lazily from your arms, down your legs, across the tile and down the drain. You might have been asleep.
You hear him call your name, quiet, and then the loud, quick staccato of his steps echoing throughout the room beg you to pull your head up, just slightly, in time to see him crouch in front of you. Your eyes are heavy-lidded with alcohol and exhaustion and the emotional deadness that comes post-cutting, but still you can see the flagrant worry etched into his face.
He calls your name again. When you don’t respond he pulls your arms from your knees. You protest, but only weakly. He looks at the cuts and you can see a sense of both sickness and relief in his eyes. They must not be that bad.
He places your arms slowly, carefully, back on your knees, chuckles a tight laugh saying, “Yer bleedin’ there, darlin’”.
You rest your head on your arms again, waiting, watching him, saying nothing. He seems to bite his tongue more than once, eyes darting from your face to the bottle to the knife to your arms. He clenches his hands in front of him. You realize that his pants are getting wet.
“Please,” he says, finally, “please, what…what can I do?”
The emotion seizes up in you before you have time to anticipate it, you don’t know if he can see the tears for the shower, but know that he can hear the tightness in your voice when you whisper a response.
“Help.”
He sucks breath through his teeth, and his voice hitches high when he replies, “‘Course. Of course, sweetheart.”
He seems to want to hug you then, hands hesitating in the air, but something about your gaze stops him. He drops his arms, goes to stand.
“Wait…just…wait here ok? I’ll be right back. Don’t go nowhere.”
For a moment, through the deadness, you’re hurt. Not that it matters. You curl back into yourself as he walks away, blotting out the harsh fluorescent lights. The nausea you thought had abated returns and the floor spins beneath you, though you can’t see it. Not that it matters.
The water stops. When you look up again, he’s crouching in front of you, a towel in one hand and a roll of bandages in the other. “Hey there. Think you can get up and get this towel on you? Was thinkin’ maybe we should get you back to yer room.”
Again, he hesitates, before finally recognizing his mistake.
His eyebrows furrow and he looks at you hard. “Is that…is that what you want? Would that help?”
You smile. Say nothing. When you go to stand it’s like some boneless creature has decided to inhabit your body to learn how to walk. You slop to one side, put your hands down in front of you, but when you go about the simple process of twisting your torso from sitting to kneeling something catches in your gut and you spew sticky, yellow bile all over your hands. A hand is on your back, another pulling hair away from your eyes. You cough, heave again, nothing.
Above you he says, “You got into it pretty good, huh darlin’? Ain’t nothin’, I promise. If I’m worth more’n two licks a’ salt then I know ‘bout drinkin’ maybe more than ya oughta. We’ll getcha feelin’ better here in just a bit. Might wanna take a deep breath there if ya can.”
You do. The nausea ebbs.
His metal hand is cool on your forehead, his human hand rubbing circles into your back. You heave again. Nothing. Sit back on your heels with a groan.
“Yeeaah, can’t imagine yer feelin’ real good at the moment. Ya want me t’ turn the shower back on? Get sommuh that off ya?”
You can only nod.
“Alright.”
The shower turns back on and you rub at the slick bile on your hands, pushing it away from the cuts still bleeding lazily along your arms. You don’t have quite the coordination to get between your fingers. Jesse steps in, taking your hands, rubbing them clean beneath the water.
Another emotion bubbles up. Shame.
The shower turns off again. “Alright. Think you can get this towel ‘round you? Maybe you can take a breather while I patch you up, before we wander off back to yer room.”
You take the towel he stretches out to you, fumble, nearly drop it in the water and bile and blood, but manage to wrap it around yourself, tuck the end loosely, dropping your hands into your lap. He gathers them up, wipes them clean and dry, winds bandages slowly and carefully around your arms. It is so quiet, with only your breathing, his breathing, and the slosh of blood slurring through you.
He finishes quickly, and you go to stand without his prompting. You can rise to your knees with your hand pressed against the wall, but can’t think of how to get from there to your feet. For a long moment you just sway there, fighting the dizziness and confusion.
He taps your arm. “Need a little help there?”
Again, you nod, and he frowns.
He grabs loosely onto your arm, below your armpit, but before he goes to lift you he asks, “Are you…are you gonna say anything?”
You’re not sure why it matters, but shake your head. No, you’re not. What could you say?
He sighs. “Alright. That’s alright.” Then he lifts you onto your jellied legs, and hunches down to sling one of your arms over his broad shoulders while your other hand clutches the end of the towel.
His metal hand catches your wrist while his human hand hitches at your hip. He’s the only thing holding you upright.
“Ok. You ready?”
Still, you say nothing.
The stumble back to your room is slow and laborious. Jesse practically carries you as you fall in and out of sleep. He’s talking, always talking, but you’re not sure about what. You nod awake at some point huddled in Jesse’s arms as he looks carefully away from where your towel has started to come undone. He’s telling a story that you catch only the end of, “–was a real good dog that old man had. Woulda followed him to hell or Halifax with just those three damned legs, if he hadn’ta gone ‘n died.”
He seems to catch sight of your woken eyes. Smiles. “Dog was alright tho. Kindly ol’ lady what ran a daycare took ‘m in. I didn’t see much of him after that. They don’t take kindly to fellas like me hangin’ ‘round daycares and such.”
You nod as though you understand, and he laughs. His hand drops slightly from your back and you hear a door hiss open.
He deposits you on your bed, not even bothering to flick on a light, looks around, picks up a dirty t-shirt and a flannel pair of pajama pants, holds them up and shrugs. You nod. He hands them to you, and turns his back while you tug off the towel. You can hear him stepping into your bathroom, the sound of water running into a cup.
“You decent?”
Again, you say nothing.
He enters anyway, holds the glass of water out to you while tugging the wet towel off the bed.
You hold the glass in your hands. The nausea swarms up.
“Might not feel so great at first, but you really oughta drink that sweetheart. Do you a worlda good in the mornin’.” He hovers anxiously above you, and you relent. Half-way through the first taste you recognize your thirst, then down the whole glass.
He chuckles, “Not exactly what I meant but, hell, whatever works.”
He goes back to your bathroom with the empty cup. While he’s gone you look at the bandages around your arms, flit fingers over their soft tautness. When he returns with the glass full, and hands it out to you, you only shake your head and he sets it, instead, on the stand near your bed. Then, he just stands there.
There is nothing else to do. Still, he stands. He looks down at you, but you only stare vacantly ahead. He fidgets in the dim light sweeping in from the hallway.
“Ok,” he says, “if you need anythin’ in the mornin’ you know how to comm me. I’ll be there. Maybe make you somethin’ nice fer breakfast, if you’re up fer it.” His confidence wavers. “Then again, probably you ain’t. Well…I ain’t goin’ nowhere tomorrow so…comm me whenever and I c’n…I don’t know I c’n get you whatever you need. ‘S no problem.”
He hesitates again, opens his mouth to say more only to close it again.
You can’t look at him.
He sighs, turns. “Ok, I’ll—”
“Wait.” Your voice is hoarse and more slurred than you would have imagined. You can’t look at him. Tears are already in your eyes. You think it might be the waver in your voice when you say, again, “wait,” that draws him down to sit on the bed, to hold you in his arms.
You cry weakly, too tired to put on a show, too tired to release whatever emotion welled up in you some four hours ago when you grabbed the stash of scotch from under your bed. He holds you anyway, strokes your still-wet hair away from your face, presses his cheek against the top of your head.
Slumped against him, you find yourself saying, “c’n y’ stay?” It seems to alarm him as much as you.
He pulls away, peering down at you nervously. “Sweetheart, I don’t think that’s a real goo—”
“Not…not that…jus’…” You pull away, only a little, eyeing the chair at your desk. “Jus’ until I fall ‘sleep. You d’n hafta stay tha’ long jus’…you d’n hafta—”
“‘S ok, darlin’.” His voice is a warm rumble against your chest. “I c’n do that for ya. No problem.”
You grip the fabric of his shirt, shaking. He pulls you in again when the tears return.
When you settle into bed, he’s there, perched on the desk chair he’s pulled close. He holds your hand and begins a story.
“Y’ know I had someone sit at my bedside jus’ like this once. Mind you, he was a mite angrier at me, but still. I ‘member his hand was real clammy. My hand ain’t that clammy, is it? Could give ya the metal one if you prefer…Anyway, Mikey was a real lady’s man fer the gentlemen, if you know what I mean, ‘n he was mighty peeved but I reckon maybe he was a bit more tickled by me than angry.”
You almost laughed. You wouldn’t remember the story later, but he would tell it to you again tomorrow and you would laugh in earnest. His face would light up, and he would laugh too, reaching, again, for your hand.