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He grew up on a ranch, riding cows because he was afraid of horses when younger and getting into fights with kids when they have a look of “my parents talk about you a lot.” He never wondered if he was a good person. He took care of his dog, an old mutt with some sort of skin disease and matted fur. He parents say that isn’t their dog, Jesse what are you doing with that thing, is that where you’ve been taking this food all this time, what is that? Their dog barks and bares its teeth at his parents; they take Jesse by the collar of his shirt and lead him away, phones in hand and dialing a number. He doesn’t see the dog again after men with big jackets and big guns stay for lunch then head out to the New Mexico plains that border their house.
Jesse Ruiz is nine.
He was born into a Roman-Catholic household, and loved God more than any being he could think of. He doesn’t tell this to his friends, though, when they let him trade his Dunkaroos for Oreos, and only wonders if he’s a good person because it wasn’t a fair trade, but then chides himself because they should know better by now. He only has two friends. He is twelve when they ride into town.
He is twelve when a group of men, far too large to be from his town and far too scary to even be from his county, come up to him and ask if he’s any good with a gun. He screams for his parents, confused, and they smack him upside the head. His parents never go outside to check on him, and he feels a fearful cold in his gut.
He fires a gun. His hands are shaky- he hits three out of four of the cans on the fence though he was trying to inconspicuously miss. It was the first time he got more than two shots land. He cries as the men whoop and holler and clap him on the back with a “welcome to the gang, kiddo!” He stares at the bloody shapes on the floor of the barn while they lead him off his property, smells the death but only blinks, confused, and takes his dad’s tan Stetson as he passes. He doesn’t feel his heart beating, and he doesn’t feel the tears staining his face. He doesn’t think about the bodies. He promises he doesn’t think about the bodies.
Jesse Ruiz is fourteen.
He hasn't gone to church in five years, but prays everyday. He says a blessing to himself before every meal. He has a cross hanging from his neck. He prays to leave. He assumes it’s a test of his strength, his devotion. He practices with his gun nonstop to become better than his captors. He doesn't want to kill them, but he might as well. He’s already killed people. His initiation to the gang was to shoot an old woman between the eyes. He doesn’t think about it. He promises he doesn’t think about her.
He doesn't have his own gun, and doesn't go on his own missions alone. He has his father’s hat. He’s not a good person. He has a few friends, he’s not on drugs. His gang seems alright until he lays awake at night and thinks of his parents. He thinks of the old woman and how the life drained from her eyes, how her body sagged, how the folk around him celebrated.
He thinks about morbid things- he woke up one night and thought about carving his own eyes out with a kitchen spoon. He doesn't call them nightmares. They aren’t nightmares.
Jesse Ruiz is sixteen.
He had gone on more missions than he would like to admit, more than he can remember. The innocent and the evil have blurred together so much he doesn’t know where he stands. There's a never-ending red stain to his hands that only he sees. He let go of the cross. He let go of his religion. He bitterly remembers devoting himself to a God that never cared for him anyway.
He ended up failing the test of strength in a higher faith. He spits in the face of those who believe. He hates his parents for making him into who he was. He fires guns and makes noise. On one of his missions, he sees a scrawny dog and doesn't reach for his gun when the dog lights up and beelines for him. He takes the dog into base.
Jesse McCree is seventeen.
He has his six round revolver and his hat, a black serape around his shoulders. His dog died- heartworm disease. He changed his last name. He has Gabriel Reyes. He has a lifetime of guilt. He makes up for it by doing good. He doesn't know what doing good means anymore, but he hopes the government agency that took him in is it. It’s a part of the UN- the upper half gets all the attention, called Overwatch, with a blond and blue-eyed man from Indiana as their spokesperson. They don’t get their hands dirty. The division Jesse joins is Blackwatch, and the commander Reyes hates Overwatch’s posterboy, Jack Morrison. They get their hands dirty, and he understands that all of Blackwatch is criminal. He’s the youngest between both programs. It’s because he’s not a good person, he thinks.
He overworks himself. When he’s eighteen, he goes into missions with reckless abandon. Reyes orders him to take a break, and yells when he uses Richardson’s ID to sneak into the training grounds. Jesse yells back that he has nothing other than suicidal thoughts and suicidal tendencies for his worthless fucking life. He has no family, no reason to exist, and Reyes cannot ever change that. Reyes hugs him. Jesse didn't realize he was crying.
Jesse McCree is twenty-one.
He really likes Genji; he treats him coldly on the surface, but when Jesse wakes up to a card and a stack of still warm pancakes, the card reading, “I can’t write in English. Thanks for putting up with my shit. Nobody else does.” through a Japanese translator, Jesse decides that they're friends.
He and Genji end up harboring a sparrow in their split rooms, nursing it back to health from a broken wing. Genji briefly notes how his brother used to note the similarities between him and a sparrow. Jesse didn't know he had a brother. Genji accents the “used to” part. They change topics.
They fly out to Japan to work with the Shimada-gumi, a yakuza clan that is somehow legal, and get told that if anything bad happens, the Shimada are the police. Don’t mess anything up, Reyes clears. Genji insists he stays behind the scenes, and Jesse do all the real work. A few days after they come home, Jesse gets around to reading his file. His name is Genji Shimada. He was killed by her brother because she was “dishonoring the clan”- the general population does not know that. He was only in Blackwatch to provide intelligence about the yakuza, and then leave.
Leave he did, letting Jesse live alone again.
Jesse McCree is thirty.
Overwatch has been dead and gone for a couple years, Gabriel Reyes and Jack Morrison killed in an explosion at a Nepali base. They were revealed as traitors, threats to the entire globe after they died. Jesse has nothing to say about Morrison. There was no funeral. Overwatch broke apart, orders from the UN. They said they had no idea it was such a bad program, because everyone in the facility lied. Jesse took to the streets and did outlaw work, a bounty over his head and wanted posters depicting his grinning face back at him. Jesse Ruiz spray pants over all anti-Overwatch graffiti, ignores how he can get free lunch by walking into a restaurant and smiling, and every year he celebrates Día de Muertos in Reyes’ honor. Reyes de todos los Reyes.
He gets postcards from Genji from Haiti, from Germany, from Congo, all marked with a green lipstick kiss. He never replies- the spitfire moves around far too quickly, and how he manages to always know where to send mail to is absolutely beyond him. He teaches him different languages by writing in whatever is primary to his location. He rarely writes in Japanese, but never in English, and he mentions his brother frequently. Jesse wants to ask why, why would he let him, did he not see that his body is more compressed metal than organic from his attacks. He has a cat on his keychain from him, tiny and plastic. And one day, he stops writing.
He doesn't know if he's a good person. He wanders the New Mexico deserts where he was born. He visits his ranch. There’s still a mouse problem, there’s more cats and blood stains the floor of the barn. He moves out of state to Idaho, then Paris, then London, then Brazil, then wanders the States again.
He doesn't think about his parents, his religion, the old woman, the dogs, Genji nor Reyes. He doesn’t think about how bad of a person he is.
He promises he doesn't.