Hey! This is going to be a three-parter, but also part of a larger series about McCree, or about the people who care about McCree, depending on how you look at it. This beginning part was written out of a desire to make Overwatch's bad canon make sense (this whole thing should be, at the time of writing it, canon compliant), as well as trying to help me like Ashe more, because I think Blizzard did a poor job of developing her. So, basically, I hope you like it!
Fistful of Dollars
Elizabeth is young, her pockets are full, and she is free in the streets of Sante Fe. She cannot help the first, she had no part in the second, but the third was all her doing, an elaborate escape plan taken place during a family trip (brought about by her third suspension from school this year) to the rural outskirts to the Southwest's most scenic city. She has B.O.B. to thank, but she'll have to do it later—he was a necessary sacrifice to make it out on her own for the day.
Everywhere she looks, there are tourists. She's one of them, technically, but she can't help but turn her nose up in distaste as they chatter, waving their Hawaiian shirts and matching cowboy hats, mimicking the holos of old Spaghetti Westerns while they munch on beans out of a can. Elizabeth wants authenticity. She wants the real Santa Fe, and she's going to find it. Then, when she's ready, she'll turn her location back on and deal with the parental aftermath.
Elizabeth ducks out of the busy walking thoroughfare, away from sand-swept cobblestones that she's pretty sure were never authentic, into a dingy alleyway. Passing trash bags and dumpsters, she follows a self-made path of the shadiest alleys she can find, until the streets she's in give her that prickling on the back of her neck that means she's in a bad neighborhood. Try to rob me, she thinks belligerently, although, if anyone was listening to her thoughts, they'd know she doesn't have a gun on her.
Away from the tourists, the streets are emptier. Elizabeth pulls her shoulders up and back, matching the posture of the people around her now. The flea-bitten woman working over her chew, back to the closed grated of an out-of-order hovercar mechanic, never moves, but her eyes follow Elizabeth. The graffiti on the walls here is all in Spanish, and the same symbols keep cropping up. Gangs, probably. Sante Fe's tourism is only matched by its danger. People seem to like it that way, because no one's doing anything about it.
The sun feels hotter here. Sweat trickles down her back and she walks the streets, close enough to the city limits now that she glimpses the edges of desert every so often. The world is so full of people, so brimming with technology, that she can hardly believe that places like this still exist. Beats all the rules of boarding schools. Beats parents that would rather be on the top floor of a penthouse than a school play.
She turns a corner, and there's an explosion of color. The neighborhood is still bad, but people live here, and they have decorated it with murals of sunsets and vaqueros, stringing laundry overhead on lines just like they do in the movies and keeping the windows open for fresh air instead of relying on air conditioning. The buildings have been updated, but their sleek finish is gone, lost to layers of dirt and everyday wear. Elizabeth cranes her neck upward, looking at the open shutters and hanging clothing.
"Now, don't be like that. I came all the way out here just to see you."
Elizabeth's gaze snaps back down. She tenses, but no one is talking to her. Instead, a big teenager, tall and lanky, maybe two years older than her, has his back to her. He is talking to a shopkeeper, leaning his elbow on her counter, his posture slack. There's nothing to fear here, it tells her, but she doesn't relax. The shopkeeper, whose business looks out into the derelict road, slams a pack of cigars down on the counter, sliding it under the plexiglass protector. Elizabeth has never been in a store where violent theft was an option, but this business has posters with criminals taped outside it, so she shouldn't be surprised. As she approaches, she sees that some of the posters fluttering in the wind have big Xs on them.
"Here are your cigars, Jesse. Run on home, now, unless you have the money to buy something else?"
The teenager addressed as Jesse whistles long and low. "Now, that just ain't fair. What about last time? You slipped me something a little extra then."
The woman behind the counter sighs so audibly that Elizabeth can sense it. "I'll get you one of those Three Musketeers bars. I know you like those."
Elizabeth almost doesn't see what he does next, just for a moment when she turns her back. His hand slips off the counter and into the display to his left, where he retrieves several comics. She blinks, and he's no longer holding them. Their display, though, is still empty.
"Thank you, ma'am," he says, tipping his wide-brim hat when the woman passes him the candy bar. "You always keep me coming back, Charlene."
"You're all bark and no bite, Jesse," she replies. "Come back when you mean all those pretty words you say."
"Hey there now," he replies, finishing the conversation. She laughs, so there must have been something in his expression. Elizabeth wishes she'd seen it.
He turns around. Elizabeth is just standing there, clearly staring at him. The teenager smirks, seeing her looking. "Who do we have here?"
"That's none of your business," she says, crossing her arms and lifting her chin.
From the front, he's almost exactly what her brain conjured up. Shaggy dark hair in need of a haircut, just a hint of stubble on his chin, the smirk plastered across his lips is enough to make her want to hit him. Skin dark enough that she knows, from the area's history, that it's not just a tan. The denim tight around his hips is worn, and the brown leather cowboy boots he's wearing match the hat pulled down over his ears. His forearms, exposed by the rolled-up sleeves of his plaid cotton shirt, are brown, his hands calloused as he sticks his thumbs into his waistband, adjusting his huge belt buckle. Between his lips rest a cigar, fatter than the ones Elizabeth's father smokes.
He's the coolest guy Elizabeth has ever seen.
"All right," he says, words dripping slow like honey off his tongue. "I guess that's none of my business."
He starts walking away. Elizabeth begins to follow, but remembers herself. She's the heir to a fortune she never asked for, and besides that, she's too good to just trail after some hillbilly with a smooth accent. She's been to Paris, to London, to Johannesburg, to Nepal—this boy has probably never been outside a hundred miles of here. She's seen more than he's ever dreamt of, thousands of miles past these scattered graffiti over adobe-sand buildings. She turns away.
"Duck," he says. It's a command. She ducks, her martial arts training, years of utilizing it in schoolyard brawls, kicking into gear.
Bullets whiz over her head. She straightens back up to find the stranger with a gun already drawn, pulled out in the fraction of a second that it took her to avoid the bullets. The street, already nearly empty, is devoid of people now—even the shopkeeper is gone, her window covered with a bulletproof grate.
Then, the street isn't devoid. People ooze out of alleyways and swagger into the sunlight with their guns drawn, many of them pieces older than the Omnic War. There are almost as many scars as weapons.
"Where's that money you owe me, McCree?" A sharp-tongued woman with more tattoos than clothing mimics McCree's stance mockingly, her blaze of green hair braided down her back.
"That ain't me," says her stranger. "You know that's above my head."
"Way I see it," she replies. "I send a message through you, and they'll get me the cash. Best case scenario, you lick your wounds in the bullpen."
"Well, that's not nice," he says. "You know I just got out."
Elizabeth isn't much for watching movies anymore—she's got places to be, windows to escape from—but when she was young she'd curl up with B.O.B. and marathon old Westerns, the public domain ones they play on the free channels for poor people. It's all coming alive around her, but she doesn't know her dialogue. She wants to. She will.
Several guns cock at once, including her stranger's. He shoots first, and a man goes down with a scream, clutching his leg. After that, it's chaos, and Elizabeth joins it. Her stranger moves himself in front of her, trying to protect her, but she ducks away and lets him get distracted by the gunfire. They both jump, dodging bullets as they roll away, and with the action centered on him, she comes to her feet behind one of the thugs, jabbing her fist to his neck in a rough approximation of what her martial arts teacher called utilizing a pressure point. He goes down long enough for her to grab his weapon out of his hand, turning it around and pressing it against his stomach. She pulls the trigger, prepared for the recoil, and his scream attracts everyone's attentions away from her stranger.
The thug is clutching his gutshot, moaning incoherently, blood bubbling from his lips. He was holding a shotgun. Heavy in her small hands, she likes its heft, and pulls it back so she can aim it at anyone who looks too long at her. The gunfire is stopped, and several bodies are on the ground—her stranger's work. He's looking at her like the rest of them, but there isn't fear and anger in the lines around his eyes. He's smirking, actually, smirking around his facial hair. Elizabeth smirks back and readies her weapon.
"Ya'll done here?" she says, adding a twang of her own to her accent. He raises an eyebrow and the smirk grows. Prickles of embarrassment wash over her whole body.
Three of the four remaining thugs leave, walking away fast enough it doesn't count as running. The fourth, the green-haired woman, narrows her golden eyes and spits on the dry ground. "I'd call it a lucky shot, but it ain't hard to shoot a double-barrel at point blank range. I'm gonna be keeping an eye out for you, and you'll soon wish I wasn't."
She walks away, turning her back on Elizabeth and her stranger, who is putting his gun back in his holster. The air smells like gunpowder. Elizabeth raises the shotgun and aims. She's seen the scatter, knows the difficulty of making it count at this distance, so she aims real careful. There is another guttural scream, and she goes down, her braid splattered with blood. Elizabeth's stranger isn't smirking now.
"Fight was over," he says. "You didn't have to do that."
"I don't take kindly to threats," says Elizabeth. The first thug she shot is still writhing in pain. If he gets back to anyone and describes her, her father will be real pressed to get her out of trouble, and the legal fees will mean he'll restrict her freedom even further. She shoots him in the head to finish the job.
"You killed before?" says her stranger. The men and women he took out are dragging themselves away, fingers coated slick with their own gore. The sun is beginning to lower in the sky, bringing a glow to the outlines of the adobe buildings. Santa Fe is one of the most beautiful places she's ever been. A man, arm broken and leg shot, makes it to a gutter.
Elizabeth shrugs. "They were gonna kill you, weren't they? Should be no skin off your back."
He shrugs back. At some point, he lost his cigar, and he lights another one with the deftness of a man who's been doing it a good while. Not a man—a teenager like her, if a little older and rougher. She'll learn the latter soon enough. "You saved me from a good beating. She was trying to resurrect the old Deadlock Gang. Crowd I run with ain't so fond of them, and vice versa."
It's getting cold out now. With the sun dropping, the shadows are getting long. Her stranger looks like Clint Eastwood, about to go for a long drink of water after a hard day's ride. If Elizabeth has her way, things are only just beginning.
"Seems you have me at a disadvantage," he says. "You know I'm McCree, but I don't even know your name."
There is only the briefest hesitation before she says, "Ashe."
"See you around, Ashe."
He walks away, hands back on his belt, slow and steady. Elizabeth herself leaves before any authorities come to half-heartedly investigate the murders of gang members they secretly wanted off the streets anyway. She sneaks back to the hotel through the second story window and washes the blood off her hands before joining her family for dinner. She'll meet Jesse McCree again. She'll make sure of it.
Thanks for reading! Drop a review if you enjoyed it!