A/N: This story has a soundtrack that you should definitely listen to. Ideally, you should run out of fic and music at about the same time, but I'm not here to tell you how to live your life.
watch?v=n_aqV5TSOT0
He had definitely been born in the wrong time. Or maybe it was the rest of the world that was out of sync with this wide swath of desert scrubland—after all, it wasn't like his parents had driven hovercars to their white-collar high tower office jobs in the big city; McCrees had always lived off the land. Nothing had changed for his kin since the railroad first came west of the Mississippi.
Not until the Omnic Crisis, of course. But that hadn't been their choice—the Omnics made the choice for his family to bring them crashing head-first into the meat grinder that was mid-21st century roboticized warfare. The immovable object that for 200 years was the McCree homestead, their little scrap of the Old West, wasn't quite as immovable as Jesse had always imagined; not in the face of the unstoppable force of an army of Bastion units.
McCree sighed, pushing his hat a little farther back on his head as he leaned back against his hoverbike. It wasn't exactly one of the horses he'd grown up with on the ranch, but it was pretty damn close to the steel one he'd always wanted—the one that drove Mama crazy when she caught him and Papa sneaking out to the barn late one night to tear down the old hoverbike they'd bought on the sly, the one that she then sold for a dollar just to make a point to her boys.
'Don't worry, Jesse, we'll get it back someday,' Papa had said as they watched it get ridden off, his wife unable to hear over the roar of that engine.
McCree liked to think he'd finally gotten that old steel horse back. And hell, that was the story he'd told to get into the Deadlock Gang, so now it was as true as it needed to be.
"Sure is a nice sunset," McCree drawled to himself, a wistful little smile on his lips as he drank in the reds and pinks against the faded purples and royal blues. He kicked at the dirt for a moment before hunching down and finally getting his little campfire lit. He liked these stakeouts, even if they were supposed to be shitty assignments without any action—it wasn't like the Mongrels were going to ride up and try to cut into Deadlock's turf anytime soon, not after the way they got fucked up last time around. But any opportunity he got to be back on the range, out under his big sunset sky and pretending for just a little while that he was back home with Papa putting the cattle down for the night with the other hands and settling in for a late supper and some music under the stars, he took it.
It wasn't five minutes before McCree had a happily flickering campfire, the cool dusty purple starting to creep farther west as the fiery sky quieted down for the night. It was moments like this that made McCree's heart ache for the past, a past that was both near enough to touch and far too long gone, its last stubborn roots finally pulled up by the forward march of modernity. Whatever couldn't adapt had already been burned away, and all that was left was him—the last of a dying breed.
The silver moon crept up over the horizon as the soft reedy voice of his harmonica began to waft through the canyon, the traditional lonely cry of the cowboy once again ringing clear and melancholy through the night.
"Goddamnit, McCree, knock that shit off," a voice crackled from the radio in his saddlebag, "We can hear your Roy Rogers bullshit all the way over here." McCree rolled his eyes and flipped the saddlebag shut with one hand, playing a little louder in defiance.