Ghosts at the Watchpoint

"What the hell am I doing here?"

This thought plagued McCree as he stood at the bluffs and stared out at the sunbaked sea. Lord knows how long he'd been standing there asking himself that same question over and over.

He'd arrived at Gibraltar at some point in the early afternoon. No one had greeted him, no one hand run out of the facility to embrace him like an old friend from the past. Maybe they were just giving him his space, maybe no one had answered the Recall… Then again, maybe they still remembered him as the Cowboy that ran.

No, he realized, they knew that he was there – it was pushing well into dusk now and he'd barely moved an inch. It didn't take long for him to spot the surveillance camera locked on to his figure. At a bare minimum, Athena and Winston would have been alerted to his presence.

McCree sniffed a bit and tugged at his crimson serape. A whole range of emotions bombarded him as he looked at the setting Sun in the distance. Truth be told, it was a sight to behold – the whole Watchpoint was bathed in an orange hue magnifying even the drab brown tones of the buildings around him. It provoked so many memories – good, bad and ugly. It brought back old friends and, along with them, old ghosts.

He heaved a heavy sigh and decided it was time for a smoke. After producing and lighting a cigarillo, he took a long drag and immediately felt his nerves calm. "Mercy would kill me before these things would," he mused to himself. "An addict to the end by one way or another, I guess." Would she be back? Hell, probably. The German knight with all his tendencies – yes. The Swedish dwarf would undoubtedly have returned in all his glorious bitching. Lena – abso-freaking-lutely… The list began to thin out quickly.

"All of the old guard died…" came a somber reminder. The perfect little Freudian trio that held Overwatch in place from the very start and ultimately caused it all to go to hell. Jack, Gabriel… and Ana. He didn't want to think about that name at all. He wasn't ready for it yet.

Thankfully, the steady thump of approaching footsteps cut him off before he dwelled too long. "Beautiful sunset, no?" came a strong baritone.

"Time to put on the charm." McCree turned to see Winston approaching him, the smile of an old friend on his face. "She sure is a beaut," came his southern drawl. McCree tipped his cowboy hat at the gorilla-cum-scientist. "Howdy, old partner."

"McCree," Winston said simply. He drew up next to him and looked out at the sea. While the light was getting ever-dimmer, Morocco was still barely visible in the distance, a whole continent separated by a mere few miles. "It's, uh… it's been a long time," he added.

He smiled and nodded. "Longer than most, I'd imagine."

There was a lot of truth to that. Unlike many of the other agents, when McCree left Overwatch he emphasized staying off the grid as his priority. Aside from a few newsworthy scraps with some bad characters, the cowboy had managed to stay completely off the radar. Hell, he'd even managed to bribe a Blackwatch agent to have his file nuked when he left just so he'd be that much harder to find. Sure, life got lonely at times, but when you're a former member of an organization that, on its best days, was vitriolic in the world, some privacy came with a warm embracement.

"Too long," Winston said, turning to McCree with a toothy grin. "Most people inside probably feel the same way, you know?"

"Can't say I blame 'em," McCree responded, "Who wouldn't miss such a pretty face?"

That earned a hearty laugh from Winston who clapped McCree on the back in a show of comradery. The sudden force caused McCree to lurch forward slightly, a quick gasp escaping his mouth. Winston, for all his good intentions and insistence that he was indeed a scientist, often forgot that he was as strong as… well, an ape. "You haven't changed a bit, have you McCree?" He placed his hand on McCree's back again, far more lightly this time. "Are you ready to go inside?"

After a deep drag off his cigar, McCree let out a sigh and nodded to Winston. "I suppose so," he stated. "Say, uh… Winston."

"Hm?"

"Just who all is here, anyways?"

Winston hesitated a bit, perhaps stuck on the names in all the emotions that were bombarding him at once. "Well, uh, let's see… There's, um… Reinhardt, of course. No one's probably surprised that he'd be one of the first to return. Torbjorn is on his way from Sweden, though he's stopped in Switzerland gathering supplies for Angela at the moment. Other than that, there's Tracer and Genji… Not quite the response that I might've expected, if I'm being completely honest."

McCree heard every name and took them in a different way. He never really interacted with Reinhardt too much, though he knew the old knight well enough to know that he'd be welcoming the cowboy back with broad, open arms thick as the Hoover Dam. Torbjorn would be bitching his way back to Overwatch every step of the way, but he was part of the organization's fabric, through and through. Tracer and Genji both joined Overwatch near the bitter end, so perhaps they'd avoided the true pitfalls that struck everyone. That left Angela… Mercy, who, if McCree's memory served him correctly, was one of the last to give up on everyone, dead or alive. Poor girl was probably trying to revive the ghosts of old to help her clear her conscience.

"Beyond that, though," Winston added, "I'm trying to recruit a few new names to help our cause."

"New folk?" asked McCree, perplexed that anyone would be foolish enough to join what was, by UN definitions, an outlawed organization. "Tell me, Winston, who in God's name would be willing to put their life on the line for a ragtag group of mercs?"

Winston nodded, understanding the nature of the question. "Well, let's see… There's Aleksandra Zaryanova, Lucio Correia, Hana Song-"

"… You mean the video gamer?"

"I mean the Meka pilot, McCree."

"Still a kid though."

Winston heaved a sigh so hard that McCree was worried he'd be blown clear off the cliff. "They're all kids, Jesse," he said plainly. "So were you when you joined Overwatch, if I remember correctly."

"Joined Overwatch before you," he retorted. "But yeah, I wasn't naught but a babe myself now that you mention it."

His mind drifted back to his first days being part of Overwatch. The lingering emotions still burned just as hard as when they first took route. The fear of screwing up, the inherent distrust of his superiors… Hardly anyone paid him any damn mind. As far as Morrison, Amari, and Reyes were concerned, McCree was nothing more than tool, a passageway into the innerworkings of the Deadlock Gang. Hardly anyone paid him any mind at all. Hell, only Amari's daughter, Fareeha ever seemed keen on joking around with him during his downtime, and back then she was just a kid, only twelve or thirteen years old.

Come to think of it, those were some of his fondest memories. Hell, he'd felt totally alienated in the first few months with the team, only talking to Gabriel and even that was on a professional basis. It wasn't until Fareeha mocked tipping a cowboy hat at him that he found any real friendly face to talk to. Sure, she wasn't exactly in his age bracket back then, but for the first time since he'd picked up a pistol with the Deadlock Gang, he felt like he had someone he could relate to. Maybe it was because he'd never had any siblings… Hell, he'd hardly had any real childhood at all, come to face it. Maybe that's why he found so much comf-

"Um, Jesse," Winston broke his chain of thought. He noticed the scientist had managed to shimmy a good deal towards the base without McCree noticing. "Not to be a bother, but it's getting awfully dark out here and we aren't exactly ready to light the exterior at night."

In an instant, he slapped his smirk back on his face and became the Cowboy again. "I hear ya." He threw his cigarillo to the ground and stamped it out, making sure the flame was gone. "Let's go in and mingle."

He came up alongside Winston and the two walked back towards the base together. At first, there was only the silence, but ever the gregarious one, Winston broke it. "It is good to see you again, McCree."

Realizing just how sincerely he meant it, Jesse's smirked fell into a warmer, softer grin and he nodded. "You too, partner. You too."