Hey, everyone! I'm so sorry I've made you guys wait, but I've been stuck on a ship these past two months with no way to update the story. But, I did put pen to paper in the meantime, and have some fresh story for you guys! Thank you so much for all the support! Enjoy!

They emerged out into the harsh light of day after two bends and another flight of stairs, intact by some small miracle. McCree wondered if he was pushing his luck now, expecting gunfire to come down from the ridges of the sunbaked gorge, a firing squad of Talon soldiers dug in behind the rocks like coiled rattlers waiting to spring. Still, it was suicide to stay there, he knew. A stationary target was an easy target. He'd just as soon make the black widow woman work for her kill, the pair of them flies in her web, the echoes of their struggles only making it worse, like dinner bells ringing as they squirmed to break free.

He spared another moment to scan the topography; the narrow canyon pass before them offered little protection, plenty of opportunities for an enterprising soldier to get the high ground over them, put a bullet where it didn't belong. He searched the banks of his memory, gently blowing the dust off an old tome ragged with age, and flipped to a dogeared page full of charts and figures, the old byways and cave systems of Deadlock Gorge he'd explored in his youth. If his memory rang true, it was about a mile and a half before the two would come upon the mouth of a well-hidden cave tucked into the side of the cliff. If they followed the system, it would dump them out at the edge of the town proper, a route that had come in handy in his smuggler days. A route that could potentially save their lives … if they weren't ambushed by gunmen first. But, they couldn't go backwards. And they sure as hell couldn't sit there and hope the bad guys forgot about them. He grit his teeth.

"Let's move," he said, doing his best to sound confident. He would have settled for determined. He thought he sold it well, all things considered. On the bright side, he thought, at least there's a chance some lucky bastard will kill us first, deny her the pleasure. The thought almost made him smile. "Town's thataway," he said, nodding. Tracer followed wordlessly, twin pistols raised warily, eyes scanning above them for potential threats. She evidently shared his concerns.

They were both on edge as they went, seeing phantom gunmen behind every rock, every stirring of dust in the wind. They turned a bend in the pass, and McCree could almost see their killers in his head, a dozen of them, acrid black gunpowder smoke blanketing the land like some Civil War battlefield, eventually parting to reveal what was left of their still bodies. They rounded the turn with no fanfare. McCree realized he had been holding his breath. He let the hammer down gingerly on his revolver, satisfied they were as safe for the time being as two people people trying to outrun a crosshair could be. It was some time later, perhaps ten minutes when Tracer finally spoke up, breaking the silence that hung over them like a lead veil.

"How are you on ammo?" she asked him. He didn't need to be a mind reader to intuit that she was trying to reckon their odds of survival.

"Twelve bullets," he answered, her unenthusiastic reaction seeming to suggest she figured the odds were on the low-end, perhaps barely into the double digits. Conservatively speaking, he placed Talon's numbers on this op at about thirty, plus a single airship they'd briefly encountered at sunrise. Even if he were able to convince them all to share two-to-a-bullet, there still wouldn't be enough to go around. If ever there was a six-gun magician, it was him, but even he couldn't get on stage and perform without his props. "Two flashbangs," he added, seeing if that would cheer her up. It didn't.

"It seems I'm faring a little better than you, then," she said. She opened up her leather service jacket, which she had opted to wear despite the dry heat, and revealed four magazines lining the inside, as well as two of her infamous sticky bombs, timed charges that could be detonated remotely, capable of sticking to most surfaces and packing a serious wallop. McCree couldn't help but think about her ratty old flight jacket, and the tragic history it represented. He couldn't help but think about the device she wore, her literal lifeline to the world, damaged and still every now and then letting out a spark or two.

"How's your ... uh, chronal … ?" he said, not sure how to broach the subject. He preferred to speak with his Peacemaker. In the matter of wordplay he was less than adroit.

"My chronal accelerator," she said enunciating the words like a countess, "seems to be in working order presently. As long as I can refrain from using it until Winston gives me the okay, I think we'll be right as rain." There was a reason she said 'we,' McCree knew, the device the only thing preventing the girl from tearing asunder the thin fabric of space-time, which he suspected was as dangerous as it sounded. Call it an occupational hazard.

"By 'okay,' you mean not slipping in and out of time?" he asked, considering it a pretty large point of clarification.

"Yes," she answered. "I'd like to avoid that, thanks." He detected a little bit of worry in her voice. He hadn't meant to put a doomsday scenario in her head, and yet he had done it expertly. McCree's face grew solemn, gravely serious.

"All I'm saying is, if you do decide to start floating through time, maybe pick us up a couple of dinosaurs on the way back?" Tracer looked at him wordlessly, head cocked quizzically like a dog's. "Doesn't even have to be that big. Like a raptor or two, you know?" Despite what Morrison had told him, years ago, McCree could be funny every now and then.

Tracer laughed. Though he was pleased with himself, he didn't smile.

"How about a T-Rex?" she offered. "Would that do the trick?"

"Too big a target," McCree said, not missing a beat. "Would catch every bullet they sent its way. Though, there is the fear factor … " he explained, thinking for a moment. "Better make it a pterodactyl. Air superiority. I can ride it into battle, if needs be, rain down some fire."

"You said it yourself," she retorted. "You can barely ride a horse. You'll fall to your death, and I'll be the one stuck scraping you up"

"Pterodactyls is different," McCree explained. "And I was only being modest earlier."

"Sure," she said, laughing again, as they kept walking, one foot after the other.

…

…

…

"There must be some reason Bastion attacked us," she said after a few minutes of quiet reflection, evidently theorizing. He wondered if she felt betrayed by the machine. He didn't; you had to trust in something to be betrayed.

"I'm sure there's a reason," he said., picturing the diner as a wave of bullets swept through it. He'd started to come down now off his adrenaline spike, noticing dozens of small cuts he'd received from flying shrapnel, all of them crying out for his undivided attention, Souvenirs, he thought. "Don't mean it's a good one."

"Then give me your bad reason," she said, her tone suggesting she already knew what he was going to say, and didn't much care for it. At its core, the robot was fundamentally broken. It was a murder machine, and nothing more. He'd seen enough of what Bastion's unit had been capable of in the war. His recent, "benevolent" behavior was, as far as he was concerned, nothing but a malfunction, a series of file corruptions, a deviation from his original programming, RE: KILL ALL HUMANS. If anything, trying to fill the two of them up with holes earlier had been a return to form. He said none of these things.

"Guess Bastion's turned," McCree thought aloud.

"Maybe," Tracer answered. "Maybe not. He didn't seem himself." Himself? McCree wondered, almost grabbing the word as a point of contention. He wanted to insist that he had been himself, nothing more than a walking gun, his only purpose to kill and maim. Though he supposed Tracer had spent enough time with the broken bot to see what could be construed (though he suspected the word misconstrued was more apt) as a personality, the bot's series of quirks. One such peculiarity was the machine appeared fond of birds, birds which became uncharacteristically friendly around him, for some unknown reason. The net effect made him resemble somewhat a Disney princess, rather than a killer of men. He feared she was just projecting what she wanted to see on the machine, humanizing it when there was nothing more "there" than a microwave. Only, McCree had never seen a microwave that came equipped with heavy ordnance. He'd never seen a microwave march on a city, torch up a hospital, or cut a nine-year old girl in half with .50 caliber bullets. "His system has been hacked," Tracer suddenly declared, jabbing him with her finger. Yeah, wouldn't that be convenient? She was ever the optimist it seemed.

"S'possible," he admitted, though he didn't think it likely. Her eyes narrowed in annoyance at him. She must've read his thoughts on his face. She'd told him once, he recalled, very long ago, that his famous scowl was a language in itself, every twitch of the lip, wrinkle of the brow, or tightening of the jaw a letter, a word, a sentence. This observation had evidently been correct, as she answered his thoughts.

"If you could simply look past your hate for Omnics, you'd realize I'm correct," she said, scolding him like a schoolmarm. He frowned, wondering what she was reading from it.

Hate was a strong word. True, he'd been slow to warm up to the Omnics, he could admit. He'd written off most of their race when the war began. He was tempted to blame his upbringing, but it seemed awful convenient. In his years, he'd come to recognize the humanity in Omnics, as ironic as that sounded. Like people, there were good ones and bad ones. And the bad ones had started the war. They called it a revolution; McCree called it a bloodbath. And the bad ones, they had created Bastion. Bastion was no Omnic, but an Omnic's weapon of war. A last-ditch effort to create a weapon to exterminate humanity, a Sherman tank on a Sherman's march to the sea.

Hate wasn't nearly strong enough a word. He said nothing.

"Think about it," Tracer said, smiling now. "It makes sense."

He thought about it. It all made sense. He swore vilely.

" 'It's possible?' " she parroted, McCree convinced she was making fun of him now. "It's a foregone conclusion, love!" McCree sighed.

"He's certainly useful," he admitted. "God's perfect murder-machine."

"And … ?" Tracer prompted. She was going to make him say the words, he knew. She was enjoying this.

"And he knows all about us," he said, undeterred. "I imagine he's got a hard drive full of us, our tactics, our skills, our capabilities …" he trailed off, taking a breath, the reality of the situation finally starting to set in. "Where we hang our hats."

"Precisely," she said. "Bastion would make an invaluable asset for our enemies," she said, McCree thinking of which there are many. "Why else would he be working alongside Talon? If he'd truly reverted back to his murderous ways, he'd be shooting indiscriminately at Talon, and not just us." She smiled again, clearly pleased with herself and her mastery of logic. It was hard to be angry at her, but McCree made an honest attempt.

"You're right," he said. "Bastion's hacked." Before she could say something else—gloating no doubt—he added "but hacked or not, it doesn't change a damn thing, He'll still kill us dead." His timing couldn't have been more perfect. The sound of a massive explosion carried out from somewhere back in the distance. The diner, he realized. That'll be the propane tank. A fitting period to the subject that was Bastion. Tracer's face became screwed up in a frown.

"It changes everything," Tracer said firmly, if not cryptically. He decided to drop the subject.

"I think it goes without saying that we're compromised. Who knows what intel Bastion's provided Talon, even if unwittingly." It was a scary thought. They had only just gotten the band back together. And at this rate, Overwatch was likely to die a second death, only this one much more ignoble and much quicker.

"Try the communicator again," Tracer suggested, his worry in her voice. Their comms had been practically DOA the entire op. They'd only managed a quick distress beacon less than an hour ago when things had gone south, and it had been static ever since. Jammed, most like. Didn't help much that they were stuck out here in the boonies to begin with, nothing for miles but desert and rock, broken only by mountains, ravines, and gulches, the dead town of Deadlock Gorge ahead of them now, withered and dried-up along the asphalt riverbed of Route 66. If they died out here, it was likely no one would ever know, only their bleached-white bones left to tell their stories, the rest of them picked clean by buzzards and scorpions, coyotes and mountain cats.

He tried the communicator again.

"CG, Woody. Downtown, downtown, downtown. How copy?" he spoke into the headset, depressing the bud in his left ear. Static. He kept at it for a minute. Nothing but white noise, his mind creating voices where there were none, all of them seeming to be wailing and moaning something awful, the voices of the damned, many of the voices familiar, the ghosts of Deadlock Gorge, many of them he had sent there personally. And, if he closed his eyes and listened real hard, he was almost sure he could make out his own voice there, inviting him to join them. He silenced the communicator, swearing. Tracer frowned again.

"You're sure Winston received our original distress?" she asked, very prudently. He didn't think it was any stretch at all to say that Tracer didn't want to spend any more time here amongst the desert than he did. That made two of them.

"I'm sure," he said. "He had started to answer when the comms died. "I'm sure he's on his way, but I'm also sure the timing's not gonna be that great."

"Maybe he'd arrive faster if you stopped calling him that terrible name," she scolded him, hands on her hips in matronly disapproval.

"He loves the nickname," he lied, doing his best to sound offended. CG—Curious George. Of all McCree's displays of his famous wit over the years, it was this he was most proud of. On account 'a your a monkey and a scientist he had explained drunkenly to the ape-man upon their first meeting. Reyes had got a big hoot out of that, he vaguely remembered. McCree had drank a lot back in those days, but he'd thankfully curtailed the worst of it by now. He'd gotten the name from an old children's book his mother had read to him, in the far-gone days of yore when parents still read to their children. She'd always encouraged his reading, and to this day, McCree was often known to keep a beaten-up paperback handy at most times. It was a strange sentiment to realize he was now older than his mother had ever been. In this way, he felt a strange kinship with the ape-man, the pair of them having more in common than what met the eye. He could still remember the look on the ape-man's face all those years ago. I'm not 'curious,' he said. I'm inquisitive. And I'm not a monkey, he told McCree, jabbing his powerful, meaty fingers into his chest. I'm a Scientist. McCree had only laughed, and asked what Inquisitive Winston was drinking, offering to buy him another one. "Besides," McCree retorted. "He calls me Woody. Like the toy cowboy. You believe that?"

"Boys," she sighed disapprovingly. "The lot of you."

"Boys will be boys," he agreed. As the pair walked, the pieces started to fall together in his head, forming a familiar image. They weren't far now, the mouth of the cave only a little ways ahead. The sun was starting to creep up ever higher in the sky, the real heat of the day just starting to settle in.

"The LZ," Tracer said tentatively, after a few minutes of quiet. McCree felt himself bristle in anticipation of what she would say. "Why did you choose it?" she asked, though she damn well knew the answer.

"You know why," he said simply. "It's defensible. I know its layout. It gives us a great vantage point over the town." These were all facts, he knew. But they weren't the reason why he chose the location as their landing zone. In truth, he did know just about everything there was to know about The Cave Inn motel, the floor plans, the entrances and exits, even the hidden ones his gang had used. He''d visited it after-the-fact, memorized its every detail. He'd seen all the crime scene photographs too, long, sleepless nights spent looking at blood splatter, viscera, and gore. No, the real reason was he had to see it again. He didn't believe in fate—truth be told, he didn't much believe in much of anything—but it seemed every road he traveled led him back here, the crossroads of his life, the one night that had irrevocably altered the course of his existence. He said none of this to Tracer, who clearly wasn't buying his explanation.

She knew.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked gingerly, like a cornered ringmaster trying to talk down a lion. He saw her eyes wander, as if she was searching for a painless way to broach the subject. But, there wasn't one. Life was pain, and the show must go on. "The … incident?"

He almost sniggered when she used the word incident. "Is that what we're calling it now? Incident?" he asked, not trying to hide his anger. The girl was taken aback.

"McCree, I didn't mean—"

"—Because I believe the papers all called it a massacre," he said, almost spitting out the word like some kind of cobra. 'The Motel Massacre,' to be precise. Seventeen dead. Four wounded. A lucky few went in their sleep, throats slit from ear-to-ear. Some lined up against the wall and shot. Others killed with their boots on, fighting for themselves and their friends. All of them butchered. All of them fathers. Sons. Husbands and best friends and brothers. All of them dead. All of it his doing.

"Okay," she said, taking the hint. "Sorry, love." McCree sighed, feeling suddenly embarrassed at his outburst.

"Look," he began. "It's not a subject I like revisiting. I didn't mean to bite your head off." The girl half-smiled and he felt a little better.

"Nothing to be sorry about," she said. "How much farther until this cave of yours?" He knew she was changing the subject deliberately, and he thanked her for it.

"Just up ahead," he answered. "It's right—" he would never finish his sentence, however, as the throaty roar of an engine suddenly split the air. They both whipped around to see a large APC pull up hard on the ridge behind them, the driver side front wheel dangling precariously over the edge. Maybe a dozen armed soldiers spilled out, and the last thing McCree heard before the bullets started was a frantic "They're over there!"

They beat feet towards the mouth of the cave, just within eyesight, almost hidden behind a wall of ugly brown scrub, just about the only life that could bloom in this forsaken place. Their attackers were some distance off, which proved to be their saving grace. Their shots were just wide of the mark, kicking up wads of dirt as they sprinted towards the cave. Tracer was the quicker of the two by a considerable margin and made it there first. McCree was only seconds behind her. He watched the mouth grew larger the closer he got, the maw of some great, dark beast trying to swallow him whole. A large, fat bee whizzed past his ear. He was there now, so close. The girl was calling out to him now, hand extended, as if she were prepared to yank him inside. He was safe now, he knew.

The last thing he saw before the bullet struck him was Tracer's hand, beckoning him forward, into the darkness.

Hoped you like it! More on the way. Oh, and in response to a review, it is not my intent to ship Tracer and McCree. Without giving anything away, I paired them together for a very specific reason. Also, as you can see with the motel portion, I'm crafting my own backstory for McCree, which will be explored further and in greater detail.