Out of Aces
After all the shit that came with the rise and fall of Deadlock, Blackwatch was… different, to say the least. So many rules and regulations, a proper chain of command, honest-to-god missions – it was everything McCree had always told himself he would hate more than anything. And, after spending three months as their newest unwilling recruit, he wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t been right with that assessment all along.
For starters, Blackwatch was full of the sort of men and women Jesse had been very carefully conditioned to be wary of, and he trusted exactly none of them even an inch. Well, except for maybe Reyes, if he was feeling charitable. The man seemed like good people, and he’d been smart enough to know that if he’d brought Jesse to HQ straight from his jail cell, he would have rabbited at the first opportunity. Instead he’d dragged him out into the middle of Siberia on some puffed up claim of ‘examining his skills’ – Jesse had been in the business long enough to know when he was trading one prison for another, and he hadn’t been impressed by Reyes’ overtures of supposed friendship. Regardless, the exercise had delivered the desired lesson: his life belonged to Blackwatch now, and he would exist only on the terms they set.
It wasn’t exactly pleasant, knowing that he would live and die at the call of others, but it had to be better than being in jail. At least he’d seen enough of Reyes on that trip he could believe the man wouldn’t get him killed just for the hell of it. He was weird about morality like that.
Still, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to send him out on missions with a team of ex-cons all as likely to kill him if he got in the way as to help him out of a jam should something go wrong. Which, of course, meant that the very first time he was sent on a mission without Reyes at his side was going to be the time that everything went incredibly, hideously wrong – and for all of the devil-may-care attitude Reyes kept telling him would get him into trouble, it also happened to be the first time since he’d picked up a gun and refused to stay down that McCree had the misfortune of being utterly and completely terrified.
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