When Jesse McCree was a young man he often prided himself on what he called his 'southern charm'; but after being laughed away by two slightly older women who favor guys like Gabe and Jack, he started to rethink his routine. Until a young woman laug...
I am so so sorry this took soooo long, lots of stuff going on at home and being sick, plus Jesse and Hanzo went all little kid on me and ran away and wouldn't tell me what happened next for their stories. But they's finally back and reluctantly telling me some more of the story so I can tell it to you.
Jesse stopped at a familiar place in the road, looking off to the left, feeling the ghosts of his past leave a chill as his memory faded to reality. Once upon a lifetime, in what felt like a different timeline, there had been a house there in the distance. A tall two story that he had slowly fell in love with, but now he had mixed feelings about thanks to his memories.
The ruins were still there, telltale marks of flames on the beams that were still standing somehow despite the years of weather and strain. His dark eyes narrowed at it, remembering how it looked in his youth and the mixture of happiness and anger that was embodied into the place. He growled and shoved his hands in his pockets, walking up the road further, his pace relaxed, but with a firm purpose, he had to get to the shack and work some before heading back to the hotel to check on Santana.
"Can't be getting all sidetracked now." Jesse scolded himself, closing his eyes to ignore the ghosts running past him, more memories trying to flood his senses and send him backward in time. "What's done is done ol' boy." He sighed slowly looking up at the sky, it looked like it could rain yet again. Dark clouds rolling over the sky like a blanket being pulled over the earth, it threatened to rain down on Jesse, and he still had some ways to go before he reached his shack. He walked for a while more, watching his boots kick up a little dust on the old dirt road as he trudged along.
"What good are ghosts?" He asked himself, kicking a soda can that hit his boot, bullet holes in the thin tin making it whistle as it flew through the air. "Not like you can change anything that happened before? Why bother us with memories? All they do is sour the mood and remind you that your gettin' old..." He looked down the road, turning to face the other direction, the small old town laid out below. "If I'd knew what I know now, I'd do things totally different...but, it's not like I can tell my ghosts that..." He felt a rush of warm air from the left and looked into it, closing his eyes and welcoming it like a tender touch of a lover. When it died, he opened his eyes, there was a vast field to the left with a small, odd, broken fence. Perhaps someone had once used it to keep in livestock, but even in Jesse's youth it had been abandoned and forgotten.
He saw ghosts there too, many of them overlapping one another, some from good happy days and some from days he'd rather forget. He could hear the echoes of bottles breaking, cans being hit and gunshots exploding in the silence as the wind blew past again, another warm gust like a warning of anger.
"If only I knew," Jesse mumbled to himself, turning and forcing himself to walk further up the road, leaving the ghosts to their devices. The shack wasn't far now, and he knew he would still be assaulted with ghosts from the past, even there. Especially there. Although the spirits there seemed to haunt him everywhere, he went.
Memories of Gabriel, Jack, Ana and even Genji, those ghosts were with him as companions. He was used to their presence and was better prepared to fend them off, but Rosa's ghost only haunted him when he returned to Santa Fe. And when confronted with the memory of her, his only escape was a bottle of alcohol. It wasn't as if he didn't think of her outside of Santa Fe, he thought of her every day, but here in the town where they met, was the only place where his memories haunted him and made him slow down. Here was where it hurt the most.
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