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Done as Much as Felt
🕑 Added 2019-11-21 22:19:35 +0000 UTCThe fic that helped me push past the writer's block! Honestly this whole thing fell out of me in about an hour, but since then the words for other fics have been flowing again, so. Sometimes writing something totally different is exactly what you need! This is Ashe-centric, featuring a lot of McCree & Ashe complicated feelings, a little Sombrashe, and endgame Doom & Calamity. Teen+. ~1,200 words.
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Love is a verb. Her parents taught her that early on: said one thing, did another, so she knew which was the truth. They didn’t even try to find her when she left. She took their butler and everything, and they still didn’t come looking. If she’d needed more proof, that’s where it was.
Love is in the doing, and they did fuckall.
Jesse did things. He taught her to pick pockets, how to choose the right time and target for a break-in, how to shoot whiskey without sputtering up a storm. She taught him how to turn his natural charm into a skill set. Smile into a weapon. There were a lot of people out there willing to drop their defenses and their pants for a nice voice and a slow grin and a little bit of attention.
When his family turned out to be a different sort of selfish, she turned the money she and Jesse had stolen into a home and then an empire. Together they built their own family. Made their own rules.
They stood as equals, and he let them all think he was the brawn to her brain so they’d take her just as seriously. The gang was her family, but Jesse most of all. He made her feel invincible.
Love was actions taken together, with and for each other, and in the end he left her anyway. She knew he was strong-armed into it, spirited away and working under duress. Didn’t take her long to learn it was Overwatch. She hated them for it.
They stole him from her, removed him from his rightful place. Or so she thought.
She saw him show up on the news eventually, bigger than ever. Larger than life. Under duress, she still told herself.
It took her years to give up thinking he might come back. Overwatch was disbanded. He gained a wanted poster, got spotted a few times not too far from the gorge. He knew where she was, where to come home to, and he never did.
In the end, if he was family, he was no different than her parents.
Love’s an action. He acted, and it wasn’t for her.
The gang was all hers now, but she was too smart to think actions taken for payment were the same as actions freely given. They might have been loyal, they might even have been family, but she knew it wasn’t love.
Sombra acted different than anybody she’d ever met. Her actions said she’d never love Ashe, but she was funny and mean and her mouth tasted like SweetTarts, and she didn’t care that Ashe knew she was a liar. There was something honest in that, ironic as it was.
For six whole months, Sombra swung in and out of her life at whim, and for once Ashe was satisfied with it. Because if love is an action, Sombra didn’t love her in some true, forever way, but she respected her enough not to make promises she’d go back on.
They parted on good terms, when Sombra realized she had bigger plans than running with Los Muertos. If Ashe sometimes missed her company or her body, at least Sombra had taught her to accept that sometimes it’s okay for people to leave.
Jesse came back after that only to tell her he’d changed. He outgrew her, he said, and she wished he’d stayed away. Ran him off again at the end of her gun.
A few years later he was back again, this time after manipulating her, and he talked down to her, acted like she was no threat at all — and maybe she wasn’t, maybe she wouldn’t have had it in her to kill him after all, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t capable — humiliated her in front of her crew and stole her bike.
It took weeks to stop feeling his fingers in her hair. To stop grieving the life that might have been if he hadn’t left their family behind. To cool the anger setting fire to her belly over all his broken promises. To accept that she had changed since then, and he’d changed twice as much.
Made it easy to accept the invite, too. It was old fashioned, gold trim around the edges. Made her think of a wedding invitation.
Akande called her Ms. Ashe, a bit of too-formal politeness that made her laugh. Then he called her Elizabeth, and she didn’t bother to correct him. She liked the way her name sounded on his tongue.
She liked that he called Talon a family.
They talked business at first. And it was a business dinner. But when the negotiations were over, she suggested dessert and another round, and his generous mouth curved just so. She didn’t sleep with him, and he didn’t seem to mind.
She didn’t trust anybody’s promises, but Akande always made good on his. Maybe it was the businessman in him. If they had a meeting at six o’clock, he was there at ten ’til. He wasn’t the type to wait around needlessly, but he had his modes of politeness, and he was consistent. Reliable. Predictable, if only in the ways that mattered.
She didn’t predict that he’d make the next move, though. He sent her flowers. An invitation to another dinner with another overly formal note attached: Please understand your response will not alter our business arrangements. I intend to honor those promises.
Akande was too cool at times, measured and careful when she wanted the same fire she saw when he fought. But he was compelling, intriguing, gentle except when she insisted he shouldn’t be. Cultured, with access to a society she hadn’t realized she’d missed. Amused when she scandalized them.
He knew exactly who he was and exactly what he wanted, and all he asked of her was the loyalty he was willing to return ten times over if she let him.
If love is a thing that’s done as much as felt, then Akande loved her. She knew it long before he ever said it. Yes, because he still sent flowers when they were apart, but also because she could see him visibly gather his patience instead of letting an argument get out of hand. Because he reached for her hand as if it were an instinct. Because he let her see him tired and worn with his confidence shaken. Because all she had to do was ask, and he would give.
Because when she had a moment of weakness herself and she needed him to stay, he cancelled his flight and held her, then he pretended it had never happened until she was ready and able to talk about it. Protected her pride at all costs.
He valued strength. Survivors. A spine of steel and a stubborn refusal to let the world get the better of you. His love reflected back at her all that she needed to believe about herself.
Akande was willing to take on the whole world, crush it all in an iron fist, and he kissed her with a tender care she’d once mistaken for tentativeness, before she knew better. He respected her work and her aim and her business acumen, and he never overstepped with her crew or her territory.
If love is in the doing, he loved her deeply. Unmistakably. If there was anything worth setting the world on fire for, it was that.
