Chapter Text
The moment Roadhog stares into the amber eyes of the peg-legged junker kid offering him a job, he knows he’s looking at Jim Fawkes’ son.
Everything is unmistakably in place—the white-blond hair and prodigious eyebrows, the nose like a drill bit, the height that would be imposing to anyone who wasn’t over seven feet tall. Roadhog knows exactly how old the brat must be. It’s been just about twenty-five years since he last saw Jim’s pointy little face.
He knows, too, that he’s the only one in the room who’s aware of the relation. Jim Fawkes would be positively apoplectic to know that he had a son running around the Outback wearing two grenade belts for a shirt and calling himself “Junkrat.” It would never fly. But Junkrat’s clearly been at this for a long time. His voice has the cadence of a Junkertown native, born and raised, and the soot and grease of the trashpicking life are baked into his skin so deeply Roadhog isn’t sure they could ever be washed off. And he’s too graceful with those prosthetics to be new at using them. Any resemblance to the man Roadhog once knew is skin-deep at best, and yet it’s close enough to keep him from actually hearing or processing anything the kid is saying to him.
“—sixty-forty sound fair enough? I ain’t going no higher than that, but for a job like this, that sounds square to me, wouldn’t you say?”
Roadhog returns to the present, considering the boy’s shrill sharp voice more than the content of his proposal. That’s the one thing that doesn’t call up a tornado of memories; that’s something he must have gotten from his mother, or simply from everyone else he’s grown up with around here. Jim’s voice had been softer, lower, smoother--a city slicker’s voice, cultured and elite when compared to the bogans they’d all been before they were junkers, but it had been easy to forgive him for that.
“What’s your name?” he asks, ignoring the wage negotiation altogether for the time being. The kid looks nonplussed.
“I told you, mate. Junkrat. Didja forget already?”
“Your real name,” Roadhog presses, as if he’s one to talk, when nobody’s called him Mako for the better part of a decade.
Junkrat looks as though he’s wondering if this is some sort of test. “Don’t see what that’s got to do with anything,” he complains mildly. “S’Jamison. Jamison Fawkes.”
Of course it is.
“Fifty-fifty,” Roadhog tells him, in a tone that would brook no argument even without the mask to lend it intimidating depth. The kid gazes back at him with mulish defiance, all but thrusting his lower lip out like a toddler, and Roadhog feels a twinge of distaste. Jim wouldn’t have been caught dead with an expression like that on his face. Jim had been all revolutionary fervor and righteous indignation, none of his son’s childish petulance—
--but everyone left in the Outback knows how that had ended. It’s not Roadhog’s place to judge a kid who’s never known anything but the hellhole he and the ALF made this place into. And he should, by rights, admire anyone willing to glower at him like that without flinching or caving. Older and tougher men have tried that and failed.
“Fine,” says Jamison Fawkes. “Half for you, half for me. Only fair, that. Your job ain’t going to come easy.”
Roadhog knows it won’t.
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He doesn’t, at first, trust Junkrat as far as he can throw him—though perhaps that’s not an ideal turn of phrase, because Roadhog could probably fling the kid’s skinny ass like a javelin if he really wanted to.
Not that he wants to. He doesn’t find himself thinking about laying hands on Junkrat at all, about touching the sun-warmed skin of his bare shoulders, or caressing that too-sharp jawline, or spanning those coat-hanger hipbones with one hand and making them arch upward into the grip, or tracing patterns through the grime and soot on his abdomen like writing ‘Wash Me’ on the hood of a filthy car…
All right, so he thinks about it. It’s impossible not to. The thoughts were all there already, twenty-five years dormant, the way fat cells only ever shrink rather than disappear, always waiting to spring right back as soon as you let yourself take pleasure in food again.
Shirts on men are generally considered a pretentious affectation in Junkertown. Just the fact that Junkrat wears something like a sock on his good leg is surprisingly fastidious, as far as Roadhog is concerned. When they embark on their travels, it becomes rapidly clear to Roadhog that Junkrat hasn’t seen much outside the Outback, let alone been anywhere else in the world but Australia.
“Look at all these fancy fucks!” he crows, hanging out of the sidecar as they drive the streets of Alice Springs. “All trussed up like they’re goin’ to the damn opera.”
Roadhog turns to follow Junkrat’s gaze, seeing where it’s landed on a man in a perfectly ordinary button-down. Junkrat seems oblivious to the stares he’s garnering in return. “People aren’t going to look like junkers around here,” Roadhog tells him, but it only earns a contemptuous snort.
“You think I don’t know that? Doesn’t mean I have to approve. Pull over, I want coffee.” For all his sneering at the fully-clothed townsfolk, Junkrat seems more than happy to take advantage of the amenities of the place, and Roadhog’s certainly not complaining.
“Can you do a flat white?” he asks the barista, ignoring the other customers and the way they recoil from getting too close to him. The woman at the register looks him anxiously up and down, her gaze lingering on the smiley-faced grenades strapped across his chest. They’re just cutesy enough that onlookers can convince themselves they’re not actually explosives, and it’s probably that fact alone that gives the poor girl the confidence to point at the sign by the door.
“You can’t come in here dressed like that, sir. ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service.’ Sorry.”
That’s got to be a rude awakening, and Junkrat takes it every bit as well as expected. “You havin’ me on, mate? What kind of stupid-arse rule is that? I didn’t realize I had to be wearing a fuckin’ three-piece suit to get served in this dump.”
“It’s just company policy, I—"
“Do I look,” Junkrat intones, cutting her off, “like someone who can wear shoes, plural? That’s discrimination, that is. Ain’t that discrimination, Roadhog?”
“So these people are good enough to farm your food and your power for you, but not good enough to have a say in what happens to their land, is that it? How can you look them in the face and tell them their homes don’t belong to them anymore? These people have been here for generations. These farms have been in their families for—"
“They’re not listening, Jim.” Mako tries to pull him back, one immense hand on his slim shoulder, but Jim wants none of it.
“I’ll fucking make them listen. You can’t do this, do you hear me? You can’t do this to us!”
There hadn’t been an ‘us,’ of course. Jim hadn’t ever been an actual part of the ‘us,’ however he liked to pretend otherwise. At least his son has a more personal stake in the argument he’s too-loudly making.
Junkrat gets his flat white in the end, and one for Roadhog too, and so life goes on. Roadhog can’t complain about the kid getting his way by threatening to blow the place sky-high if his demands aren’t met. It gets results, and it’s no different than the way Roadhog usually operates on his own—though he doesn’t always have to make his threats explicit; sometimes his sheer size and the impassively chilling mask are enough to get people to cough up whatever they’ve got on them to give. Having a demolitions expert on his side can only help matters.
And Junkrat is an expert, a legitimate one, whatever else he may be ignorant about. Roadhog watches him work sometimes, tinkering with his metal arm or his grenade launcher when they’ve set up camp in the evenings, incorporating bits of scrap they’ve found in their travels to make things run smoother or tighter or faster. Roadhog had thought his own scrap gun was impressive enough in its ability to launch most of what he stuffed into it without jamming, but he has nothing like Junkrat’s virtuosic talent for making machinery work. It becomes apparent that his prosthetics are handmade, a self-reliant fix for an issue Roadhog assumes he also caused himself.
“Where did you learn how to build things like that?” he asks one night, curiosity finally getting the better of him. He doesn’t usually ask questions. Junkrat volunteers a steady enough stream of information, most of it pointless, that it’s rare for anyone to have to ask him anything. But this is something Roadhog actually wants the answer to.
Junkrat shrugs, absorbed in making some minute tweak to his peg leg with a delicate screwdriver. “I dunno. Figured it out meself, mostly. Can’t really remember not knowing.”
“How?”
“Books.” He glances up, preemptively defensive. “Don’t look at me like that,” he says, as if anything about Roadhog’s expression is ever visible under his mask. “I do read, y’know. I ain’t stupid.”
“Thought maybe someone taught you,” Roadhog says, neatly sidestepping the question of Junkrat’s general intelligence or lack thereof, though he never has called the kid stupid, or implied it. Junkrat’s more than sharp enough when he actually wants to be. It only takes a day or so of his company to realize that.
Junkrat snorts. “Who’d’ve taught me? I never knew anyone else could fix anything worth a damn. Not as fast as I can. Mum went out with a bloke once who fixed motorbikes; I learned some from him…” He gives the screwdriver a twirl, tightening a joint with a flourish. “Stole a bunch of manuals from his workshop. I read through about half of ‘em before he found out they was missing and beat the pants off me.”
Roadhog wouldn’t bat an eye at the story, if he were talking to anyone else’s son. It all sounds like your average Tuesday night in Junkertown. He keeps his mouth shut, though, letting Junkrat keep on talking half to himself as he works.
“He was sort of decent, as Mum’s boyfriends went. Definitely not the worst of ‘em. I wouldn’t have minded him sticking around. I figure he must have been better than my dad, at least, right? Because I don’t know nothing about him at all. She wouldn’t ever talk about him. He up and left ages before I was born. And she’d always do her fuckin’ block if I asked about him. Once when she was dead drunk, though, she told me I was named after him. So I asked if that made me a Junior, then, and she said no, so I reckon his name must have been James, but that’s all I could figure out. I tried to look him up once, under James Fawkes, but you know how many fuckin’ Jameses and Fawkeses there are out there? Wasn’t worth the time. Anyway—"
Bile rises up, sour and sharp in the back of Roadhog’s throat, and he suddenly needs to be as far from this conversation as he can. “That’s enough,” he says, before Junkrat can get another word out.
“Yeah,” says Junkrat, not missing a beat. “That’s what Mum always said, too.”
If it’s the last thing Roadhog does for this kid, he’s going to make damn sure Jamison Fawkes doesn’t learn another thing about his father. It isn’t worth it.
Not ever.