Chapter Text
It was always easy to tell when a Junker had been hired by suits. They’d still be dressed in whatever kind of bullshit clothes they could scavenge or piece together. They ate enough, but they didn’t eat right, and it was easily reflected in how their flesh clung to parts of them and bulged out in others. Dust that had taken years to accumulate would be scrubbed from fingernails and crevices, and their hair looked like it had been combed properly sometime within the past week. Suits did love their pets well-groomed.
Or, as well-groomed as it was possible for a junker to be, anyways.
The semi-clean woman in question approached him with her hands already raised and a piece of paper clutched between two prosthetic fingers that were clearly new. The smell of soap cut through the sour musk of the other Junkers, accompanying the tang of fresh motor oil that didn’t carry the acrid stench of having been used over and over again. It gave her away immediately as a junker who’d sold herself to suits. She had scars arcing down the left side of her face, giving her a permanent sneer on one side, and she’d shaved the left side of her hair away to show the remainder of the scars where they would have otherwise disappeared into her hairline. Her shiny prosthetic, still mostly clean of the dirt and oil and God knew what else, stopped just above her bicep. Roadhog was almost impressed that she hadn’t managed to bleed out. It would’ve been a lot more probable for her to have died, as opposed to Junkrat’s, which stopped only a few inches above the elbow.
“Not here to fight,” she assured him.
Roadhog snorted behind his mask, not bothering to look up as he played with his still-full drink. “You’d be stupid to try,” he told her. “Go away. I don’t deal with suits’ pets.”
“It’s not you they want,” the woman told him. She ignored his command to leave, and slipped up to sit on the barstool next to where he stood. “They just want the kid.”
In one swift motion, Roadhog’s hand was wrapped all the way around the woman’s shiny new prosthetic, his thumb and middle finger overlapping at the curve of her forearm. He stared down at the woman through the dark, near-opaque lenses set into his mask. She paled slightly, but, to her credit, didn’t jerk away. Instead, she carefully slid the piece of paper closer to Roadhog and nodded down at it.
“There’s an address, time, and the amount you’ll be paid,” she told him, her voice pitched too deep to be steady. “You hand us the ankle-biter and we give you the cash. Simple as that.”
“Simple as that,” Junkrat had cackled, sloshing Junker moonshine onto Roadhog’s boots. “One minute, I was sitting in mum’s lap, then next thing I know, I was forcing my skinny ass into some deep dark crevice of that hunk of shit Omnium. Spent fuckin’ years hauling out the motherload of alloys and parts and shit. Fuck, wish I’d had the sense to pocket some of it. Choice scrap, it was,” he lamented as he took a pull from their shared bottle.
Rage, cruel and hot and unexpected, flooded Roadhog’s chest. It was the kind of anger that had finally put Mako Rutledge to sleep, but that had been for a different cause. That had been personal—for him, for his family and friends. This was for Junkrat.
“They sold you?” he asked, ignoring the booze seeping through the laces of his left boot, cool from the dry wind.
Junkrat winced at the burn of the alcohol and nodded. He handed the bottle back to Roadhog and took a hissing breath.
“I get it. I mean… another mouth to feed ‘n’ all.” He waved his hand dismissively. “How ‘bout you, mate? What’s your damage?”
Roadhog heard the bottle crack in his hand before he felt it. Junkrat squawked and snatched the bottle back before any of the precious booze began to leak out.
“Right, okay! Get it, ‘m sorry I asked,” Junkrat muttered.
Roadhog stared wordlessly at the wall across from him, trying to imagine his charge—shorter, ganglier, and somehow even more excitable, being traded for a bag full of cash, drugs, booze or whatever the hell was precious enough that his parents had just given him up like that.
It made him angrier. The fire within burned even hotter, so much so that he wanted to break everything within a fifty kilometer radius. This was bad, but it didn’t feel wrong. It was then that he realized that Junkrat was bad for Roadhog.
Good for Mako, in a way he didn’t even want to consider, but bad for Roadhog.
Roadhog stared the woman down for an entire minute, knots coiling in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to refuse. His first instinct was to crush her prosthetic like a tin can and tell her there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in this irradiated hellscape of him giving up Junkrat.
It wasn’t just so some lowlife scavs would be kept from making a bundle by doing dirty work for the suits. It wasn’t the grudge any Junker worth his salt still held against those who had told them to bite it for “the greater good” during the crisis. It was because Junkrat’s voice was calling to him across the bar and the bones in his neck cracked with the speed at which he whipped his head around. It was because his instincts were screaming at him to make sure Junkrat was okay.
The Rat in question was currently being held down with his left arm twisted up behind him by a brawny one-eyed Junker. A knife was stuck in the table only a few inches from where Junkrat’s face was pressed, though it didn’t seem like it was putting him off. He just grinned when he saw that he’d gotten Roadhog’s attention, and that his assailant had become aware of Roadhog. He jabbed a metal finger up at the man holding him down. “Come arm wrestle this bloke, Hoggy!” he called.
Roadhog felt a smile tug at his lips as Junkrat was immediately released. He had to bite down a chuckle that teetered on affection when Junkrat scooped up the betting pool and blew a raspberry at the bogan that had been twisting his arm.
Roadhog finally let the woman go, and she acted casual, like she hadn’t just had a vice about to crush her new arm.
“Just make sure he doesn’t bring the place down on our heads, yeah?” she told him before she slipped into the crowd as Junkrat waded back over to Roadhog with the stack of bills in his hand.
“Drinks’re on me, mate!” Junkrat crowed as he slapped down a tenner before grabbing Roadhog’s still untouched drink to take a gulp. “Who’s the sheila?” he asked as he set down the over-warm, piss-colored lager and began to count through the stack of bills in his hand. He counted it twice, then carefully counted out half to smack onto the bar in front of Roadhog.
“Thought she wanted to get to know me,” Roadhog told him gruffly as he thumbed through the stack of bills on the bar. He shuffled the slip of paper in with his pinky before he folded the entire wad into his pocket.
Junkrat laughed halfway through draining the rest of Hog’s drink, sloshing the so-called beer down his chin and onto his chest and stomach. “Way to blow it then, mate,” he said as he socked Roadhog’s arm companionably. He tipped back the dregs of the beer with a grimace.
“Shit’s piss,” he commented as the bartender set two more down in front of them and took Junkrat’s bill in exchange, slipping it into his pocket. Junkrat grinned, shrugged, and grabbed one of the “fresh” glasses with an upbeat hum.
Roadhog finally allowed himself to unbuckle his mask enough to be able to drink his beer and listened as Junkrat prattled on and on about how he was going to taste an actual Belgian lager someday.
Junkrat kept talking, and Roadhog let him, and eventually the familiarity of the younger man’s voice allowed the uncomfortable knots in Roadhog’s gut to loosen.
This wasn’t going to work, Junkrat had to go.