Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Spy has never been particularly fond of birds. They tend to make such an awful racket in the early morning, not to mention how his car’s bright blue exterior suffers when he parks in the base’s garage overnight and forgets to relocate the nests in the rafters.

And this was all before he shared a residence with the flying white devils.

Medic’s birds, for one reason or another, are the bane of his existence. Often he will be in the base somewhere attending to his own personal business when a dove or two will find him and hover nearby, all the while insisting on disturbing him in some way.

Once, he was sitting at the breakfast table, drinking coffee and quite literally minding his own business when he heard a muffled screeching sound as the flapping of wings exploded from a doorway. Suddenly, a lone white bird barrels into the room and directly at his face in the exact moment his cup of coffee happened to be inches from his lips.

Luckily, the burns all over his lap are minor and heal with relative ease, this doesn’t stop Spy from grumbling and complaining to Medic the entire time he is forced to sit there, under the healing beam, without pants. He ponders sending Medic the bill for his slack, but considering that he likes how all of his organs are inside him and relatively functional, he thinks better of it.

Another such incident occurs not long after.

Thanks to Engineer’s mechanical intervention (such as the renovation of various piping and the installation of a proper boiler room), their base now possessed a state-of-the-art running water system, no easy feat in a desert where the infrastructure was more than half a century old. Sometimes the laborer did happen to do more useful things than haul his toys around.

In other words, with the luxury of a private washroom, Spy has every means at his disposal to take hot baths whenever he wishes, as much as he wishes. And he does so quite often; it’s his go-to when his teammates are being insufferably irritating, or simply when he’s very stressed. Whenever he feels an overwhelming desire to blow out the brains of one of his teammates or even himself, he simply goes and takes a bath.

Water hot enough to scald, the slightest layer of bubbles, lights turned low and candles lit on several surfaces; that is his idea of relaxation, the kind that drains the tension from your very muscles.

Perhaps he is simply getting old. He can barely even tolerate the touch of cold water anymore.

One day, Spy finds himself at his absolute mental limit.

It was a combination of several things, really; incompetence, incoordination, miscommunication, and most of all, just a lot of bad luck. When he’s not yelling at Scout to stop overextending his flank or Soldier to not practice his rocket jumps in the middle of an ambush and give away their position, thank you, he is mostly getting burned to death.

In a particularly humiliating instance, he remembers the RED Engineer’s smug face as the Frenchman was burning alive on the ground before him. When Spy respawns, it is the enemy Engineer’s death that marks his sole kill for the day.

After the match, he doesn’t even bother with the post-battle reassembly and heads straight for the baths, a headache knocking around his skull like a ricocheting baseball.

Spy goes all out; he scatters rose petals, lights incense, scented candles, and runs the water extra hot so that it would last longer. To top it all off, he had just bought a new issue of Dapper Cadaver. He was entirely prepared with every fiber of his mind and body to spend the rest of his night in a bath and nothing would get in his way.

With a satisfied smile at the utter perfection of the scene before him, he leaves both to undress and get a towel.

Already, he has made two fatal mistakes.

The first mistake was complacency, convincing himself that his plans were certain to succeed due to the care and detail he poured into them. Of course, it was incredibly idiotic to believe that his every attempt at relaxing would not be thwarted at every opportunity by an uncaring universe.

The second one was leaving the door open when he left to go get said towel.

Spy returns to his bath naked from the waist up, hot steam pouring deliciously from the doorway, to find a pair of doves in the bath making an absolute mess of his bathroom; the rats with wings were flinging his carefully-temperatured, rose-petal-infused, scented bathwater all over the room without a single care.

The candles were all doused, and nearly every surface was covered in copious amounts of water and soggy petals; it only takes a single glance at Dapper Cadaver sitting on the toilet seat to know that the magazine was thoroughly soaked, as were the piles of freshly-laundered, neatly folded silk pyjamas on the counter.

Spy stands shivering in the doorway, pinching his nose hard enough to leave marks, and tries not to have a literal stroke.

The little white demons prove unrelenting; sometimes they simply follow him around like nuisances, attempting to land on his shoulders, his head, pecking at his fingers if they were resting on the table. Soon, even the most oblivious of his teammates take notice.

“Wow, Spy, these pigeons sure do like you, huh?” Scout snarks as a dove tries to bite Spy’s lit cigarette. “Can’t imagine why, though.”

“Look’s like ya got a lil’ friend, there,” Sniper smirks as Spy gasps in terror when he feels tiny claws pinch the top his head, batting madly at the air.

“Aw, shucks, pardner,” Engineer chuckles as a disgustingly big load lands on the front of Spy’s dark blue jacket. “Hope ya can afford the dry-cleaning for that fancy ass suit.”

Spy was at his limit, both in mind and body. There comes a point where he stops fearing Medic’s retaliation and simply goes to confront him with as much venom as he can muster.

“They are ruining my fucking life!” he spits, so angry that he shakes, and Medic simply stares at him, a dove sitting innocently in his lap. “Everywhere I turn, a bird! They follow me no matter where I go, and have been doing so for weeks! Do something about this or I swear that I will snap every single one of their stupid necks!”

“...you seem quite stressed, my friend,” Medic says slowly, his face growing concerned. He begins to pet the head of the dove with a bright blue glove. “If this was bothering you so much, why have you not come to me before?”

Spy flushes, but doesn’t respond.

“I honestly have no idea why they are bothering you like this,” Medic frowns thoughtfully. “Usually doves are quite genial pets, you know. Perhaps...”

Then, Medic looks up at him with a coy smile.

“Perhaps they simply do not like you,” he finishes, shrugging. “There is not much I can do about likability, medicinally-wise. Perhaps if you had some faulty organ...”

“So what you are saying is, you will do nothing,” Spy intones, so angry he could burst, but Medic shakes his head with a laugh.

“Nein, of course I will! I will take a look at their behaviors, perhaps keep them caged for longer periods of time. There is such a thing as too much freedom, you know. Perhaps they are simply taking advantage by thinking they can do what they please.”

Medic looks at him strangely when he says that, a gleam in his eye. Spy finds himself drained of anger, now that Medic has at least acknowledged his plight and might even do something about it.

“Thank you,” he says stiffly, and then leaves. Medic’s words about likeability echo in his ears like a tune he can’t get out of his head.

Spy isn’t here to be likeable. He’s here to stab men in the back for money, and nothing else. Nothing else.

Spy never does get a chance to discover if Medic better regulates his birds’ behaviors, for the next day, the RED Medic cuts off his head. But he doesn’t die. He doesn’t die.

“Sometimes I wonder if they truly love me,” RED Medic laments as he lounges on top of his desk; he was looking with exaggerated sorrow at the bird that walks circles Spy’s severed head, the pest clearly unsure of what it was looking at.

“Doves aren’t people, after all. They don’t tell you that they love you, or show much appreciation for how much you break your back for them. They merely eat all of your food and fly away when you call them. It breaks my heart.”

“Do people often tell you that they love you, then?” Spy snarks sarcastically. RED Medic looks at him and smiles widely.

“Yes,” he says, and then laughs at the decapitated Spy, his shiny boots kicking the air. Not expecting that answer, Spy falls reluctantly silent, his heart aching, though he no longer technically has one. He watches the dove warily, and when he looks into its beady black eyes, he sees the reflection of a body missing its head.

At Spy’s downcast expression, Medic sighs, and then picks him up by the sides of his head. His gloveless fingers, still wet with blood, rest under the valleys of Spy’s cheekbones and curl around the back of his skull, and Spy knows that even if he can manage to bite the man, he has no doubt he would suffer thrice the pain in response.

“Alas, poor Spy,” Medic sighs again, thumbing under Spy’s sunken eyes, leaving bloodied streaks. “I knew him, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

“Do not start with this again,” Spy hisses. He has heard enough Hamlet remarks to last him a lifetime—which, he prays, will soon be cut short.

There are no such things as ‘day’ and ‘night’ when you have no body to feed, to fight, to rest. As a head, Spy is worth nothing more than a hastily abandoned corpse floating along the river of borrowed time.

Perhaps the worst thing of all is that he isn’t even sure he believes his team is bothering to look for him.

RED Medic seems to have better control over his birds than his BLU counterpart, because for the most part, they sit in rows and simply watch him with the occasional twitter. But they never touch him. Not even Archimedes, feathers stained with Spy’s blood.

Spy remembers the operation (he was awake for it), watching his viscera drip from the little demon’s beak as it ate its fill of Spy’s chest. There wasn’t a single thing he could do about it.

No doubt his body is entirely gone, now. Not that Spy could have even done anything even if his body was close by.

He realizes, later, that the doves are passive because Medic is in the room. It’s why Spy is shut away in the fridge when Medic is gone. He has yet to be alone in the room with all of these birds. He isn’t sure he wants to think about the reason for this.

“Kill me,” he begs RED Medic on the third day, but the man only frowns.

“Why?” he asks, looking surprised as well as concerned. “I like you too much to do that. Nein, I think I will keep you around a little longer, my totenkopf.”

Medic’s words (his Medic’s words) about likeability echo in his ears. For now, Spy will be patient.

“Kill me,” he asks RED Medic on the ninth day, but the man only quirks a smile.

“Have a cigarette,” he says. “I know how irritable you get without one.”

Spy hasn’t had a cigarette in over a week and a half. Or was it two?

“Besides,” RED Medic continues. “You don’t really want to die. You just want to escape, run away. But you can’t. You have no legs. Spies always tend to be the biggest cowards, don’t you think? I am doing you a favor. You can’t run away from what you’re afraid of anymore.”

Medic puts a cigarette in Spy’s mouth and lights it, looking pleased when Spy accepts. But Spy cannot do anything with the stick in his mouth. He can’t breathe in the nicotine or exhale the smoke. He can only foolishly exist with a cigarette in his mouth as it wastes away from disuse, and there isn’t a single thing he can do about it.

“Kill me,” he whispers to RED Medic on the seventeenth day, but the man only ignores him. Like a child grown bored of their pet, Medic has begun to neglect him and his upkeep. Unlikable, Spy wastes away, becoming more skull than head, more object than trophy. These days, when he sleeps, he doesn’t bother to wake up, and his dreams grow deeper every time that he opens his eyes.

Spy doubts it’s a mistake when RED Medic leaves on the eighteenth (or was it the twenty-third?) day, and the latch to the bird cage is unlocked.

The doves make their leisure way out of the cage, heads bobbing, cooing softly to each other. They are as pale as skeletons, for Spy knew that both medics devoted much time to each of their birds' upkeep.

Some fly away to perch around the room. Others make their way slowly to Spy, beaks shining. One of them pecks at him, clearly curious about the nature of his unfortunate being. Then another joins the first. The birds peck at his mouth, at the bridge of his nose, at his teeth, at his eyes.

When drops of blood leak from his eyes, it is then that the birds grow excited.

(They peck at his eyes. They peck at his eyes. They peck at his eyes. For three days. For nine days. For eighteen, or twenty-three.)

(There isn’t a single thing he can do about it.)

By the time he stops screaming, he no longer has eyes. He thinks he might be crying, but all that comes out is blood, making a puddle around his throat, hot like a bath. He can hear it dripping, making a mess on the floor. There isn’t a single thing he can do about it. 

In a nightmare, Spy finally realizes why Medic’s birds devoured him like that; once they had gotten a taste of his blood, their appetite from there on out was insatiable.

Like birds, like owner.

“Kill me,” he breathes to the person standing at the doorway. He can’t see them, but he knows someone is there by the sudden footsteps, the abrupt breathing.

“Jesus... al-alright,” they say. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”

Spy hears the click of a gun, a hand on his wet jaw. He smiles in relief. Around the room, he hears doves singing, or maybe it’s just the sound of the bullet in his brain. Either way, it doesn’t echo.

ᨏ

He respawns in the respawn room for the first time in a long, long time. Below his head is his body, and he can feel everything from the tips of his fingers to the thrum of his heartbeat. He breathes, and it isn’t just a memory.

Someone is in here with him. Scout. Wearing that familiar blue that he’s missed during his time in the land of dark, dripping red.

“Sp-Spy!?” the boy shouts, looking as pale as dove’s feathers. “Where... where the hell have you been? Fuck... we thought you up an’ deserted or somethin’!”

Spy opens his mouth to say something, but all that comes out of his mouth is vomit.

It’s odd. Spy knows he is in his body, yet from the way he watches himself slump over, Scout swearing loudly and hurrying to sling his arm over his smaller shoulder, it feels as though he is watching it happen to a different person. Mind and body, Two separate people, when you think about it.

Not unexpectedly, Scout brings him to Medic. BLU Medic, not RED. Though the two share the same face, in more ways than one.

“Ah, Spy...” Medic says, eyes wide in shock, but his tone is ever casual. “Willkommen zurück.” Spy is so terrified that he trembles like a child alone in a dark room. Medic watches him, his eyes as blue as RED’s, but he doesn’t say anything. Perhaps he doesn’t care.

Behind him, doves twitter on various perches, and Spy vows to break their necks if they so much as fly in his direction.

“I never left,” is all he says, gritting his teeth. “It was you who never arrived.” Medic raises an eyebrow in confusion.

“Ich verstehe nicht,” he admits.

“Then open your eyes, while you still have them,” Spy snaps, and like a puppet with cut strings, he marches in freedom out of the room, tripping on his own legs many times.

That night, he takes a bath. He makes sure to lock the door behind him.

Spy doesn’t bother with heating the water, or spreading petals, or lighting incense. He doesn’t even put out fresh clothes for afterward. He simply fills the tub with water, steps in, and lowers himself into it.

He is still wearing his shoes, his suit, his mask. The water is colder than ice and seeps into his skin, running through his veins. The sheer temperature stiffens his joints, his muscles, a pale mockery of rigor mortis.

He doesn’t cry, though. He is terrified that blood will come out of his eyes instead of tears.

Slowly, slowly, he begins to strip out of his clothes. First, he peels his jacket off, nails getting caught in his gloves. He undos his tie, unbuttons his undershirt, unties his shoes. Unbelts his knife holsters, unbelts his belt. Soon, he’s wearing nothing but his mask.

He takes that off, too, and sees that the hem is crusted with blood, though the rest of his clothes had respawned spotless. Something is wrong.

His hands come up to his neck, and he's startled when he feels ridges and rough patches making a ring around his flesh. When he puts his hands back down, the water turns a pale pink with slivers of something darker.

Swallowing, he picks up a mirror from a shelf (vanity has always been his strong suit) and looks into it. His neck is a mess of scars and mottled skin. Evidently, the RED Medic had a bit of trouble getting Spy’s head off his shoulders, but RED Medic was, if anything, a man who did not do things by half.

Spy can see every groove where the tip of the man’s übersaw scraped downwards, the excess places the back edge of the saw slit as it came around. Much like some of the aristocratic Frenchmen during the reign of terror, Spy’s head was conscious for a time as he bid adieu to the rest of himself.

His hand weak, he lowers the mirror into the water. It floats, face-down, towards the surface.

He returns to battle without much incident. In his absence, his teammates had evidently learned how to get by without him, but looking at their scores, they clearly struggled. Spy is welcomed back among his colleagues with wide, albeit stiff arms. Surprisingly, no one asks him questions with anything other than their eyes. Like Scout, they probably collectively assumed that Spy had simply left, and now was back.

Say something! he wants to yell into their faces, wants to scream and laugh and cry. Why didn’t you look for me!? Where were you when I needed you to put me back together!?

His teammates respond to his silence with more silence, unsurprisingly. Spy wants to cut off all of their heads.

He falls back into the rhythm of battle with relative ease. One could subdue a predator, put a collar on it, convince it that its nature is not to kill, but the second that predator is once again released into the wild, it only takes the scent of blood to return it to its true state of being.

Spy hefts his knife and spills enough blood to fill a bath. For a time, he doesn’t see a single dove from either side, but he has his revolver just in case. He doesn’t see the RED Medic, either, but he doubts any weapon he has would truly be enough to protect him.

He doesn’t die for a good while, so he pushes his luck, pushing farther and farther into enemy territory. Soon, he finds himself on a ledge a few stories above the ground with the intention of looking for the RED Sniper. He immediately gets his wish when he invisibly turns the corner and accidently bumps into the sniper, and the man growls, immediately brandishing his long kukri and slashing Spy in the arm. Spy cries out and slinks away.

“Hey, there’s a spy ‘round here!” the sniper calls down to his team, and a few of them swivel around with weary eyes.

Spy is forced to clutch his arm and hide on the very edge of the ledge as Sniper blocks the exit and stabs at every corner with his kukri. When the man finds nothing, he growls in frustration, and before Spy can react, the man pulls out his SMG, suddenly spraying bullets in every direction.

Hitting Spy.

The second he gasps out loud, thin bullets cutting between his ribs, he knows he’s done for. RED Sniper’s eyes narrow as he advances, looking Spy dead in the eyes even though Spy is still fully cloaked.

“Have a nice fall, mongrel!” Sniper shouts, and with a grunt, kicks him backwards off the ledge.

Spy does not, in fact, have a nice fall.

His legs hit the ground first, and the impact sprains both of his ankles simultaneously, the popping of his ligaments almost as loud as a gun going off. Immediately, Spy is on his feet and hobbling away, biting his tongue so as not to scream. He can’t reach his watch for the pain, so invisibility won’t save him this time. A few members of the RED team were sure to still be nearby, no doubt searching for him.

“Merde...” he hisses through his teeth, dragging himself along the ground as quickly as he can, his hands gripping at his various bleeding wounds as they pulsed in agony under his clutching fingers. To take cover, he stumbles into the open doorway of the first floor...

...and directly into a sentry nest, the RED Engineer standing only feet away with his back turned.

The pivoting sentry gun doesn’t even have time to lock onto him before Spy dives behind a dispenser and out of sight, rolling over and curling up as small as he can.

A dove, sitting on the dispenser, makes a loud cooing racket when Spy gets near, and the Frenchman feels his heart stop when the bird then flees at the approaching of footsteps.

"Someone there?" a voice says wearily. "Spy? That you? I thought you were 'spoused to be in BLU's right flank right about now."

Spy, in his silence, dooms himself. When RED Engineer doesn't say anything else, Spy knows he's realized the truth.

Gasping, he pushes his back into the hard, uneven surface of the dispenser as his torso spasms from the sudden motion, his front turning almost black with blood. Then he leans his head back, panting from the pain and exertion, and waits. At this point, there isn't much else to do other than wait for the Engineer to come around and kill him. He closes his eyes...

But nothing happened for a second. Then two. Then three.

Then, the Engineer speaks from somewhere behind the dispenser.

“Fancy meetin’ you here,” is what he says, his tone neutral.

Spy opens his eyes, and wraps his arms around his stomach with a wince.

“ ...what?”

“Just bein’ polite... BLU,” Engineer says. More silence, except for the sounds of RED Engineer shuffling around.

Spy hears the Engineer inhale as if to say something, but in the next moment, there is a loud stomping of boots as RED Medic storms into the room while sporting a bloody shoulder. Instantly, Spy cloaks, shuffling even further into the corner as his body is wracked with terror.

“Ah, danke, Engineer,” RED Medic sighs, leaning heavily against the dispenser only inches away from where Spy sits. Engineer chuckles, but the sound is noticeably hollow. Medic’s expression changes.

“...still angry at me?” he smiles sadly, shaking his head. The other man huffs out of his nose in disgust.

“You already damn well know the answer to that, Doc,” he says lowly

“You don’t understand,” Medic frowns, clearly upset. “I didn’t realize I had left the cage unlatched. It wasn’t my intention—”

“... out of damn line,” Engineer hisses, and suddenly, the air is thick with dangerous tension. Looking up, Spy can see the outline of Medic’s back, bent and taunt.

“Shut up,” the other man growls as Medic begins to say something. “Now get the hell outta my sight before I make you.”

Somewhere in the distance, a dove flies in and out of sight, white against the blue sky. Frowning, RED Medic hefts his medigun and obeys, his shoulder still slightly bleeding.

However, just as he’s under the doorway, Medic suddenly stops and sniffs the air. And looks around. At the floor around the dispenser. At Spy, curled invisibly in the corner, who no doubt smelled strongly of blood.

Then he smiles, and turns back around to look at the sky.

“Kopf und kragen,” he says airly. “Literally, it means ‘head and collar’. However, idiomatically...”

Medic turns his head to look back at the Engineer, showing his teeth.

“It means danger, risking one’s neck,” he finishes, a gleam in his eye. “Keep that in mind, won’t you?”

And then RED Medic was gone. But Spy doesn’t stop trembling. He can’t see the enemy Engineer, but he knows the man is standing there, waiting. But for what?

“Close one,” is all he mutters. And suddenly Spy can’t stand it.

“Je vous en prie, just kill me already!” he bursts, gritting his teeth. “I-I can’t—please, stop talking to me as if—as if you...”

Pursing his lips, he stops. His vision curls and blackens at the edges, like gently burning paper.

“As if what?” Engineer asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “You seem to have a real bad habit of askin’ for mercy kills, don’t ya. From me, of all people. An' I suppose you don’t just wanna do this the easy way and step in front of my sentry, either.”

Spy remembers when he was nothing but his head, when he was sitting there blind, begging the darkness to kill him. He realizes who it must have been, to pull the trigger at his request.

“It’s funny,” he chuckles, his grip on his stomach loosening as cold warmth floods him. “It’s funny, that of all the people in this wretched place, you are the only one who seems to give a damn about me.”

Engineer seems to fall silent, pondering that.

“...I’ll make you a deal, ya snake,” he says finally. Spy, a bit intrigued, waits; his breathing is beginning to even out, but Spy doesn’t pretend for one second that it’s a good thing.

“Now, ya seem to be in a spot of bother over there. You reek like a slaughterhouse, no offense. I was thinkin’... if I patched you up a bit, if you might return the favor and walk outta here without pullin’ a knife on me or touchin’ my sentry. A little quid pro quo, or however you’d say that in French.”

“...I don’t trust you,” Spy intones, once again wary, and doesn’t bother reminding Engineer that Spy is the one at Engineer’s mercy, and is far too injured to use his knife even if he wanted to. “But... I suppose I have nothing else to lose. Do your worst. Just please, do it quickly.”

In the past month alone, Spy has begged his enemies for death more times than he can count. How the might truly do fall.

From behind the dispenser, RED Engineer emerges with a grim expression, and the bright red of his clothes instinctively puts Spy on guard. Curiously, he isn’t holding a weapon. They stare at each other for a few tense seconds.

“Spy... you’re still cloaked,” Engineer states, his lips quirking into a smile. Embarrassed, Spy hastily uncloaks in a cloud of thin smoke, and Engineer’s expression falls instantly.

“Jesus Christ,” he swears, kneeling on the floor in front of Spy and yanking medical supplies from the dispenser at random. Spy laughs, clutching at his stomach when the air is throttled in his lungs.

“I am used to it, do not worry,” he assures Engineer, who instead looks anything but assured.

“My dispenser won’t do a thing to ya, bein', y’know, RED. An' I doubt your medic will come all the way over here just to heal ya, so I 'spose we'll have to do this the hard way."

With more gentleness than Spy expects, Engineer helps him out of his torn, blood-stained jacket, loosening Spy's tie, his mouth twitching whenever Spy winces. The man presses a cloth to the Frenchman’s stomach, the white instantly blooming with red, and Spy is surprised to see that the RED's hands are trembling.

Shakily, Spy lifts a hand to place it at the back of Engineer’s in an attempt to steady him. Engineer only glances at him from the corner of his eye, but he seems reassured.

“Bleedin’ like a stuck pig...” is all he mutters, shaking his head.

Carefully, Engineer rolls up Spy’s sleeve to wrap a bandage around the kukri slash on his bicep. His warm breath, smelling faintly of beer, blows against Spy's cheek.

It turns out that extracting bullets is somewhat easier than extracting teeth. RED Engineer, it turns out, would not make for a very good doctor. He is far too slow, too gentle, too concerned about harming his patient than what is making his patient ill in the first place.

(It's endearing, in a way, that Engineer makes him bleed only out of obligation rather than any real bloodlust. Though perhaps the man simply feels sorry for Spy. The very thought leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.)

At some point, as the other man is busily digging into the flesh above his ribs with tweezers, the pain becomes almost too much to handle by himself. He doesn't know when Engineer had begun kneeling between his legs, but he's thankful for the closeness as he grabs Engineer's hips and squeezes hard enough to ground himself. The little pile of bullets next to them grows bigger.

When the tips of the tweezers press against the outermost edge of his lung to get at a deeply-imbedded bullet, Spy instantly presses his face down into the other man's shoulders to hide the tears that spring to his eyes, breathing in the smell of cloth and oil.

"Stay with me, sweetheart," Engineer breathes into Spy's ear. "Almost done, I swear."

Lifting up Spy's shirt with an apologetic expression, the man winds a bandage around the Frenchman's ribs a few times, and ties the ends very tight. With bloody fingers, Engineer straightens Spy's tie with a shaky chuckle. Spy only looks away and pretends that his eyes aren't rimmed with red.

"Merci, " he says, and means it more than he can say. However, Engineer only frowns, and his fingers raise up to Spy's neck.

"You're still bleedin'," he says, and his fingers brush the edge of Spy's balaclava. "Here, let me—"

"Wait," Spy says quickly, grabbing Engineer by the wrist, who raises a questioning eyebrow at him.

But Spy doesn't say anything else. He just sits there, pursing his lips, his expression frozen with the uncertainty of vulnerability. He can't let Engineer pull back the cloth anymore than a rabbit can bear its neck to a looming wolf. But he wants to. He wants to.

"Not all the way, please," he whispers. Because in the end, it's not really the enemy in front of him that he doesn't trust. It's himself.

He expects Engineer to recoil when he sees the scars around Spy's neck, the torn skin, the ridges, the flesh mottled with bruises. What he doesn't expect, perhaps, is for Engineer to take the back of his head with impossible gentleness and tilt it back, and in the next moment, press his lips to Spy's neck directly against his Adam's apple.

Spy leans his head back against the wall and squeezes his eyes shut, his face burning. Faintly, he hears Engineer chuckle.

More bandages, gently wound around Spy's neck. It is the softest noose he has ever felt in his life.

"You didn't deserve it," Engineer says, and the other man instantly knows what he is referring to. "I think that's why I… helped you, when I did. But I'm real sorry. That no one better than me ever came to save you."

Engineer leans in again and presses another kiss to Spy's neck, and Spy can almost feel the heat of the man's lips through the bandages.

"I hope I can someday at least find a way to make it up to you," he admits. Spy sighs, already abandoning the world for this man.

"Imbécile," he says. "You already have."

When he leans in to show the RED Engineer what a proper kiss was, both his mind and body come to a mutual agreement about falling in love. And there isn't a single thing he can do about it.