Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Once, as a younger man, Dell owned a snake.

Having grown up on a farm, he was familiar with the occasional no-good serpent sneaking into the hens’ nests and making a meal out of their eggs. Out in the woods and scrubland roamed dangerous kinds such as coppers and diamondbacks, snakes with enough poison to stop a man’s heart miles away from any kind of hospital, but the ones near ‘round were usually harmless.

However, his pa didn’t let that affect the prejudiced philosophies he one day imparted upon his young son with a still-writhing snake’s body clutched in his large weathered hand, its head bleeding in the grass. Dell hadn’t been looking where he stepped, but luckily his big, strong daddy was watching out for him, knife at the ready.

Son, when you see a snake, you cut off his head as damn quick as you can, he would say, eyes blue and swimming with white lines like a blueprint. It don’t matter if it ends up ‘harmless’ or not. If that snakes bites you an’ it’s venomous, you’ll be lucky to survive the day.

Adam and Eve didn’t doom the world to sin simply because they needed something to do on a Sunday, after all.

Needless to say, Dell did not much enjoy snake meat growing up, though chunks of snake found their way into his dinner stew often enough.

His pa must not have either, and left the farm when Dell was thirteen. He took his blueprints, his guns, and his tools with him. He did not, however, take his only son or his wife, and rather left their little family to the mercy of the snakes.

He doesn’t touch a snake for almost a decade. Of course, he’d stumble over one on occasion, but usually they’d dart like a bang into the grass before he can get a closer look.

So when Dell finally finds the sneaky little son of a bitch who’d been gobbling Henrietta’s every lay (poor girl had enough trouble making eggs as it was), he makes the mistake of grabbing its sleek, rope-like body as it slithered through the hay. He doesn’t even have a knife out before the damn thing bites the hand he’s holding it with, its jaws latching snugly around the meat of his palm.

“Dammit—!” he yells, his heart stopping a little in his chest, a bead of sweat rolling down past his ear. He’s too stunned to move, to breathe; the snake’s body wriggles madly in Dell’s grip, making a hypnotizing S shape, but he doesn’t let it go.

He can practically feel the venom coursing through his veins and rocketing towards his heart. Any second now and he’ll be on the floor dead—!

He knows he’s in real bad shape when he even starts to pray, fuck’s sake, under his breath, as if big, strong God would save his children from the serpent’s teeth.

The snake’s eyes seem to almost bulge in their sockets, unblinking, emotionless. It doesn’t seem to be looking anywhere in paticular.

The pain itself doesn’t even register at first, and when it does, it’s not... nearly as bad as he was initially afraid of. For all he knew, his hand could have just been very, very itchy. He realizes he’s shaking like a wet dog and stops.

He grimly studies the snake as his vision swims, trying to gauge if it was venomous or not—how could you tell, anyhow? With a dark brown hide and a white belly, it was certainly no copper or diamondback, but this doesn’t reassure him.

Then, he notices just how... little the thing actually is. The snake’s body was no thicker than his thumb; just a baby, really. Dell wonders how such a tiny lil' thing could swallow a whole chicken egg without chewing it first. It must be real hungry, to try something like that.

“Where’s your daddy, huh? Leavin’ you to fend for yourself?” he murmurs, and without thinking, rubs his thumb against the snake’s body; its scales are smooth to the touch, and made a pretty pattern of perfectly aligned diamonds. Nature was her own engineer, it seemed.

After a full minute, the snake finally decides to let him go, jaws settling into place. By now, it’s stopped wiggling so hard and only makes impatient swaying movements in Dell’s hand. He can feel its small muscles, the ridge of its fragile spine. Hesitantly, Dell allows it to thread around each of his fingers.

The numerous pinpricks and teeth marks on his hand are bleeding, but only a tiny bit, which surprises him. Heck, he’s been more wounded by sticking his hand into a thorn bush. He’s not even going to need a bandage. Talk about anti-climactic.

“Bet you’re not even venomous, ya tiny bastard,” Dell sighs and, snake in hand, goes to find a bucket to keep the dang thing in. He’d best keep it close in case it actually did have venom; he has no clue how antivenom is made, but it would be an interesting little chemistry project as his body shut itself down.

The little brown snake flicks its tongue out as if to reply, and with its big ol’ eyes, manages to look almost... cute. Dell sighs again. No snake meat for dinner tonight, at this rate.

After trying to figure out the snake’s sex and calling it quits after ten seconds, he names it Martha after his late mother, who stayed with him far longer than his pa had. She, at least, was still nearby in a small graveyard by the church over yonder way. He brings her flowers in the spring, eats chicken eggs for breakfast, puzzles over the blueprints and schematics his pa left behind, and fends for himself.

At least he wasn’t so lonely, now.

Martha was actually quite the joy to keep around, actually. She took to her brand-spankin’ new glass cage built by yours truly quite well, snuggled in his overall pockets when he stuck her in there, ate chicken eggs for bi-weekly breakfast, and grew longer and fatter before Dell knew it.

Occasionally, she did bite him, but it was a rare thing, and usually because Dell was moving his hands too fast or grabbed her when she wasn’t expecting it. She was a sweetheart, really, if not a tiny bit of an ornery thing when the mood struck her. She was about as loveable as a cold-blooded reptile could be, which did in fact amount to some amount.

This is what he tells his niece a week before he ships out to a RED base, a little girl about thirteen who looked at snakes and lizards like they were puppies, much to the horror of her mother. The stars in her eyes makes him wish someone was there to make him happy like that, at that age. Dell hopes Martha will be happy with his niece. It was difficult to tell with snakes, but one could only hope.

Like his father, Dell left the farm. He took his blueprints, his guns, and his tools with him. He tries to leave his heavy heart behind him, but somehow the dang thing still catches up with him no matter how fast he books it. At least no one will miss him but the snake. Maybe he really should have cut off its head all those years ago, because now the poison was finally taking hold. He’d been dying all along and he didn’t even know it.

There are plenty of snakes in the desert, but Dell isn’t looking for a pet. He already has his hands full with his eccentric, chaotic, clinically-insane coworkers. He feels particularly obligated to keep an eye out for the running boy and the pyromaniac in particular. He has every sympathy for little boys stuck in a war they had no business of being in to begin with.

There are plenty of snakes in the desert, and even now, Dell still has nests to guard.

He’s beginning to care a lot about these RED hooligans faster than he’d like to admit, but there’s something about that Spy character he can’t shake. While his team members become something like his friends, his family, even, Spy lingers in the background like a wisp of cigarette smoke, like something burning just out of frame. But then again, the man did tend to keep most of them at a safe distance. Dell probably wasn't special.

The BLU Spy was a whole ‘nother story altogether.

The thing was, Dell has never actually... seen the man. Sometimes, he glimpses an unknown figure in the distance among the other team, but whereas he’s gotten savagely up close and personal with pretty much every BLU, the enemy Spy seemed to prefer indirect methods of confrontation. Dell wouldn’t even know the man existed if not for the damned sappers, the smell of cigarettes in the wind, the faint laughter in his ears, the knives in his back.

Whereas his Spy kept him at a distance, BLU Spy seemed to do anything but.

Often Dell is alone in some intelligence room or at some control point, tending to his machines, jumping at every shadow, when he’ll hear footsteps as an unseen force brushes past him as the premonition that he is very not alone washes over him.

‘Just the wind’ is a phrase he particularly longs for, nowadays.

“I know you’re here, snake,” is something he might say whether he’s sure of such a statement or not, firing at random and growing angrier when the spy’s quiet laughter comes from every direction. “Why don’t you come out and fight me like a real man?”

He insults the spy, heckles and goads him, tries to appear intimidating with frequent spychecks, but no amount of words or wild flailing is ever enough to convince the spy to uncloak and face him.

Often, when his equipment beep in alarm from being sapped and Dell hurries over to find one of his teammates standing nearby, way out of position, looking at him with an odd, uncharacteristic coldness in their eyes, he smells the rat almost immediately. The spy seems to know it, too, but he never speaks a word to convince Dell of his genuity. Nor does he run away, and that alone offends Dell more than anything.

Sometimes, the spy smiles at him like a cat that just swallowed a bird. It’s an odd sight on the faces of his friendly colleagues. It downright chills his blood.

Early in his employment, he often panicked in these situations, fumbling between decisions like a handful of hot potatoes.

In the time it takes to kill the spy, his buildings will have been destroyed and he’ll have to painstakingly rebuild every single one, leading to lost time, wasted efforts. But ignoring the spy to try and save his buildings will lead to some impasse where the spy simply puts a bullet into his brain or, just to be cruel, replaces each sapper faster than Dell can swing his wrench.

Sometimes he’s so pissed that his aim suffers even at point-blank range, as if he wasn’t humiliated enough. There wasn’t much in this world that got him mad, but when he got mad, he tended to lose all reason and motor control, like a bull being bitten by flies. It just got him madder knowing that he has yet to actually land a hit on the spy at all.

No, there’s simply no way to win when he’s alone and vulnerable. Every match, Dell loses his resolve almost as fast as he loses metal—not that there is ever, ever enough on hand to begin with.

Between finding metal, keeping up with teleporter re-location, dispenser upgrades, guarding the objective, replacing his sentries, and watching for spies, Dell barely has enough focus left over to breathe oxygen in and out of his lungs.

There is a point in his first few weeks where amidst broken buildings and the endless demands of his team, Dell himself breaks down. The kind of internal collapse that happened when screws came loose and frames shattered from overuse.

The incidental anomaly, he’d call it. The kind he’d erase from the drawing board, or discard in a pile of reject parts.

One nest in particular had taken half the match to build and calibrate to strategic perfection, but when Dell stupidly leaves it alone for a minute, he returns to find it in ruins like the remnants of some great empire that never really was all that great.

In the far distance where battle is waging, he can hear one of his teammates calling for him to build a dispenser. Dell kicks at the piles of sparking metal, takes a shaky breath, grips his wrench, and privately steps into a small building off to the side where he won’t be seen.

In the shadows, he lifts his goggles to scrub at his face with his bare hand, and isn’t surprised to find that he’s crying, his throat tight, his chest heaving. The dust and dirt on his face make his eyes sting when he rubs them.

“Christ’s sake, pull yourself together,” he mumbles to himself, burying his head in his hands, for once glad he doesn’t have any hair because if he did, he’d be pulling it out.

Not much to do now but breathe and collect himself, so he does, trying a bit desperately to stop weeping.

His team still needs him, after all. If they can pick themselves up after a firefight and still have grit left over, so can he. Dell grinds his teeth, sniffles, and tries to keep his lip from trembling. The sun peeks around the edge of the open doorway. A breeze brushes past him, only it is oddly heavy, and smells like cigarettes.

Instantly, Dell is on guard, his body tight with tension but still wracked with emotion, kinetic energy with no conductor, axial stress with uneven distribution.

“GOD DAMN IT, SPY!” he bellows in no certain direction, his face still wet, but he doesn’t care. “FOR ONCE, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!!”

His voice cracks and betrays him, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. When he hears a shoe scrape against the wooden floorboards a few yards away, he acts immediately, flinging his wrench as hard as he can muster in that direction.

Unexpectedly, the wrench actually connects. Dell hears a man yelp in a voice he’s never heard as the shadow of a figure he doesn’t recognize materializes like a blue shadow, but it’s gone before he can react.

His tears fade into dust as he stands there until he’s certain that the spy is gone. He secures his goggles over his raw eyes, bends to pick up his wrench from the floor, and heads off into the direction of battle.

He thinks of the shadow he saw of the uncloaked spy, and finds some resolve in the fact that he saw with his own eyes that the snake had a body despite his invisibility gadgets. He was flesh and blood just like any coward, and damn if Dell wasn’t going to take up his weapons and prove it.

However, the next time he finds his gun being sapped, a suspect, well-postured Pyro hightails it instead of cloaking and lingering like normal.

Puzzled but still on edge, Dell hurries to remove the sapper before it can destroy his sentry when he notices his gun shrinking instead of sparking, the machine literally being reverse-engineered before his eyes. His level three sentry transforms into a small turret before he comes to his senses and destroys the sapper. In his confusion, he momentarily forgets about his plan to tear the enemy Spy a new one.

The sapper, it must have been defective. Some mistake, a freak of engineering.

Or so he believed, when days pass with his sapped sentries downgrading instead of promptly exploding, teleporters merely becoming slower instead of getting blown to hell.

It’s a hell of an annoyance, but Dell finds himself getting better at managing his buildings. Constantly upgrading is tedious, but not so much as rebuilding from scratch after every spy attack. His team excels as their defense lasts longer, forcing BLU to work that much harder to fight back. He never does manage to catch the spy, but Dell breathes easier even if in bewilderment. Even the knives in his back seem to decrease in frequency.

At first, he ponders if the spy actually decided to listen when Dell had hollered at him to leave him alone, but that was just crazy talk. No, snakes don’t show mercy to the thing in their teeth just because it's crying. They just swallow, and don’t blink.

Martha had let him go, all those years ago.

After the third day, Dell finally takes apart the sappers. Instead of the typical transistor radio box, they looked like... miniature tape recorders? When he takes them apart, the mechanics are convoluted and much different than typical sappers at first glance. Even after a few minutes of tinkering, he can’t make heads or tails out of this strange sapper, but he knows who he could ask.

No doubt spies in kind used the same kind of equipment. Tools of the trade tended not to have huge variations, so he’s betting the RED Spy will know what the deal is with this strange device. The bigger issue is if Spy will tell him about it.

Mostly, RED Spy is much easier to find than his BLU counterpart. Either he’s making nice with the more intellectual members of the team or he’s absolutely nowhere to be found at all. No middle ground to be found. Dell takes note of the team members Spy hangs around with, and takes notes.

With Medic, Spy tended towards animated conversation in foreign tongues (probably gossip, if Dell had to guess).

With Heavy (the big man was surprisingly into books), Spy was drawn to political and fantastical discussion of a literary nature (though somewhat limited by Heavy’s limited vocabulary).

With Demoman (of all people), Spy seemed to favor the occasional drinking partner, as the two seemed to often share drinks, sometimes over the piano.

Of course, Dell can’t speak nothing other than English and his preferred taste in literature ranges from train engine combustion manuals to old westerns, so the only thing left to befriend the Frenchie with is alcohol.

Which should’ve been easy with any normal person, but if Spy didn’t seem the most pretentious, big-headed son of a bitch... no doubt he liked expensive foreign labels, probably Italian reds or French whites, the bastard. Aged wines, cultivated vintages, that thing of thing.

Either way, Dell delights in the way Spy’s smug face crumbles in surprise when Dell offers a drink and, instead of cheap Texan whiskey or something, he’s given a glass of wine that probably rivaled the cost of his fancy pinstripe suit.

“This is...” RED Spy begins.

“Château Latour, from Pauillac,” Dell says with a grin. “Though I’m pretty sure I said that wrong.”

Across the table, Spy bends his wrist to palm the glass delicately, a sliver of pale skin exposed, and sniffs the wine with amazement in his eyes. They were light, the color of spring water, and surprisingly pretty up close.

“No, your pronunciation is quite... impeccable, for a laborer, and an American one at that,” Spy remarks offhandedly, apparently never one to let an opportunity to insult pass him by. Dell’s easy smile twitches.

Spy sniffs the wine again, but still doesn’t drink.

“What? Not gonna try it?” Dell asks in a light voice. “Pretty rude of ya. I spent an arm an’ half my leg on that there bottle.”

Spy gives him an odd look, but then his expression turns muted. He swirls the wine in his glass with a kind of meaningful smile, and he stares at Dell without blinking.

“What is rude of me,” he says, pursing his thin lips, “is to drink by myself, while you watch. Go ahead, pour yourself a glass. You must tell me what you think of it, por favor. It is only polite.”

That smug look returns to his face again, and Dell finally understands that Spy probably thinks the wine’s been tampered with in some way. So the backstabber has trust issues, go figure. Dell shrugs and pours himself a glass. He knocks back a long gulp and nearly gags; it was bitter beyond belief and burned his throat going down. He suddenly remembers why he doesn’t drink wine.

“Tastes great,” he says, and inclines the glass towards Spy with a humored cringe while the other man watched him closely. With a coy smile, Spy takes a poised sip and his eyelids lower in a way that Dell can’t look away from.

And now, for the hard part. Small talk with an arrogant prick. 

“So, you’re from France, huh?” He begins, wracking his brain for topics and falling short. “Can’t say I’ve ever—”

“Tais-toi,” Spy cuts him off, his eyes narrowing. “I know what you are doing. You don’t like wine, and you don’t like me. The fact that you are indulging in both of these things... you want something from me. Well, by all means, speak your mind and don’t waste my time.”

Dell was taken aback at Spy’s blunt perceptiveness. Rude little son of a bitch, wasn’t he? His mama would’ve smacked a man for talking to her like that. But Dell won’t stoop to that just yet. He's beginning to find Spy's teeth a little amusing, the way the pinpricks barely bleed.

“Heh, well... just thought I’d get to know you, is all.” Dell explains lamely, halfway honest. Spy raises an eyebrow. “We haven’t really ever talked properly, have we?”

“You have been here for two weeks and five days, most of which you have spent in your silly workshop or with the others, monsieur, ” Spy replies, sounding disturbingly certain of everything he just said. “If you truly desired to ‘get to know me’, you would have done so already. As you already have, with everyone else.”

Spy’s tone was coarsly bitter. Maybe it was the wine on his tongue.

“...yeah, I reckon you’re right,” Dell sighs, seeing no point in pretending otherwise. He pulls out the strange sapper from an overall pocket and hands it to Spy, who clearly recognizes it.

“Where did you get this?” Spy asks, his tone accusatory.

“Just from the other Spy, no need to get riled up,” he explains. “It’s real odd, though. Different from regular sappers. I don’t fully understand what it does and was hopin’ you would, bein’ a spy and all.”

Dell hopes the flattery is effective. Spy makes a sharp dismissive sound, but he’s looking at the sapper.

“Of course,” he snickers. “The amateur. How embarrassing.”

Dell looks at him expectantly, but Spy doesn't relent.

“What? Can’t tell me?” Dell guesses, frowning a little. Shit, he can already see this entire scheme going down the drain.

“Technically, no,” the Frenchman replies mysteriously. “But... then again, you did purchase some very nice wine, and just for me, I’m certain. And you asked so nicely, so I shall enlighten you.”

Spy uses a finger to turn one of the dials on the sapper with a disapproving expression.

“Simply put, this red tape recorder is a deconstructing device. It reverses the construction an engineer does to his building. It does indeed destroy, but laughably slowly. This device is nothing short of a joke, I’m afraid. That BLU imbécile must not regard you very highly.”

“Ah, well... that’s good t’know,” Dell replies, his heart sinking a little at Spy’s last words. He absent-mindedly reaches for the sapper, but Spy only stares at him bluntly, clearly not intending on giving it back.

“Ah... I was hopin’ to take a better look at that, actually, if ya don’t mind,” Dell nods at the sapper. And figure out a way to counter it, he thinks afterwards. Spy only smirks at him knowingly.

“Non, I’m afraid not. It would be most unfair to have that advantage over that amateur. God knows he doesn’t already embarrass himself enough. Don’t look at me with that face,” Spy says suddenly, startling Dell. “That... wounded puppy face, like Scout when he doesn’t receive attention every ten minutes. You have worn this expression every day for the past fortnight. Bon sang! I’m tired of it.”

“Oh, uh, my apologies..?” Dell says as he rubs a hand over the back of his beck, a little embarrassed. He had been a little gloomy due to getting his ass handed to him every day by the BLU Spy, but he hadn’t thought anyone noticed. Especially now that he was doing better (all thanks to BLU Spy giving him a little breathing room, whether it was because he was a fool or not). Spy drinks from his glass and pointedly looks away.

“Well... since you don’t want light conversation, I’d best get goin’. Thanks for the info, I ‘spose,” Dell sighs, suddenly itching to get far away from Spy and his meaningful expressions. “You can keep the wine if ya want. Have a good night, Spy.”

Setting his nearly full glass down with a heavy heart, he gets up to leave before Spy clears his throat.

“...I never said I disliked conversation,” he says softly, peering up at Dell over the rim of his glass. “Perhaps conversation without a hidden motive, maybe. After all, I have wasted good wine with many I would have rather tortured for information, but one cannot always do things the easy way.”

“Do tell,” Dell says, faintly curious in a morbid way, but Spy shakes his head.

“Perhaps another time, with wine you actually enjoy. Oh, and one more thing.”

“...yes?”

Spy sure was feeling talkative all of a sudden.

“You’ve been... smiling more, in battle,” Spy remarks casually, crossing his legs and leaning back in his chair coyly. “I daresay it suits you much more than that pathetic look. I meant it when I said I was tired of it.”

...what.

“I... I’ll keep it in mind,” he stammers, his face reddening. Spy smiles at him like a cat that just swallowed a bird, and Dell almost smiles back.

“Adieu, laborer,” Spy says simply, and goes back to slowly sipping his wine like he wanted it to last a long, long time.

“Yeah, yeah, sayonara, ya snake,” Dell mutters as he leaves, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck once again. His thoughts linger on Spy’s admission that he wanted to drink with Dell, some other time. And even talk a little, God forbid.

...he never really was gonna figure out these spies, was he?

Chapter Text

He wakes up early. It’s no unordinary thing.

The city is already awake. He can hear the cars in the street, honking and beeping. People talking, laughing, shouting. Everyone had somewhere to go, but even this early, no one was getting there fast.

“Time to get up, bout de chou,” his mama whispers, kissing his forehead to wake him, but he pretends to be asleep so he won’t have to go to school. She tickles his sides, not fooled by this ruse, making him explode with laughter. He can see her smile curving in the dark.

His papa sits at the breakfast table, dressed in a full suit, drinking coffee and smoking at the same time. There are croissants on the table (too chewy), toast (too crumbly), apples (too sweet), and dates (too sour). The pâtisserie these days only has flour for bread, so there are no pastries. He is hungry, the smoke of the kitchen the only thing in his belly, but nothing catches his eye. He just stands there and hungers.

“L'appétit vient en mangeant,” his papa sighs, frowning, but doesn't look up from his newspaper. Simply staring at one puts a furrow in his brow for the rest of the day. “Appetite comes with eating.”

“Never have I known such a picky child,” scolds his grandmother from the kitchen. She is skillfully cutting strawberries with a polished knife, but she’s looking at him rather than her movements, and he is looking at the strawberries rather than her. “In America, children eat sawdust and mouse bones for breakfast, and even they are fatter than you.”

“Leave him alone, maman,” his mama sighs, pulling on her coat. She leaves to find her shoes as well as his own.

Regardless, his grandmother puts all of the strawberries into a glass bowl and gives it to him. She cuts them up very small, just how he likes it. She gives him a glass of milk with it. Milk and strawberries for breakfast. They are the only things his tummy can handle in the morning. Everything else makes him feel bad. Except pastries. He wishes he had pastries.

“Drink it. It will fill your belly until lunchtime, since you refuse to eat solid food,” she instructs with a harsh voice, smoothing her pink apron, her long silver hair. “God knows how many children starved in the great war, picky or not. There was no such thing as milk back then.”

“Maman!” his mother calls sharply from down the hall. His grandmother sighs, and starts cleaning her knife, though it already shines. His papa frowns harder. Every day he smokes as he reads the newspaper. He doesn’t eat breakfast, either. How isn’t he hungry? Perhaps the smoke fills his stomach.

His mother holds out his boots, as he is old enough to put them on his own feet. The laces, however, she ties. He still doesn’t know how to tie his boots. Once he tried, and his fingers got all tangled up.

His mother puts on gloves and dons her hat, the one with roses on the brim and a black veil, and takes his hand. They walk out the door, and the city swallows them.

People talking. In their cars, on the street, in doorways, in windows, in shadows, in light. They all talk about the same things every day. He hears words like enfreindre and Maginot and blitzkrieg and doesn’t understand them.

But he doesn’t dare ask his mama. Her lips are pursed and her face is pinched, so he stays silent. She never lets go of his hand, not once. The sun soon kisses their foreheads, as his mama would say, rising above even the tip of the Iron Lady’s spire, but the chill of the shadows makes him shiver.

Everyone around him is looking at the sky with apprehension, as if they were afraid the sun would go away. Some people trip over the big brown bags in the street. Once he tried to pick one up, but couldn’t, as it was very heavy. He wonders what is hidden inside them.

They pass the rosebush underneath the tailor’s porch, but today the tailor isn’t there to wave at them through his window. That man is the one who makes papa's suits. He hasn’t seen the tailor for almost two weeks, but he doesn’t wonder. The rosebush, neglected, grows bigger and more tangled every day. It looks big enough to hide things in.

On the way home from school, he will walk not with his mama but alone, and he will pick a rose for her. He knows she loves them because she smiles when she sees one. They make her happy, even if the rose eventually withers.

The first time he tried to pick a rose with small, clumsy fingers, he got the surprise of his life as he suddenly started bleeding out of cuts he couldn’t see. He ran straight home instead of along the Seine, a rose clutched in his injured hand, and cried of his plight to anyone who would listen.

His mama had to pick out the thorns with tweezers, but kept the rose. The petals were torn, the stem bent in half.

Still beautiful, his mama had said. She kissed the rose deeply, then the bandages on his fingers. Her hands were so much bigger than his own, her fingers long and bony. She could reach more piano keys with one hand than he could with two.

Such slender hands, she would smile, her lips bright red with lipstick. Just like your papa’s.

The rose withered in a few days, even though it was put in a vase with water. No matter. The rosebush underneath the tailor’s porch had plenty more. In no time, he learns how to properly pick a rose. One needed only to pick off the thorns before the rose was touched. He bled less and less every time.

In the distance, the Holy Chapel is a dark silhouette against the sky. Once, he fell into the Seine, and nuns dried him off in the entrance hall of the chapel. He had watched the rainbow glass make colorful pictures against the ground. The windows are bare and gaping now, the rainbow glass gone. Where did it all go? Who took it?

He arrives at school like always, hugs his mother goodbye after she gives him his ration card, and starts to think about art class, where he will draw flowers that he hopes his papa will hang on the wall. He doesn’t notice his mama hugging him a little longer, a little tighter. She brushes under his eyes with her gloves, and then she is gone.

Many of his friends are absent, so he lingers by himself in the courtyard until the bell tolls. He doesn’t notice the teachers wringing their hands at the doors, their numbers also low. Why would he? He is only a young Parisian school boy. He likes strawberries, roses, his mama, his papa, and his grandmother. He doesn’t worry about Germans in Belgique or Luxembourg. He worries about thorns, and if there will be pastries for lunch.

He starts to hum under his breath, practicing his languages. His papa used to sing in German, serenade in Spanish, and carol in Italian, but these days all his papa ever does is smoke. Still, he practices what he remembers.

He hears someone else hum, louder and louder. He looks around, but sees no one nearby. Puzzled, he looks up.

There were, suddenly, lots of birds in the sky, black and slender. They flew in V shapes as if they were going south for the winter. It almost sounded as if they were screaming, there were so many of them.

But it wasn’t winter. It was June. And the birds weren’t birds. They were planes. And the screaming wasn’t screaming. Or maybe it was. There was, suddenly, noise.

“C'est les bombardiers!” someone cries, pointing at the planes.

“Get inside the building!” a teacher yells. “Hurry, now—!”

And suddenly everyone is running. A lot of things are happening suddenly. He is pushed, shoved, and knocked to the ground as children everywhere start dashing towards the doors of the school.

Les bombardiers. The bombers. They are the planes in his papa’s newspapers that drop bombs on people, and now they are flying above his head. Even the teachers, who are grown up and know more than anyone, they are afraid, and that is the most horrifying thing of all.

He starts to cry; he scraped his knee, but no one is stopping to help him. Somewhere in the distance, a loud booming sound rattles the ground and the gates around the school, so he does not think about being afraid. He simply runs. Out of the gates. Into the road. He does not hear his teachers calling him.

Along the bank of the Seine, he forgets about his knee and races like a horse, like a train, like a bullet, pumping his arms and moving his legs as fast as they could go. The planes in the sky are everywhere now, like clouds of flies. The people nearby are running as fast as they could just like he is; everyone had somewhere to go, and everyone wanted to get there fast.

He runs so fast that he feels as though he is flying. Like at any moment he would rise into the sky, above even the bombers. Running is something he is good at. He is one of the fastest children in the school, and wins most races.

He passes the tailor’s shop and sees the rosebush under the porch. He was going to pick a rose for his mama. He looks at the sky, but it is hidden by the buildings around him. Maybe he could spare a moment... reluctantly, he slows down as his chest heaves and his lungs burn, and approaches the bush. He will only be a moment before he starts running again. He reaches for the thorns...

A loud, booming noise knocks him to the ground, and before he knows it, the tailor’s shop screams and roars as it is set ablaze. Glass rains on the ground as the windows are blown apart from the inside, the walls collapsing like crumbly pastries.

He screams in terror as sharp rubble dusts across his face and tongues of flame reach for him with long, desperate fingers. The rosebush is on fire, every red rose turning black and withered. His vest is on fire, and slowly, slowly, it begins to eat him alive.

He does not think. He jumps into the Seine, and the thorns in his skin are everywhere.

He wakes up early. It’s no unordinary thing. 

With a hand, Spy wipes the nightmare sweat from his bare brow and gropes at the table next to his bed for a lighter. The cigarette is already hanging from his lips before he opens his mouth.

He palms the lighter, flicking it open with a practiced hand. A small flame materializes, bathing the edges of the dark room with a soft glow. He stares at it, how it dances, and feels that familiar twist of fear whenever he lights a cigarette, that prickling across his skin. He wants nothing more than to throw the lighter across the room and away from him. But he doesn't. He lights his cigarette, closes the lighter, and his first breaths of the morning fill the room with smoke.

Spy dresses in the dark, and greets the familiar morning sickness with gritted teeth.

This always happens when he wakes up early. His stomach will feel like a gaping hole as hunger grows heavy roots inside him, but even the thought of eating makes him nauseous. His heart beats not in his chest, but in his belly. If he’s feeling particularly worse off, his breathing will be heavy as if he were extremely winded.

He’s fully dressed, mask over his face, but his hands are bare. He studies them for a moment, looking at his long and boney fingers. Still slender—they never did get as big as his mother's. He puts on his gloves. He stops thinking about it.

Usually there is no one else in the kitchen so early, but Medic or Engineer have occasionally been known to be up and about. This morning, it looks like the latter.

At the table, Engineer is sitting with eggs (too runny), bacon (too greasy), and milk. He's wearing his blue work shirt but not his overalls, and his goggles are pulled up to reveal his eyes. He’s reading some sort of book. A manual, with complicated mechanical designs on the front cover. Spy rolls his eyes at what the laborer probably considers casual reading.

“Mornin’,” Engineer says huskily, glancing at him. He sounds tired. Probably was up late in his workshop, working on the new dispenser prototype that aimed to distribute health at a faster rate. Spy knows this because he’s observed him doing so some night ago.

That, or he was watching spaghetti westerns on the rec room’s colorless television and weeping over the tacky romantic scenes. If anything, Engineer at least was always somewhat amusing to spy on. Observing Scout’s activities, for instance, always made him want to douse his eyeballs in cleaning fluid.

Deeming it far too early to pretend to be polite, Spy forgoes replying to Engineer’s greeting and pulls open the fridge, hoping for milk or even some fruit. His heart sinks in disappointment when he sees nothing but a loaf of old bread (which he doesn’t trust in the slightest), half-eaten bowls of soup, and the preserved carcass of a dove that appeared to be... pregnant.

The cupboards are equally disappointing, though one holds a single cereal box that he finds to be promising until he opens it and discovers that it was actually empty save for the cereal dust at the bottom. Spy groans long and low.

“What, don’t like dead bird?” Engineer chuckles from the table. “Awfully picky of ya.”

“I was hoping for milk, actually,” Spy intones a little harshly, feeling too sick and irritated to indulge the other man’s banter. He needs milk to fill his stomach and get him through lunch. Coffee is out of the question. His heartbeat is already dangerously strong.

“Sorry,” Engineer apologizes, actually looking a little regretful. “I took the last of it. As you can see, it’s bare bones in the ice box, so I was fixin’ to do a little shopping in a bit.” He pauses thoughtfully. “Can get some strawberries if ya like. You seem to like those.”

Spy doesn’t reply, and resists the urge to hold his middle. He could feel his heartbeat against the walls of his stomach. The nearest grocery store is about twenty minutes away, twenty minutes back.

For what wasn’t the first time nor certainly the last, Spy curses the fact that he lives with eight other full-grown men in one building, two of which ate food at the pace of four. Heavy, he could somewhat understand, but Scout, despite being in his twenties and as thin as he was, possessed the demonic appetite of a teenage boy.

(Despite his irritation, Spy is grateful that the boy isn’t starving, that they all have a fairly reliable source of food. For all his ignorant squandering and selfish complaining, Scout will never have to know what it was like to spend days without food, to have to convince your stomach that you will feed it even if you both know that the only food around was rotting or hideously expensive.)

Their war, at least, was a comfortable one.

“You feelin’ alright, hoss?” Engineer asks, looking at him worriedly. “You’re just standin’ there, starin’ at the fridge.”

Spy, startled, tries to find the appropriate words.

“...I just need a cigarette,” he finally says. Which isn’t a lie. Engineer wrinkles his nose and Spy frowns, knowing why the laborer is doing that.

“It’s only five in the morning and you already smell like an ashtray, boy,” Engineer chuckles. “I think you need a bath, not another cig.”

“Connard,” Spy spits angrily, and storms out of the kitchen. He has no energy to bite back today. He is simply too out of sorts.

He goes back to his room and waits for the sun to rise. Once, he almost takes out another cigarette, but then he remembers Engineer’s slightly derisive smile, his judging expression.

“Damn him,” Spy mutters. As if he could expect that idiot to understand that he needed to smoke, to gain some form of control over his sickness, his nerves. He holds his stomach with one hand, and with the other, reads a book but not the words. The sun rises, unconquered by anything, unlike most people.

Spy thinks about what he will do today. Today is Saturday, so no fights are scheduled, but he doesn’t feel like being around other people.

At least, not while they can see him. Perhaps he will pay a little visit to the RED base and see what his dear enemies are getting up to. Perhaps, he thinks wryly, he could even see what they were keeping in their kitchen. For intelligence gathering, of course. 

It is easy to leave the base when invisible. No one stops him. He is simply a shadow taking its timely leave. Besides, BLU’s base is always colder than RED’s, the cooler colors seeming to leech warmth from the air. It didn’t help that BLU’s base was built in the shadow of the sun. No wonder his team always seemed to be somewhat gloomier than their counterparts.

He walks along the long road, enjoying the warmth from the sun.

When he arrives at RED base, he can smell cooking meat almost immediately. The faint aroma of something spiced and honeyed fills his nose. He stops in his tracks, sniffing the air. The smoke in his stomach clears, and his nausea abates somewhat. For the first time today, he feels like he could stomach food.

Then he scoffs and slaps his head. He wasn’t actually here to eat, idiot. That would be inappropriate, and even he wouldn’t stoop to such petty thievery.

He gets inside the RED base easily. A quick walk around tells him that most of the REDs are outside. The halls are empty, structurally identical to BLU’s, but the red paint everywhere still gives him an uneasy feeling. He can die here if he’s caught, after all. His enemies are everywhere, in places unknown, inside these walls and out.

So he goes outside, following the delicious smells into the courtyard.

It’s not even a proper courtyard, really. Just an open area behind the base where there is more grass than sand. There are plenty of REDs about; Scout and Soldier seem to be loudly fighting each other with baseball bats, Sniper is sleeping in the shade, and Demoman is mixing various deadly-looking powders on a picnic table while Pyro watches.

Their Medic, Heavy, and Spy seem to be elsewhere, which gives him three potential disguises. Engineer is the closest to him, and is tending to what appears to be a grill. A table next to him is piled with food and cooking supplies.

Spy’s stomach growls so loud that he jumps a foot in the air. He briefly worries that someone heard it, and hastily retreats into the base, trying to calm down. It’s difficult when he’s so light-headed.

Breathe, he commands himself. Stop acting like a fucking imbécile and do your job.

He settles on RED Spy. It is the easiest disguise, for he simply has to act like himself. He must be quick, though, in case the other Spy is prowling around somewhere.

Besides, as Spy, he at least will have an excuse to smoke.

When he walks into the courtyard, a second mask over his face, he keeps his back straight, his head held high. It's not an easy thing to do considering how his stomach is twisting. Some of the others glance at him, but they soon return to what they were doing.

“Afternoon, Spy,” Engineer says, looking surprised. When he turns around, Spy can see him wearing a pink apron over his overalls, and resists the urge to taunt him. “Didn’t expect to see ya here. I thought you were headin’ to town?”

“Change of plans,” he replies smoothly, but doesn’t elaborate. Over-explanations tended to be suspicious. RED Engineer’s eyes pierce him through his dark goggles, so he looks away, smoothing his lapels with a neutral expression. He grows nervous when Engineer looks at him for a second longer than usual, but then the man turns away, going back to his grill.

“Have a seat,” he says cheerfully, and Spy sighs to himself. “Would ya like some ribs? They’re honey-glazed, special recipe. I’ve also got some baked beans if you’d like. Creamed corn. Whatever strikes your fancy.”

Before Spy can reply, he hears the running of footsteps.

“Yo, hardhat!” RED Scout calls as he jogs over, his face covered in dirt and purple bruises as he sports a huge, toothy smile. RED Soldier is lying face-down in the dirt meters away, but Spy thinks he can see him breathing. “You almost done with the grub? That shit smells amazing, man.”

“Not until you wash your hands, Scoot,” Engineer tells him firmly, as there is indeed blood and dirt caked on Scout’s hands. “Do not make me tell you twice, boy,” he threatens when Scout groans.

It would have been a comical sight to see a man getting treated like a child by another man several inches shorter and wearing a pink apron, but RED Engineer is... oddly intimidating.

Spy would know. He’s faced off with the man in battle several times before. Spy much prefers to catch the man when he’s turned around, because when the Engineer confronts him tête-à-tête, wretch swinging, smile sharper than any knife, it tended to get quite bloody.

And then Scout dashes off, but not before glancing at Spy and sticking out his tongue. How immature.

“Kids,” Engineer says, shaking his head, but he has a soft smile on his face that swims in Spy’s vision. Faintly flustered both from hunger and the RED Engineer’s friendliness, Spy only hums in agreement. He sits down heavily and focuses on not throwing up.

There are bread rolls on a plate across the table, the letters RED printed across the package, but Spy cannot muster the courage to take one. L'appétit vient en mangeant, he thinks, repeating it in his head, but it doesn't help. Shakily, he pulls out a cigarette and lights it so fast that he burns his thumb.

“Merde..!” he hisses loudly through his teeth.

“Aw, hell,” Engineer exclaims, and hurries over. Before Spy can protest, Engineer is gripping the skin of wrist that his glove doesn’t reach. Touching him.

Spy tries very, very hard not to lash out. He has a knife in his left sleeve; he could slit the Engineer’s throat from such a close distance. But he hesitates, frozen despite the hot sun overhead.

“Hmm, doesn't look too bad,” Engineer murmurs, looking at Spy’s thumb critically, and Spy can see a bead of sweat roll down the laborer's neck from the heat. Spy jerks his hand out of the other man's grip with a grimace.

“It is fine,” he says stiffly. A dark mark appears on his thumb and begins to throb. What’s worse, he dropped his cigarette in the grass. Putain.

“Want me to wake the doc? I’m sure he’s lazin’ around in bed somewhere.”

“It’s fine!” he insists loudly, and then instantly regrets it when Demoman and Pyro glance up at them curiously from far away. 

There is a brief, tense silence. When Spy finds the courage to look at the RED Engineer, the man is turned away, back to working at the grill. He feels almost... guilty, somehow. Which he shouldn’t. This man is his nemesis, after all. They kill each other for money and often enjoy it.

Spy sighs, resting his head weakly on his hand, and watches the enemy Engineer work with half-closed eyes. The laborer’s strong back shifts and hunches with concentration, and his sleeves are rolled up to reveal his forearms.

Then, suddenly, the grill erupts into flames, ones that roar almost over Engineer’s head.

Startled, Spy utters a small shriek as he’s blasted with heat, but the flames die down almost immediately as Engineer skillfully smothers them. He glances around at Spy, and his expression is strangely humored.

“Aw, what? Scared of a lil' fire?” he asks, his smile sharp and teasing. Spy’s face itself bursts into flames. Mon dieu... he wants to shoot himself out of embarrassment.

Yes, he is scared of fire. He burns alive in his nightmares often enough, from bombs, or flamethrowers. Fire is fire regardless of where it comes from.

“Y-you! Well! I... it was unexpected!” he sputters, and RED Engineer has the nerve to laugh at him. Spy’s hands tremble, but he forces himself to stay calm.

“Aren’t you precious,” Engineer snickers.

“I will stab you, and your death will not be quick,” he hisses. Thankfully, Engineer doesn’t seem fazed, so empty threats probably weren’t out of character for RED Spy. Typical.

“Just shut up and eat, ya snake,” he replies, and sets a plate of food in front of Spy before sitting down across the table with his own, considerably bigger-portioned plate.

Spy looks at the food with hesitation. There are thick slivers of meat oozing with sauce (ribs, Engineer had called them, a visually unpleasant name), as well as beans, corn, and mashed potatoes. The cacophony of foods and rich smells is dizzying, and nausea starts to creep back into his middle.

Just take it and flee, he yells at himself. But he can’t move. He can’t do anything, so he sits there and hungers.

“You’re lookin’ a little pale there, slim,” Engineer says, sitting casually across the table from him, chewing on a rib. His gaze is penetrating and contrasts his easy posture, as if he could see through Spy’s disguise. “Somethin’ wrong?”

Suddenly, Spy gets up and walks stiffly away from the courtyard as bile rises in his throat. He turns a corner that will hide him from view, his stomach heaving, and dry-retches into... bushes of roses.

Shocked, he stares at the roses, at their crimson vibrance and soft fullness, the shiny thorns curled just out of sight. He has not seen roses for a long time. There was no such thing as roses in the desert. He had absolutely no idea they could even grow here, so far from everything.

“...you don’t eat much, do ya?” comes a quiet voice from behind him. RED Engineer. The man would have been quite stupid not to be at least a little susicious of Spy right now, but Spy holds his stomach and doesn’t turn his back from his enemy. He is simply too enraptured by the roses. He closes his eyes.

“These are... very beautiful,” he says with a hollow tone, and clears his throat. “Do you... grow them yourself?”

“Yeah,” Engineer affirms. “As you would very well know. You help me, after all. Though... I wouldn’t particularly expect a BLU t’know that.”

Heart in his throat, knife in his hand, Spy whirls around to slash the RED Engineer in the face, but the other man already has his hands closed around his wrists as he swiftly drives his knee into Spy’s stomach, making him see stars. He can feel his disguise dropping, his suit turning from a withered red to a smokey blue.

Gasping in pain, he’s driven harshly backwards, his back crushed up against the wall so hard that it hurts. He tries to fight back against the RED’s grip, but he’s weak from not eating, and Engineer has always been physically stronger.

When the hand he’s holding the knife with is rendered immobile by the RED's iron grip, he has no choice but to shut his eyes and accept that he will soon die very, very painfully.

"Ha, knew you were a spy," Engineer grits. "Spy hates it when I grill, can't even stand to be around me, 'cuz of the smell or somethin'. Not that you weren't already acting weird, ya snake."

Spy writhes in his grip, fighting so hard that he manages to headbutt the other man, but he only receives an elbow against his throat for the trouble.

“Now hold on just a damn minute,” Engineer hisses in his ear, shocking him. “I don’t know about you, but I prefer t’keep the fighting to the minimum on the weekends. They don’t pay me to kill bastards like you off the clock, after all. So how ‘bout ya go back to playin’ nice before I have to do somethin’ I might regret?”

The elbow on his throat relents a bit when Spy wheezes for air. Reluctantly, he lets his knife fall to the grass. When Engineer lets go of him, he doesn’t expect it and collapses to the ground, breathing harshly. His stomach was still spasming from the blow Engineer had given him, so he doubles over, gasping.

“...ya know, it might’ve been easier pretendin’ to be the spook if you weren’t this sick,” Engineer snarks, but his tone is soft. Or perhaps Spy was imaging things. “The hell’s even wrong with you? Why don't you just eat?”

Spy suddenly laughs out loud, startling the other man.

“I don’t know!” he giggles and snorts, his composure collapsing. “I’ve been this way all my life. Even before the fucking Nazis were bombing my city and taking my parents away on a train, I could not eat properly! When I was starving to death and managed to find scraps, I could not eat to save my life!”

He chokes on a dry sob, his head in his hands. He hears the RED Engineer hesitate before he, too, sits down in the grass, but he doesn’t get too close.

“Wanna... talk about it?” he offers hesitantly. Spy laughs again, but it’s quieter. More defeated. His head feels light.

“I would prefer that you kill me, s'il vous plaît,” he admits, leaning back against the wall with a groan. “...my apologies. I am quite hungry. I’m not thinking straight.”

He smiles wryly, and suppresses his ridiculous urge to cry. “And here I am now, talking to you. An enemy. Why did I come here, anyway? There was... no point. To any of this.”

“Well, I did say it was the weekend. Cease-fire an' all,” Engineer shrugs. Slowly, he gets up from the grass with unhurried movements. Spy peers up at him with trepidation, and hunches defensively.

“Stay here,” Engineer instructs, the faintest dangerous note in his tone. Spy doesn’t respond. He does not think he can muster the energy to get up on his own, anyhow.

The laborer returns a moment later, probably having retrieved a suitable weapon. However, instead of a shotgun barrel, Spy finds himself level with the plate of food he didn’t eat some minutes ago.

“...I do not think I can stomach this, désolé,” he admits. Engineer snorts, looking offended, and sits back down on the grass again. Spy realizes that it sounded as though he was insulting the laborer’s cooking, but he is too on edge to apologize.

They sit in silence for a moment. Engineer, who evidently brought a beer back with him, cracks it open with a hiss.

“So, you got caught up in the whole Nazi thing, huh,” the laborer says. Spy bristles, but knows that the RED Engineer probably is just curious.

“Yes. When I was a boy,” Spy replies, his voice made of stone. It is not something he ever talks about, and for good reason.

“Sorry,” Engineer simply says. “I was real little myself, but that whole thing was across the pond for me, ya know. That war was part of a whole ‘nother world altogether.”

Spy doesn’t respond. He suddenly wants to speak about his childhood to this man, which was madness. He was sitting on the dirty ground, in enemy territory, speaking with the enemy Engineer about the war he should have already left behind. He drags his hand down his face, and takes a shuddering breath.

“My father...” Spy begins, looking into the unending horizon of the distance. “He was a linguist, who wrote illegal newspapers, and was a baritone singer for a choir. He sang in many languages, including German. My knowledge of this language... that is how resistance groups recruited me. That is how... I began my life as a spy.”

“Goddamn,” Engineer says eloquently. Spy smiles at his genuine shock.

“With my parents gone, I had only my grandmother. We would not have survived long, if I did not learn how to survive for the both of us.”

Engineer whistled.

“Still, that’s impressive, doin’ that kinda work so young.”

“Ah, it was child’s play, monsieur. Nothing elegant,” Spy says drily, but secretly feels flattered. “All I did was carry messages, money, the like. Sometimes I hid behind doors and listened to conversations.” He stops. “Once, I even destroyed a Nazi’s radio.”

“So you were as much of a bastard back then as ya are now, huh?” Engineer says wryly, sipping on his beer.

Spy remembers the thrill of survival that made the fear, the terror, and the risk on his life worth it. He had only been a little orphan boy, but that didn’t stop him from fighting back against his enemies who infested Paris like rats and drained it of resources. Even when food grew scarce and only the hideously rich could afford it, he prevailed. He starved to death, but he emerged from his grave alive.

He turns to the rosebush next to him and fingers a leaf. Slowly, carefully, he picks a rose. He thinks about kissing it, but instead puts it in his lapel.

“There was... a rosebush, by the Seine. It was dead. Burned,” he finally says. “This is where I concealed most of my contraband, the letters, the newspapers. And no one ever discovered it, because one must bleed in order to tear the thorns from a rose.”

Engineer doesn’t say anything. Spy shakes his head.

“There is something wrong with me,” he states. He's not talking about his childhood profession anymore. Engineer shakes his head right back.

“Nah,” he replies, and smiles, despite himself. “I don’t think there’s anythin’ wrong with ya. You just grew up in the wrong time, in the wrong way. It wasn’t fair, but... it wasn’t your fault.”

Spy only looks at Engineer, perplexed by his perceptiveness. He didn't expect his enemy to be so... thoughtful. Perhaps he wasn’t as good of a spy as he’d thought.

"War is hard," Engineer offered. " 'specially now that we're all fightin' in one together.

Spy snorts so hard that the other man looks a little offended.

"This?" Spy exclaims, gesturing around him. "This is not a war. This is a fight between children squabbling in a sandbox." He laughs, but it is not a happy sound. "Trust me when I say that you should be grateful, that this is the closest you will ever get to fighting a 'war'."

"Well, I 'spose you'd know better than most," Engineer says, and leaves it at that.

The two sat in silence for a moment, listening to the breeze.

“...I am sorry I tried to stab you,” Spy mutters, frowning when Engineer only laughs.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll make it up to me come Monday,” and he winks. Spy frowns harder, flustered. He thinks he is starting to know why the RED Engineer keeps looking at him like that, why he didn’t kill him from the moment he entered the courtyard.

“Say, I have an idea,” he says suddenly. Spy looks at him wearily.

“You’re still pretty hungry, right? No, don’t say a damn word—I know ya are. You got that look in your eyes, and you’re skinny as all hell. It makes me sad just lookin’ at you. So here’s what I propose.”

Engineer takes a fork, picks up a rib, and holds it up in front of Spy’s face.

“No,” Spy protests automatically. “You are not feeding me like—like I’m some child.”

“What, are you embarrassed or somethin’?” Engineer says, grinning, effectively trapping Spy in a corner. “Just close your eyes. I reckon if ya don’t see the food in front of you, you won’t have as hard 'a time gettin’ it down. That’s my theory, anyway.”

“I do not trust you,” Spy glares, crossing his arms.

“That’s fair,” the other man shrugs. “However, this food is gettin’ pretty cold, and I worked pretty hard on it, y’know. Would hate for it t'go to waste.”

A second passes, and Spy sighs. He closes his mouth, and stiffly lets his mouth fall open, feeling like an utter fool.

A fork with meat enters his mouth, and Spy closes his mouth around it, chewing, then swallowing. Surprisingly... it’s actually quite good. He tastes honey, and a balance of spices.

“So? How’s it taste?” Engineer’s voice asks. He sounds casual, as if he wasn't degrading Spy with every second of this nonsense.

“It’s... okay,” Spy says. His tone is harsh, but he opens his mouth again as Engineer chuckles.

They go on like this, the enemy Engineer feeding the Spy. The man’s theory was right. It is indeed easier to eat this way. Although Spy is somewhat sick, he isn’t as hungry. His dizziness subsides.

Soon, he even feels... full.

Then, instead of the fork, something cold and hard touches the bottom of his lip, like the rim of a bottle. Spy resists the urge to open his eyes.

“Just some beer,” Engineer says. “Careful.”

Very slowly, the man tips the bottle forward and beer  trickles down Spy’s throat. He almost chokes at first, for the beer was thick and warm, but accepts it anyway. Engineer uses his other hand to lightly brace Spy’s neck, and Spy’s throat bobs against it.

Then, the bottle is moved away from him, and his mouth parts as he swallows and licks his lips. Engineer doesn’t remove his hand from Spy’s neck.

“Now, this next one might be a little much, but I think ya can handle it,” Engineer says, sounding suspiciously conniving. Spy doesn’t exactly like his tone, but he keeps his eyes closed.

“Oh?” he says, pretending to sound curious, but he already knows quite well what Engineer is going to give him next.

When Engineer kisses him, he tastes sweetly like beer and honey, and Spy sees roses with no thorns in sight.

Chapter Text

Looking back on it, Dell never should have robbed that grave.

Temptation, to him, isn’t tangible. It’s not a factor in any equation, but an imaginary number that one only considers when nothing else can bridge that gap between the theoretical and the possible.

You don’t get tempted to steal money or do drugs or skip out on some tax forms. You simply think about how you could benefit by not benefiting others and somehow the machine of prosperity and high cotton builds itself and utilizes your self-worth for fuel.

In other words, self-worth is the imaginary number in the equation of addiction.

But that was probably just the Devil inside him talking.

He’s a little drunk. Okay, maybe he’s more than a little drunk. He can’t really feel the tips of his fingers or stand properly, so he’s in prime condition to make terrible decisions. Dell looks at the blueprints, how everything swims and blurs like an ocean, and then he looks at his hand, which appears in perfect clarity. He’s left-handed like the Devil was, so it isn’t difficult to decide which arm had to go.

Perhaps the most difficult part of all of this is deciding what kind of saw he wants to use.

Many of his own tools were meant for wood and soft metals. He doesn’t want to be in the middle of sawing only for the teeth to get stuck in the bone. He wishes he had a proper bone saw, but blood is roaring in his ears, and if he leaves the room now he’ll probably collapse and wake up to find the blueprints never existed to begin with. That he only ever imagined their existence.

He trips on some bottles on his way to the garage. Glass is constantly never very far away from a state that could cut you apart.

Maybe he’ll use a backsaw to get a more precise cut down into his flesh, then switch over to a hacksaw in order to cut through the radius and the ulna. It shouldn’t be any more difficult than cutting through polycarbonate or fiberglass. After all, every saw is only ever as good as the force and precision you pour into it.

The line he draws on his forearm is very crooked, but he doesn’t need it to be perfect. He knows how to cut straight. He’s an engineer, fuck’s sake, even if his pa didn’t believe it.

Dell won’t even need to lubricate the saws. His blood will do it for him.

His lonely little house echoes nothing but himself. There is no one around but him. If he messes this up, he will probably die here. Probably won’t get found for a good few weeks, and by then his blood will be black and his body will be full of flies, buzzing around in the hollows of his chest where his heart used to be. At least he doesn’t have a son that will bury his blueprints with him.

Dell cracks open another beer, drinks half of it in two swallows, and immediately forgets the taste. He’s kissed death on the lips before. Might as well go all the way and get married while the relatives were still in town.

He puts his arm on a cutting board, his blueprints nearby. Blood roars in his ears. He picks up a saw. He starts building something wonderful enough to make a dead man roll over in his grave, and the blood arrives exactly on time.

“Ah, hell,” is what he says when he wakes up lying in what is clearly a hospital bed. He feels clinically sore and light-headed, like if someone made him into a pillow, doused him in alcohol, and then beat him half to death. The blood in his ears is a quiet mumble. He can’t really feel anything past his neck. Somewhere, a radio is playing music. Or maybe it was just a radiator. Or maybe it was the buzzing noises in his head.

“Hell, indeed,” says a voice. Dell looks over with lidded eyes to see a man sitting in a chair, legs crossed, reading a book. He’s wearing scrubs and a doctor’s coat, but his entire ensemble is burgundy, and neatly fitted as if tailored. All that was missing was a fancy tie.

If he could move his lungs, he’d laugh. What kind of doctor tailors their own hospital scrubs?

“Thought doctors were ‘sposed to wear white,” he slurs. His tongue is full of buzzing termites. He's glad he isn’t made of wood, or he’d be a goner.

The man in the chair raises an eyebrow. He’s real pretty, like some foreign movie villain. His dark hair is full and pushed back, and touched with silver at the temples. A five o'clock shadow darkens his thin jaw.

Then the man smiles wickedly, and Dell forgets to breathe.

“Far easier to wash the blood out of something already red, no?” he crows. There’s something wrong with his voice, as if his nose were blocked, or he had a head cold.

“Y’know, you’re real... real, ah—you know...” Dell tries to say, but the words keep falling out of his mouth. He wants to move his hands to gesture at the other man’s face, but he can’t move them.

The man just rolls his eyes, closes his book, and leans closer. He smells terrible, like oxidating copper. Or maybe it was just the blood coming out of Dell’s nose.

“Go back to sleep,” the man instructs, and puts something over Dell’s face. A clear mask hooked up to a wheezing machine. But he doesn’t mind. He’s too busy dreaming about the color of bloodstains when washed and dried, how some things could simply never be removed.

ᨏ

He’s not awake so much as he’s not asleep. There is a difference.

He hears the nasally-voiced doctor talking to someone, another man with a voice considerably more excited and higher pitched. He can’t put together their words in his brain. Either he’s having a stroke, or they’re not speaking English.

“Oi, he’s awake, ya bogans,” someone says reproachfully. The talking ceases almost immediately.

“Why, hello!” a boom exclaims. Dell cracks open his eyes to see a blinding white smile, and a man in a long white coat with a spitcurl leaning very, very close to him. His breath smells like blood and saline.

“Hi,” he mumbles back. He closes his eyes again. The lights in the room are white and almost blinding. Then someone’s fingers start snapping rapidly.

“No, no, stay awake. I have questions for you, bitte.”

He groans, but obeys.

The man (who is clearly a doctor judging by the stethoscope around his neck and the round metal disc on his head) is not standing but rather... casually sitting on his bed. Almost touching his legs. Dell feels extremely uncomfortable, especially that the doctor wearing burgundy is watching him critically, as well as an additional man in pale blue scrubs.

“Uh, ask away,” is all he says.

“Alright!” the doctor exclaims, his smile never wavering. He pulls out a clipboard from seemingly nowhere. “Now, I need you to tell me your name, the president’s name... hmm, let's see... as well as the chancellor’s name, God's true name, and then my name for good measure. And please hurry! These are time sensitive questions.”

Despite wearing thick rubber gloves, the doctor in the white coat snaps some more.

Dell only gapes at him in confusion before the  man in pale blue scrubs scoffs loudly, clicking his tongue at the doctor sitting on his bed.

“For God’s sake, Ludwig, just ask the normal questions. You this every bloody time,” he says, sounding exasperated. Then he turns to Dell, his face softening. “Just your name an’ the president’s, mate. It’s just so we know your brain’s workin’ like it should.”

“Oh, well. Name’s Dell. Conagher. And the president’s Mr. JFK, ‘course,” he says, and then turns bright red. He just noticed that under the blankets, he’s wearing some sort of dressing gown instead of normal clothes... and nothing else.

The doctor, Humboldt, hops off Dell's bed and goes to the one in burgundy with a conspiratorial expression.

“Wait, is that right? Who is the president of this country again?” he whispers loudly, furrowing his brows. The other man lights up, but then his face falls as he frowns. Evidently, he doesn’t remember, either.

“Uh, ‘scuse me, boys,” Dell cuts in, a little hoarse. “May I ask why in the hell I’m lyin’ in this bed, in a hospital, wearin’ nothin’ but this... nightgown...”

There is a brief silence as Humboldt opens his mouth to say something, but the man in pale blue beats him to it.

“Take a gander for yourself,” he says, and gestures at Dell. And Dell looks.

There’s a needle in his left arm, for some reason, connected by a tube to a bag of what appears to be blood hanging from a literal coat rack (there were hats hanging from the other hooks). And his other arm...

Oh.

“Oh,” he says.

“Oh,” the man in burgundy agrees, staring at Dell with pale eyes.

“I cut it off myself!” Humboldt exclaims. “Picture this, if you will—a man is wheeled on a gurney into my operating room with his arm already half-sawed off! Before I even touched him! Whoever tried to cut off your arm clearly did not do a good job, mein freund, because they did not even bother to finish what they started. I simply lopped the rest of it off, and voila! You began to bleed out twice as quickly as before! There is no need to thank me, of course.”

“...I see,” is all that he can say, staring at the bandaged stump where his right hand used to be.

Dell remembers it now, of course. Cutting all the way down into the radius before his body started convulsing uncontrollably, forcing him to drop the saw. The blood in his ears was a tidal wave, the kind that drowns thousands of people at once. Dell thinks he might have gotten to a phone, somehow. It was hard to rememeber. He kept slipping on the blood puddles and banging his head.

Well, the job is done, then. Even if he hadn’t finished it himself. Now all he needs is to follow the blueprints.

“So, I ‘spose you’ll still have t’stick a few needles in me before ya let me go, is that right? Then I can leave?” he asks detachedly. The man in burgundy makes a strangled noise.

“Are you joking?” he sputters, sounding almost offended. “You just had your arm amputated! That—that warrants a week here at least!”

Suddenly, Dell snaps his fingers (with his right hand; not an easy feat), making a loud confirming noise in his throat as all three doctors stare blankly at him.

“Aha! I get it now,” he chuckles. “You’re French! That’s why ya sound like ya have the flu in both of your nostrils!”

Gratifyingly, the two other men laugh as the Frenchman sputters angrily, his face turning the color of his jacket.

“I should have let you bleed to death,” he spits, sounding outraged. “Fils de pute!”

He storms out of the room, which was a shame. He really was kinda easy on the eyes. Dell begins to feel a little bad.

“Ah, I think I’m gonna like you,” the man in pale blue says, wiping a tear from his eyes. “Name’s Mundy, physiatrist. ‘Course, you don’t have to call me ‘doctor’ or nothin’, ‘cause I’m the one that hooked your wanger up to the ureter. It’d just be right awkward, you understand.”

Dell isn’t really sure he fully understood that sentence well enough to respond, so he just nods.

“And I am Doctor Ludwig Humboldt,” the smiling man says, offering his left hand which Dell takes with a cringe (the man’s brightly-colored glove was... oddly sticky). “However, you will call me doctor, or I will be contractually obligated to remove the rest of your arm along with your skeleton. But please do not take it personally. This is simply how we establish respect in Germany.”

“Ain’t that how you got banned from Germany?” Mundy mutters, but Dr. Humboldt ignores him with a wide smile that makes Dell begin to sweat.

“I will see you tomorrow, Herr... Carpenter, was it? Tschüss!” he says with a flourish, and exits the room, his long coat billowing behind him. The door closes with a loud, deafening sound. Leaving him alone with Mundy.

“...do I really got t’stay here for a whole week?” he asks Mundy, who scratches the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” he says apologetically. “It’s just so we can make sure you’re doin’... y’know, alright. Physically. Me specifically, I’m the one who’ll be stickin’ by you like a leech, just to help you out. Why, you got somewhere more important to be?”

“Nah, it’s just...” Dell says, but then stops, because he doesn’t really know. He slumps a little, the reality of his situation starting to register a little. He lifts his arm to scratch the back of his neck, but then lowers his stump embarrassedly. Mundy smiles at him crookedly.

“You’ll get through aw’right,” he says, bumping a knuckle against Dell’s shoulder. “Seen it ‘appen dozens of times. ‘Sides, except for the spook, this place ain’t that bad, really. Maybe a little loud an’ full of rough types, but...”

“Who’s ‘spook’?” he asks.

“Just Adrien. Doctor Adrien. The Frenchie, y’know. We call ‘im that on account of him bein’ so damn quiet. Always sneakin’ up behind us an’ scarin’ the shit out of everyone. I’m fairly sure ‘e does on purpose, the drongo.”

“I sure did make him mad,” Dell smiles, remembering the man’s pretty face contorting in anger. “Uh, sorry,” he adds. Mundy chuckles again.

“Nah, ‘e’s always mad about somethin’ or other. I’d be careful, though. I'm pretty sure ‘e carries knives.”

“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Dell says, somewhat nervously.

“And, ah, what did he mean earlier?” he asks as Mundy looked at him questioningly. “The whole I should have let you bleed to death business. He was actin’ like he did me a real favor or somethin’.”

“Mate, Adrien was the one who fixed you up after Ludwig... well, you know,” Mundy explains, looking thoughtful. “I saw you, afterwards. You weren’t... doin’ so well. But Adrien, he went right up an’ calmed you down. It was pretty sweet of ‘im, to be honest. Usually ‘is bedside manner is fuckin’ terrible.”

Suddenly, Dell lets out a strangled gasp as his arm throbs and seems to contract into itself. He clutches his shoulder tightly, not daring to touch anywhere else, his nails digging into his skin.

“Ah, bugger―here, deep breath,” Mundy says, and roots around a nearby tray to take out a needle. “Here’s some morphine. You needed to take one soon, anyhow.”

“Much obliged,” he gasps as the needle enters his shoulder. The two wait for a moment, and soon what’s left of his arm grows numb, as does his mood.

Mundy then stands up, hands in his pocket. Dell realizes how tall the man was, how he had to slouch.

“Well, I’d best be off, then,” he states, checking his watch. “The morph might make ya feel a bit tired, but it’s gettin’ late anyhow. I’ll be back later to bring you dinner if you’d like, but otherwise you got to stay in bed for a bit. There’s newspapers an’ stuff on the table.”

“Thank ya kindly... stretch,” Dell says wryly, his limbs growing heavier. He wasn’t sure how the man would react to a nickname, but Mundy only grins toothily at him. Luckily, it looked like they’d be getting along just fine.

“See you,” his new friend says as he dims the lights and then closes the door behind him. Dell doesn’t bother reaching for a newspaper before he shuts his eyes, and falls alseep to the muffled noises of the hospital; people talking, machines beeping. Somewhere, a radio is playing music. He hopes he isn’t imagining it.

ᨏ

Morning comes with twitching aches and phantom pains, and the frightening doctor who smiled entirely too wide was back. Dell is given a shot with twice the speed and none of the gentleness of the shot he got last night, which makes him wince. Then, the doc pulls out a thermometer.

“Say ‘ah’!” he exclaims enuthsiastically. Dell opens his mouth, but doesn't make the noise. The doctor tuts at him as he takes his temperature, and then studies the thermometer with such an intense expression that Dell actually grows a little worried.

“...somethin’ wrong?” he asks nervously. Dr. Humboldt only smiles at him, which could mean a number of things, really.

“Nein, not at all!” he says, and then tosses the thermometer behind him, which promptly shatters on the floor. “I merely forgot that I can’t read imperial units, haha!”

“...oh.”

“Ah, Herr Miller! Come in!” Dr. Humboldt calls to a young man standing at the doorway, who looks nervous for some reason.

“Yeah, thanks doc,” he says nasally (did every single person in this damn hospital have a weird accent or what??). He sounds awful young to be a doctor... Dell wonders what this boy’s role is.

“This is Jeremy,” Dr. Humboldt grins happily at Dell, his blue eyes void of any true emotion behind his round spectacles. “He will your nurse for the remainder of your stay here. Bis später, mein kleiner freund!”

And just like a bird that shit on your car window, the doctor is gone as soon as he’d appeared.

“Now hold up a moment—did he say nurse?” Dell questions the boy, whose baby face made him appear no older than a high-schooler, the poor fella.

“Uh, yeah! Ya got a problem with that, baldie?” Jeremy snarks, but his face is dusted red. Dell holds up a placating hand, ignoring the insult and resisting the urge to insist that, yes, he did have hair, it was just light-colored and cropped close to his skull.

“Nah, not at all,” he says. “I just... didn’t know that men could be nurses, s’all.”

Jeremy seems to calm down at that.

“Yeah, well, I totally just picked up this job to talk to chicks,” he shrugs, smiling wide like he was proud of himself. “Thought it was pretty clever, y’know? I mean, literally every other nurse here is a lady! Score, right? I guess they thought I was just too hot to refuse when I signed up.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever ya say, shortstop,” Dell chuckles in amusement.

The two of them have a (fairly one-sided on Dell’s part) conversation as Jeremy (incorrectly) takes his pulse, re-wraps his banages (dude, your scar looks sick!), and asks him random questions that Dell wasn’t sure were necessary (such as if he liked Tom Jones or if he thought either fancy cars or motorcycles were better for picking up girls). Meanwhile, Jeremy scribbled away on his clipboard like nobody’s business.

“Wha’cha writin’ there, son?” he asks, finding himself a bit endeared by Jeremy’s enthusiasm and general friendliness, despite how much the boy ran his mouth.

Unexpectedly, Jeremy holds the clipboard a little close to his chest as he looks a bit embarrassed.

“Uh, just unimportant hospital BS,” he laughs anxiously. “Real classified, you know how it is.”

Dell raises an eyebrow suspiciously, not convinced. 

“You were writin’ down everythin’ I just told ya, right? C’mon now, let me have a look to see if ya got everythin’ correct.”

“...fine,” Jeremy relents, squaring his shoulders. “But only because ya got an arm off. Which is frickin’ cool, by the way. Just... don’t laugh. Or I’ll kill you.”

Jeremy hands him the clipboard, which Dell takes with his left and maunevers with some struggle to turn over with one hand. His mouth parts in suprise.

On top of rows of proper standard questions (of which he wasn’t asked a single one), there were pencil drawings of various things, such as a flaming motorcycles, a detailed profile of a man with an afro and a cross necklace, and other fine sketches. Most of them clearly based off of Dell’s answers. Dell whistles, impressed.

“That’s some damn good art, shortstop,” he implores, and then tries not to regret saying it after Jeremy’s ego visually grows twice as big. “But why not just write down my answers? ...or better yet, ask the questions you were ‘sposed to, heh.”

Jeremy glances around with widened eyes, as if afraid they were being overheard. He leans conspiratorially closer to Dell, who rolls his eyes and imitates the movement.

“Don’t tell nobody this, but... I can’t read that well, okay?” he says, sounding extremely mortified about this fact. “I can, like, read thing like signs and people’s names, but complex shit is hard. I dunno. I’m a drop-out.”

“Boy, how the hell did you even manage to get a job here in the first place??” he exclaims with disbelief.

“Calm down, sheesh! And keep your voice down, God,” the nurse says indignantly. “Look, let’s just say... some guy owed me a favor and hooked me up. I lied. I didn’t just take this job for girls, okay. My mom’s real sick and—and I need money.”

Jeremy falls silent for a moment, genuinely put off, and Dell immediately feels bad.

“Hey, nothin’ wrong with havin’ trouble reading. We all got our problems,” he reassures the young man, wracking his brain. “Like, uhh... did’ja know that I can’t drive to save my life?”

“Wait... what!?” the nurse blurts, looking morbidly shocked. “Who the hell—what kinda old bastard are you that you can’t frickin’ drive!? ”

“Told’ja it was bad,” Dell laughs. “Y’see, it’s been somethin’ of a lifelong fear of mine. I’ve just always been real terrified of goin’ down the road in a thousand-poud vehicle that I never got around to learnin’.”

“Dude,” Jeremy exclaims, looking comically about to cry. “I could not imagine not bein’ able to drive. That shit’s like my entire life! I bet—I bet you could still learn. It’s not too late...”

Then, Jeremy glances timidly at Dell’s stump and seems to reconsider.

“Or, maybe... not,” he mumbles, but Dell only waves an airy hand, ignoring the heaviness in his heart.

“Well, ya were right about one thing,” is all that he says. “S’never too late to learn, if ya catch my drift.”

The young man looks at him with something like amazement in his eyes, and for the first time since Dell woke up at this hospital, he forgets about his own pain for a moment.

Of course, he thinks as he waves goodbye to Jeremy, the boy returned to his perky self, he had completely made up that whole thing with being afraid of driving, but a little dishonesty (when used correctly) never hurt anybody.

Dell lays in bed for a time, cradeling his aching stump, and ponders Jeremy’s parting words to him.

Speakin’ of that guy who owed me a favor, he’d said. Well, he’s one of the doctors here. A real asshole, generally, but I think that’s just how he is. He’s nice enough when he wants to be. Like a cat. An old, ugly cat, heh.

Does he wear a dark red jacket and talk like he just got off the boat from France? Dell asks, honestly just guessing, but Jeremy’s eyes light up.

Yeah! How’d you know? Anyway, I just wanted to ask if you know him.

Know him? How do ya mean? What a weird thing to ask. He’s never met that Adrien fella in his life. And damn if he wouldn’t remember it.

Yeah, ‘cuz after your emergency op, he was there the whole time even though Luddy was the one operatin’. And when you were sleepin’ it off, he was just sittin’ there next to your bed, never even left. I dunno. I was just wonderin’ if you guys were friends.

Dell rubs his sore head with his sore hand, and, not for the first time, wishes he had a stiff drink. He throat is dry all the time now, no matter how much water he drinks, and his agony is starting to seep into him so deep that even the morphine is having trouble reaching it.

“Good day, Monsieur Conagher,” a voice says stiffly from the doorway. It’s Dr. Adrien, wearing burgundy and looking as haughty as ever. Dell's mind automatically goes back to what Jeremy had said about the Frenchman being at his bedside, but any courage he’d had for asking about it dies immediately in the man’s presense.

“Evenin’,” Dell replies, a little wary. He hasn’t seen the Frenchie for a few days now, and had begun to worry that he’d driven him away for good. “Look, I’m real—”

“Get up,” Dr. Adrien cuts him off, looking annoyed. “And get dressed, tout suite. We have places to be.”

Without another word, Dell obeys, sitting up with a wince as pins and needles pierce the muscles of his remaining limbs. Dr. Adrien helps him out of the IV with a furrowed brow, and doesn’t do it gently.

When he finishes, he stands up with an impatient look. Dell gathers his clothes and dresses in the bathroom as quickly as he can (just some pants and a shirt he borrowed from the hospital, as his original clothes were ruined from the blood), but struggles with one hand.

When he finishes, he takes a glance at himself in the mirror, at the dark shadows under his eyes, the light stubble along his jaw. Goddamn, he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. His stump feels extremely obvious, so he grips it self-conciously.

“Took you long enough,” Dr. Adrien remarks. The man really had no business looking so pretty with that sour expression on his face, but there he was. For the first time, Dell notices how long his lashes are. It sure doesn't help that the slender bastard is a good few inches taller than him, either.

“Sorry,” he apologizes. “S’just a much harder thing to do, now.”

The Frenchman doesn’t reply.

However, when Dr. Adrien heads for the door, Dell hesistates. The other man arches an eyebrow.

“Ah, I just...” Dell starts, fingering the right sleeve of his shirt, trying to explain his trepidation in words to a man who seemed to hate him. “I don’t—I can’t...”

In the few days he’s been here, Dell hasn’t actually been out of his room a single time, choosing instead to spend his time reading newspapers and chatting with Mundy as well as the occasional Jeremy. It was a far better alternative than walking around and risk getting gawked at like some freak.

You did this to yourself, the Devil inside him reminds him reproachfully. You would deserve it.

However, instead of insisting he walk outside anyway, Dr. Adrien’s cold expression shifts into one of slight understanding.

“...you are afraid of judgement,” he says. Dell nods slowly, averting the pale gaze of the other man. The doctor hums, then sighs. Then starts shrugging off his jacket.

“What are you doin’?” Dell questions, taken aback, but the doctor doesn’t reply.

The next moment, the Frenchman drapes the jacket over Dell’s shoulders, the sleeves hanging over his arms... and effectively hiding his stump from view.

“...it’s too long,” Dell says with a gentle smile, his heart fluttering madly in his chest, and Dr. Adrien’s face sours again.

“Then give it back,” he says, sounding the slightest bit wounded. But Dell only grins harder.

“Nah,” he says. He flicks at one of the sleeves playfully. “I work here now. Just call me Dr. Dell.”

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Adrien remarks, rolling his eyes, but his lips are upturned in a slight smile. “And just where is your doctorate, Dr. Dell? I would love to see it.”

“Got eleven of ‘em, actually,” Dell says cheerily, and revels the way the Frenchman’s face shifts from amused to shocked when he realizes that Dell is being serious.

“...you’re joking, right?” the Frenchman says flatly. He chuckles.

“Nope. Got eleven hard science PhDs. I’m an engineer, ya know. And, ah, didn’t ya say we had somewhere t’be?”

With a grumble, Dr. Adrien takes him by the shoulder and leads him to the hallway where they walk together, side by side.

“Eleven...” the Frenchman mutters in disbelief, but that is all he says on the subject.

Suddenly, their path is abruptly cut off by a screaming man in a hospital gown who is wearing a... bucket on his head, the front of it covering his eyes comepletely.

“Screamin’ eagles!!" he shouts like a madman. The man looks wildly around the halls before his gaze locks on Dr. Adrien. He barrels towards them, and Dell backs up nervously, but the doctor looks unfazed.

“Ah, Frenchie!” the man shouts in their faces, his face breaking into a wide smile. “Seen any commie spies around here!? I swear on my own grave that if I so much as see someone wearing red, I will make them wish they had thought to put on a different color shirt!”

“Not around here, I’m afraid,” Dr. Adrien says dutifully, brushing dust from his shirt, which, coincidentally, is red. “However, if I see anyone such as that, you will be the first to know.”

Then, the helmeted man looks at Dell. Or at least, Dell assumes he was. He couldn’t see the man’s eyes, so it was diffucult to tell.

“And what about you, maggot?” he demands, jabbing a finger at Dell. “Do not tell me you know where the USSR is on the map! Because as far as I’m concerned, the only map this world needs is the one with the US of A!! And maybe Scotland, too!!”

“Jane, laddie, who the bloody fuck are ya shoutin’ at at nine in the damn mornin’??” calls a thick Scottish accent. Dell whirls around to see another man approaching them. It takes him a second to notice the man’s tapping cane, his dark sunglasses hiding his eyes from view.

“Ah, Tavish! Just in time!” Jane (?) shouts, towering over Dell, and Dell glances over at Dr. Adrien nervously. The doctor, however, is reading some papers with a bored expression on his face. “I was just about to interogate this maggot about his recent political activities!”

The blind man, Tavish, taps his way over to Dell. He leans uncomfortably close, seeming to appraise him as best as a blind man could, and then shakes his head.

“Nay, lad,” he says solemly in Jane’s direction. “He reeks like cheap beer. American beer. You an’ me both know how much those fuckin’ ruskies love their vodka and crumpets. The Queen of Russia practically invented those things, ya know,” he adds, whispering conspiratorially to Dell and Dr. Adrien as he smiles broadly.

Jane tighly clutches his chest, looking moved by Tavish’s words. He pats Dell roughly on the shoulder, who was still frozen in terror.

“You’re real good, son,” he says, his voice significantly quieter. “Keep it up and someday America will thank you for it.”

And with that, the madman with a bucket on his head marches off and out of sight. His friend Tavish sighs, but it is a fond sound.

“Well, ah’d best go keep ‘im out of trouble, the bastard,” he says, seeming to speak to Dr. Adrien, who hums in agreement. “Ah can’t let those damn Europeans make a dictatorship out of this here hospital, after all. He’d never forgive me.”

And then Tavish makes an odd head movement as if he were winking, but Dell isn’t entirely sure, as the man was wearing sunglasses. And then he was gone.

“...he does know Scotland is in Europe, right?” he asks the doctor, but Dr. Adrien pretends not to hear him, too busy checking his watch.

“We are almost late,” he insists. “Let us go.”

The doctor has yet to actually tell him just where they were going so urgently, but Dell doesn’t ask.

They pass more halls without incident, and soon end up in a ward with a sign labeled Burn Unit. 

“Stay here for a moment,” Dr. Adrien instructs Dell, who says that he will. The doctor approaches the front desk where a young woman in a purple dress is sitting, typing madly away at a typewriter.

“Miss Pauling,” he says. “Is Mikhail in his office? I have the pyschoanalysis reports that he requested.”

“Um... yes, Dr. Adrien,” the young woman replies, glancing over at Dell with a queer expression. She’s clearly noticed that he's wearing the doctor’s jacket over his shoulders, and Dell flushes in embaressment. Dr. Adrien nods and walks off.

Dell takes a seat in one of the chairs, pulling the jacket tighter around himself. It takes him a moment to realize that yards away, someone sitting at a table is beckoning to him. He glances at Miss Pauling, but she is back to typing away at her typewriter. So Dell stands up and walks deeper into the ward.

It shocks him when he realizes that, under a flower-pattered hospital gown, the person is covered head to toe is white bandages, the only exception being the full-face respirator on their that the bandaes are carefully wrapped around. The glass of the eye part is too dark to see anything, and only shows Dell’s reflection.

“Ah... hello there,” Dell greets with aprehension. The person wrapped in bandages pats the seat next to them, and Dell obediently takes a seat. The table is small and clearly not intended for adults, so it’s a bit of a struggle getting his knees under.

He looks at the table’s contents, noticing the multitude of crayons and markers as well as scattered drawings. The pictures are all crudely childish, depicting things such as rainbows, flowers, and distored shapes that look like attempts at what Dell thinks are unicorns.

They’re almost cute, regardless.

“These are pretty good, lil’ fella,” he remarks, putting his hand on his chin as if to appraise the drawings critically. “You’re a gen-u-ine Picasso, if I do say so myself.”

The bandaged person makes a happy muffled noise before grabbing a blank sheet of paper, and intensly scribbles on it for a moment. Then, the paper is held up to where Dell can see.

:) is what the paper reads. Dell can’t help the smile that stretches across his face.

However, in the next moment, a spasm of pain arcs through his stump, and he hisses and reflectively grabs it.

And instantly regrets it, as he just uncovered his arm in front of someone else.

A bandaged finger gently touches the part of his stump above where Dell is clutching it, his breathing pained and hoarse. The person seems almost to look at him questioningly.

“Ah, I just... had a bit of an... accident, recently,” he chuckles, but his voice is toneless. “I haven’t had a shot in a few hours or so, so…”

Abruptly, the bandaged person gets up and walks off, their posture determined. Dell trails off, wondering if he did something wrong, somehow.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Conagher,” says a familiar voice. Dell looks up to see the young woman from before, Miss Pauling. She walks over to him and sits down, and seems to have a much better time than he did fitting onto the small chairs.

“What happened to that poor fella?” he asks quietly, jerking a thumb at where the bandaged person retreated. Miss Pauling’s face grows sober.

“...it was such a horrible thing when he came here,” she recalls, looking at the drawings. “Poor guy had been pretty much burned alive, and now he's covered head to toe in burns. His face was hit the worst, and now he has trouble breathing without help. The fire he was pulled from was a pretty big one. No one ever figured out what caused it.”

“Lord...” Dell remarks sadly, heart squeezing in sympathy.

“Yes. And what's worse, we don’t know who he even is!” she exclaims regretfully. “Not his name, his age, or if he even has family. So he basically lives here now, until we can figure out how to help him fully recover. He’s pretty childlike, as you can see, even though he’s adult sized. Dr. Mikhail Morozov calls it ‘regression’.”

“Huh, I see. Poor fella,” Dell murmurs, staring at the brightly-colored drawings. They seemed only depressing to him, now. Miss Pauling appears to stare at them too, for a moment.

“So... I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Miss Pauling says. “...why exactly are you wearing Dr. Adrien’s coat?”

However, before he can reply, Dell hears the sound of footsteps and turns to see the bandanged person approaching him, their body language exuding excitement.

“Wha—” he begins, and then something small is pushed into his hands. Glancing at Miss Pauling, he holds the object up to the light.

It’s a small figurine of a pink unicorn. He doesn’t see anything remarkable about it until he realizes that the toy only has three legs and was missing the fourth, it clearly having been broken off somehow.

He stares at the bandaged person in shock, and his reflection stares back at him. Then, his face breaks out into a wobbly smile.

“Thank you,” he whispers, feeling extremely foolish when his eyes get a little wet. The bandaged person gives him a thumbs up, murmurring happily. Then, without so much as a warning, they wander off, seemingly to do other things.

Dell looks around to see Miss Pauling smiling gently at him, and finds it in himself to smile back.

“Why are your eyes red?” Dr. Adrien questions with alarm when they rejoin soon after. “Are you in pain? I can get you some morphine if you would like. All you need to do is ask me.”

“Nah, pardner,” he says, thumbing the corner of each eye one at a time before patting his pocket where the toy unicorn was being safely held. “Just got somethin’ in my eye, is all.”

“Hmm,” is all the doctor says, and without another word, they’re walking again.

They pass multiple more wards without incident, passing children, adults, old people. Sometimes a doctor or nurse will nod at Dr. Adrien, glance confusedly at Dell in Dr. Adrien’s jacket, but no one says anything. Dell is glad. So far, besides the bandaged fella from the Burn Ward, no one has noticed his stump, and that relieves him more than anything.

The two climb the stairs. And they climb. And climb. The railing is located on the right side and is obviously inaccesible to Dell, so without a word, Dr. Adrien takes Dell by the elbow and helps him climb. Dell only looks at the wall, his face burning.

“You know,” the doctor begins, his face breaking into a wry smile. “We’ve been walking all this time, and yet not once have you asked me where we are going. Are you not curious?”

Dell chuckles. The hand on his elbow is warm, and endearingly small. He wants to hold it, to see how much bigger his own hand is compared to the doctor’s.

“Nah, I trust ya,” he says. Dr. Adrien looks content with this.

Finally, they reach the top of the stairs. Dell looks at the other man questioningly, but the Frenchman only opens the door and beckons him through with a smirk.

They’re on the roof, and judging by the blinding reds, the soft purples and royals blues, they arrived just in time for the sun to set.

"You've been trapped in that windowless room for days now," the doctor says sheepishly. "So... I thought looking at the sun setting might make up for it."

Dell doesn’t reply or even move for a moment, too enraptued by the sight of the sky around him. Up here, on top of the hospital, the heavens seemed almost bigger and more magnificent than on the ground.

“Come on, then,” the doctor says with a smile, and pulls Dell along. The two approach the edge of the building, and when Dr. Adrien sits down with his legs hanging over, Dell only nervously glances at the ground hundreds of feet below. The doctor looks at him from the corner of his eyes.

“What? Scared?” he teases. “Don’t be. I will not let you fall. I have saved your life twice already, after all. Who’s to say I cannot do it again?”

“A-alrighty, then. I trust ya,” Dell contends, the second time that night. He sits down on the man’s left, just so he can grab him in case something happened.

The two of them sit there like that for a few minutes, drinking in the magnificence of the sky. Dell can’t see the sun due to buildings being in the way, but the sky is still real pretty regardless.

There is a flick of a lighter as Dr. Adrien takes out a cigarette and lights it. The cloud of smoke he breathes gathers above their head and soon disappears, pulled apart by the wind.

“Did you know...” the Frenchman begins, his eyes on the skyline. “...that smoking is quite harmful? Even a single cigarette increases your body’s likelihood for a myriad of diseases, such as ones of the heart or lungs. There have been some studies of this recently. Most of it not public, of course, for coporate reasons.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Dell admitted. “It must be real serious, judgin’ by your tone."

He thinks for a moment.

"Still, though," he continues. "I think it would be real hard to get people to stop. Cigs can be really very... addicting, if that’s the correct word.”

“We are all addicted to something,” Dr. Adrien professes. “For instance, my body is quite enmored with cigarettes. And you...” he glances at Dell. “Alcohol seems to be your preference.”

Dell flushes immediately, his heartbeat quickening. 

“How the hell would you know that?” he demands sharply, almost angry, and Dr. Adrien has the good grace to look apologetic.

“When you came here,” he says. “Not only was your arm crudely sawed in half, but your liver... was in the cirrhosis stage of liver disease. Ludwig noticed it when you had a poor reaction to acetaminophens. When we looked, your liver was indeed quite scarred. Sometime during your operation, he replaced your liver with another one. At my insistence, of course.”

“T-that—that sounds mighty illegal of ya,” Dell stammers, shocked that it was even possible to remove organs and replace them like that. Like faulty machine parts. Dr. Adrien merely shrugs.

“I do not have so much qualms about breaking laws, if it saves lives,” he says, and takes another drag of his cigarette. In the breeze, his combed back hair is growing messier, a few strands falling out of place and into his face. “Besides, hah, it made Ludwig quite happy.”

“Ya mentioned saving lives, before. Specifically mine,” Dell begins, and then puts his only hand on the concrete, the cold seeping into his skin. “This whole thing has been real odd. First you break some laws for me, a stranger. Then you sit at my bedside the whole time I was alseep... then that boy nurse mentions that he was convinced we were friends. Am I missin’ somethin’ here, or have we... met before?”

Throughout Dell’s tirade, the Frenchman’s face grew solemner and solemner, like a darkening shadow. He takes, yet again, another drag of his cigarette.

“You were younger,” he says. “And so was I. So young, in fact, that I was newly employed. I had barely ever conducted a single operation. The first case I ever took on happened to be that of a young man’s. He had a bullet in his chest, above his heart, from a failed suicide attempt.”

“Adrien...” Dell whispers, but his voice is carried away on the breeze. The sky grows deeper around them, pulling them further inside itself.

“You,” he whispers back. “Are the first life I have ever saved. I thought I would never see you again. So imagine my suprise when I see you, after all these years, yet again in mortal peril. You tried to cut off your arm yourself, didn’t you? I could tell by the marks on the bone. T-that is really... an addiction you must overcome. Trying to destroy yourself. I won’t let you.”

“Ah, well...” Dell murmurs, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “The first time, I was just bein’ stupid. I got into a fight with my old man durin’ a pretty bleak point in my life, and... I ‘spose I didn’t. Want to be alive anymore. I don’t even think he ever found out, thank God.”

Adrien says nothing, only waits for him to continue. He has stopped smoking his cigarette.

“An’ the second time... well, my pa just passed, recently. He never... he never thought I would amount to anythin’, you know, not like he and my grandfather had. So he buried my grandfather’s life’s work in his casket. He probably thought I would be too afraid to—to, get at them.”

Dell pauses to take a deep breath, inhaling the cool city air.

“One of the blueprints was for a robotic arm,” he explains. “It’s magnificent, really! It incoporates the entire functionality of a regular hand, but it-it can rotate 360 degrees, w-withstand extremely hot temperates, s-sp-” but he stops, choking on the lump in his throat. Adrien pats him gently on the back.

“But that’s not why you cut off half of your arm, is it?” Adrien remarks, but it isn’t a question. “It wasn’t to build something magnificent. It was to prove to yourself that you could.”

“Y-yeah... I ‘spose,” Dell concedes. After all, it’s not like he could have proven anything to his pa; the old man was busy rotting in the ground, after all. The only one around he had anything left to prove anything to was himself.

“...guess that kind of thing is hereditary,” he says softly as Adrien looks at him questioningly. “Addiction, I mean. My pa was an alcoholic, too. He drank everything away, his faliures, his son... all washing away downstream where he didn’t have to worry about it.”

But then, Dell shuts his mouth, shaking his head. He buried his pa almost two weeks ago. It was probably about time he also buried his pa in the soil of his head.

The two sit in silence again, but the air is lighter. His heart, he discovers, is lighter, now that he’s opened it.

Rather suddenly, a strong breeze picks up from below, and Dell lets out a gasp of suprise as he instincitvely grabs at Adrien. When the breeze settles, he quickly realizes that his arm is wrapped around Adrien’s waist, his face buried in the man’s shoulder.

“U-uh... Dell stammers as he lifts his head. He’s about to pull away before he feels an arm wrap around his own waist, and Adrien pulls him close enough that their shoulders touch.

“I told you that I would save you,” Adrien whispers warmly in his ear, his lips brushing against the other man's jaw. Dell forgets about being thirsty, about the blueprints sitting blood-soaked in his garage. He simply closes his eyes, pulls Adrien closer, and together, the two of them set as the sun did, in a brilliance of color and light.

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.