Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In northwest New Mexico, not far from the four corners, there's a patch of badlands that covers an area of just about 70 square miles. It's one of the many areas of badlands in the San Juan Basin, sharply eroded from time spent underwater when the sea cut North America in two. It's been baking under the sun for just about 70 million years, and these days most of it's federally protected. There's wild horses elsewhere in the basin, but you won't see them here. It's too arid, too hot and dry and desolate, for most things to survive.

When our story starts, right near the end, there aren't wild horses in the basin at all. There's just rocks jutting out of the desert and into the sky, a dying town, and a group of mercenaries who barely remember what death even means. War was all there was, here, and all there ever would be. 

The Engineer had awaited Dr. Ludwig's arrival with bated breath, a secret he had no intention of sharing with the rest of RED. Once Ludwig arrived, he was left waiting again, the doctor insistent on giving everyone a full physical. He was with Soldier, presently, something The Engineer knew would not go well. 

Not ten minutes after Dr. Ludwig had taken Soldier into the infirmary, he was back in the rec room where the rest of the team was waiting. Alone. The doctor grinned like nothing was wrong, but The Engineer could see the tension in that bonesaw-smile.

"Herr Engineer, could you come with me?" He stood with a ramrod posture almost as straight as Soldier's, hands clasped behind his back.

The Engineer was more than happy to comply. It had been months since he'd last spoken to his old friend, and there was so much to catch up on. More than that, though, his missing teammate worried him. He hauled himself up out of the chair he was sitting in and took a step towards Ludwig. Medic, now, he supposed.

"Sure thing, Doc."  They didn't speak as they walked to Medical, a desire for privacy beating out how much they had to talk about. The base at 2fort was small for what would eventually be nine people, and sound carried through the cheap wood planks like it was nothing. The infirmary was one of the few places you could have a private conversation without speaking at a near-whisper.  A conversation that the other mercenaries wouldn't hear, at least. He knew She was always listening.  The moment the stainless steel doors swung closed behind them, Medic turned to face The Engineer. He prayed he couldn't see the worry behind his goggles.

"Where's Soldier?"

"No 'hello' or 'it's good to see you', then? You've been impossible to contact since they sent you out here, you know." Medic spoke dryly, though his smile never faltered.

"Hello, Lou. It's good to see you. Where's Soldier?"

He didn't like getting impatient with people, especially his long-time friend, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Something was always, always wrong. Sometimes it felt that fate itself was rioting against this war, shuddering as they tore apart the line between past and present, life and death. More likely, their employers were cheapskates who handed people guns when they really just needed help. Neither point had ever been enough to stop a Conagher before. 

"I've missed you too. Is he a clone?" 

The Engineer froze. Medic didn't know Soldier like he did, didn't know his history like he did. The Engineer had recognized that face the moment he laid eyes on him, yes, but Medic?

The Engineer's shoulders slumped. Getting aggressive had never worked with Dr. Ludwig before.

"Is he okay? Please don't make me ask again." 

"Oh, yes, yes! He just stormed off," Medic said with a dismissive hand wave. "It might be good to talk to him later, but he probably needs some time to calm down, no?"

He studied The Engineer with shining eyes, gaze unsettling despite the fondness he knew was behind it.

"You really care about him, don't you, Dell?" 

The Engineer bristled. "That's not my name. But I do care for him, I suppose. He's… a good friend of mine. And yeah, he is a clone."

Dr. Ludwig walked across the room as Dell talked, and hopped up onto the operating table before he replied. "Well, there's no need to sound all defensive about it! He clearly is actually a real person. Not like that thing on BLU that we wrapped in a replica of your skin, huh?"

The Engineer followed him over to the table and leaned on it, looking up at him. "Christ, Doc, don't bring that up. Honestly, we should never have made him. I'd probably feel bad about how badly he wants my life if he wasn't always trying to steal it from me. It's damn pathetic."

He was being glib, but not entirely insincere. They should never have made that thing they all called Dell Conagher. The Engineer felt sick whenever he saw him. Mostly hatred, mixed with a bit of undeserved pity.

"Is that why you felt drawn to your Soldier, though? Curiosity about the clone situation?"

The Engineer had never said he felt drawn to anyone.

"At first, yeah," he admitted. "But at this point I'm mostly just trying to look out for him. He's not real, and I am , obviously, but I don't always feel like it. I see something in him that the other guys can't. He's trying harder than any of us, and I'm not sure anyone here really understands that. Though that's partially because his best is, well, you know."

Medic rolled his eyes, though The Engineer doubted he was serious. "Having a love story without me in it, then? You clearly didn't miss me too much."

"Doc," The Engineer warned.

"I'm joking, I'm kidding! I'll tell you what we talked about, alright? Did you know he's also transgender?"

A beat. That wasn't the type of information people went around sharing.

"I suspected," The Engineer said. "Never could confirm anything, not without being more invasive than I wanted to be. He is my friend, you know."

Medic hummed. "I hope he gets more comfortable with that eventually. As it stands, trying to do any exper- treatments with him will not be easy. It's a shame. He's incredibly interesting."

"Interesting is right, Doc. It probably won't ever be easy workin' with him. Now, what all have you been into lately?"

Medic lit up , the same way he always did when someone asked about his work. "I'm so glad you asked! You remember me talking about ÜberCharge, right?"

"I do, I do."

It was nice to have Soldier and Medic keeping him occupied. The Engineer didn't want to spend another second of his life thinking about Dell Conagher.

He drummed his prosthetic fingers on the operating table.

Chapter Text

The Engineer had hardly slept the night before, a bundle of nerves and neurons that just would not stop firing. Now, that wasn't anything noteworthy for him, his brain and sleep schedule long-since ruined by the concrete dark he'd been living in, but it was inconvenient. Deeply inconvenient.

It was late morning on a Saturday, and he had work to do. He damn near always had work to do. 

There was more caffeine in his body than was probably healthy for a man of his age, or for any person of any age. His hands shook almost imperceptibly as he placed a hacksaw - that hacksaw, tainted as it was - into a wooden crate. At least he knew he had people who wouldn't let his heart stop.

See, despite all the disrespect he'd faced and everything he'd lost, The Engineer was still too valuable for his employers to lose. With his grandfather long dead and his father getting close to it, they needed a mind like his to keep the war going.

Not like they didn't have a mind like his even without him.

More than any of them, though, there was Dr. Ludwig. He wasn't willing to let go of The Engineer either, and the mad doctor had the capability to keep him around for as long as he wanted. At least in this case he appreciated the claws in his back. At least somebody's interest in "Dell Conagher" meant him and him only.

The doctor was leaned up against the wall by the door, watching him. The Engineer gave him a warm, sleepy smile, though he didn't actually feel either of those things. Tired , maybe. Crouching down in front of the crate, one kneepad on the floor, sore was just as accurate.

"Are you sure you don't want help, Conagher? You're certainly taking your time here."

The Engineer was taking his time, dragging his feet like a child who didn't want to go to church on Sunday. The red shirt he wore, the red shirts his team would be wearing… why would he want to go? He was supposed to be taking the role his father had left for him. He'd known that since he was a child. Instead, here he was, about to take on the position of some other Engineer on some other team.

No point in trying to fight Her whims though, was there?

"No, it's alright, I'm just about done now. Besides, I like to be the one dealin' with my own equipment." 

Like being a pallbearer. Like burying the coffin.

"If you say so," Dr. Ludwig said with a shrug and a bonesaw-sharp smile. The Engineer found himself just briefly deer-in-the-headlights from it, dazzling brightness that wouldn't let him run from the weight of the world barreling towards him. He broke eye contact and he was back to packing away his sharp edges in heavy wooden boxes.

The Engineer was a practical man, all gunpowder and lead to the very core of his being. He'd long-since learned to hide himself behind southern hospitality and charm, to let the world believe he was like them. He was nothing like them. He was a powder keg.

Dr. Ludwig didn't have any of that. He couldn't hide his brilliance, couldn't hide that spark. He was a firestarter, and everyone could tell from the moment they laid eyes on him. In a world of tangled pretense and masks and pretending-to-be, it was a freedom most people would never know.

The Engineer dreaded going to war without him.

You see, The Engineer dreaded a whole lot of things about the years to come, most of all that every day he'd have to face that thing. The one that had stolen his face, his name, his family, his life. The war wasn't supposed to be like this. The world wasn't supposed to be like this. 

But there was nothing to be done.

In just a few minutes, there wouldn't be anything left to pack. There'd be nothing left to do but start carrying crates and toolboxes out to the van outside. That meant facing his teammates, facing the badlands. It meant he'd have to leave the twisting warrens and constant buzz of fluorescent lights behind, forced to find himself while exposed under an endless desert sky. 

Surely there was meaning to all of it, some kind of poetry or something, but that wasn't really in The Engineer's wheelhouse. He always felt eyes on him no matter what. He put another saw into the crate.

"Hey, Lou?"

"Hm?"

The Engineer didn't actually know what he wanted to ask. He'd hoped the words would come to him when he needed them. He stared at Dr. Ludwig in silence. Like an idiot.

The good doctor took pity on him, eventually. "Ok, well, if you'd like, I could help carry your equipment. I'd love to get a better look at your team, anyway! Have you seen your Heavy?"

One more sawblade, and there was nothing left to pack. The Engineer hesitated for a moment, waiting for something, anything to let him stall for just a moment longer. No such luck. That wasn't how this was going to go.

"I'd appreciate that," The Engineer replied with a halfway-genuine smile. He put both of his hands on the edge of the crate and pushed himself up onto his feet. It took more effort than he'd really like to admit, something that he'd decide to blame on having his prosthetic under a glove instead of the actual truth. 

The glove wouldn't be there forever, probably. The Engineer just was not in the mood for staring and pointless questions he'd been asked a thousand times.

"As far as the new Heavy, I can't say I have. I take it you like him better than BLU's old one?"

Ludwig rolled his eyes. "I didn't dislike him! I never even talked to him before Pauling… you know. He just seemed boring! And he was rude to his Medic."

The Engineer wasn't really supposed to let other people watch the war going on. Really, he wasn't supposed to watch the war going on himself . Not until he was in it.

But he had to know. He had to know how this was going to play out.

"The man outside, he's just as massive, and not nearly as rude. Imagine how many surgeries he could withstand with that physique!"

The Engineer was several decades too old to be gossiping about whatever fella caught his eye, and by that standard, so was Dr. Ludwig. The man didn't seem to care. Maybe he should try to be more like that. He didn't want to be going into the war already old and tired.

He wanted to make his father proud. He wanted this. 

(He wanted something close to this, the mirror of this. Something he couldn't have. Something that had been his first , his to have, until that mistake had stolen it from him.)

"I wonder what he's like in battle," The Engineer mused as he lifted a toolbox up onto his shoulder.

He was a brilliant scientist. He'd created something truly, truly remarkable, even if he hated it. He knew that Dell was just as stubborn, knew that he'd get right back up again every time he fell. That meant bullets would rip through him over and over and over again, throwing his life into the spiraling nothing between death and respawn. In his deepest fantasies, the ones that had kept him company the sleepless night before, he was the one doing the killing, tearing Dell apart the same way he'd put him together. He wanted to see him hurt, and more than that he wanted to see him fail .

Part of him still struggled to tell the difference between the two of them. His imagination always put him in Dell's place, at the end. He'd pictured his own death more than a living man ever should.

"So do I," Dr. Ludwig replied, the longing in his voice a distinctly different color. Not that The Engineer was any better, eyes going between the doctor's chest and arms as he hefted up the crate he'd packed his drill press into. That kind of upper body strength was just excessive.

He could only imagine how lost Dell felt without his lab partner. It might even be half as awful as The Engineer felt.

Ludwig was the first one to leave the room, shoving the workshop door open with his hip. The Engineer followed, steady footsteps echoing the click of the doctor's boots. 

The Engineer's workshop was close to the surface, all things considered. He knew his own little corner of the labyrinth well, in spite of the stark gray concrete that spiralled down and down and down into the earth beyond it. Dr. Ludwig walked with less certainty. He wasn't part of this place, not like The Engineer was. 

Apparently realizing he couldn't lead the way, but not willing to be left behind, Dr. Ludwig walked the rest of the way out at The Engineer's side. The route they were taking outside wasn't the one he was used to, but he knew to look for red before looking for light. They had to keep up appearances, act like they were tied to RED and RED only. They couldn't let anyone find out about Her.

A week ago, Dr. Ludwig hadn't known she had ties to RED at all. He'd been essentially guaranteed a spot as BLU's Medic. The Engineer was doing his very best not to think of that as another thing Dell had taken from him. There was only so much spite a man could carry.

The Engineer pulled his goggles down over his eyes as they stepped out into sunlight and sand, himself first, Ludwig right behind him. 

He looked out to see that the new hires were already there, four men dressed in red and looking varying degrees of bored. The big bald guy, presumably their Heavy, was visibly unaccustomed to the climate of the badlands, but the tan, scrawny fella with the sniper rifle seemed right at home. Sitting a ways away was a black man with an eyepatch, explosives on his vest and a bottle of booze in his hand. None of them were acknowledging or even looking at each other, not even the restless kid with the baseball bat pacing around.

The Engineer took a deep breath, letting his thoughts drift to that bat connecting with Dell's skull. Like always, the perspective shifted before he could stop it, putting himself in Dell's place, watching and feeling himself die.

Some ghost story this was turning out to be. 

"This is what you were raised for, then. In your shoes, I wouldn't be disappointed, wrong side of the mirror or not." 

Ludwig spoke matter-of-factly, and The Engineer could tell he wasn't really trying to comfort him. Good, seeing as it was not the least bit comforting. He nodded.

"Suppose I should get myself acquainted, then." 

"Oh! That's probably for the best, yes. I'll wait by the van. We have much more to carry out here." 

As Ludwig pranced away in that way he always did, The Engineer sauntered over to his new teammates. The kid - the Scout, if he had to guess - jogged over to meet him halfway.

""Ey buddy, you with us?"

"That I am," The Engineer said, holding out a hand for a handshake. "You can call me the Engineer."

The Scout shook The Engineer's hand enthusiastically, somehow managing to grip too tight and too loose all at once.

"What's up! I'm the Scout! You any good?"

The Engineer blinked behind his goggles.

 "What?" 

"You any good? At like, engineering, or whatever. You know, mercenary stuff."

The Engineer didn't know how to answer that. He was potentially the greatest mind that had ever graced the field of engineering, 10 of the 11 PhDs under his belt earned just for the extra prestige. 

"Well, I mean, they hired me." 

Dell Conagher came into the world screaming. 

As far he could figure, that was perfectly normal. Doesn't it just seem right for folks to spend their first few moments of their lives scared and in pain and crying for attention? That paints a pretty clear picture of humanity as a whole. Somewhere deep in his genetic code, he'd always known to hate the cold and the unfamiliar, known to long for comfort and care.

Clear as day, he remembered the sound of his own screams, muffled in his ears as a doctor placed him in his mama's arms. Coming into the world had hurt so much, and he'd still been sore from it. Why did he remember that? He wasn't supposed to remember that. It was so long ago.

Why was he screaming again?

It had hurt. He had more than half a century behind him, and so, so much of it hurt .  How had he been carrying all of it? Hell, how had he been carrying any of it? He was cold. He wanted his mama. Something had gone very very very wrong.

A long time ago, Dell Conagher had been born in a little private hospital near Bee Cave, Texas. That hadn't been his name, not just yet, but he couldn't think of himself as anything else. His mother had been there, as is typical for childbirth, and her mother had been right there with her. The doctors and nurses in the room were blurry, faceless things he'd never come to know, unfamiliar now and forever. And everyone in that room had held him. The memory was disjointed, unnatural. He hadn't known what a grandmother, or a doctor, or a hospital was. He hadn't known anything, save for hunger and the feeling of being in someone's arms. Trying to shove concepts and meanings into it all felt wrong, somehow. Like digging up a grave. He'd woken up to a memory of his life that just was not his to have.

He remembered being young, looking at words and not understanding what they meant, and felt the meanings piece themselves together in his mind. It was nails on a chalkboard, walking through a spiderweb you didn't see. He remembered the certainty of monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, monsters in the dark. When had he stopped believing in them? It was there, somewhere. That moment crystallized with all the others, if he could just think, just find it, just untangle the threads. Where was his pa in all this? Where had his pa been? He'd always looked up to him, where had he been?

When Dell was three years old, he'd been shown a picture of his grandfather, one of the only ones where he wasn't wearing his prosthetic. The scar from cutting off his hand was still visible in faded and wrinkled grayscale. His mama had said he was just like him. She'd called him another name then, one he hadn't heard in… how many years? How old was he? What year was this? His head hurt. His head hurt.

That pain was the only thing grounding him to the present, the anchor tying his spirit to the earth. Some part of him was still with his body in New Mexico, trapped and screaming and terrified.

The rest of him was falling, one rabbit hole to the next, jostled around in his own overfull mind. It felt like an eternity, or at least a lifetime. Something ticking inside told him it had only been a few minutes. Each and every second felt like he was choking on it. He had to find something, any anchor, any landmark in the sand slipping through his fingers. He needed to calm down.  

A dozen different memories of being told to take deep breaths hit him like a slap across the face. That had never once worked for him. 

He pictured a sudoku board in his brain and took to solving it, one square at a time. It was an effort to not chase down the memory of when he'd played one just like it two decades ago, but he needed to spend a minute outside his head more than he'd ever needed anything.

When he was done, his brain helpfully supplied that it had been closer to two minutes. 

As terrified and overwhelmed as he felt, the fear itself didn't worry Dell. Every emotion, every shallow breath and tear down the face, was just a reaction to stimulus. The past followed him, his memories weighed on him, everything that had ever happened would haunt him forever. He buckled under the pressure. That was just life, just the machine in him.

He laid there solving imaginary logic puzzles until his heart wasn't beating quite so hard in his chest. 

The first thing he understood of his new reality was the smell of plastic and metal. Flat on his back, somewhere coffin-small and unknown. Where was he? He needed to take stock of the situation. He could sort through his memories of afterbirth later.

He was Dell Conagher, from Bee Cave, Texas. Son of Fred and Minnie Conagher, grandson of Radigan Conagher. He loved barbecue, guns, and higher education. He was smart enough to figure this out.

Dell was inside what looked like the inside of a big CT scanner, white plastic lit dimly enough to be gentle on his eyes. He didn't have his goggles, so he couldn't have been actively working. He didn't feel the weight of his prosthetic, so he couldn't have been doing anything particularly public-facing for Mann Co. 

When was a much harder thing to piece together. Dell usually had a really good sense of these things, but nothing was coming to mind. He'd just have to retrace his steps, starting with the last thing he remembered. 

What was the last thing he remembered? That was a simple enough question. What. Was. The.

What was the last thing he remembered what was the last thing he remembered what was the last thing he-

.
…

A spark. Gunpowder igniting. 

He'd been working with Dr. Ludwig, his long-time friend and research partner. They'd met a decade ago, when Dell caught him stealing body parts from the university morgue and found himself… oddly charmed. For the past several years, they'd been studying cloning, taking a route more mechanical and sophisticated than the average biologist would think to try. Dell would've been first author on the paper they could never publish, but he couldn't have done it without Herbert's brilliance. They were midway through their biggest project yet: a human clone, grown with all of its memories and scars intact. They'd just started uploading Dell's memories when-

Oh no .

Dell was screaming again. When had he stopped screaming? His throat was raw.  He knew exactly where he was. Of course he did. He'd drawn up the blueprints himself, made sure to put the handle where it would be easy for his clone to access. His hand went to where he knew it was and… nothing. Nothing. He ran his hand up and down the left wall, hoping he'd just missed it, misremembered somehow. Where else would it be? He wouldn't have removed it, right? He tried to ignore the growing sense of dread in his stomach. Shit. Shit.

Desperate, he kicked at the plastic above him until it splintered under his bare foot. He smelled blood as the top of the machine popped open. 

As he climbed out on shaking legs, he noticed that the lid hinged on its… left side.

That couldn't be right. The hinge was on the side opposite the latch, which meant that the latch had been on the side where he didn't have a hand. Looking over at the machine, he saw it did have a handle on the inside, saw that it was on the right. Why the fuck had it been where he couldn't reach it? Why would he move it at all?

Now angry as much as terrified, Dell's eyes went from the now-damaged machine to the neatly folded pile of clothes sitting on a desk. His desk. He was just in his workshop, everything's place just barely unfamiliar. It was still his workshop, clearly, but time had passed. A few months, maybe? 

He struggled through putting on his underwear and a shirt, the process oddly unnatural to his callused hand. He kept telling himself that he needed to calm down long enough to get this over with, that trying to take stock of the situation any more would keep him spiraling. Pulling on the overalls took even more of his focus, as it always did, and reaching over his shoulder to get the straps was harder than usual. Each and every step of putting on his clothes was ingrained in his mind, but the muscle memory just wasn't there. Every single part of the process was manual, conscious. Because things needed to be harder.

Alright, he knew it was good for him to have something to focus on.

Dell held the front of his overalls up with his right forearm while he hooked the clasp of an overall strap around the button. He despised how difficult it was, hand feeling like it had never done this before despite a mind remembering it hundreds and hundreds of times. As he worked, his arm brushed against the fabric in a… weird place. He flinched and glanced down. 

A hand. A flesh-and-blood-and-sinew-and-bone hand. His first thought was that it was a scientific miracle, that he should be over the moon. The first thing he felt was utter revulsion. 

Dell didn't have a right hand. He'd been born without one. That wasn't his hand. He remembered wanting this, dozens of frustrated moments imagining how much simpler and easier his life would be. Looking down, those feelings felt totally alien, a memory that could only belong to someone else. It wasn't a part of his body, yet there it was, and dear God his stomach turned just looking at it. It was like looking at an ankle turned backwards, like looking at a bone sticking out of the leg. 

Dell decided to try and avoid thinking about it. There were parts of his situation he'd have to start acknowledging sooner than he'd like to, but this one would have to wait. He finished putting his overalls on the same way he always had, pretending he wasn't shaking and sick. There was more on the desk, socks and goggles and his favorite pair of boots, but he didn't bother with any of it.

Across the room, a small sink with a mirror above it sat against the wall, simple and unassuming. He'd had it put in years ago, the mirror mostly to check for injuries after a project quite literally blew up in his face. That had happened more times than he could count, more than he could bear to remember. He shuddered.

Now, though, Dell found his gaze being drawn towards it. Despite the noise in his head, he was more alone than he'd ever been. The workshop was all desaturated blues and dark grays, metal and concrete, and something deep inside longed for the warm familiarity of his reflection.

Across the room, Dell saw his own eyes staring back at him, the same face he'd known for 50 years. He looked… tired. When did he get so tired?

Those eyes didn't do anything to quiet the noise in his head, but they did soften the fear. It was just him, like it had always been. The rest was background static. 

Mechanically, conscious thought behind every step and movement, he walked over and sat down heavily in the workshop's sturdiest chair. He leaned back, squeezed his eyes shut, and sighed. Lord almighty.  

He was the clone, then. There was no point in denying it anymore. Somehow, in all the thinking and calculation and years of work, even as he pulled the memories from his head, he hadn't thought to account for that possibility. He was always himself, the clone was always the other. Stupid . 

The fact that he wasn't really Dell, that none of his memories or feelings were really his, that was just a technicality. Dwelling on it wasn't going to accomplish anything, would only send him spiraling. He was himself enough to already regret what he'd done. He remembered his childhood and his family more sharply than he ever had, the feelings closer to him than they had been in a long long time. 

When he was seven years old, he'd been picked on at school because he wasn't girly enough for them. It shouldn't have hurt, especially because their best insult was calling him a boy, but it did. He came home in tears. His mama had held him, and comforted him, and told him that he was plenty feminine. When that  just made him cry harder, she'd hugged him tighter and told him that it didn't matter, that he was wonderful either way. A kiss on the forehead and for a while all was right in the world. 

It felt like yesterday. Wasn't that enough? 

Improved memory was one of the intended features of his clone, something he'd planned on from the very beginning. The hand, presumably, was also intentional, though it was a choice he'd made after the memories were ripped out. 

He'd made a mental note - to ask if he could try out for football to take out the trash to bring his baseball cards to school to submit his thesis for - for the clone to take notes on their experience and perception for future research. Ideally the clone would have perfect recollection of everything, but documentation was always preferable. The science was too good to publish, but they had intended to do this again.

Work . That would make him feel better, or at least make him feel less. Something to work at, something to get excited about, that would keep him sane. At least that's what he was praying for as he dragged himself to his feet and walked over to the table. A notebook and pencil were already laid out for him. Glad he thought of that, and glad he thought of the clothes. He looked over at the calendar, and then to the clock on the wall. Months, he'd thought before. It'd really only been a few weeks. 

He wrote with a shaking left hand, trying to make the letters look the way he knew they were supposed to. It was how he imagined people felt writing with their nondominant hand; clumsy, unpracticed. 

June 21, 1964. 10:05 A.M.

Chapter Text

Now, Dell had always intended to get into journaling eventually. His ability to focus was very… selective, in the kindest terms, and that had impacts on his ability to remember. He'd made it through 11 PhDs on sheer brilliance in spite of that shortcoming, but a shortcoming it was. Journaling was supposed to help, just like it was supposed to help with the… other things wrong with him. The things that, you know, people journaled about. He'd gone as far as to buy a journal a few different times. The issue was that no matter how hard he tried, he always seemed to lose interest and completely forget about it. He never knew what to write, anyway. 

At least, that's the way things had been before. After waking up that morning, Dell had thrown himself into writing notes for himself and his counterpart. He'd ended up filling 3 pages before he moved on to rewriting and reformatting some of the preexisting notes, hoping to make them easier to scan and easier to understand.

The focus was still out of Dell's hands, but it was so much easier to keep the plates all spinning. Further updates to the day's journal entry weren't what he needed to be focused on right then anyway.

Dell walked at Miss Pauling's side, listening to her talk about the last top secret mission she'd been on as she led him through an unfamiliar part of the building. Not unfamiliar to her, clearly. As she spoke, all ramble-ish and uncertain-sounding, he couldn't help but be impressed at how gracefully she talked around the truth and even outright lied. He didn't even have a guess as to what the truth was, but he was sure at least half of what she was saying wasn't it.

It was a puzzle he'd have to put together later, when he wasn't navigating alongside Pauling through the rabbit-warren tunnels they called hallways, passing identical door after identical door. Anything but strict control of his thoughts would make it harder to ignore the growing sense of nausea he felt, the growing pain as he dug his nails into his ("his") right hand. 

The man he was before wouldn't have had any issue repressing that feeling. It wouldn't have been able to fight its way through everything else. Of course, the man he was before didn't have a right hand.

"It is real lucky that you didn't kill anyone of any political significance," Dell said in his best impression of someone who believed a word of what Miss Pauling was saying.

It wasn't like he didn't understand the game they were playing. She, like most other people he worked with, would tell obvious lies on purpose, hoping he'd run off chasing that rabbit and ignore the more subtle, important things. There were things he missed, at least a few of them. He wasn't impossible to trick. But he was snakebite-mean and twice as sharp. it wasn't fucking easy. 

Together, though Pauling was leading the way, they walked into a truly massive room that Dell had never seen before. Odd, seeing as it looked like every hallway in the complex ended there. He followed Pauling towards the center of the room, the place where he imagined the Administrator's office had to be. Briefly, he recalled something about prison design before ripping his focus away from that particular bit of information retrieval. His hand twitched.

His body being wrong had nagged at him decades ago. This was worse. This was so much worse.

There was a sheer drop between the main part of the floor and the door at the very center, only accessible by the bridge Dell watched slowly extend towards them. The quiet was eerie, the cavernous room oddly empty save for the two of them and the soft whirring of the bridge. It wasn't dark, not really, but every shadow felt oppressive. Every quiet, lonely sound echoed.

"Have you ever met her?" Miss Pauling asked, her low voice filling the near-silence. Dell shook his head.

"Not in person, no. We've spoken on the phone a few times. These days, most of her messages I get through you."

"Oh, yeah. Well, you know. Just doing my job!" Pauling replied in that tone she was always using, where Dell couldn't tell whether or not the humility was genuine.

When the bridge was finally in place, Miss Pauling took a step back and gestured for Dell to go ahead. "I'll wait here to walk you back out. It's a bit of a maze down here, I know."

"I appreciate it," Dell replied as he walked towards the central room, though he knew he wouldn't need the help. The door slid open silently to reveal… an elevator. Even farther to go, then. Even farther down into the earth.

The elevator ride was 30 seconds or so of stillness and silence, only broken by the soft humming and buzzing of machinery. Dell spent all of it fighting the urge to do something about that fucking hand. He just had to not think about it, plant his feet on the floor and keep his mind on whatever it was the Administrator wanted from him. Surely it wouldn't be like this forever. He couldn't avoid anything resembling downtime for the rest of his life.

By the time the door opened and he started down yet another hallway, he'd settled on shoving his hand in his pocket where he didn't have to look at it. He walked down the industrial walkway, watching the blinking electronics on either side of him. The hallway doubled as a server room, apparently.

The door at the end of the hallway was half-open, but Dell faltered at the threshold. This woman had been such a big part of his family's life for generations, even more than Blutarch or the Hale family had been.

Hesitantly, he knocked on the doorframe. He was answered with a heavy sigh.

"Come in."

Dell took a few steps into the room, mind running in overdrive to assess the situation as well as he could. It was a welcome distraction, honestly.

The dozens and dozens of monitors that lined the walls weren't doing much to sway Dell from his earlier thoughts of a panopticon. Most of them were showing the battle outside, including several angles of his pa chasing the RED Scout off with a shotgun. His father had been always vague on the rare occasions that he mentioned the Administrator, but she looked like the exact type of person he'd been imagining. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

"You're the Conagher boy's new science project, then?"

Dell bristled. "Well, I'd hardly call myself a boy, now. I am a year past 50. Or at least he is."

The Administrator raised an eyebrow. Not outright angry, but clearly not used to people contradicting her. From what he knew of her, that was reasonable. He met her eyes steadily, but made a mental note - he needed to STOP with the mental notes, he couldn't ever GET RID OF THEM - to avoid offending her.

"Yes ma'am, I am the clone. I've been up and moving since just shy of 8 hours ago."

He spoke intentionally, careful not to express any doubt or shame. However he felt about his circumstances, the Administrator didn't need to know about it. She arched her eyebrow somehow higher. Her gaze was piercing and cold, and it was all Dell could do to not shrink back under it. 

"Fascinating, yes. Tell me more about the intended applications of this… cloning. I trust there was a purpose behind it? I can't imagine your existence is pointless."

Dell forced a genial smile. The meaning of life, huh? For most people, that was one of the big questions.

"I'm here to fight your war, ma'am. Cloning means that you can have quite literally the exact same folks on both sides. It all but guarantees the stalemate you're lookin' for. In my case, though, I designed my clone to have certain improvements. Figured it'd be a better lab partner like that, and, well, I am."

The Administrator narrowed her eyes. It felt like she could see right through him. It was scrutinizing, like he was more of a curiosity than a person, and it lacked any of the genuine fascination he'd come to associate with such looks. She wouldn't see him as a person, though, would she? He could still feel that fucking hand in his pocket.

"You're better than him, then. Good." She paused to put out her cigarette before continuing. "What improvements? What's wrong with the man Conagher was working with before?"

The hand grafted onto his body had calluses mirroring his real one. Calluses from work that it had never done. He could feel them. There was some kind of mounting distress happening internally, he was pretty sure.

"It's not that there's something wrong with Dr. Ludwig. It's only that he's unaware of our involvement with RED, and unaware of my… future intentions. I'd like to keep it that way." He carefully left out that he'd love to have the doctor as his Medic, the same way he left out that there very much was something wrong with him.

The look in her eye was withering. Dell was fairly certain that was just her face, though, so he steeled himself and continued. "As compared to the original Dell Conagher, I've got much better memory, I'm better at multitasking, and, uh…"

Again, he faltered. He didn't know why he was having this meeting, or what was on the line, but he found himself desperately wanting her approval all the same. He felt so exposed, so sure she was going to see something he didn't want her to see.

"Yes, Mr. Conagher?" the Administrator prompted, impatient.

Dr. Conagher. Doctor. Because of all the doctorates. Though he supposed that technically, he wasn't the one who earned them. A name was more respect than he'd anticipated, anyway.

"Dell's fine, ma'am. Anyway, the interesting thing is that while I still have most of my scars and such, I've also got this little beauty!"

He pulled his hand out of his pocket and held it up, wiggling his fingers for good measure despite the way it made his stomach turn. He could feel the bones. He could feel the seam where his body ended and that hand began and it was all he could do to not start tearing it off right in front of her.

He did a good show of looking proud. His gaze flickered back and forth between the hand and the Administrator's eyes on it. She reached out and poked it with a fingertip.

One day, he'd think back on that moment and wonder why exactly it had been so distressing. The sensation wasn't physically unpleasant, really. Just a proprioceptive issue.

…

He needed the hand gone. He needed to get away from her. He needed to run, he needed to leave, he needed to rip that foreign body off of his fucking arm. What good was it doing? He grit his teeth and decided that he was not having one of these fucking meetings without his fucking goggles ever again. 

The Administrator smiled.

"He was born without that hand. Impressive. When you are no longer needed as a mercenary, you'll be working with me. This would have been the real Mr. Conagher's job, but if what you say is true, you're essentially the same, only more qualified. And I know you're familiar with Australium."

Dell knew what he was made of. He could feel it burning in his veins.

"That I am, Administrator."

If not for the rising panic and revulsion deep in his gut, he'd be in awe of her presence. Whatever Miss Pauling and his father saw in her, he saw it too. He'd taken what was hers and they both knew it, but she didn't seem the least bit angry. That smile she wore, though? It was patronizing at best. He'd call it outright mocking.

"Thank you for your time, clone," she said, more an order to leave than anything else. Dell got the message loud and clear.

"Thank you for your time, ma'am," he replied, trying to not sound as hurried as he felt. Every physical sensation from his right hand hurt, from his fingertips right up to his skull.

Dell was careful to walk back to the elevator at a normal pace, but as soon as he got back to Pauling, that mask was off. Before he could even speak, she was asking, "Dr. Conagher, is everything ok? You're really freaking out."

He speedwalked past her, only telling her "Dell's fine," before muttering under his breath something to the tune of "workshop, I need to get back to my workshop, there's the hacksaw, I just need to get back."

Miss Pauling jogged after him, slowing to match his pace once she got ahead. "Okay, okay, okay, hold on! You'll need me to walk you back, won't you? You can't have memorized all of this on one trip!"

But he had. Of course he had. "S'alright, miss," he reassured, as well as he could manage. "I know the way."

Dell took off sprinting back to his workshop, left left right left left straight right right right right left straight right. He couldn't spend another second feeling the way he felt. 

Stumbling, out of breath, Dell threw open the door to his workshop and pulled his newest, sharpest hacksaw out of a drawer. Nails on a chalkboard, fork scraping against the bottom of the bowl, high whines of electronics and horrible textures and bright fluorescents, it was all nothing compared to this. For all the world, he felt that if he didn't get this thing off of his body, he'd die. He gripped the hacksaw in his hand. His real hand. 

Dell had been nine years old when his father and grandfather had brought him out to help them butcher a steer. Good life experience, they'd said. He remembered the sound of blade through bone as vividly as he remembered the sound of wind in the sagebrush. A hacksaw, though, was not a bonesaw. The blade's edge was designed to cut metal, the mechanical, inorganic, inhuman. In that moment, a machine might've been all he was. 

It went about how you'd expect. Slow, agonizing. Dell was left half-conscious, sobbing, and still bleeding.

More than anything, though, he felt relieved. He blearily tied the end of a ratchet strap around his arm, something he should have done before he started sawing in the first place. His earlier outburst in front of Miss Pauling was mortifying, the amputation was poorly planned, and he felt like he was going to bleed out and die. But despite it all, relief.

Tears and snot and spit were pouring down his face, and he dully recalled that it had been over a decade since the last time he cried at all. Fuck. FUCK.

Screw what he was supposed to want. Screw what was sane. Dell remembered every time he'd been made fun of, every time his life had been harder one-handed, every imperfect prosthetic. He'd lost blood and part of his actual arm in the process, but at least his body was his own again. It was the most raw, real thing he'd felt in years.

He let his head drop to the table, putting him at eye level with his own pooling blood. God, he felt horrible. The lightheadedness was starting to feel like impending doom. His counterpart would hate this. How could he understand? He'd thought giving him that hand was for the best, surely. The Administrator wouldn't like it either, but if it was all that important to her, maybe Dr. Ludwig could keep the hand around.

How would Ludwig feel? Disappointed he hadn't been able to help, or at least watch, most likely. Halfway through cutting off his arm, when he'd adjusted to the pain and the panic had started to subside, Dell had started thinking about plans for future prosthetics. For most everyday tasks, he'd always preferred using his arm and left hand on their own. For the first time, it was settling in that a replacement hand, or even an "upgrade", wasn't what he wanted. If he was going to attach something to his arm, make something else be a part of his being and his body, it needed to be something different altogether.

Dr. Ludwig would want to be a part of that. Dell wished he had it in him to keep thinking about the future.

There was a knock at the door, and Dell prayed it was either his counterpart or Dr. Ludwig coming in to check on him. He wanted the former more than anything, but he heard the click of heels against the floor, too soft to be the latter.

"Hey, Dell! I just wanted to- holy shit!" Miss Pauling grabbed an oil rag and ran over to him. She had a surprising amount of strength to her as she tried to stanch the wound, undaunted by the presence of a severed arm and massive quantities of blood. 

"Are you okay? Did you do this to yourself? No, don't even worry about answering that. I can handle this. You're gonna be fine. I promise."

"You sure about that?" Dell replied weakly. "Might… might die here. I felt better for a second, but, yaknow."

"You're not dying, Dell. We aren't gonna let you. Whatever's wrong, whyever you did this, you're gonna get through it. We need you here."

It took all of his focus to understand what she was saying through the ringing in his ears, but it was said so confidently. He almost believed her.

"Um, okay. You're going to stay here, and you're going to hold that cloth, and I'm going to be back with Dr. Ludwig, okay? Say okay if that's okay."

She guided his hand to the cloth at the end of his arm. His grip strength was failing him, but he hoped what little pressure he could put on it was better than nothing.

"Okay."

"I'll be right back. Don't die on me."

It wasn't like he had any say in the matter. Everything felt fuzzy. Unreal. Since he'd woken up, everything had felt unreal. And why wouldn't it? The hand had been the worst of it by far, but there was some innate wrongness to him. He felt it, as sure as he felt his own heartbeat spilling out into the cloth in his hand. He was the facsimile of the real Dell Conagher, the touched up photograph, the corpse at the funeral they made so nice and pretty that he looked nothing like himself.

He tasted blood in his mouth. He wished Dr. Ludwig was here, to hold him in his arms and tell him there was really nothing to worry about. Or his mama, ready to tell him that she loved him, that she'd love him no matter what, that everything would be okay.

In the back of his mind, though, he knew what he really wanted was Dell Conagher. The mortician. Who else could feel what he felt? Who else could help like he could? He was so sure he'd slot in with him like they'd always belonged together. If he had to be taken care of, he'd want nobody else. 

The Engineer wanted Dell dead.

Alright, that was a bit of an exaggeration. Logically, he knew Dell still hadn't been around long enough to be all that different from him. On some fundamental level, any spite or hatred he felt was really just towards himself in a different set of circumstances.

Still, he was spiteful. Dell had promised to help him, right on the heels of a very serious heat-to-heart, but where was he? Fucking Texas. He was having to work twice as hard to make up for it.

The soft humming of teleporters would have been a comfort if not for the near constant stop-and-start of trying to get them working. He smacked the entrance teleporter with his wrench, which mercifully got it working again. He hit it again for good measure.

"Dell?" Dr. Ludwig called, perched on a stool by the tallest desk in the room. The Engineer looked up from his position sitting on the floor.

"What?" he snapped, more harshly than he meant to. Ludwig raised his eyebrows.

"Well, I thought you might like to know-" Ok, passive aggressive. "-that some of Ein's contour feathers are rooted wrong. Everything internally seems fine, but if you want to avoid any damage during teleportation…"

Ludwig stroked the head of the canary cradled in his hands with a finger and gave The Engineer a meaningful look. 

"Damn it!" The teleporter The Engineer was working on sputtered to a stop. He smacked it until it started working again. "Damn it, damn it, damn it!" 

Ein sang softly as the engineer flipped open the teleporter and popped it open, digging around for the wires he hoped were causing the problem. He'd spent days trying to fix this exact same issue in the prototypes, and it all came down to crosstalk. He'd done his best with the cable management, but it was always a pain in the ass to fix on his own. 

The Engineer sighed. "Hey, Doc? Could you give me a hand here?" 

"Well, I'd worry that you'd cut it off."

"Herbert!" 

"Alright, Alright," Ludwig huffed. He opened his hands and Ein fluttered away, settling on top of a nearby shelf. 

Ludwig sat down on the floor beside The Engineer and peered down at the teleporter, curious. Normally, it was a comfort to have his dear doctor close by, even though he was no help, but some combination of Ludwig's annoyance and his own exhaustion was screwing up the connection. He huffed.

"I'm sorry, Doc. You know I don't mean nothin' by it. I'm just… frustrated about being behind schedule."

He shot a pointed glance up at his workbench, not quite able to see the photograph on top of it from his place on the ground. Dr. Ludwig followed his gaze. 

"I know you're not one to cut corners, Dell. I mean, you're not going to make a half-assed teleporter!" He laughed, bright and toothy and egging on the headache that was starting to form.

"Don't call me that," The Engineer grumbled. He took Dr. Ludwig's wrist and guided his hand to the wires he was holding. When Ludwig took them from him, The Engineer did the same with his other hand, positioning his hands about a foot apart along the bundle of wires. He picked up his wire cutters once he was sure Dr. Ludwig had the wires steady. "Don't move."

Dr. Ludwig's normally owlish eyes narrowed. "Surely anyone could do this. These things tend to sort of just… sort themselves out, you know!"

"No, they don't sort themselves out!" The Engineer snapped, pain flaring in his temples. "I sort them out! We don't have a billion years of evolution to rely on here! It's all done by hand!" 

Ludwig didn't reply, just held the wires and waited. That was… not a good sign. He'd get into shouting matches if he was phenomenally mad, or if it was something particularly petty, but normally, his anger meant either giddy-seeming violence or an uncharacteristic silence. Imagining exactly what he was going to do to The Engineer, most likely.

"I was supposed to have help from somebody who actually understood this. Instead, all I've got's you." It was mean, but he was tired and frankly didn't have much of a filter. Ludwig bristled.

"It's not like I'm the one who left you to go-" he paused, tapping the side of foot on the floor. "-play house?" 

Dr. Ludwig was right. He was not the one trying to steal The Engineer's family from him.

The Engineer cut the lengths of wire one by one, wincing each time. It was satisfying, on a good day, but right then it just felt like more of his hard work wasted. 

Neither of them had slept more than 2 hours in the past 48, and while Dr. Ludwig seemed no worse for wear, The Engineer was really starting to feel it. How dare he be more human, more mortal, than him.

As he reattached the wires, patching in more length in some, keeping others as short as they could be, he made sure to keep in mind the crosstalk values of each one. He needed some of that twisting and interaction for this to work. It was easy to lose track of, even with only half a dozen wires in question, and he wished desperately that Dell was around to help. That was what he was for, after all. 

“Watch your hands,” he reminded Dr. Ludwig as he moved to reattach the red wire to the black wire. He was more of a mechanical engineer than an electrical one, which meant he was only one of the best in the latter field. But it didn't take a PhD to know not to shock himself with live wires. 

Now, so did Dr. Ludwig. His mind wasn't mechanically or electrically oriented, barring his neurons, but he was brilliant and had known The Engineer for years. He had a better sense for these things than the average layperson. 

“Watch your own hands,” Ludwig hissed, sharp and grating. The Engineer jerked his hands back from the tips of the wires.

"It'd be safer to shut off the teleporter first," he admitted through gritted teeth. It would take longer. It would be a waste of time. He flipped the off switch with more force than it needed, his hand slipping off it at the very end. 

Dr. Ludwig tilted his head. "You… need to sleep," he said slowly, like this wasn't something he already knew about The Engineer.

"I need to get this done. Once the teleporters are working, I can sleep as much as I want."

That wasn't true, of course. There'd be more projects to do after this one, and regardless, he wasn't sure if he'd have a decent night's sleep ever again. He wasn't fooling anyone.

"You're hurting the project! It will only take longer if you're drowsy. Please, at least rest for 30 minutes. We can get back to this after that, and maybe by tomorrow night, we'll have something that actually works."

"Could you be just a little less passive aggressive?" The Engineer grumbled. He laid back on the hard concrete floor, hard and uncomfortable except for the fact that it was cold, even on a late afternoon in early summer. 

Dr. Ludwig took his lab coat off and joined him, rolling it up to use as a makeshift pillow. "I could be less passive, yes."

They got about five minutes of lying like that (and The Engineer was almost asleep) when there was a knock at the door. Ludwig told the person to "Come in!" before The Engineer could react, And Miss Pauling poked her head into the room.

The second they saw her, both scientists scrambled to their feet, Dr. Ludwig pulling his lab coat back on in the process. 

Miss Pauling was someone The Engineer had never been particularly close to, but in the past week, he'd seen even less of her. It was just another way his world was shrinking, and he hated it.

"Hey, Dr. Conagher! I've got an update from The Administrator but your, uh-" She looked at Dr. Ludwig, eyes lingering on the rumpled lab coat he was hastily trying to fix. "This is kind of sensitive information, so I am going to need him to get the hell out."

"Excuse me?" 

Pauling ignored Ludwig entirely.

"He's perfectly alright to be here, miss. I trust him, and he'll probably find out about whatever this is eventually."

There was an edge to The Engineer's tone, exhaustion and frustration coalescing into something that didn't want to be argued with. Miss Pauling, thankfully, seemed to accept that.

"Fine. BLU's Medic didn't come out of respawn, and that means that group of mercenaries' time is up. They're hiring a new group of mercs this weekend, fighting starts Monday. You're going to be part of that group."

The Engineer nodded. It felt right, finally getting to settle into the role and title he'd already started to wear. 

"She loves the teleporter prototypes you sent her, by the way. When you go into battle, she wants you using them." 

Pauling fidgeted with her sleeve as she spoke. Just excited, maybe? Anxious about something totally innocent? The Engineer narrowed his eyes. 

"I'm glad to hear that, miss. Do I need to meet with someone from BLU to sign all the paperwork, or can I just take care of that here?"

Pauling's eyes widened. "Um."

The Engineer tilted his head, acting the part of good-natured and encouraging. "Um?"

"Well, that's, well that's the thing. The Administrator just got out of a meeting with De- with your clone, and-"

Miss Pauling didn't scare easily. Her personality and mannerisms didn't read hardass, but he knew her and he knew this company well enough to know that she was fucking ruthless. She rambled, yes. She was awkward, yes. Hesitation like this, though?

"What?"

She glanced over at Dr. Ludwig. "Dr. Conagher, you're not working for BLU. You're working for RED." 

"WHAT?" Ludwig shouted exactly what The Engineer was thinking.

"So you came in here to tell me that I'm fired." He knew it wasn't like that. He knew it didn't actually matter. It was all the same in the end. Their business was the war, not winning it. 

"Dr. Conagher, it's not like that! It doesn't- you know one team is just as good as another! You've worked to keep it that way!" Her placating was frantic, if somewhat frustrated. "You're the furthest thing from fired!"

His grandfathers had both been hired by BLU. His father had been a mercenary for BLU. The Administrator was taking every hand-me-down he'd ever been promised away from him.

"Thanks for the heads up, ma'am," he said, warm, not clipped at all. "If you wouldn't mind giving me and my friend here space to work, I'd really appreciate it. Come back when you've got somethin' for me to sign, alright?"

The Engineer smiled. A coiled snake rattled its tail.

Chapter Text

Dell had been soldering for the past four hours when the door swung open and the other him walked in.

His forearm bumped the table as he sat up, sending white-hot pain up his nerves. It hadn't quite been a full day since he'd cut that hand off, and the stitches were still fresh. Apparently, he'd been unconscious for hours afterwards. Naturally, when he finally came to that morning, he'd gone right back to the workshop and got right back to work. In the end, he was glad he'd done it.

In the few exchanges he'd had with the original Dell since then, they hadn't talked about it. From the look on the man's face, it looked like he was steeling himself to do just that.

Steeling himself he was.

"We need to have a chat," he said seriously, eyeing the work Dell had been doing and avoiding looking at his arm. "If you'd be willing to do a walk-and-talk with me, I've got sandwiches already packed."

Dell - the real, original Dell - gestured to the bag slung over his shoulder. His clone didn't look all that enthusiastic about the idea, but he'd expected as much. He'd never been one to jump at the chance to share his feelings. Despite some obvious hesitancy, his clone put his work aside and got up. The sense that this was necessary appeared to be mutual, at least. "Sounds like you're breaking up with me," the clone joked, though there was a clear apprehension in his voice. "Where are we walkin' to?"

"Not sure," Dell replied with a shrug. "Outside. Bring a water bottle." 

He nodded towards the water bottle sitting on the table, but the clone was already going for it.

"Lord almighty, why?"

Dell headed for the door, only stopping long enough to hold it open for the clone. That earned him a smile, and then he was right back in front, leading the way. He had to be. He was the one in charge. 

"I dunno." That was a lie, and he knew his clone knew it. Not that he should've expected anything different. He was not the type to wander the badlands when the temperature was in the mid-90s. As they walked the familiar path to the exit, he hoped he wouldn't call him on it.

The clone of Dell, meanwhile, didn't appreciate being lied to. Especially not by his creator, his mirror image. Maybe offering up a correction was showing his cards, but it was a bit too late to be worrying about that, wasn't it?

"Sometimes I worry I'll die down here. I get nightmares about it all the time."

He paused for a response the original Dell didn't grant him.

"I dream that the ceiling collapses, or that I walk upwards for days and days and never reach the sun. Part of me is sure that the story we're part of is too twisted and heavy and old for us to survive it."

He paused again, the silence filled only by two pairs of heavy bootsteps. Dozens of people worked in the building, maybe even more, but Dell rarely saw them. The places he walked were so often empty.

As they stepped out into the sunlight, the brightness and heat immediately unpleasant, Dell tried again. "It's more than we can untangle, that's for sure."

On instinct, Dell Conagher and his clone stopped at the same time, side by side, and each took a deep breath. The New Mexico badlands sprawled out before them, wide and yawning. The red-banded rock formations scattered across the landscape, the canyons and ridges and outcroppings; it had always reminded Dell of bones, the remains of something great and ancient and terrible.

With the sky wide-open above them, none of it felt the least bit safe. But it was home, more than the cramped and narrow dark ever could be. The helplessness of a vast wide open was an old friend, no matter how much he'd acclimated to the walls pressing in on all sides of him. Each man knew the other understood that feeling. Only then did Dell finally say something.

"I figure I'm just made for big sky. It's the rancher in me. You feel the same way?"

The clone nodded, just once. He had an anchor in Dell, and wasn't sure how he'd fare without him.

"I'm made from you, after all."

Of course. What feelings would his clone have, if not the mirror of his own? It was an unpleasant thought, but unfortunately, it was what they were out there to wrestle with.

"Let's just get going."

He didn't know where exactly he was leading his clone as they walked the winding path down into the canyon, the only way in or out of headquarters. The southwest summer sun meant they wouldn't be going far, but that was the only limit they had. 

The road was wide enough for vehicles by necessity, but the clone walked behind Dell, not at his side. Dell was glad, frankly. It meant more time where he didn't have to look at… that.

"Me and the doc worked hard to get you that hand. How come you took it off?"

Dell had expected the original to ask, but he stumbled all the same. He'd been sitting on half of a plan for how to explain, but he still felt hopelessly lost.

"It wasn't mine," he finally settled on. "It was a foreign body that didn't belong. I'd say it was the psychological equivalent of tissue rejection, but… there's more apt comparisons you're familiar with." 

The original - Dell didn't really like thinking of himself as something distinct from the an original, but he didn't have a better alternative - replied with a vague, affirmative noise. He'd given an unsatisfactory answer, apparently. Dell wasn't going to try and correct for that. It wasn't his job to comfort the person who'd brought him into the world as a science project.

Of course, the clone had no idea how scary the state of his arm was to Dell. That shiny new hacksaw had gone dull sawing through bone, and the stitched together skin left behind was not pretty. It wasn't a nice thought to have about someone else's appearance, not when he had a limb difference of his own, but the word grotesque kept coming to mind.

Dr. Ludwig agreed with that last point, but he liked it. Of course he did.

The clone also had no way of knowing how angry Dell had been, how scared he was of losing him. They'd only just met, but they'd known each other for their entire lives. His clone had existed as a separate entity for such a short amount of time, and that had very nearly been all the time he got. He'd watched Dr. Ludwig hover over the clone's unconscious, bloody body, and that image would never leave his mind.

Now, the original Dell, of course, had no way of knowing that the attachment was mutual. Life as a clone was already so lonely, and if nobody could understand that part of him, he hoped he could rest easy knowing he had someone to understand the rest.

None of this was voiced. They both would've liked to believe that there was an unspoken understanding between them, but the canyon between them was only widening. They kept walking in silence, water carving through rock.

It was another five minutes before Dell started up the slope away from the road, the clone watching anxiously to make sure he didn't slip and fall. Once they were on relatively flat ground again, Dell did slip, but the clone was able to catch him by the arm and keep him from falling. After another five minutes passed, Dell finally stopped. 

"Is here good?"

Dell didn't really have an opinion on where he and the original stopped, but he was hot and tired and ready to be done. He shrugged, which apparently was good enough.

Even when he was frustrating, everything the original did was fascinating to Dell. He watched as he pulled the blanket out of his backpack and spread it out on the ground, the same way he always had. Most people didn't get the experience of watching themselves, and he was trying to take in as much as he could. It was really fascinating stuff. The original wordlessly sat down, and Dell followed suit beside him. The original handed him a sandwich and he took it gratefully.

They were both about halfway through their sandwiches, and Dell had noticed that his counterpart was deeply uncomfortable with looking at his arm, when the original spoke up.

"You've missed the past few weeks, so I'm not sure how aware you are of the timeline we're working with here. That is, that we're goin' to war sooner rather than later. Likely before the year's out." 

He didn't mention what his father had told him.

Dell stared down at the sandwich in his hands. "I know."

"When that time comes, we're gonna be enemies. On opposite sides, not able to talk, having to…. You know. Kill each other."

Dell gripped his sandwich tighter, leaving nail-marks in the bread, and looked up at the man who had made him. Whatever dread and distress he felt, he saw it all reflected right back at him. It felt good to know he wasn't the only one hurting. "I know. That was… that was always the plan."

Really, who was he without the real Dell? How was he going to feel like anyone if he didn't have somebody to mimic when he started losing himself? He swallowed hard.

"I'd like to really, really connect with you before then," the real Dell said, softer than he'd ever expected to hear from him. "You're literally my other half, so I know you're brilliant. And you're part of me."

There was something odd in his tone, something Dell didn't want to push. "You're just as brilliant, of course. I want… I wish I was happy to be here. Being separate from you feels wrong, still, but I like spending time with you." 

The original sighed. "I'm lookin' forward to you workin' with me, at least for a little while. You can say whatever you like, but you're my better half, really. Which I suppose is my own fault. Better yet, my own doing."

That's what that tone was. Envy. But there was a fondness there, too. A sense of pride. Dell took another bite of his sandwich.

A clone was already a ridiculously impressive thing to invent, scientifically. People had done it before, but… nothing like Dell's. His clone had more than his genes. There was a part of his very being he'd imbued in him, and he'd made his own brilliance shine even brighter. How could he not love the person who came from that?

"Have you had a chance to read my notes yet? The ones about bein' a clone, I mean."

Dell blinked in surprise. That was the last thing he'd expected the clone to ask.

"What? Of course I read them! I read all of last night's first thing this morning! You're not- I'm not-" He threw his right arm up in frustration. "You're a scientific marvel. I know I have other things going on, I'm sorry I haven't been around very much, but you really are my top priority here. Your existence is up there with the most important research I've ever done. There's nobody like you on the whole damn planet!"

The clone winced. He hated how the original understood the feelings behind his words, and a reminder of how utterly alien he was just was not comforting in the slightest. "Thanks. I'm glad to hear you're invested in me. Bein' here has been… hard. Real hard. I'm not sure how important the psych profile is to our documentation, but I've felt consistently awful." 

Dell swallowed hard, biting back the immediate wave of guilt he felt. "I remember what you wrote about first waking up, how hard remembering everything all at once was. I'm sure we can figure out a way to make that easier. We'd start with a clone that has all of the blueprint's memories but no upgrades to retention, just to see if we can isolate the variable."

Blueprint. What a nice way to put it. Dell - the clone Dell - was maybe a bit hurt by how quickly the original moved onto more work, but he shared the impulse. "The arm having been such an issue concerns me more," he added. "I don't expect it's something that'll come up all that often, but figuring out whether it's an issue with the process or the subject will be harder."

Dell went back to eating his sandwich as the blueprint thought about that, brow furrowed. "We could chop a normal person's limb off," he finally suggested. "That should correct for any neurological differences, if that's the issue. You're thinking that the problem is that our brain never made pathways for another hand, right?"

Dell nodded. "That'd be the best way to do it, yeah. Only problem is finding someone willing to let us. We could probably pay someone enough to not fight, yeah? Some folks would do anything for money."

Dell would never sell his body like that, no matter how desperate he got. His family had been able to work their way up to being millionaires before he was even born, and he knew he could do it again.

The blueprint - Dell liked that way of thinking about him, liked that it centered his personhood - took the last bite of his sandwich. "Some folks, certainly. Honestly, I ain't sure if we'd even need all that much money. Pa talked a sniper into letting him risk his eyes, remember?"

Dell laughed, forcing what should have been a full belly laugh down into a chuckle. "It was only Pa's favorite story to tell. I swear, he'd repeat it every time we were both home."

It was weird to watch another person have his fond three-decade-old memories, even if it was an identical clone. Still, in spite of himself, Dell couldn't help but grin. When his father was around, he was an incredible man. The specifics were distant and fuzzy, but when he thought about it, he remembered his father's antics fondly. Maybe his father had been right. Maybe he should call home more often. Or at all.

He shouldn't have got angry at him. 

"Remember when we'd go on trail rides around the ranch and he'd try and get Grandpa to banter with him?"

"God, yeah," the clone answered, grinning. "Grandpa was trying to help me - well, us - practice neck reining, and it was the most I'd ever heard him talk. Pa just wanted to talk about…. well, you know. The war." 

Dell had never been particularly close to his papaw Radigan, but he had fond memories of him all the same. He talked about his work from time to time, but never mentioned BLU or The Administrator around Dell, even as he was dying. The clone doubtless had even more memories of him, held even closer to his heart. He wondered what that felt like, to not have your past trapped behind a wall of glass.

They lived in that quiet for a while, neither quite sure where to take the conversation. The war seemed like the natural next step. Everything came back to that, really. For better or for worse. But what else was there to say? 

The clone was the first to speak, voice soft and vulnerable in a way that sounded utterly wrong on Dell's ears. "I… I don't think I've been happy even once since I woke up. If all of my memories are yours, if this existence is the only thing that's real…" He looked away. "Dell, I'm honest-to-God miserable living like this. All I've ever been is miserable. Maybe when we're actually able to work on something together, maybe when I'm not all alone in the dark, it'll be better. But it has to get better. I won't survive this. I know I won't."

Despair. Pure and utter despair. All Dell knew to say was, "Why?"

The clone didn't answer for a while. He didn't want to tell his blueprint any of what he felt. His own nonexistence, his own unhumanity, the wall between himself and the world outside. The way that the name he remembered choosing, the family he remembered loving, none of that belonged to him. How angry he was at the "real" Dell Conagher, how angry he was at himself. What kind of monster makes a creature with so much to want, so much to grieve, and nothing to have and hold?

He ran his hand over the stitches on his arm. It hurt like hell.

His counterpart didn't say anything, just waited for a response. "I don't feel real. I feel like I'm your ghost, even though you're still alive."

Part of him wanted to do something about that. Something. He didn't know what, but he imagined there would be blood.

Dell put a hand on his clone's knee. "I'm real sorry about that," he assured him, more condolences than an apology. From the way the clone narrowed his eyes, he was well aware. "It'll get better though, yeah? We're gonna fork off from each other. You're gonna make your own memories. Get your own name, even." 

It was more humanity than he was used to thinking about his clone with. Sure, he wasn't much of a person, but neither was Dell. 

It'll get better. Thanks, blueprint. Dell rolled his eyes, something he was probably too old to be doing. "I'll be keeping the name I already got, thank you. You already get everything else that feels like mine. I know that's my own fault for not planning better, but that makes it your fault too."

The words were angry, but his tone was soft. He was reminded of being a little boy, of his mother after he'd poured salt into his fishtank. He left his stitches alone and put his hand on top of the original's.

"You know I can't give up the real life I've lived because of the fake one I put in your head. I'm sorry." Dell looked at his clone, tried to make eye contact despite his averted gaze. The sorrow in his voice was obvious, but it wasn't remorse.

"Why did you do it?" the clone asked, stupidly.

"You know why," the blueprint replied. "You tell me."

Dell took a deep breath in and out, in almost-sync with his counterpart.

"I wanted someone who could help me work right away, without having to learn. I felt that removing someone's personal memories while leaving the practical ones would be too disorienting and distressing. I thought that this would give my clone some sense of self..."

He trailed off and looked the original in the eye, ignoring the visible discomfort that came from giving the man exactly what he wanted. "Clearly, I was wrong."

Dell - the real Dell - looked anywhere but the hollowness in his clone's gaze. "So, your name."

"Either I get to be Dell, or people start calling me Engie, the Engineer, now.  This ain't up for debate."

The original, the blueprint, the real one, thought about that. Choosing his name had been so important to him. He didn't want to give that up.

Letting someone else think of themself as The Engineer, though? It was unthinkable. He'd spent his entire fucking life walking the path that would lead to it being him. Just like it had been for his grandfather. Just like it was for his father. The only mercenaries who knew his father's name had met him before the war. Your title is what you are, regardless of who you were. 

He needed that tie to his family. He hadn't put all of his being into this for nothing. He was not going to let some cheap copy of himself take that away from him. Not the thing he was born to be. 

The truth was, that's why he'd made the clone in the first place. He'd never admitted that to himself before, but it was. He wasn't going to let anyone else be The Engineer, not on BLU, not on RED, not as long as he could draw a weapon. Of course he'd found a way to make another one unnecessary. Almost.

"Fine," The Engineer spat. There was nothing for him to be angry about. This had to happen eventually.

"You can be Dell. Your class title is still going to be the engineer, of course, but that's not your name."

Don't ever start thinking of yourself that way. It's my family, my legacy, my Pa, and I'm not letting you fucking take that from me.

Dell couldn't believe what he was hearing. A real name, his real name, was what he wanted to have more than anything. It had taken him almost a month to find it, asking his parents what they would have named him if he'd been born a boy, looking through baby name books with his mama. His family had never cared about him falling in love with guitar, had never cared about any of his passions but engineering. Ever since he was a little boy, being Dell had been the one thing he chose for himself that really mattered.

Why was Engie so willing to give that up? Dell had tried playing tough, but he was tearing up again.

He never used to cry like that.

"I… Thank you, Engie. If there's ever anything else you'd want to be called, I'd be more than happy to do it, any time. Thank you for this."

Engie - The Engineer - looked at Dell, not sure what to do with how emotional he was getting. He started to worry that he'd given up something important, something he couldn't get back. He pulled his hand out from under Dell's and held it out for a handshake. 

"We oughta seal the deal, yeah?"

Dell hesitated. It felt like a goodbye. It felt like giving up something important. Something he couldn't get back.

He took The Engineer's hand and shook it. "Yeah."

The sun was baking them overhead, brutal and unyielding. Any tears from Dell were almost hidden by how much he was sweating. If you didn't know any better, you'd think that The Engineer was crying too.

"No matter what we do, as long as we live, we'll never know anyone like we know each other right now." Dell spoke softly, mostly to himself. "Doesn't that break your heart?"

The Engineer thought of the distance already between them, the things he already didn't understand. How Dell was being so vulnerable, for one. He was being more honest with The Engineer than The Engineer had ever been with himself.

"It scares me, more than anything," he admitted to the both of them.

Dell nodded. "Really, I just want to be happy. I just want both of us to be happy."

"We will be," The Engineer insisted. For all the world, it looked like he wasn't feeling the same weight Dell was. "It's just a rough start, is all. Like you were saying, once we're settled in and working, it'll be ok. There's more to be done, but it's nothing I- we can't figure out." 

More to be done. It was a hollow description of something completely insurmountable. Dell's hand went back to fidgeting with the stitches on his arm. It didn't hurt that badly, not in any way that mattered. 

The Engineer sensed that hesitancy, pulled his hand away from reopening the wound on his arm. "One day at a time," he assured, intertwining their fingers. "It's like folks say. You can survive anything if you can survive the next day, the next hour, the next ten minutes."

Dell nodded and squeezed The Engineer's hand. He just had to keep living until it started to feel like it was something he could stand. He just had to figure everything out.

He still wished they'd always be together.