Reconnect
Rating: K+ for violence, profanity, guns, and technical major character death.
Characters: Medic-centric, Archimedes
Spoilers: Mann vs. Machine? Have you watched it yet? Here let me give you a few minutes to check it out right now. Okay, now that you've seen that WASN'T THAT AMAZING? Oh there's also a Poker Night at the Inventory reference here to a story that's not even a little bit funny, man.
Disclaimer: Valve owns your money after the Steam sale. They also own Team Fortress 2.
Notes: This was a short ficlet based off a prompt from a user called cutelittleproxy given to jannelle-o (who had let me use her doodle for the cover image of this story, thanks!) on Tumblr to draw Robo-Archimedes and a Robo-Balloonicorn. My need to throw in angsty headcanons to everything kicked in, and I ended up vomiting up some feels. (Who knows, it might help me get back into working on some TF2 fic...but I'm not guaranteeing anything, especially with how much a lot of canon things have changed.)
This was wrong. The Medic knew that everything about this was wrong.
He had known it was wrong ever since that cold, thunderous day that Gray had sent those verdammt maschinen to murder every single last one of their mercenaries, Blue or Red. He had known from the moment they had to ally together that this was wrong. Ever since he had lashed upon them in fury and tore them apart, bolt by bolt, plate by plate, only to see within them the complicated systems of broken circuits and wires, nuts and screws.
These were things that the Engineer could appreciate but things that the Medic could not; he only saw these robots as poor, abominable imitations of the creature known as homosapien.These robots were nowhere close to the living, breathing specimen that were built with flesh and bone, with veins and arteries streaming tiny cells that composed the crimson liquid every human bled.
These robots did not bleed, and because of this they were not natural.
These robots had made Archimedes bleed.
Time and time again, the Medic had warned his birds - especially Archimedes - to stay put and not go outside when the blasts of guns would begin. And time and time again, he had seen Archimedes flying about carrying a limb or taking a birdbath in some unfortunate, filthy corpse's chest cavity. This would usually be followed by an irate, frantic exclamation of "Archimedes, NO!" from the Medic as he sprinted after the bird (ignoring the gibs of the Demoman he had almost Ubercharged just seconds ago) and would proceed to scold it:
Archimedes, never fly outside during war.
Icarus, never fly too close to the sun. Lucifer, never rouse My anger.
Never did the Medic cry those two words more desperately than that time he had seen the bird, his bird, trailing feathers and blood as Archimedes descended to Earth.
Like Icarus whose wings had melted; like Lucifer who had been banished to Hell.
To this day, everyone but the Heavy chided him for being petty and emotional when he recalled that time he had buried his fallen angel in the snow.
That was why this was wrong - seeing this thing within his gloved palms whir as it craned its head up towards him. Small red lights that functioned as eyes flickered, and electricity crackled at the severed copper wire; a vital circuit that could be easily fixed if they were tied together at the ends.
A synthesized, static-laced warble left its metallic beak, and if he hadn't convinced himself that these robots were wrong and had no trace of real life or feeling within metal shells, he would have thought the noise almost sounded pained and forlorn.
He still hadn't convinced himself to this day as the Medic shooed off Archimedes 002 from one of his patient's chests, threatening to electrocute the blood-stained synthetic feathers off of it with one of the Spy's sappers.