In the half-light cast by a dispenser, the huddled figures on the mattress twitched in their mutual dreams. The figure on the outside, head shaved to stubble, dug his fingers into the arm of the woman behind him. His eyes squeezed over and over, wrinkling, and he curled slightly, pulling the arm around him in toward his chest. His mouth moved, a faint shape in the darkness, as if he were speaking to someone in his dreams. The arm around him tightened and he gasped, his eyes flying open, still dulled with sleep. After a few blinks, they closed again, lips still shuddering.

The figure behind him lay pressed tightly against his spine, arm flexing with her dreams. Her lips were pressed to the nape of his neck, moving restlessly as if she spoke. Her eyebrows flexed down, and with the cant of her lips, it was clear that whatever she dreamed about was equally disturbing as the dream of the figure she clung to. Her head shook momentarily back and forth, as if trying to fling an idea from her head. She snarled once in her sleep, and the man in front of her whimpered. Without waking, she tucked her arm in more tightly around him and he sighed in his sleep, hands relaxing from their white-knuckled grip on the arm she had thrown over him.

The RED Spy sighed very, very quietly. He had to check, as much an invasion of privacy as he was committing, to see whether or not she'd be all right, and whether or not she was being well treated. The collar around her neck answered that question in the negative, and like any agent he'd sent on a rough mission, he expected that she'd be a mess for awhile afterward. He was proud of her—even while he was still recruiting for the French government, most of his agents hadn't had an assignment as tough as what she'd done to get rid of those three monsters. When the BLU team had loosened up, they'd given him enough information to take a good guess at the events of the last few days, and he was frankly impressed. Those days had been hellish for him, though he'd made much less of an obvious display of his tension than his lover or the firebug, and really hellish for her. They all knew what sort of men the BLU Soldier, Spy, and Medic were. Everyone, at one point or another, had the misfortune of being alone with those men on the battlefield, and they had seen women who spent time with the BLU Spy or Soldier come back to the bar, haunted and terrified. Some women did not come back at all.

He'd forgotten how helpless he felt when sending an agent out, and how nerve-wracking it was to know that their lives were out of his hands. He'd tried, for the most part, to find agents there was no chance that he'd be attached to, but this one had gotten to him. He knew himself too well to have not known it was coming. He'd always had a thing for ordinary people who took on extraordinary strengths under pressure, and the combination of prickly brusqueness, compliance, and desire to be one of them had done the rest. She was ordinary in appearance—he'd seen enough naked bodies and faces not to be particularly impressed by anything on the outside of a person—but what had been exposed through pressure was extraordinary.

He smiled wryly in the darkness at the two figures on the bed. Of course, now came the really difficult part. Once the pressure was off, what would she do with the damage that had, no doubt, been inflicted on her? The agents he'd recruited had often performed well enough under pressure at first, but decayed almost immediately once they had time to introspect. A few times, he'd had to put them out of their misery before they wrecked a situation he'd worked for months to set up. He'd been kind enough to do it with an opiate overdose whenever he could, letting them die easily.

He shifted carefully, slowly enough to make the whisper of his slacks inaudible. This one, he couldn't kill. They could, however, subdue her if necessary. He'd rather not, but they'd do what they had to. It remained to be seen if she could learn to compartmentalize well enough to be allowed off base, and whether she'd survive and thrive. Few did.

The Spy also had to admit he was curious to see what sort of shape the BLU team was in after losing their three most aggressive and dangerous members. He'd done enough scouting to be able to find his way around the base, and more than enough to be able to locate her. He'd actually arrived in time to follow her into the base—the sex acts she'd gotten up to with their direct supervisor had been, if he were that kind of man, quite possibly the finest blackmail he was likely to get on the woman. However, the woman was both dangerous and he had no need to blackmail her, so he'd decided to merely enjoy the view and commit it to memory, to describe to his lover later. He agreed with Miss Pauling. If the boy wanted any, he could ask directly and take his chances like anyone else. Asking was, in his opinion, worth it. He'd very nearly stroked himself watching them, a happy accident that turned to a graphic and rather excellent bit of impromptu porn. Finding out his direct supervisor had once been a prostitute didn't bother him in the least. He'd often recruited sex workers when he had been working for the French government, finding their prosaic practicality and the sheer volume of their personal connections incredibly useful for infiltration.

The Spy stretched, knuckling his lower back, and decided he'd seen enough. She appeared to be fine. The BLU Engineer appeared to be no particular threat, not that he'd expected the man to be, and there was no need to help her with anything. He hated to admit it, but for a civilian, she'd done a professional job of surviving—she had not frozen, had not succumbed to the pressure that they had no doubt put on her, and had been able to convince two experts to kill each other despite their decades of experience surviving.

The Spy paused for a moment, hand on the door knob. I can't think of her that way anymore, he thought. She's not a civilian.

He let himself out of the door. The Engineer was going to shit himself when he woke up to find all his turrets sapped, but he had to do it. The Spy let himself out of the outer base doors and trotted across the mile or so of intervening sand easily, the faint crunch of his steps fading into the darkness. He let himself into the Sniper's camper, where his lover sat up, waiting for him.

"Well," the Sniper asked.

"She's fine." After a moment, he added. "Well, all except for the bad dreams. I think we should take some pride in the way she turned out. Very few people would have survived even a few days with our colleagues. Of course, it remains to be seen whether she'll be all right after all this." The Spy unbuttoned his white shirt and laid it over a chair. "I think, however, that she'll survive."

His lover reached for him, sliding calloused fingers around the Spy's sides and pulling him into the circle of his arms. "She's had an effect on us, as well."

The Spy froze, looking down at him. I didn't know you think that way, he thought, startled. After a long pause, he answered. "Yes, she has."

"Do you think that's why they sent her?"

The Spy sighed and laced his hands around the back of the Sniper's neck. "Likely, Bête. Quite likely. Men were not meant to live this long, through dying repeatedly. The longer this goes on, the more difficult it becomes to stay sane, to remember anything but this. If I had known what was going to happen, I'm not sure I would have taken the job."

The Sniper leaned forward, resting his head against the Spy for a moment, then looked up at him. "Did you choose?"

"In a way," the Spy said softly. "I could have killed myself before she came for me. I sometimes wonder if that wouldn't have been better." Perhaps it was just his real age, or the experience of sending someone out again into danger, but the thought of permanently dying remained an old friend—a comfort not to be ignored, the knowledge that with a little careful sabotage, all this could end.

The Sniper sighed, then pulled the Spy down into his lap, running his calloused hands over the planes of his lover's chest, wordlessly speaking to him. After a moment, the Spy relaxed into his lover's caress, accepting the silent reminder that for better or worse, they belonged—though the word made them both laugh, since anyone who knew the migratory habits of the profession knew that the idea of belonging was hilarious—to each other.

The Spy led them both to the low bed against the camper wall, shedding and neatly folding his slacks, leaving his socks in his shoes and crawling into bed in a silky pair of briefs. The Sniper left his clothing where it fell, and crawled into bed to hold his lover. Neither man commented on the fact that it was unusual for them to spend this much time together though it was there, between them: a change that neither man would have asked for.

Both were grateful for it, the simple comfort of knowing that the other man was there, and that they knew themselves to be in company.