We interrupted your regular programming to bring you this: something of a writing exercise for me, as I needed to practice writing Medic, and I thought, well, why not, let's throw it up there for the masses. Enjoy, I guess?

Special Thanks to Victor Wizard Half-Blood Spy for the awesome beta!

Don't own TF2. Never have, never will.

The Hippocratic Suggestion

It was always cold in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but on this bitterly chilled winter night everything seemed a little bit deader too.

Josef had long since given up trying to write his report. He could hardly recall what the report called for anyway. Not that it mattered. He had an inkling the report would go up in smoke.

Like everything else in this godforsaken hellhole.

Josef leaned back in his uncomfortable wooden chair, eyes scanning the infirmary. Candlelight flickered over the beds and bare walls, casting the world into an eerie half-darkness. Things were never this quiet, the silence punctured only by the ragged breathing of a dying man and the faint, almost ignorable whimpers of a teenage girl.

He was dead-tired, and neither of the patients were in any condition to escape, but he couldn't go to sleep just yet. There too many thoughts nagging at him.

That was the problem with him, Horst had complained. He was too quiet, too absorbed in his own thoughts to pay attention to the master plan. Too empathetic, Horst said. After all, empathy was what had caused his nervous breakdown at the beginning. Sorting young from old, sick from healthy, good from bad, it had been too much for the promising young doctor from Stuttgart.

They had put him on night duty, kept him clear of so-called operating rooms. Horst and the Other Josef—oh, how he hated being mistaken for the Other Josef—lorded it over him like it was some great tragedy, how he was missing the most fascinating experiments of the age.

Josef didn't care. He knew he would've gotten sick to his stomach if he walked into those rooms. As it stood, he felt bile rising in his throat every time he walked into the infirmary.

Joelle would never forgive him if she knew what was going on here.

Josef sat down, burrowing his face in his hands. Every day he'd been fighting back the memories of Joelle, of her soft voice, her eyes tender with love. Every day, at the beginning, he stood at the start of that awful sorting line and prayed to a God he didn't believe in he wouldn't see her. And every night he made the rounds around the infirmary, heart pounding painfully in his chest, just in case he'd missed her somehow.

Joelle wasn't here. Joelle, as far as he knew, was still hiding in Dresden, with his extended family. They'd promised to keep her safe. No one would find her there, unless it was the Allies. And at this point, he preferred her in the hands of the Allies than his own countrymen.

He missed her so much it physically ached.

Before the war he would've reflected on this intense and immersive pain. He was—had been—something of an expert on the subject. He had written two discourses on pain and the human ability to overcome it, and both had been well received by the scientific community. That's probably how he ended up here, freezing and miserable in a ramshackle infirmary.

They hadn't even asked if he wanted the job. He'd been nearly forced to take it, as a means of protecting Joelle. He thought it might protect her, draw them off of her trail. They knew, or at least suspected, that his wife was one of them. Maybe they enjoyed watching him squirm under the pressure.

Maybe this war would end soon and he and Joelle could enjoy the flower blossoms in Dresden. Maybe they'd found Joelle and shipped her off to tortures elsewhere. Or maybe he'd be the one who would suffer. Maybe he'd wind up dead with a Russian bullet in his head. Or maybe he was dead already and this was his punishment, his iced-over hell, filled with the moaning and screams of the dying.

The man had awoken, flailing his hands around uselessly. He turned to Josef, his face skeletal, his eyes sunken and wide. "Please," he croaked, "kill me."

Josef bit back his own scream as he picked up his pen once more. "Later."

If you know anything about WWII you know sending Joelle to Dresden did not turn out in Medic's favor.

I hope I did everyone and everything justice. :)

Thanks for reading!

~Chaos