You Were Good, Maybe Even the Best
Rain dampened the grounds of Teufort, the dirt and sand mixing together into a muddy mixture. They'd done it, saved Mann Co. from Grey, but at terrible cost. The fabled respawn machines were almost destroyed, and an entire army of Engineers was working to repair them - repair the cycle of endless combat.
The veterans of both teams - from all classes and all outposts. Lay dead. The heavies of Teufort had lost Dnail and Boris, brothers who had fought each other countless times on the battlefield, had been destroyed in the blast that killed Grey Mann. alongside many others.
The spies of Dustbowl had lost a living saint of stealth - The Boss. When it had been the time to confront Grey personally, he had been the one to sabotage the robot construction facilities on his personal ARG. He had also helped set the core supplying power to the gigantic construct to critical.
The demomen warring over Degroot Keep watched their leaders - Tavish Degroot and Davish McMurphy - be buried beneath a tibe of giant robots. Both shouting defiantly as they brandished a claymore and a frying pan before charging defiantly.
The losses were countless at that final battleoutside of Mann Co's final headquarters - that which was below Teufort the entire time, but none were more affected by the battle than the soldiers. The BLU team had lost it's god of war - Jonathan Grey.
In the final hours of the battle the vault-like entrance to the production facility was breached, only to be retaken by two soldiers - Jane Doe and Jonathan Grey, both were lords of the battlefield, revelling in the carnage of war.
Eventually even they ran out of ammo and robot parts to throw at the enemy, and Jane had disappeared to go get reinforcements. Jonathan merely laughed insanely before charging in with a pick axe.
The tide had proven too much, and they corned him outside of an explosives closet - where he laughed even more as bullets tore into him. He merely laughed even more and tore grenades out of the closet ans pulled the pins out of the ones on his chest before throwing them - every last one - from the closet as they set off, the explosion ripping through Teufort.
He lay in the dirt when they found him, dead. The grenades had left him unrecognisable. shrapnel shredding him and bullet holes punched through him.
Five days later they buried him and the rest of those who died in a giant cremation. Three thousand men burned upon a giant pyre before the ashes were placed in three hundred coffins before being placed in the old - and now abandoned - intel rooms of the team they belonged to.
Nine men in front of a large display cabinet - one of the many bearing a lead lined coffin - and looked upon the plaque emblazoned on the front.
A rocket.
Below the rocket was a second plaque bearing the name of Jonathan Grey. A man in a white trench coat merely sighed and slumped his shoulders as he placed his hand upon the glass
"I always liked you better." Baumann said quietly "You understood loss." and with that he returned to his duties of maintaining the crypts. Tyson Jameson, the bostonian wyrd hunter encountered way back in the beginning, shed a single tear. A tear that contained the combined sadness of every single friend of those lost in that final, cataclysmic, battle as he made his exit, to return to his position of warden to Thunder Mountain. He would remain in contact with his colleagues until the day of his passing, where he was returned to Teufort and joined the grim collection alongside his team mates.
In the background, hidden within the shadows of the darkened room, stood the twin heavies, Dnail and Boris, both lowered their beloved weapons out of respect before disappearing, returning to their posts as guardians to the rebuilding fortress. Five figures remained out of the nine. One of them an Australian sniper, who had docked his hat and left on the plaque three pictures Taken the night before the final battle, where a combined ten thousand souls stood in unison, and a fourth picture showing just the eleven stood together as a team.
Jeremiah Helsing returned to his post at the watchpost above the ramparts, where he remained dutifully until he was taken in his sleep at the age of a hundred and one. His brother joined him in death the following morning, falling asleep and embracing death as an old-friend. Returning to his comrades at the age of ninety nine.
A solitary figure in a wheelchair remained sat there, in his vegative state. At one time The Boss had been a master of the arts of the arts, then as the ARG exploded the last anyone saw of him was him stood over a dying Grey, flicking a cigarette butt onto his foe's body before jumping out of the window as the explosion reached them.. he had encountered a giant heavy bot, and after a hard fought battle, collapsed into the arms of pseudo-ally Jeremiah's arms. When his colleagues died his life support finally failed, allowing death to claim him. He was wheeled away by the now mute Isaac Jones, the engineer that had survived Thunder Mountain. Isaac went to pass aged eighty, forty years after the battle.
And finally stepping out of the shadows was Tavish Degroot, claymore on his back. The room was empty when he entered, and as he approached the display he slid two tickets into glass case, a sad, disheartened smile on his face as he placed a hand upon the glass
"Aye, those're the tickets for that game we went tae see, matey." he sighed sadly "We 'ad good times, eh? heh, we were gonna see the next game, weren't we, matey? Good times..." he patted the glass as he departed, returning to his men a disillusioned man. He went on to die the oldest of them all, aged 110, at the head of a dynasty of demolition people, he finally returned to his comrades and friends.
Thus, was the story of the few concluded.
Written in place of my brother, the writer of Teufort Times, who was sadly unable to finish this final piece, he has become disillusioned with the writing eorld after losing the use of his legs.