The Crock Pot had set itself to warm with a quiet click several hours before the day's battle ended. The remains of preparation were scattered over the counter—the ends of celery ribs, onion skins, carrot tips, bits of potato on a chopping board, an empty bottle of burgundy standing neatly beside the Crock Pot and its cork. The knife laid neatly across the board and the vegetables on it. The savory, herby smell of bouef bourguignon filled the kitchen, empty but for the smell and the inanimate objects on the counter.
The Soldier was the first to find the empty kitchen, worry immediately knotting his eyebrows. He left it, his normally exhausted after-battle pace quickening, and went to her room, then the living room. Seeing no one, he started to open doors to the mercenaries' rooms, calling her name. He paused in front of the Demo's door—the man had been clear enough about the explosives he'd put on the other side of it and the cost of barging in—and called through it, first softly, then bellowing, his voice echoing in the halls. Silence answered him and he ran for the main doors, meeting the rest of the RED team as they trickled in.
It took him three tries to tell anyone, chest heaving, still bloody and singed from the day's battle. When he stopped them one-by-one, they at first shied away from him, from the white rims around his eyes and the expression on his face. The news was even less pleasant than they supposed from his expression and they joined the search on hearing it, fanning out to search the barren desert around the base as well, calling her with a mix of pet names and her own, learning it as the Soldier bellowed it.
None of them had seen her, not since that morning when she sat across the table from the Spy, glaring at him as if she were planning to launch herself across the table and slit his throat with a butter knife. The Spy himself would say nothing about her, going immediately to his room when he heard the news. His door slammed in a rare show of temper. The Sniper, hearing the boom of the door slamming, went to it. Rapping with his fist on the door got no response but the faint sounds of the mercenaries calling her name outside. The Sniper picked the lock with a rather specialized set of small hooks pulled from a thin roll in his back pocket—a gift from his lover—and let himself in, stepping over the grease-darkened tripwire. The Spy, face down on the bed, didn't bother to look up.
"Sneak," the Sniper said softly. "You can't just lay here."
"Vas te faire encule, baise-moi, et son basier aussi. Fuck the entire lot of us," the Spy growled into the bed. "J'suis trop fatigue pour cette merde."
The Sniper frowned with concentration, translating in his head, then sighed. "Sneak, I know. But you can't sit this out."
"Nique ta mere!"
The Sniper sat down on the edge of the bed, watching his lover run his fingers over and over through the unruly, salt and pepper curls on the back of his head, forehead pressed to the mattress, invective muffled by the bed. What he could hear ran high to mothers, fucking, and the cruelty of luck, sprinkled with the occasional goat. After a few minutes, the Spy turned his reddened face, panting. "Do you realize," he said, fingers knotted in his hair, "that if she has run, they will send the BLU Spy after her? It will not be me, it will be him because she is a member of this team and not BLU. He is not… He is not a reasonable man."
The Sniper sighed and briefly touched his lover's back, which twitched under his fingers like the skin of a horse beset by biting flies. Pulling his hand back, he stood up. When he opened his mouth to speak, the bomb went off, throwing him down across the Spy and spattering them both with ceiling plaster and fragments of concrete.