(Obligatory note about not owning TF2 goes here)
The only sound in the dingy little room is the Administrator counting down the seconds before the match. The other men stand silent. Most of them have been prepared for the last hour.
The waiting grates on the Medic's nerves. The others, at least, have done this before. He has not. He keeps himself from looking around at the Respawn room, full of the invisible technology that will bring him back from the dead.
If he's sloppy enough to get killed.
He keeps his eyes on the broad back of the Heavy, holds the medigun steady. Five seconds. Four. Three.
Part of him wonders what death feels like.
"Begin!"
The others charge forward, yelling and jeering. He follows the red stream of the medigun, everything ahead of him obscured by the bulk of the Heavy.
A flash and a bang, and he jumps back. A man charges out at them from the building ahead. He ducks back behind the Heavy. The man doesn't say much, but he's good at stopping bullets.
The Heavy opens fire. The noise stupefies. He follows. Stay behind me, Doktor. Will protect. He bristled at that. Now, he feels foolish for it.
An explosion. No one in front of him, just pieces, a hand in the dust. A man in a blue uniform bearing down on him. He flings himself out of the way, drops the medigun, reaches for the other one. The man comes around the corner and he yells and pulls the trigger, and the man's face below the helmet fills with syringes and he falls.
Medic stands there, panting, looking down at the corpse. The helmet rolls away.
Medic grins. The new job's not so bad after all.
He doesn't see anyone for a while, and then it's the Soldier from his own team, so he switches back to the medigun and follows meekly, until Soldier decides it's a good idea to shoot a rocket at his feet and soars out of view.
The first time the Medic sees him, he's well across the field, standing on one of the points, looking around, gun in hand.
The uniform is blue. The gloves, the tie, the pack—all the mirror of his own, and all blue. It's not the uniform that dries his mouth with rage. It's everything else.
The man is him. Same jaw. Same glasses. Same damned gray patches in his hair. Same height, build, bearing. It's him. Not even his brother resembled him this closely. They're the same man.
He stops where he is, horrified, staring. He reloads the gun, fumbles, gets it loaded, raises it. He'll wound him. He'll interrogate him. There are enough quiet corners around here that two men can have a conversation in something resembling peace. He raises the gun.
The back of his neck prickles. He turns.
The thing behind him tilts its head, the flat eyeholes of the gasmask glinting, and pulls the trigger on its flamethrower.
—-
He comes to in the Respawn room, gasping, and barely makes it over to a bucket in time to be sick. He leans his forehead against the wall, bile in his throat, the smell of it in his nose, and shakes.
He doubts he'll be able to tolerate the smell of cooking meat for weeks.
A hand slaps him on the back. He swings without thinking. The Scout ducks out of the way, laughing.
"Woah man, didn't mean to freak you."
Medic straightens his labcoat, trying to look composed. The Scout looks him up and down, and he glares at the boy.
Who is unmoved. "Tha Pyro got you, right? Sucks. You know what helps, right? Go kick tha mumbler's ass."
He says nothing, checks his weapons, and heads for the door, the Scout's, "Good luck, old man!" ringing in his ears.
—-
By the next battle, he has a plan. The Heavy has agreed to help, as curious as he about their doppelgängers.
It takes some time to catch the BLU Medic alone. Once they do, it is no matter to overpower him. Of greater difficulty is smuggling him to the infirmary unnoticed, but the Heavy brings a large sack with them and it works.
They strap him down to the table and Medic asks Heavy to leave. It promises to be unpleasant. He doesn't want Heavy to see. Heavy objects; Medic assures him that he will be perfectly safe, and at last that insistence is enough.
The man comes around soon after that with a groan. The Medic is waiting.
"Who are you?" His voice grates on the last word.
Sullen silence. Then, "The Medic."
"Your real name."
The man is very quiet for a long time, and at last gives a name. Medic sits there, the pen hovering above the pad of paper, forgotten.
It's his name.
He asks further questions. He doesn't have to use any persuasion to get answers. He asks about the war. He asks about his childhood. He asks about doves, about surgery, about scientific papers.
At last, he asks about what happened that cold March morning, in an unfamiliar town, which they thought safe, and then couldn't flee.
The other man's eyes light with a fury and grief that is not counterfeited, and he does not answer.
So the Medic takes the blood and skin samples and while those are processing, stares at the pad of paper and thinks while the man stares at him with curiosity and contempt and fear.
Cloning should be theoretical. But so should a machine that brings the dead back to life. Or the medigun. He wouldn't put it past his employers, and remembers clearly the blood sample Miss Pauling took from him when he first signed on—though that has the difficulty that most of the cells don't have nuclei. If they were to take white blood cells…
At last he comes to the appropriate conclusion, sedates the other man so he won't wiggle inconveniently, and begins to examine scars. The old ones, from before he signed on, are identical, and appear to be fully healed. But a close examination of the scar tissue shows them to be shallow, no deeper than the first layer of muscle. It's not enough to hypothesize that the man is the clone—there is still room for error—but what he finds next confirms it.
The other Medic has an appendix. The scar from the appendectomy is there, extending across the abdomen, fine and well-healed, but there's no damage to the muscle tissue, no scarring past the epidermis, and the other man still has an appendix.
The other Medic is a clone. They took a blood sample and cloned him.
He can't simply kill him; they'll send another one. So he'll have to live with it.
The anger builds in his throat, and his hands clench. He'll have to live with this...this experiment with pretensions of grandeur, this thing that they grew in a tube from his cells without his permission, this thing they stuffed with his memories, this obscenity that is convinced it is him. And he's helpless to do anything about it. He'll have to live with it.
He wants to kill it. He wants to wake it up and take it to pieces while it screams. This thing has stolen his form, his face, his memories. It deserves to die.
And then he hesitates, his hand hovering over the tray of scalpels. It's not because he feels sorry for it. It's not because murdering the thing for merely existing will make him the same as the monsters who killed his family.
It's because he remembers the terrifying prospect of it being the original, of him being the clone. Letting it live with that knowledge will be infinitely worse than any mere death.
When it's awake, he folds his hands in front of him and doesn't even bother with the sympathy. "You're a clone."
The clone stares at him in horror, shakes its head.
He leans forward. "Zhey took my cells und made you. Zhose memories? Zhey are false. You are a fake."
It screams back at him, demands evidence. He produces the appendix he removed, still warm; the clone insists it must have been from someone else, how is he to know, it's a biased source.
In the end, he has to sedate the clone before returning it.
—-
Not too much later, the clone kidnaps him. He comes to on the operating table, with an unhappy BLU Medic standing over him.
"You vere correct," says the clone. He smirks.
"Prehaps zhis is a stroke ov luck," says the clone. "I could tip certain people off to your location, lie low und vonce you vere out ov zhe vay, live a normal life. Settle down vith somevon."
It doesn't know about Elsie. That is a relief. He doesn't want to have to explain this to her.
"I cannot imagine your creators being too happy about zhat," he points out, and the clone's face twists.
"I vant coauthorship," it says when it's mastered itself. It's his turn to stare.
"On vhat?"
"Zhe paper."
"You zhink ve vill get a paper out ov zhis? Somevon has beat you to it—you are zhe proof!"
"No. I vas zhinking ve could develop an assay. To determine vhether somevon is a clone. Differing rates of mutation. Somezhing ozzer zhan cutting each ozzer open."
It's intriguing. He has to admit the clone might have gotten some of his good sense after all. "Zhat...has potential. Vhy do you need me?"
The clone looks sheepish. "I…may need your lab, on occasion. Zhe Scout put gum in my centrifuge. I cannot get it out."
"Coauthorship?"
"Ja."
He hates the clone. He tells himself he does, but it's standing there, looking at the centrifuge, looking at him with an embarrassed defiance. Then it adds, "Und vho else vould be interested? Zhe Engineer's eyes glaze ovah if you mention intestines. Zhe Heavy is good for holding zhings still, but his degree is in literature. Zhey're useless!"
He's also missed scientific conversation. He's tried to explain why he's so excited about a few articles to the Heavy. The Heavy has only made polite, confused comments and left puzzled.
The Engineer threw up when he saw the figures.
"It is reasonable," he says. The clone smiles, a bearing of teeth that makes him wonder why Elsie married him if he looks like that when he's happy.
"I vill still take pleasure in killing you," he says, because it's true and he doesn't like seeing the damn thing so happy.
"Zhe same goes for me, I assure you."
—-
He's not quite as sure about their bargain as time goes on and the clone kidnaps him to discuss scientific papers, but once he reciprocates, it's easier to tolerate. It's reasonably intelligent, all things considered, and they spend many nights poring over methods papers and technicalities and after a while he stops thinking of it as an it or the clone and starts thinking of him as BLU Medic and a colleague. He tells BLU Medic, after a while, about Elsie, about the memories they didn't transfer, and BLU Medic agrees with him that it was likely for the best.
Visits become more frequent, less technical. They drink tea and discuss things other than the project, discoveries, cancer treatment. After a while, there is brandy in the tea, reasonable confidence that one is not trying to get the other drunk to kill or dissect him. BLU Medic is consciously modifying his behavior, trying to be less like his counterpart.
By the fiasco with the monkey and the rocket, living with it has become pleasant.