Three part commission for Survivingcanberra on Tumblr. Thanks again for commissioning me!
This fic's a real step away from my usual kind of thing (where's the angst?) but I had fun with it! Especially since it got me writing Pyro, a character who doesn't usually feature heavily in my fics despite being my main in game!
It was an instinct so deep that it was written into his bones. When someone screams you run towards the sound. Never away. It was the healer's duty. No matter what the danger, no matter what the risk to yourself, you must always put your teammates first.
It was something that, with his unorthodox experiments and loose grasp of morals, the RED Medic would never understand. But the BLU did.
So when he heard a scream rise above the noise of the battle, he changed direction and limped towards it as fast as possible. His Heavy was dead. The giant soldierbot they'd been fighting was dead too, but the shrapnel from one of its exploding rockets had lodged itself firmly in the Medic's right leg.
No matter. No matter. The patient came first.
Another cry of pain.
He picked up the pace. Who was that? Who needed to be saved?
He rounded the corner to find the scene laid out before him. An axe abandoned on the ground amongst the twisted remains of two scoutbots. A swathe of blood. A spybot crumpled in the dust. More blood. Another scoutbot, one leg slightly damaged but still functioning. Its bat raised, silver tinted in red at the end. Beneath it, huddled up against a wall: Pyro.
The RED Pyro.
The enemy Pyro.
No.
Not the enemy anymore.
Medic charged forward, teeth gritted into a snarl against the pain in his leg. He crashed bodily into the scoutbot, sending it reeling off to the side.
'Hey, Doc,' the scoutbot said, its robotic voice coming out even more distorted than usual. Medic bared his teeth at it, hating the way the crackling, pre-recorded voicelines always made the nape of his neck prickle. He drew out his bonesaw and shoved it as hard as he could between the joints in its metal chest, severing wires. There was a horrible screech of metal-on-metal as the saw hit the robot's spine.
The scoutbot's legs gave out. It fell to the ground, yanking Medic's bonesaw out of his hand as it went.
'Hey, D-d-d-doc, h-h-h-hey-hey-y-y-y,' the robot said, the blue of its eyes flickering erratically.
'Heeeyyyyyy...'
Medic turned his back on it. He had more important things to see to than a dying robot.
The BLU Pyro had pulled themselves a couple of feet away. Medic could see exactly where they'd started off from the blood soaking into the wooden barn wall.
As Medic approached, the Pyro flinched, a burbling, whimpering sound escaping through the filter of their mask.
'There, there, it's okay,' Medic said hesitantly, making calming gestures with his hands. He felt like he was approaching a wounded animal. Well, this was the RED Pyro after all. This creature had laughed while torching him to death more times than he could remember.
But now they were here on the ground in front of him, badly injured and clearly in great pain and distress. When they shuffled backwards they only used one arm, and there was something about how gingerly they moved that suggested broken ribs. A botched backstab from the Spybot and multiple accounts of blunt-force trauma caused by those scoutbots' bats, Medic suspected.
'I'm here to help, I promise.' He'd never been very good at the whole 'bedside manner' part of being a doctor. He usually just told people to hold still and man-up, but he didn't even know if the Pyro was a man under that suit.
Another miserable little burble from the Pyro. They'd stopped trying to escape though. Medic knelt down next to them and pulled his medipack off. The thing was, each medigun could only heal one team. As he understood it, it had been set up that way to stop those cheating REDs from stealing the medigun off his dead body and using it on their own teammates. Though, admittedly, if given the chance, the BLU team might do the same thing. But only because they knew RED would try and do it first.
Medic had meant to swap some medigun fluid with the RED Medic so they could heal both team, but the two groups had been so fractured and argumentative since they first joined forces that it hadn't seemed worth it. Plus, the RED Medic was an asshole. They had to share one infirmary together now but had ended up splitting it in half with curtains because they fought so much. It was all very childish, Medic had to admit. But the RED had started it.
As he reached into his jacket and pulled out a little red-tinted vial, Medic felt relieved that he'd sneaked behind the other Medic's back and stolen some of his formula for further study. It was only luck that had it in his pocket now though; he'd simply forgotten about moving it elsewhere once the sirens had started up and the latest robot attack began.
Medic emptied out the BLU medifluid from his gun barrel and poured the RED down it. As he worked he muttered nonsensical phrases of reassurance to the Pyro. 'Just one more moment, bitte, there, just one more moment, then it'll be all right, then it'll be all okay.' He had to reconnect the gun to the canister to get the whole thing running again, but hopefully there would be enough RED medifluid in there to heal the Pyro before the BLU came back through..
It occurred to Medic as he turned the medigun back on that he could have just sent the Pyro through respawn. Their weapons still worked on each other after all, as his Heavy had proven when the RED Spy made one crude joke too many about their close friendship.
But he realised he couldn't do it. RED and BLU might still fight with one another, but they were on the same side of the war now. This Pyro was his ally. This Pyro was his patient. It was his duty as a field medic to do everything in his power to help them.
'The medigun heals faster when you've got skin exposed,' he said.
Pyro shook their head fervently, evening sunlight bouncing off the lenses of their mask. 'Npth sknth, npth sknth!' and then a quiet, muffled little, 'Plpth.'
Medic nodded, respecting his patient's wishes. He almost said, 'well here goes nothing' as he activated the medigun, but stopped himself when he realised that that wouldn't be the most reassuring thing to say.
RED fumes streamed out of the end of his gun. It was a strange thing to watch. Medic had always associated the colour with harm, not with healing. It seemed to be working though, the Pyro's rattling breathing returning to normal, and the fingers on their limp arm starting to move again.
Gradually the fumes turned purple and began to snake around Medic too. He felt the pain in his leg fade as purple eased into red. That presented so many interesting possibilities. Is that all it would take to create a universal medigun, the mixing on the two fluids? Combined, would their effectiveness be decreased or boosted? At what shade would the medigun stop healing one team? What if-
Red and black filled Medic's vision. Arms wrapped around him. The smell of petrol and burning plastic filled his nose. For a moment, panic flared through Medic, leaving him rigid. The filter on the side of Pyro's mask knocked against his chest as they buried their head in against him. They squeezed him lightly with arms that felt far stronger than Medic had expected from the little figure. Well, they did spend all day lugging a flame thrower around, it really shouldn't have come as a surprise.
'Fnpth fu,' Pyro said, 'fnpth fu fur phthvthn mpth, Medipth.'
'Um, you're welcome,' Medic replied, relaxing a little. He patted Pyro gingerly on the shoulder, not sure what else to do.
'Right, then, we'd, uh, better go find our teams. Should be easy, we've just got to follow the sound of mini-gun fire and explosions!'
In the end it was the RED team they ran into first. Medic hung back warily, wanting to make sure that his patient was safe, but not wanting to get too close to the REDs. They were on the same side now but 'accidents' had happened before on the battlefield, and things could get hostile even when they didn't.
'You take care now,' Medic said, one eye on Pyro, one eye on the RED Demoman behind them folding his arms and glaring.
'Mpth mpth!' Pyro replied happily. He turned around when he'd joined the Demoman and gave Medic a big thumbs-up. Medic nodded back to him and left, forcing himself to walk and not run while the eyes of the RED team burned into his back. He suspected that the Pyro's team was going to have a lot of questions for them. He wondered if they'd be able to understand any of the muffled answers.
The sound of gunfire drew his thoughts swiftly away as he rushed off to join his team. Amongst all the shouts, explosions and battle cries, he soon forgot about his odd encounter with the enemy Pyro.
He was reminded of it again two days later.
There was something lying on his desk in the infirmary. A white piece of paper, lopsidedly folded in two. It hadn't been there last night. Medic was very careful about organising his paperwork, but only because the RED wasn't. Small victories and all that.
He picked it up and turned it over. It was a card. At the bottom there was something fat and pink. A pig he thought, before adjusting his glasses and peering at it more closely. No, a unicorn? There were two figures above that, one drawn in red, the other blue. Written in laboriously careful bubble writing was the word 'me' next to the red figure and 'Medeck' next to the blue. A shape at the top that looked like a ball with two huge hands coming out of it had been drawn in pink and then coloured in in white. Next to it was an arrow and the label, 'Ackemeds.'
Medic flipped the card open. Inside, in blue on top of an arching rainbow, it said, 'thankyou.'
He closed it again, studying the front. It was very amateurishly drawn, yes, but something about it spoke of a great amount of effort. Maybe it was the colouring, the way every area had been devoutly coloured in without a speck of white paper showing through and with barely any colouring over the lines. This had been no rushed job.
Medic realised he was smiling, and even when he did, he couldn't stop it. There was something utterly charming about the card and the thought that had been put into it.
Sometimes Medic thought his own team, apart from the Heavy, forgot about how hard his job was and how hard he tried. Other times, people like Soldier or Scout would berate him for not being quick enough, or for not healing them because he was too busy being dead. Again.
And yet, the RED Pyro, that masked being that he'd thought was just a soulless monster until recently... they'd given him a thank you card. No, better, they'd gone to the effort of making him a thank you card.
Medic didn't consider himself a sentimental man, but he tucked the card away into his desk all the same. Maybe he was getting soft. Or maybe, for once, he deserved to feel happy for being acknowledged for a job well done.
He couldn't leave the card out, his teammates and the RED Medic would have too many irritating comments to say about it, but he left it safely tucked away in his top drawer.
That evening Medic staggered back to the infirmary, so tired he could barely keep hold of his medigun. He hooked it up to the wall mount to recharge, collapsed down into his chair, and pulled open the drawer. He lifted the card out, and he smiled.
Chapter 2 will be up on Saturday :)