burn·out |ˈbərnˌout|
1. the reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion.
2. physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.
Dell awoke a full hour before he would have liked, his face too hot beneath a stray beam of sunlight. That made it about the same as every other day since he arrived. Coldfront's base had the blessing of individual rooms instead of barracks, exactly nine of them, but his had a window that faced east and a bed against the west wall. Even though the first thing he'd done was fix a spare blanket up as a makeshift curtain, the damn sun still seemed to slip through to jar him awake before his alarm most mornings. It was enough to drive a man crazy.
By the time he dragged himself out from the covers his alarm was about to go off anyway. He pulled on his clothes, thanked heaven it was Saturday, and went to scavenge for food.
The mess was empty, but the fridge, unexpectedly, was filled with pancakes. Every single one of them was burned around the edges, and one looked more like a tire than a pancake, but it was all mostly edible. He stacked his plate with the least black specimens and high-tailed it out of there: the mess was the coldest part of the base.
He made his way to the common room and found Sniper with his feet kicked up on the card table, basking in a pool of winter-bright sunlight like a rangy cat. His hands moved in quick, neat fashion, and something soft and green spilled down from them to pool in his lap. Knitting, again. No one had realized Sniper could knit until they'd been hauled up here into the cold and the scarves and hats started piling up. He didn't lift his eyes from his work when Dell walked in, but he did say, "G'mornin', truckie."
"Mornin'." Dell settled into the vast stuffed armchair he had claimed as his own and started picking at his food. "Didn't snow again, did it?"
Sniper chuckled and started a new row in his knitting. "Didn't stop."
"Damn it all. Don't know how you stand it." Even here Dell could feel the sharp prickling of his skin, irritated by the cool air, and he was wearing a sweater. "I'm hardly dealin' with it myself, and it's even hotter where you come from, ain't it?"
"Hotter than Texas? Might be. In the bush, sure, in the wet season. Oh, mail for you," Sniper said, leaning sideways in his chair to nab something out of the windowsill. "Yesterday's," he added when he stretched out an arm to hand Dell an envelope. "Y'seemed a bit out of sorts after dinner, though, thought it best not to bother you."
The letter, a faint shade of robin's-egg and stamped with BLU's logo, was cold to the touch. "Thanks," Dell said, wiping off his knife to open the seal. He knew what it was before he even unfolded it, but something possessed him to scan through the thin typewritten letters beneath the REGARDING YOUR FUNDING REQUEST headline again anyway. When he looked up he found Sniper eyeing him. "Well?"
"Denied," Dell said, dropping the paper by his feet. "Same old. Don't know how I'm s'posed to get anything workin' in this fool weather without the right tools."
"What's it you're lookin' to get fundin' for, again? Seems you been gettin' denied a lot, didn't they shoot you down for a fourth-level sentry back in Steel, too?"
Dell nodded. "Yeah. An' the teleporters don't work right in the snow. An' I mean why should they, s'Aussie tech, ain't got no need for it to work in the snow down under." Dell looked at his food and set it down, too. Suddenly he wasn't hungry.
"Huh. Figure you're right on that one. S'a matter with 'em? Seems they work fine to me."
"Eh, technicalities. It'd bore ya."
Sniper nodded, and let it go.
If he was honest with himself, Dell wouldn't say the teleporters needed fixing. More or less they worked fine. He had sorted out some time ago that the minor glitches the extreme cold caused in them—transmission lag, blips in frag detection, and the like—they were problems, but problems of a sort that could be solved in a few hours' time with the right hardware. And the hardware wasn't that hard to get ahold of, really. Hell, he could have it mailed up from his house if he wanted.
Maybe BLU knew he was lying about what he needed the money for.
It was drawing on near late afternoon now. Dell had filled his time with re-reading the handful of magazines lying around the base and trying to sort out why Sniper's truck had been stalling. He didn't know why the man had brought the damn thing all the way up here, and engineering was pretty far off from auto repair no matter what Sniper thought. But here he was, trying to fix it regardless. The truck was the only mode of transport they had off the base, anyway, and it didn't sit well with Dell to have no escape routes at all.
The engine just revved and died when he turned it on. The second time it belched enough black smoke from the tailpipe to fog the garage for a moment. After an hour he'd gotten it to where it would rumble to life for a few seconds before quitting. By then his fingers were going blue, and the wind was sneaking in through the cracks in the garage door, biting into him.
He had just decided he wasn't going to get anything more done on the thing that day when the door leading back into the base banged shut behind him. He looked, and found the Pyro standing on the cement steps. In one gloved hand she held a rusting metal bird cage, filled with dead grass and defrosting hay. Dell shut the truck's hood and looked at her. "Where'd you get that?"
The Pyro just waved at him. She crossed the garage, to the old shelves covered in abandoned things, and started rummaging through the rusting coffee cans and plastic bins Dell kept half an eye on her as he stowed his tools. He was just dropping the last of them into the toolbox when a muffled cry of triumph echoed from the shelves.
Dell looked up in time to see the Pyro sit down on the ground to push a tennis ball into the cage, on top of the "nest." Humming to herself, she shut the little wire door, and when she noticed him watching she leapt up and ran toward him. He braced himself for another shattering hug, but she just skidded to a stop before him and held up her new toy, glowing with pride. "Lhuk!"
"I see it," Dell said, not looking. He turned away to pack up his toolbox and hefted it over his shoulder. "C'mon, let's go inside. Too cold."
She followed him back into the base and all the way back to his workshop. Night was coming on, now, early as ever with it being November this far north. Dell unlocked his workshop door and flipped on the lights. Their familiar hum greeted him as the workshop was bathed in yellow.
He glanced over his shoulder at his teammate again. She was hanging back, trying to draw shapes in the fog on the windows with her finger. "Pyro, hey." She ignored him. "Pyro!"
The Pyro looked up and tilted her head to one side. A renewed sense of exhaustion crashed into him. Of all the damn things she could have kept as a part of her, out of every bizarre habit, she'd kept that damn head-tilt. He pushed the weariness down and headed back into the workshop. The Pyro trotted in after him.
"Sit," he told her, and she hopped onto one of the two-dozen crates stuffed in the corner of the workshop. Dell brushed past her to the workshop's storage room, and after a moment's rifling through it pulled out a squat, silver box, all bare wires and ragged metal. Gold and green vials of liquid sloshed in their tubes as he set it down next to the Pyro. She watched as he went to haul a dispenser from across the room and dropped it beside her, fiddling with the bars on her bird cage. When she reached for the glass tubes and their sparkling contents he slapped her hand away, and she whined. "You'll hurt yourself," he scolded, leaning over to the workshop's smaller bench to pull out a sorry-looking cardboard box bursting with color. "An' last time you got the stuff all over these, remember?"
The Pyro made a muted noise of delight when she saw the box, grabbing for it even before he put it down next to her. In her haste to pull out one of the dozen-some childrens's books from the pile, she let the bird cage and its tennis ball egg slip from her lap. It clattered to the ground with a grating clang.
With the Pyro occupied Dell went through the motions of cracking open the dispenser to hook it up to the silver contraption. By now he didn't have to think about it: disconnect the proximity sensor, ground the inductive ballast, check the monitoring graph. He had it put together in under two minutes. When he was done, the silver box lay on top of the dispenser, feeding a handful of hoses and pipes down into its guts. He thumbed the power button, and got the hell out of the way.
The dispenser hummed and something in it thumped. The familiar light of a medigun beam edged out of it to twine around the Pyro, glowing gold instead of blue. She didn't seem to notice. They had done this too many times for her to stay interested.
From a safe distance from the dispenser's reach, Dell watched, wondering what in hell he was putting in her system this time. Nothing he'd tried out of the dozens of vials secreted from Medic's hoards had done anything like what he wanted them to do—Medic labeled things in a typical doctor's scrawl, and in German. Some of them did nothing at all. Some had left him gritting his teeth and wondering why in hell the doctor even had it laying around. Over the years Dell had accidentally inflicted the Pyro with more pain than he cared to remember.
It was harder, back in the beginning. The first time he'd poisoned her he realized his mistake too late. When he'd gotten her off the bad dispenser and pulled her to a clean one her lungs had already filled with fluid. Pink foam frothed up out of her throat with such speed it spilled out from beneath the mask, staining the floor and his overalls. She died with a pathetic noise, going went limp in seconds. It all happened so quickly.
He stopped using third-level dispensers after that. He stopped getting so close to her, too—the stain had never come out of his clothes, and in the end he'd thrown that particular garment away.
For a while he'd used Medic's anaesthetics (found by chance in a box clearly printed with NUMBING AGENT) in conjunction with whatever new thing he'd swiped. That had worked well enough, until one day he looked at her and realized he'd dosed her with something acid. It had eaten holes in her suit and skin and she still sat there quietly, unaware of what was happening to her.
Dell had come to prefer the shotgun.
If he was honest with himself, Dell wouldn't say he still had hope of restoring the Pyro to the person he had found trying to set his house on fire. The arsonist with the firestorm temper, unexpectedly clever, with her one-eyed gas mask and her beautiful handcrafted flamethrower. That woman was dead.
But, he reasoned, if he quit trying, he'd be giving up. And damned if Dell Conagher would give up.
The Pyro, oblivious and happy, turned another page.
Dell left her like that, went about his business. The Pyro would pour over those books endlessly, even if she couldn't read them anymore. It was just as well, since from everything he'd learned about that first broken dispenser, it took hours for the mind-altering chemicals to go into effect. The Pyro had been exposed to the first one for something like eighteen hours altogether, as far as he could figure, and that was enough to turn a smart if unstable woman into a child-minded monster.
On the other side of the workshop, the dispenser hummed. The Pyro talked quietly to herself in muffled words he was grateful he couldn't understand. For a time he banged about the workbench, cleaning up after five-AM brainstorming sessions, kicking boxes of spare parts and spare shotguns out of the way. It was amazing how many shotguns seemed to accumulate around the team, and somehow they always found their way into his workshops.
He had just cleared the second workbench of its mountains of refuse when he felt a tug on his shirt sleeve. "What?"
"Strhy." Dell glanced over his shoulder at her, found himself lens to lens with that rubber mask that served as a face. The Pyro let go of his sleeve and gestured to the book in her hand. "Hhlees?"
"No. G'wan, sit back down."
"Munn't hhna."
Dell shut his eyes. "If I tell you a story, then you got to sit back down, okay? And a short one. I got things to be doin'."
She clapped her hands, once, then darted back to her seat on the crate. As Dell leaned back against the workbench, she stooped to grab the birdcage up from the floor. After a moment, she fished out the tennis ball from inside, pulled out a lighter from her ammo pouch, and began trying to set the bright green fuzz aflame. He didn't bother stopping her.
Instead he folded his arms over his chest, looking heavenward, as if that would do him any good. "So … once 'pon a time there was this … cat, and the cat—"
"Nho!" Dell glanced at her, brows knitting. "Hh mrrd. Hh mrrd hnn." The bird one.
"I said I ain't tellin' you that one no more, I don't like it."
"Hh mrrd!" Her hands curled into fists and she raised them up by her face in a show of pleading. "Hhlees, hhlees, hh mrrd hnn, hh—"
He put up a hand. "Fine. Fine, just, don't ask me again. Okay?" He got a vigorous nod in answer. The Pyro leaned forward, waiting.
Dell rubbed his nose and scratched his neck, stalling. Of all the idiot things he'd done since she'd gone and destroyed herself, the bird story was one of the worst. "So … once there was a bird. A phoenix bird, you remember what a phoenix is?" Head tilt. "C'mon, told you this a dozen times, girl. It's this bird that can set itself on fire, more or less, but only when—only when it's ready t'die. Real unusual creature." He glanced aside. "Now, this phoenix, she had herself a problem. She couldn't turn her fire off."
Outside, it had begun to snow again. Dell's eyes cut to the broad flakes tumbling down to smother them. He must have been silent for longer than he realized, because suddenly the Pyro was making impatient noises, fidgeting. The tennis ball was crisped to black and the acrid smell of burnt rubber hung in the air. "Hnnd?"
"… couldn't turn it off," he repeated, shifting his weight from one leg to the next. "Or she didn't want to. So wherever she flew she set big blazes. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. Phoenixes, they love fire, same as you. But it weren't no good, all the fires she was settin'. They were outta control. She burned up the whole countryside, caused a real mess, hurt—hurt some people. Until all the other critters—the unicorns an' the griffins, even the dragons—they rounded up and drove her out to the desert, where she could have all the fire she liked without hurtin' nobody.
"But out there in the desert, she wasn't happy. She burned and burned and burned everything, trying to be happy, 'til all the cactuses were black an' there weren't no living thing'd come near her. And finally one day she looked around and realized she'd burned up everything, everything except herself." He took a deep breath, and the words came out bitter, as they always did. "So she did what every phoenix does. She went and burned so bright and so hot her own fire ate her up."
The Pyro watched him with rapt attention, almost completely still. The dispenser's hum seemed louder without her fussing, with the silence that consumed the world outside. When he paused he could hear the lights buzzing, the Pyro's filtered breathing, but those was the only other sounds.
Dell exhaled. "And when she did, as the smoke went an' carried her in the air, she found herself her family, since phoenixes, they get reborn when they die, that's what the flames're for." He looked up, and for a long moment matched the gaze of the empty black lenses. "An' the phoenix, she got what she wanted, whatever it was. She was happy."
The Pyro was quiet a time. She was turning the torched tennis ball over in her heavy gloves, squishing and warping the weakened plastic. "Whht hbt—" she started to say, when the ball cracked open in her hands with a pop. She stared down at it, startled. Dell glanced at it, too.
There was a tiny, pink-skinned thing, beaked and clawed, lying motionless in one half of the false egg.
Dell stared at it for a full ten seconds. Then he rubbed both eyes and looked again, sparkles bursting along the edges of his vision.
It was gone.
His shoulders sagged. He glanced at the dispenser, still pumping its mystery chemicals into the Pyro's brain and bloodstream, and made for the door.
"How many times must I tell you? Nothing. There is nothing to be done."
The infirmary was spotless, though it smelled like blood and chloroform. Coldfront's medical room reminded him of the premed wing at his second college, if you darkened all the lights and hung questionable posters on the walls. Medic seemed to have no end of questionable posters. This station's theme of choice was mildewed advertisements from students seeking cadaver donations.
From where he was leaning against a steel table, empty of things that might jab him if he looked at them funny, Dell glared at Medic from beneath his goggles. His teammate ignored his stare. In fact, he looked exceptionally bored as he flitted from surgical tool from deranged surgical tool. "It ain't about Pyro," Dell said, "it's about me."
Medic lifted one eyebrow, but his attention was still zeroed in on the delicate silver tools. "Ahh, have you changed your mind?"
"What?"
"About my new procedure," Medic said, whirling suddenly enough that his coat flew out and dragged half of the tools to the floor. He didn't even blink, too busy fixing Dell with a bright-eyed stare. "The one with the bugs, come now, I detailed this to you at great length!"
Oh. Lord, that, right. Dell recalled it now, a starless and chilly night at Hydro with Medic explaining—at great length, indeed—how integrating themselves with insectoid traits would vastly heighten their field advantage. The reasons behind it were flimsier than cardboard, and he wasn't fooling anyone except maybe Soldier. It wasn't like Medic actually cared if they won or lost any of their rounds. "No," Dell said, "no, and hell no. The problem is I'm seein' things."
"Oh," Medic said. Everything about him, from his voice to his posture, dulled in an instant. "So it is about Pyro."
"It's about the dispenser that you poisoned, and I'd damn well appreciate it if you took some responsibility."
"I was advancing the cause of psychological medicine."
Dell stared at him for a long few seconds, felt his temper fraying strand by strand. "You know what, I don't care what you thought you were doin'. I am seein' things an' this all rests on you. Fix it."
"I can't. I have said this!" Medic said, kneeling now to scoop up his instruments. "All the samples are gone, my notes were lost when the RED pyro burned Barnblitz, you destroyed the prototype in a fit of drunkenness." He peered over his shoulder at Dell, squinting through his pince-nez. "So, no. I don't even remember what I put in the original, and I have much more pressing matters to be attending to than minor hallucinations. And on the subject, Engineer—I would appreciate it if you would stop stealing my dispenser compounds."
"Steal—?" Dell bit his tongue, leaning back. "…I ain't done no such thing."
Medic dumped the tools unceremoniously onto the table with a long-suffering sigh. "Lies do not suit you, my friend." He didn't even do Dell the dignity of looking at him as he said it, set right back into organizing the scissors and scalpels. "Anyway everything you have taken has either been a disease or a poison. I do not believe this was your intent, poisoning Herr Pyro."
"I don't got a clue what you're talkin' about. You keep poison 'round here?"
"Yes," Medic said, absently picking a feather off of something long and silver and painful-looking. "Among other things. I've been wanting Spy to swap them into RED's dispensers, but he's being dreadfully stubborn about it. I think the last one you took was my tetrodotoxin."
"And that is fancy German doctor for what?"
"Greek, actually," said Medic. "Are you familiar with blowfish poisoning?"
Dell keyed in the security code and threw open the door to his workshop in time to see the Pyro staring quizzically at the ground. He barely registered the book splayed on the floor, or stiff, arrhythmic way her fingers moved as she tried to reach for it. Instead he grabbed her by the shoulder-strap and jerked her away from the dispenser. She stumbled and hit the cement.
The dispenser made a flat, jarring crunch when he hit the power button. Even with it off Dell backed well out of its range, breathing hard. He hadn't known he could make it from one side of the base to the other quite that fast.
A weak grunt drew his attention away. The Pyro was still laid out on the ground right by his feet, awkwardly gathering her hands and knees beneath her. He stepped away, watching as she tried to get up.
All her movements were slow and jerky, like a rusty wind-up toy. It reminded him of the night he had found her outside his house. She reached out a hand to steady herself against the workbench and came crashing down on her shoulder instead. For a few seconds she just lay there, twitching. When she started to move again, still disoriented and hunched up with pain, Dell took a deep breath and shut his eyes.
In college he'd had a friend majoring in marine biology, a chatty girl with freckles and curls. He'd got an earful on every kind of dangerous fish you could care to mention and promptly forgotten about all of them until just now. He didn't remember much of what she'd said about blowfish, not until Medic began lecturing him on it. Then the memories started to trickle in.
"…paralysis of the diaphragm, suffocating to death while fully conscious…"
When he opened them again, the Pyro had managed to pull herself up to a sitting position. She was pawing frantically at her mask, fingers too stiff to grip right. Dell just watched, tired, as she dragged the thing off.
The mask dropped and the Pyro gasped in air, slumping back against the big workbench. He could see her chest heaving, the way her mouth hung open and her tongue lolled.
In short, a mess, same as always. Her hair was plastered to her scalp, a shoulder-length nest of grease and tangles. Sweat beaded her face and collected in the corners of the burn scar that streaked down one side of her face, and her eyes didn't quite focus. They hadn't in years. Now strings of saliva spilled out the edges of her mouth. Dell averted his eyes as she lurched sideways and vomited.
He cussed a blue streak all the way to his storage closet, louder and nastier when the Pyro started whimpering. He grabbed the first shotgun he saw and shoved the rounds in. On his way back to her he sent the picture book and forgotten bird cage spinning as he stormed past. The bird cage went rattling off beneath his second workbench, and the book thumped into the Pyro's leg. She looked down at it, stupefied.
The safety clicked. The Pyro dragged her gaze upward and stopped on the barrel of the shotgun, pointed at her head. Then she looked up at him. Her pupils were mismatched pinpoints of black.
Dell stared back at her. His finger curled around the trigger. "C'mon," he hissed, "quit lookin' at me like that." She blinked at his voice, face screwed up in pain, but didn't look away. "Dammit, Pyro, close your damn eyes. It's for your own good."
"Okay," she mumbled, and then her eyes fell shut. Dell wet his lips, felt the cool of the gun against his fingers. His hands were steady as he pushed the muzzle up against her forehead, right on the edge of her scar.
"Shouldn't trust me like that, girl," he said, and pulled the trigger.