The room was hot. Her breath came in gasps she could feel moving in and out past the ring of her pale lips, as her heart fluttered nervously. The mail was normally picked up in the mail room - she had no idea how the note had gotten there. Had he dropped it off, and was he here already? But then, where would he be? And how would he have known she was staying in Demoman's room? She realized it didn't matter now. That he was coming to the base soon, and that was enough to send something scalding through her veins. She wanted to lay down and find swift and sweet sleep, dreaming of Medic. She wanted time to pass faster so that whenever he was going to appear, it was going to be very, very soon.
But her racing heartbeat wouldn't let her sleep. Dahlia couldn't close her eyes, lest they snap open in response to some imagined sound of Medic bursting into the room to sweep her up and carry her away in his arms, bridal style. It dawned on her now how very sick she was with love - and it haunted her.
She turned off the lamp for a moment and sat motionless in the darkness, listening only to the sound of her hastened breathing, trying to calm herself and clear her mind of its barrage of thoughts. In an hour or so, the distant cacophony of drunken song would die down; in so many more, the calls of the morning crows would arise, and so would she, and so would the rest of the team, to get ready for another tedious, rainy day out on the battlefield against a troop of blue maniacs that mirrored their own insanity, in a pointless war with no foreseeable future. She had seen the same scenes replayed so many times, she could remember with a motherly fondness quite exactly what it would look like. In her mind's eye stands Soldier, dressed in his pompous uniform, complete with the golden, fringing epaulettes, hard hat casting a sharp shadow over his eyes as his chin lifts skyward, ready to march boldly forward. Scout scrapes his feet on the ground beside him, tapping the balls of his feet as though fitting on a new pair of running shoes just sent from Ma, back in Boston.
Spy doesn't face forward like the rest of them, but looks off onto the distant lakes with a poet's eye, idly handling a cream-colored cigarette between his lips. Engie, the shortest of the group, has his hands on his hips, having already laid carefully his old, rusty red box of tools on the ground beside him. He wears a broad smile and adjusts his overalls, every so often uttering a well-natured comment on how prepared they are that day, or how he 'lows that Builders League United don't stand one mother-flubbin' ghost of a chance. Pyro is in his own world, like Spy, but with a much eerier nature. One hand on xir trusty degreaser, xe hums softly to xirself. Demoman's one eye glazes over with morning exhaustion, and every so often, he nearly stumbles over the pebbles on the ground in his own intoxicated time step - which jerks him awake for a moment or so. The new Medic positioned dutifully behind him, Heavy grins stupidly, his tomislav growling like a monster truck engine as his beady eyes surrounded by rolls of fat search for unsuspecting foes. Sniper looks over the scene like a cat on high perch, a fiery gleam in his eyes behind the shades. He straightens his hat and adjusts his bandana with an idle care. And there, leading them all, is she, who once stood at the back of the lines, her expression solemn, protectively cradling in her arms her supplies to set traps on the battlefield for that day. Yes, everything was normal.
Huntress's chest rose up and down slowly, her hands on her abdomen and her head back on the pillows of Demoman's bunk. The light still burned brightly, but she was exhausted and chose to pay no heed. Breaths away from sleep, her thoughts drifted listlessly, focused on thoughts of Engie, and they way he would ramble in his southern drawl as they constructed machines together in the shadows of the Sawmill cabins. Just the two of them, to keep her thoughts away from Medic. The two of them, working as week-long friends in the peaceful, steady rain.
The door to the bedroom opened with a loud creak. Dahlia shot up as though electricity had shot through her. There, in the doorway, someone stood on the edge of the lamplight, fidgeting - as her eyes adjusted, she could make out a younger man with short but unkempt hair, biting his lip and peering through the room anxiously.
"H-hey... D... Dahlia... you in there?" His voice broke with each stutter. "Please... please be there... I- I can't see you."
"I'm here," she said, rising from the bed and walking towards him. "What's up?" Scout didn't respond, but she heard him whimpering softly and imagined that the hiccups in his speech were from the tears streaming down his face. "Scout?" Dahlia placed a hand on his arm to comfort him, and was immediately pulled into a desperate hold as he buried his face in her shoulder and cried. She wrapped his arms around him and felt every tremble, every shudder as his body jerked violently with his sobs.
"Scout, what's wrong?" She tried to speak slowly, so as to not overwhelm him. They sat in a minute of awkward silence, he, enthralled in his own tragedy, and she holding him as best she could, struggling to assemble every fiber of assuring maternity in her essence, but completely unsure of what to do. Dahlia wondered what someone braver, like Medic, would do. He'd have all the right words to say. He'd set her down and stroke her hair and hush her till the crying stopped. But it wasn't something she could picture doing herself - least of all to Scout, anyway. At last, he took a large breath in and spoke.
"Help me."
"What?"
"P-please, help me." Practically shouting.
Huntress lowered her voice. "Honey, I don't understand. Tell me what happened."
He swallowed and tried to compose himself, still letting out snivels at intervals as he recollected his experience. "I... I w-went out for a walk, okay?" Scout buried his face in his hands. "And... I got back and... I-I got back and I didn't... I didn't see nobody, ok. Thought maybe they went to bed, or, went to bed or somethin, but... There was s-somethin in the corner of my... my eye, yknow... and... I... by the e-entrance to the... to the b-base...yknow... I..."
She had lost him again. He lurched violently as he burrowed his face into her shoulder, hands shaking too hard to hold her at the sides. She realized there wasn't much more she was going to get out of him, and let go of him gradually, leaving him to collapse onto the bed and heave.
"I'm going out there to see what happened, ok?"
No response.
"Scout. Everything's going to be alright. Nothing's going to hurt you. I promise."
His sounds grew more hysterical, but she ignored him and stepped out into the hallway, whispering about how everything was going to be alright, though whether this was for him or for herself, she was no longer sure. What ever could have brought an arrogant guy like Scout to this sort of despair must have been something formidable. It's ok, she assured herself, rubbing her arms and pacing down the long, dark corridor. All the bedroom doors were shut, and the base was in a state of eerie silence.
Reaching the common room after an expanse of hallway, she leaned over to turn on a nearby lamp. A foul stench filled the air, strong and suffocating. Her eyes adjusted to the bright light. The usual metal chairs were scattered in their half-hearted arrangement, with toppled over end tables across the stainless steel tile, from when Soldier had demonstrated his latest battle plans.
"Hello?" she said, moving soundlessly as she could. In the next room over, Heavy, Soldier, and Demoman had been drinking, as they did every night until the small hours. Surely they couldn't have already stopped. She walked over to the door and peered inside the room. The smell was fainter here, the room an empty scene - bottles of beer standing upright on the long tables as though the shadows of her teammates had all just been there. Even the ceiling light was left on, and continued to flicker. She exited the room and began to follow the trail of that vile scent that seemed to emanate from the walls. It was a familiar smell - of a hard day's work, of throwing the shambles of used traps together to haul home. It was a tired smell, an earthly smell - a smell uncannily human.
She stopped at the entrance of the Respawn room, to which she had wandered up the stairs and was now facing. The rain outside fell softly, a night quieter than usual. No storm, thunder and lightning, just incessant, ominous rain.
The doors to the room slid open at her approach to reveal a shocking sight. The stench was unbearable here, almost tangible. In the back of the room, the supply locker had been torn apart, with several dents in the exterior, one of the doors missing, and its contents - gauzes, bullets, bandages, thread - half-burnt and littered across the floor. Everything in the room had been dismantled, the machines in the walls sparking and fizzing as though about to short-circuit. It looked as though a monster had torn through the room, but to these disruptions she paid little attention. Her eyes were on the floor.
RED Engie lay on the floor on his stomach, the blood draining from his face and beginning to settle towards his belly, his face turned to the side, drooling onto the cold floor. He was surrounded in a pool of his own fluids, with several messy stab wounds in his back where blood puddled up and trickled down his sides. He was covered in scratches and bruises, obviously having gone through a struggle, and wounds on the sides of his shoulders suggested that something had been forced into his body. She recalled this particular scent with more certainty now - it was not only human, it was also unmistakably dead.
She held herself and cried. Everything is going to be alright.