san·ko·fa (Akan)
1. "go back and fetch it"; to look to the past in order to understand the present and move forward.
The next day brought a blizzard.
That morning she awoke groggy and still cold despite the mound of blankets, and it took another stint of hunching over her collected lighters to get herself fully functional. By then she felt a little better, at least.
When the sirens howled she left the base with the rest of them. She moved a little awkwardly now, with more bulk to swim through, but the warmth was worth the trade-off. At least, she thought so.
The wind screamed as they ran into it. Pyro couldn't help but flinch when the thick flakes hammered her lenses, and from the edge of her narrow vision she could see Engineer pause and wipe them from his goggles, too. She took a deep breath and stepped into the snow.
The storm had been raging since before the sun came up, or so Sniper had said. As a result the snow went halfway up her calves, and she found herself using Shark to melt herself a path. The snow slid and sloshed around her boots as she walked, tiny diamond droplets leaping back into the drifts. It was a waste of fuel, but by the time she got up to the fighting probably Engineer would have a dispenser up anyway, and she needed the fire. She needed it.
When the shrieking wind snuffed out the pilot light, and the long ribbon of flame with it, she stopped short. With a harsh exhalation she shook herself and looked around for her team.
No one was there.
She turned in a full circle, uncertain. Surely she hadn't gone that far. But the storm whipped the snow up around her, obscuring her vision past a few feet. Shit.
It took much too long for her to realize she could simply follow her trail back to where she had started, and from there her team's tracks in the snow. Right. Yeah. She turned to retrace her melted path.
Somewhere, a voice called out.
Pyro stopped, lifting her head. "Hello?" she called back, realizing in the same moment that she would be impossible to hear over the wind.
The voice came again, still too muted for her to make out. Pyro looked back down the path, and then where the voice had come from—deeper into the storm.
It was probably nothing.
She headed back to the base.
"Where've you been?" Engineer asked her some twenty minutes later, once she'd finally found the right way toward the fighting.
"Got lost." He couldn't hear her, so she kept talking. "I thought I heard someone calling. Because, because that makes sense, middle of a fucking blizzard."
Engineer might have blinked at her. She couldn't tell, same as he couldn't see her furrowed brow, or the way she gnawed her lip as she refilled the flamethrower's canister. "Never mind, I guess. You doin' alright?"
She gave him a thumbs-up. Sure. Yeah. Never better. "Good," Engineer said, turning.
BEEP.
Pyro flinched badly, even knowing the sound. She ripped her flamethrower off the dispenser and spun, looking for the RED. There was nothing in the thick flakes.
BE-BEEP.
The sentry had lost the target. When she glanced at it she saw it dropping back into its monitoring routine, only to immediately lock again. Twice it repeated this, locking in a different place each time. Engineer had put his shotgun to his shoulder, matching the sentry's line of sight. He moved his head slightly toward her, and with one hand gestured a sort of half-circle in the air. Circle around.
Well, she didn't have a better idea.
As quietly as she could, she rounded the rocks by Engineer's nest. Still couldn't see for shit, and looking down she found no other tracks. Maybe the RED spy had come calling again?
BEEP. BE-BEEP. They were using the storm to their advantage.
Pyro pressed forward. If the wind snuffed out her pilot light this time, she was screwed. She had her flare gun, but she doubted she could even aim it right now.
She shook off the question like so much snow, colder for it. On she went. She had not made it three paces before the sentry's target-lock cut through the wind again, followed by a yell. The shock of it froze her for a heartbeat, and then she ran forward, blind.
Gunfire split the air. All at once the wind died, the snow thinning out, like a curtain parting.
Pyro turned her head in time to see the sentry's rockets launch with a blaze of fire. In the corner of her vision, something crimson moved.
The enemy pyro deflected the rockets back into the nest before she could so much as draw breath.
Something whiter than the snow flashed across Pyro's vision, and flying ice and frozen earth struck her hard enough to bruise. The boom swallowed Engineer's howl, and the sentry teetered backwards. The RED pyro rushed in as the machine hung precariously on its back leg, driving its shoulder up beneath the frantically twisting gun barrels. The sentry toppled, and Pyro, frozen, watched as the RED looked from machine to man, both lying motionless in the snow. It made a fist with one hand and jerked its arm down sharply, pumping the air. Victory.
It turned too late to meet her when she charged it, blinkered by its own mask. A muffled yelp rewarded her as she dropped it into the snow. The impact knocked both flamethrowers out of their grasps, and Pyro found herself straddling her double. Her hand was already at her belt before her victim could do more than kick.
The axe leapt to her glove, the iron head flying skyward. The RED looked at her, or seemed to, before turning its face aside and raising its arms, all one instinctive, futile movement.
Pyro hesitated.
She was in the barracks—
—there was something smeared on one of her lenses—
—there someone smeared on the floor beneath her.
The axe began to shake.
The RED was still alive.
Suddenly Pyro was gasping on her side on the ground, the axe just out of reach. The straps of her oxygen tank were twisted where the other pyro had grabbed them to throw her off. She shoved herself upright, fumbling for her flare gun only to find it missing. As she began casting about for a weapon, a rock, anything, the RED unholstered its shotgun. All she found was snow, powder above, wet beneath.
Pyro stared up at her double with a numb, sinking kind of feeling. The RED put the butt of the gun to its shoulder, and the wind picked up again.
With it came a the blast of a battle horn, howling triumphantly against the storm. The RED looked off toward the sound.
The snow in Pyro's hand was frigid and heavy.
The trumpet sounded once more and faded beneath the wind. The RED looked back at her.
She hurled the snowball.
It exploded across the RED's lenses, followed by a muffled yell. Dumbstruck by her own good fortune, Pyro almost forgot to move as the RED reeled, trying to wipe the snow from its mask. The snow six inches from her exploding from a blind shotgun blast was impetus enough to rouse her. On her feet, she rushed.
The struggle was brief. Frozen rubber grips poorly. Ripping the shotgun out of the RED's hands was easy, and so was pulling the trigger. The shotgun bit a hole the size of a fist through the other pyro's side, and a ragged shriek rent the air as it fell into the snow.
Her own labored breathing was scratchy and painful inside her mask. Pyro stared down at the RED as it writhed. Blood gushed from the new holes in the suit, and she could see the punctured skin and torn fabric beneath its clutching hand. It would die even if she did nothing. She curled her finger around the trigger again, unsure.
As she watched, the RED's movements got less frantic. She blinked, glancing at its face, then back to the crimson melting the snow. The red started moving, slithering through the white, curling until it had spiraled into a perfect peppermint swirl. The RED said, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death."
"What?!"
Her answer was lost in the boom of the shotgun. She'd startled so badly that she'd fired it again. Another chunk was taken out of the RED's skull, and it went still. When she looked back at the snow the peppermint swirl remained.
The wind cascaded around her, pulling at her. Pyro watched the corpse for a full twenty seconds before she dared to holster the gun. Once assured it would not resurrect itself, she turned to look for her weapons. The flare gun she found not two feet from where the RED had knocked her down. Further off the dark glint of Shark's black nozzle caught her eye, but as she made for it she almost tripped over something else. Glancing down, she found the RED pyro's flamethrower.
It was different from hers, which if she thought about it was to be expected, but still caught her off-guard. She looked around, and satisfied she was alone, knelt to pick it up. Her hands were still shaking—she needed the distraction.
It was dirty silver and red, and astonishingly lightweight. It had no pilot light, just something resembling a stove element on the end of the nozzle, and when she gave it an experimental puff it breathed out a gorgeous flame. She chanced another look around, then hauled back on the trigger. A tongue of fire bloomed out toward the snow, buffeted by the wind but never snuffed.
The tension seemed to go with the fire, a little. The fuel ran out all too soon. Reverently, she lay it down in the snow, and went to fetch her own.
Shark felt heavy and cumbersome by comparison now, and she found the pilot light had gone out again. It took five minutes' finagling with a lighter from her ammo pouch to get it going, and by then all traces of the fight—except the trampled snow—had vanished.
She got lost again. Or else the fighting had simply moved so far ahead she couldn't hear it over the howling wind. The snow around her was scuffed and muddied too much for her to try the same trick twice, so. Pyro picked a direction and walked.
It took her about ten minutes of walking to figure out she'd picked the wrong one. By then the wind was so bad it was driving itself into every feasible crack her suit had, whistling through her filters, seeping in under her gloves and collar. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, looking around. It was a solid wall of white no matter where she looked.
The shotgun's weight hung heavy on her side. Worst-case scenario, she guessed she could send herself to respawn. How many times had she done that, over the years? How many times had she fought the RED pyro? How often had she won? Lost?
When another blast of snow hit her like a wall she stopped in her tracks, burying her face in her arms. It seemed to take forever to stop. The shotgun option was looking better and better. She reached down to touch the thing and her hand bumped the flare gun instead. Of course—she wrapped her hand around it, pointed it skyward, and fired it.
The flare streaked upward with a high scream, and she watched it disappear into the falling snow. No one would see it, but something in her demanded she try—probably the same thing that didn't want a shotgun anywhere near her face no matter how assured she was of resurrection.
She waited, rubbing her hands together. Nothing, of course, happened.
Pyro turned to try and retrace her steps.
"Wait!"
The voice came clear as crystal. Pyro froze in her tracks, head jerking up. There was no one there when she looked around. It came again, and this time she knew it was the same voice from before. "Wait!"
Something about it made a chill worse than any wind crawl down her spine. She fell back a step, and turned again to flee.
"Wait," it said a third time, five feet from her.
She cried out in shock, nearly falling straight back on her ass into the snow. Someone was standing there, but the snow had gotten too bad for her to see more than their silhouette against the white. "Who?" she started, but couldn't find the words to follow it.
"Just me," the voice said.
They were too tall to be Engineer. "Demo…?"
"Nah, nah." Scout—he sounded like Scout. What was Scout doing out here? "Just I ain't seen you in a while. Thought I'd say heya."
"You—you saw me at breakfast."
He tilted his head a little to one side. "Y'know you're goin' the wrong way?"
"Yeah—yeah." Pyro hefted up her flamethrower and made for what she hoped was the right way, into the wind.
Scout followed her. "Pretty cold."
"Uh-huh."
"Don't never get this cold back home."
"In, uh. In Boston?"
"Yeah, you remember."
"Why the hell would I—"
(Her yard, in January, patchy with melted snow, drowning the sulfur smell, hiding the burnt grass.)
Pyro swallowed. "…It, no. I guess it doesn't."
"Yeah, nothin' like this nohow anyway, ridiculous," Scout said. She tried to steal another glance at him, but he was a half-pace behind at her side and the lip of her mask's lens blocked him out.
He said nothing more as they made their way through the snow. It wasn't like him. The longer he went without speaking the more uncomfortable she became. "Hey," she said at last, more to break the snow-muted silence than anything. "Hey uh, did ..." Something pulled at her. "Did I ask you for something recently?"
"Mighta. What?"
Pyro chewed her lip. "I don't remember."
"That's a pretty big problem with you."
"Don't remind me."
"Someone's got to."
For a moment, the wind lulled. If she squinted Pyro could see a building in the distance. "…I think I asked you to tell me a story."
"Did I?"
"Yeah. Yeah, you did."
"Do you remember?" Scout said.
The wind began to blow again. It pierced Pyro's mask and suit to swirl around and inside her, through her teeth, into her ears and eyes and nose. When it left, slipping out of the cracks and gaps like exhaust, it pulled something away with it. She stopped in the snow again, turning to Scout.
It wasn't Scout, of course. Just someone like him. Pyro looked him up and down and he stood patiently, hands in his letterman jacket's pockets, waiting. She took a long, slow breath, and let it out as evenly as she could.
"Do you remember?" he asked again.
Pyro turned her face away.