Despite all the water he'd drank alongside the alcohol, Sniper still woke up with a pounding headache. The loud snoring from beside him did not help. Sniper blinked blearily, rubbed at his eyes, and tried to make sense of the world.

He was in his van but had clearly never made it to bed last night. Instead he'd propped himself up in the corner of the L-shaped seating and fallen asleep with his legs hanging off the end. And for some reason, Demoman was slumped against him, fast asleep.

What on earth?

'Uh, Demo? Oh God, my head. Demoman?' He shook the snoring man's shoulder gently.

On the table next to him there were four beer bottles, two of them half still half-full. That jogged a few memories. An intense wave of embarrassment flooded through Sniper as he recalled sharing that particular story with the group. He'd never told anyone the truth about how he broke his fingers before, not even Michelle. But it had all come pouring out last night and now they all knew. Hung-over Sniper was currently very fed-up with the earlier drunken Sniper, and not for the first time. But still, it could have been worse. He had far more shameful secrets locked away that no amount of drinking would ever persuade him to bring to light.

He poked Demoman in the side. The snoring stopped, replaced with a snuffling noise and then, 'Where the hell am I?'

'My van.'

'How did I end up here?'

'I think we wanted to keep on drinking when everyone was heading back in but it was too cold outside so we decided to come here instead.'

'Oh. Okay. Why?'

'We thought it was closer than the base.'

There was a pause.

'It's not though, is it?'

'Nah.'

Another pause.

'Uh, Sniper?'

'Yeah?'

'You know your van?'

'Yeah.'

'It's, well... It's very blue, isn't it?'

Eventually Demoman managed to persuade Sniper to leave the safety of his van, but not before the marksman had shoved his aviators on, found his hat, (which had been in the sink for some reason) and pulled it down as far as it would go. The only reason Sniper was leaving his nice, dimly lit van was because of the DSS Dispenser. As well as healing minor cuts and bruises Medic didn't want to be bothered with, and embarrassing little things they in turn didn't want to bother him with, apparently the dispenser could cure hangovers too. It was a dream come true, and also an explanation for why the others (sans Medic) had all gone flat out with their drinking.

The found a rather crumpled looking Spy collapsed over the top of the dispenser, surrounded by billowing red fumes.

'Mentlegen,' he croaked.

'Uh, what?' Demoman asked.

'What?' Echoed Spy, his brow drawn together in bleary confusion.

Sniper, who had noticed nothing wrong with the greeting and just assumed it was French, sat down heavily next to the dispenser and laid his head against the cool metal.

'God, my head hurts.'

'Mine too. Budge your arse over, Spy.'

Spy grumbled but complied, peeling himself off of the dispenser as its healing fumes latched on to Demoman.

'By the way, gentlemen, I should warn you to tread carefully around Medic today.'

'Why? He hardly drank anything last night!'

'No,' Spy agreed, 'But Heavy and Scout certainly did. Medic had to pump their stomachs to save them from being trapped in respawn all weekend. He is not happy. Best to leave him to take the brunt of his anger out on those two.'

The rest of the weekend passed quietly, with most of the RED team spending as little time conscious or in Medic's vicinity as they could manage. The DSS Dispenser might cure the worst of a hangover, but it was best to sleep the rest of it and Medic's rage off.

Sniper did make sure to spend some of his time on Sunday practising his archery though. He was still rusty, but his hands were starting to toughen up again. Soon the blisters would be gone, replaced with proper callouses. Now, that was what Sniper called progress.

The BLU Spy was relieved when Monday finally came around. It hadn't been a very interesting weekend for the BLU team either, unless you counted Medic catching Scout raiding his experimental medicine cupboard. Medic shrieking in anger was always amusing, and it had certainly been entertaining watching what happened when Medic forced Scout to take pills from the bottle he'd been holding when the German discovered him. The Spy hadn't known that it was possible for skin to turn such a vivid shade of blue. As an extra bonus, whatever the substance was also killed Scout, so they'd all been spared his company for the rest of the weekend. All the same, the BLU Spy had found himself itching to return to the battlefield.

The match started off well with two nicely-done backstabs on the Sniper, an Ambassador headshot on the Engineer, three sapped buildings and a safely delivered briefcase full of intelligence, all in one life. It should have raised the Spy's spirits greatly, but somehow it didn't.

The problem was that the Spy was bored. Bored bored bored. Now that he was no longer allowed to play with the Sniper, everything felt so humdrum and dull. Scaring the Sniper off the rafters during that one humiliation round had been fun, and aiming to get so many backstabs in the same place on the marksman's back was good practice, but it didn't stop him from feeling bored.

So the Spy made a deal with himself. If he could behave well for the next five days, then after the battle of Friday he'd allow himself a little treat for good behaviour.

The rest of the week passed far too slowly for the Spy's tastes. By the time Friday finally came around he'd been just about ready to off himself from boredom. He'd done it once or twice before so he could use respawn like a time machine to skip dull evenings by.

After the battle he grabbed a quick dinner, avoided getting caught up in a fight between the Heavy and Soldier in the kitchen, and went off to visit the REDs. Really, he knew he should go snoop around their new Heavy's room. He hadn't got around to doing that, but to be honest, he couldn't be bothered. The Heavy was a large Russian man who liked firing his minigun, eating sandwiches of all things on the battlefield, and his Medic. So, pretty standard as heavy weapon guys went, and not very interesting. The Spy was sure that there must be more to the man than that, but he couldn't really be bothered with finding it out right now. Some day when he'd got bored of the enemy Sniper he'd have a nose around the room, but that didn't look like it was going to be happening anytime soon.

Instead, he took a moment to make sure that none of the REDs were around, and then broke into the Sniper's van again. This time, rather than looking around, he went looking for one thing in particular. He zeroed in on the little battered table and lifted aside a couple of newspapers and a battered copy of the first Lord of the Rings book in search of a little notebook. He found it and flipped through it until he came to the picture of himself as a fox. The Spy smiled and picked up the camera hanging around his neck.

Click.

He turned to the next page and took a picture of the second drawing of himself and then flicked through the remaining pages. There were only a handful of them, and then evidence of several torn out pages. The Spy tried to convince himself that he wasn't disappointed there were no more pictures of him. He decided to photograph a few other of the drawings too because at the end of the day, the Sniper really was quite the artist.

When he was done, he put the little notebook back where he found it. He'd done what he'd came to do, but he still felt rather bored. He was just about to leave when he spotted the edge of something sticking out from underneath a newspaper. He carefully lifted the paper off and to the side so as not to lose the page, and then picked up the object beneath.

It was a sketchbook, and a proper one sized, not at all like the tiny lined notepad. And it was obviously well-used if the battered plain black cover and dog-eared pages were anything to go by.

He opened it to the first page and was met with a lovingly rendered drawing of an old, slightly dilapidated looking farm building. The Sniper had made full use of the A4 paper, with careful little details all over the page; clouds scudding across the sky, a battered bucket fallen over on its side, fat little hens pecking at the ground, the missing slates off the roof and knots in the wood of the barn door. Obviously this was a place the Sniper either knew very well, or had spent a lot of time looking at. The other interesting thing about it to the Spy was that it was done in pencil. Everything he'd seen of the Sniper's art so far had looked as though it had been done in cheap blue or black ballpoint pen.

He went to turn to the next page and found himself unable to. Sellotape had been stuck at the top and bottom, sealing away over half the sketchbook. The Spy frowned to himself and flicked to the next available page. The cheap looking pen lines were back, but the art was better than in the little sketchbook because of the additional space for extra detail.

He passed by a number of nicely drawn but dull pieces, a rather explosive looking car crash and some sort of coiled up crocodile-dragon creature before he found another slightly more interesting picture. It was the whole of the RED team gathered around their kitchen table during a rather rowdy looking dinnertime. The thing that really caught his attention was the Sniper's drawing of himself. The Spy had never seen a self-portrait by the marksman before. Compared to his depictions of the rest of the team, he'd drawn himself very loosely. Just simple little lines that gave the impression of long limbs, slightly hunched shoulders and a small frown on a face almost completely obscured by glasses and hat.

The Spy decided to take a picture anyway.

Several pages of cats followed for some unknown reason. The same cat, actually. Now that he thought about it, it looked rather like the ginger tabby he'd spotted in the Engineer's workshop on occasion. On a whim, he decided to snap a picture of a couple of those too.

Four pages later and his heart did a little leap for joy in his chest. It was him. The Sniper had drawn him. And it looked fantastic. Sure, the Spy was certain that his features weren't quite that sharp and the sinister expression on his face was just a little off-putting, but overall it was a beautiful rendition of him. People would pay good money to get a hold of such artful depictions of themselves, and here was the Spy, getting them for free from a man who hated him.

On the next page was a quick sketch of his face on one side, and the RED Spy's on the other. The Sniper had drawn the BLU with a cold-eyed frown on his face, while the RED looked cheerful enough, albeit rather tired. It came with caring too much, in the BLU Spy's opinion. Much better to distance yourself from people then waste your energy worrying about them.

Ignoring the picture of the RED, the Spy snapped a photograph of his portrait and continued on through the notebook. To his disappointment there was nothing more of interest, just a couple of sketches of the treeline visible from his window, a few rough outlines of some of the locations on the battlefield and a handful more drawings of the RED team.

The Spy flipped back to the hidden pages, curious. What could they contain that was so secret that even the Sniper didn't want access to them? Carefully and patiently the Frenchman began to pick the sellotape off, making sure the strips came away in a single piece so he could try and press it back down again to hide he'd ever been there. Eventually he managed to peel them off. and after glancing nervously out of the window that faced the RED base for signs of the Sniper, turned the first page.

It was her. The lady he'd seen little glimpses of in the notebook. But this wasn't just a feature or two picked out and then scribbled back over, this was a fully shaded portrait done in pencil like the first page.

Whoever she was, she was beautiful, he had to admit that. Not the kind of woman he'd ever go for himself, but attractive all the same with her full lips, soft scattering of freckles and halo of curly black hair.

'Hmm, half-cast?' he muttered to himself. From their treatment of the Aboriginal people he'd always assumed that most Australians would be too racist to be interested in black women. Then again, so far the Sniper had proved himself to be rather an odd one for an Australian.

The next page was her again, beaming up at him from the paper. On the next she looked thoughtful. And the one after was a full body sketch in which she had absolutely no clothes on.

The Spy snickered to himself and snapped a picture of that too. This lady certainly was a good looking one all round. Far too good for the Sniper.

He lowered the camera, deep in thought. So who was she exactly? The Sniper's mother had mentioned him having a girlfriend or the like in that Smissmas card. At the time he'd written her off as a fantasy. Maybe she was. Or maybe she was some woman the marksman had been lusting after but never got.

It was quite possible this nude had been drawn from imagination. Except, she looked real. She looked like a real, flawed human being, not a pin-up girl. Was the drawing based off what he'd seen one day peering down that rifle scope of his? Possibly. But her pose looked deliberate, and the look she was shooting back over her shoulder was a coy, enticing one.

The Spy was forced to come to the conclusion that perhaps the Sniper had a little more pulling power than he'd given him credit for. He was lanky and awkward and had terrible fashion sense but even the Spy had to admit- no, the Spy didn't have to admit anything.

Jumping off that train of thought before it had chance to reach the next station, the Spy continued to flip through the pages. There was as much of a variety of subjects and styles here as there had been in the notepad. He spent some time admiring a page covered in wonderfully intricate Celtic knots and another that he thought have must been a self-portrait, though the man in the picture looked so much younger and happier than the one he'd been fighting that it was hard to say. The Spy took a photograph of it anyway, deciding he could always draw a hat, aviators and scar on top to see if that helped confirm anything.

Every few pages though, there she was again. The same woman from all angles and in various outfits and stages of undress. Some looked candid, others purposefully posed. In the corner of one especially fine sketch, the Spy found another little clue to add to his collection. It was a little scribble that read simply, '02/04/71'. So this sketch was two years old. Drawn in February. Or was that April? He couldn't remember which way around Australians wrote the date.

But either way he had a date for one of the Sniper's drawings of his lady friend. He finished going through the remaining pages in pencil before hitting pen again. That also happened to be the first page after the tapped-up section.

So, what did this mean? He put the pieces together in his head. The Sniper only seemed to draw in pen these days but clearly used to use pencil. There's a woman, or at least, there was a woman he used to sketch all the time but these days he only drew hints of her here and there, and often crossed them back out. And he'd also sellotaped up the pages containing his full illustrations of her. Most likely it seemed, to hide them from himself rather than from prying eyes, as he'd shown no indication of knowing the Spy had been in his van.

Clearly something had happened between them some time in the last four years. RED had got the Sniper out of prison or off Death Row. It seemed the most likely answer was that she'd left him for being a felon. Most likely, she'd found someone better while her partner was locked up and decided to leave him. That would explain the Sniper's reaction too. But might there be more to it than that?

The Spy wasn't happy to just sit around and speculate. He pressed the tape back into place as firmly as he could, carefully rearranged the table to how it had been when he entered the van, and left. He spent the journey back to his base planning.

He had the Sniper's name.

He had a date.

He had contacts.

He could find the answer.

Apologies for he Spy's period-typical racism. Also, apologies in advance for everything about him in the next chapter.

Thank you to the boyfriend for catching my typos and naming this chapter :)