EPILOGUE
The morning sun glittered on the snow, turning everything dazzling and beautiful. Pyro stepped into the light, aiming to loop around to try and take the enemy by surprise, and just as she did the speakers crackled. "RED has seized all control points," the Administrator said in a bored voice. "Finally. BLU has failed."
Great. Pyro let her flamethrower's muzzle drop to the snow, hissing out her breath. Without Dell, it hadn't even taken them an hour to lose. The moment the RED team had realized there was no sentry nest anywhere their assault doubled. Even now she could hear the whoops of the victors from BLU's final point.
Breakfast that morning had been terse and uncomfortable. No one had any idea where their engineer and the entirety of his equipment and belongings had vanished to. Pyro kept her mouth shut, and shook her head when they asked if she knew. When Sniper found his truck missing, that told them all they needed to know anyway. "Kind of wondered if this was gonna happen," she had heard him say to Demo, who made a solemn noise of agreement. "S'pose I'll ask him about it next I see him."
But now it was over—they could go home. As she moved to head back for the base, Pyro wondered what would become of her. She had no place of her own, as far as she could remember—her memory offered flashes of staying at Dell's farmhouse in Texas, or sometimes at the BLU headquarters. One was now impossible, and the other unappealing. She didn't even know where it was. But she'd been getting paid for the last two years, surely. Maybe if she was lucky she had some of that money in a bank account somewhere.
Something jangled against her foot as she picked her way through the snow and interrupted her thoughts. Whatever it was had caught around her boot, so ice-crusted she couldn't tell what it was. As she knelt down to investigate she thought it might be a thread, or a snapped catgut from one of Sniper's bows.
It was neither. It was something else entirely. Pyro stayed there in the snow for a long time, turning it over in her hands.
Policy stated the losing team had to be out of the territory within twenty-four hours. A truck would be arriving to cart them off to Miut's airport in five, Pyro learned when she got back to the base. Lots of time to kill, but it slipped away fast. It took her an hour to gather all her belongings and weapons and pack them, and she filled the next three with helping to clean the base before they left. By the time they were done her time had dwindled to an hour, and she was left looking around her barren room and fiddling with the thing she had found in the snow.
The smart thing to do would be to give it to one of her teammates. Have them do it. Any of them would understand why she didn't want to.
But, apparently, she hadn't learned her lesson yet. When she at last squared her shoulders and flipped her light off for the final time, her own words echoed in her head like a death sentence:
I want to try and fix things.
With the base dark and emptied, most of the team had holed up in the commons to wait out their ride's arrival. Most of them. It took Pyro a solid thirty minutes of searching to find Scout, and when she did, another five of looking at his back and convincing herself not to turn around.
She managed that, at least. Small victories.
When she opened the garage's side door and went out to where he stood staring down the horizon, the sun was beginning to set. The sky was a blazing canvas of color, the sun burning the clouds up to pinks and golds and autumn-reds. If Scout heard her approach, he gave nothing away. Not until she stopped just a few steps away from him, looking out at the sunset herself.
"So what happened, Engie finally get sick of takin' care of your stupid ass? That why he left you behind?" Before she could even open her mouth Scout turned his head just enough to glare at her from the corner of his eye. There was a certain haggardness to his face she did not recognize—not the same dead look as before, but perhaps second cousin to it. "Or did he just decided to get away from you before you did him like you did my brother?"
The words stung, but Pyro met his gaze. None of the answers that ran through her head seemed sufficient. In the end, she just shrugged. Scout snorted, a puff of dragon-smoke on the frigid air. "Yeah, sure. Put your damn mask back on, no one wants to look at that thing you're callin' a face. The hell do you even want?"
She supposed that was meant to hurt, too, but the way he said it was so hollow that she just felt sorry for him. Shifting her weight, she glanced down at the snow and took a deep breath before reaching into her pocket. "I found these on the field today," she said, holding out the silver dog tags. "They were buried in the snow by that little bridge."
Scout's eyes widened as they fell on the tags. An instant later he had ripped them out of her hand and darted a few steps back, head bent as he inspected them. Each passing second darkened his expression more and more. At last he shoved them deep into his pocket, sneering at her. "Found 'em?" he said. "Found them? You expect me to believe that shit, you expect me to—you goddamn freak you wanna tell me that you found his lighter on the ground too?" Both his hands had clenched into fists as he took a step toward, then another and another, his volume increasing with each one. Pyro stood her ground. "You—you're a goddamn psycho, first his lighter and now my tags! My—"
"Aren't they his tags?"
Scout sputtered, mouth hanging open like he couldn't believe she'd interrupted him, but she wasn't looking at him now. Her eyes were locked on the ghost standing beside him, all burns and blood.
"Don't they have his name on them?" she said, trying to remember. The ghost tilted his head to one side. "I thought he used to wear some. He—"
"Shut up," Scout said. Something was wrong with his voice. "Just—just shut up! You don't—you don't get to talk about him, you hear me, don't you even dare go thinkin' you can just—" He broke off, grit teeth cutting off anything else he might have said. After a moment he swallowed and straightened up, leaning into her face. Pyro tore herself away from the ghost to look at Scout again. "You did all of this," he growled. "You screwed up the team, it's your fault Engineer went AWOL, it's your fault we lost—you ruined my family, you broke my ma's heart, you killed my brother—"
He spat in her face. Pyro flinched but did not look away. "You better hide real good after we're outta here," Scout hissed. "You better goddamn disappear, because—"
"No," Pyro said. She reached up and wiped the spit from her scarred cheek with the back of her wrist. "I'm done with that. But I won't talk about him. And I'm sorry about all of it. But I'm part of this team as much as you are and I'm not going anywhere."
Her answer silenced him. For a few seconds longer Scout glowered at her with fire in his eyes, but when she stepped back from him he did nothing to stop her. The ghost was still there beside him, but this time she chose not to see it.
The sun had vanished. Out on the horizon, a slowly moving light trundled up the mountain. Pyro sighed, nodding toward the base. "Come on," she said. "The truck's here. Let's go back."
THE END
Dedicated to the admirable Noel B., who is always right, and to the memory of Ray Bradbury, without either of whom this story would not have come to be, and to all of you who have traveled here with the arsonist.
There Is A Season continues in Part III: Hold Your Fire.
