Spy stabbed her fencing dummy with the point of her sabre, then wrenched it out with a vicious flourish. It didn't make her feel any better, but she did it again anyway.

The moment played and replayed in her mind in sickening repetition. The way Sniper's face had gone blank, the way she'd tensed, the way she'd drawn herself up…the way their easy camaraderie had stumbled and shattered with an echoing finality.

Spy had blown her own cover, like a rank amateur falling over their own tripwire.

Disgusting. Generations of spy ancestors were turning up their proud noses at their failure of a descendant, who had apparently forgotten what it was to be disciplined and careful and unaffected. To stay in character, no matter what.

Even then, though, it could have been fixed. Even then, she could've pulled their friendship back from the edge. But it hadn't been that little kiss that had betrayed her. It'd been her own reaction to it.

Caught figuratively red handed, she'd done the equivalent of opening her mouth and confessing everything. She'd thrown every alibi into the trash and set it on fire. She'd betrayed herself and her training utterly.

What kind of spy was she? What happened to all her casual lies, her self-control?

She could have played it off like an accident. She could have not reacted at all and left Sniper with suppositions unconfirmed. By all that was well-tailored and freshly ironed, she could have dismissed it as a normal French farewell.

"Oh yes indeed, oui oui," she said, in a mocking caricature of her own voice, "Eet is customary to do zis with friends, family, and even ze barest acquaintances back 'ome. Romantique? Of course not, filzhy bushwoman. Les Australiens are so terribly uncivilized."

Safely distanced from the moment, she could list hundreds, thousands of excuses and lies and camouflages for what she'd done.

But no, the idiotic, emotional child that she was, she'd panicked and fled. She'd ruined everything.

She threw her sabre aside with a snarl.

All of her fighting styles were precise and cunning, and she desperately wanted anything but that right now. She wanted to smash something. She wanted to curl up in a corner. She wanted to shove someone deserving off a cliff.

She fell to pacing, gnawing at the seam of a glove and hoping it would tear gruesomely so she would have something else to be mad at.

Demo, strolling past the gym, looked in at the dummy - which at this point was fileted to pieces, little bits of dusty straw drifting in the air. Then she looked at Spy, who was sweaty and exhausted and still practically vibrating with anger and grief and despair.

She cleared her throat and - with all the care of someone who had woken one morning to find a large snake peacefully sleeping on their chest - said, "Want ta talk about it, lass?"

"Absolutely not," snapped Spy.

But word must've gotten around, because over the next few days - as Spy avoided Sniper entirely for fear of what she might see - members of BLU kept popping up in suspicious circumstances near her.

-—-—-

"Ah, Doktor!" boomed Heavy, mugging furiously, "What is delicious meal you have made for team?"

"Vhy, thank you for asking, Heavy," said Medic, looking equally suspect. "It is a Cornish game hen, baked vith rock cherries and almonds vith port in an old French recipe. Vell, cranberries, and peanuts, and absinthe, because that's vat I could get on short notice. But very nearly rock cherries and almonds and port!"

With ever-disconcerting competence, Medic neatly carved the bird and passed around plates. "Guten Appetit! Or rather, bon appétit," she said, with a wink toward Spy.

"Uh…was it supposed to be that big?" whispered Scout loudly. "I thought you were saying they were tiny friggin' birds?"

"Revised; it is probably a Cornish hen," said Medic, cheerfully. "Vith Mann Co., one must take their catalog with a pinch of salt." She held up the shaker. "Pinch of salt?"

Spy sliced into her portion with far more caution than she ever had a living human's back. "It appears to be…raw. On the inside."

Medic beamed. "Yes, rare. It makes it more tender, ja? You are lucky, if I had permitted Pyro to do the roasting, there vould be nothing left but charcoal briquettes! Ahahaha!"

Pyro, eating in their usual far corner behind their concealing GnG dungeon master's standee, made a grumpy noise. "Mmph," they added, eloquently.

Medic whipped around. "Excuse me, Pyro, I know everything there is to know about food safety! You follow the same rules as you do to keep corpses from rotting."

She looked around at the suddenly green faces around the table. "Vhat? It's all meat, in the end."

For a moment, the only sound was the scrape of Demo carefully putting down her fork and shoving her plate away.

But then: "WE ARE ALL MEAT!" said Soldier, and happily dug into her portion. "I AM EATING MEAT TO MAKE MORE MEAT!"

Scout poked her slice with a finger. "Uhhh why is it cold on the inside? It's not supposed to be friggin' cold, right?"

Heavy was scrutinizing the piece on the end of her fork. "Doktor, this is meat of bird, we are…very sure? Color is...green."

BLU Sniper shrugged as she shoved a chunk in her mouth. "Eh. I've eaten worse in the bush, it probably won't kill us." She chewed, and swallowed with effort. She coughed. "Probably."

Demo had opened her jacket and was looking through her hip flask collection with a sommelier's eye. "Goin' ta need a high proof to sterilize me mouth after that bite…"

Engie had pulled out a thermometer out of somewhere and was shoving it into the carcass, eyeing it with professional interest. "Couldn't say biology's one of my areas of expertise, but -"

And "Mmph," said Pyro, shaking their head.

Spy, after a private struggle with what little remained of her training in etiquette, decided discretion was the better part of valor.

She slipped out of the room while Medic was busy arguing with Engie about internal cooking temperatures (the matter being confused further by the Celsius-Fahrenheit divide). A bit of sleight of hand deposited the contents of her plate into the bottom of Pyro's heap of Things-To-Burn in the fire pit outside. There either the local wildlife would enjoy being poisoned by it or Pyro would finally get to make the charcoal briquettes of their dreams.

-—-—-

Spy strode out of Respawn, fuming. The damn red dot had been dogging her steps ever since the day Spy had blown her cover. Sniper thought she was sneaky in hiding it, but Spy saw, and it bothered more than she would have thought.

It didn't help that Sniper was so good at finding her. Invisibility only temporarily threw her off the trail; the dot would soon appear again, no matter Spy's tricks or disguise. Sniper seemed to have a preternatural ability to find her, and it was both professionally insulting and (if she could be honest with herself) personally hurtful. She wished Sniper would just shoot her. Then they could just be businesslike enemies again, and things wouldn't be so complicated.

On top of that, Spy was internally warring between her natural curiosity to invisibly stalk Sniper (i.e. her willingness to put her hand in an emotional mousetrap) and her newfound conscientious urge to leave the woman alone and make a clean break of things (i.e. pure cowardice). So far the cowardice was winning.

Spy swept out of the door, and Scout jumped up from the Respawn bench and fell in beside her. The girl was being unusually quiet today - actually, she'd been unusually quiet a lot recently when Spy was in the room. She would stare, face scrunched up in apparent thought, until someone threw something at her and told her she was acting weird.

With so many of her own problems at hand, Spy had no interest in investigating whatever asinine thoughts were running through the girl's mind. Scout would work it out on her own or go talk it out with her usual gossip buddy, Demo. Knowing them, over a Shirley Temple, cheap whiskey, and a sports broadcast.

Step, step, step. Scout tapped her bat nervously on her leg.

"So, like, you're not my mom or anything…"

"Something I am eternally grateful for," muttered Spy.

"But but BUT! If I had to choose, and I only had two choices, and if the choices were you or that bitch Spy on RED, and I had a while to think about it, and someone had a few guns to my head, and -"

"Ah, that is rather more like it," Spy said, lighting a cigarette. "Normalcy returns."

"Shattup, fuckface. Anyway, you're better than her, I guess." Scout's forehead crinkled in deep thought. "You give better Smissmas presents, anyway."

Spy snorted. "That is…not difficult." The RED Spy's gifts to Scout were legendarily awful, so far off the mark that Spy wondered how someone so observant could so thoroughly misunderstand her own daughter. She remained, as ever, thoroughly glad to be childless. Spy was not built for kindness.

"Yeah. So there, I said it."

"Thank you ever so much for the magnificent compliment," said Spy, drily. "I suppose you are marginally better than the RED Scout yourself, though that bar too is practically low enough to be subterranean."

Scout was staring at her again, expectantly.

Spy reached over and flicked her forehead. "Staring is rude."

"OW, FUCK!" Scout yanked off her ballcap and rubbed her forehead. "Like, do you feel better now? I can't fuggin' tell with your dumbass mask-face."

"Feel better than what, Scout?" Spy snapped, blowing smoke out her nose like a peevish dragon. "I am precisely as I always am."

"Well, uh, glad to hear it I guess." Scout gnawed a chapped lip, then gathered herself. "Great! It worked! I'm the best!"

She pointed her bat at Spy as she jogged off. "Later, loser! You're welcome!"

-—-—-

Aha. So she was being followed.

Spy cloaked and ducked around a corner, took a second turn, then doubled back to lurk in a shadow. She wasn't fully invisible to her own team, of course, but in the darkness she was close enough.

The soft footsteps came closer, and she had a moment of conflict. It would be suicide for Sniper to be walking around unprotected in BLU base after hours, and any intentions of hers would not end well for Spy besides, but a foolish part of her still leapt with a pathetic sort of hope at the thought. But who else would be insane enough to follow Spy - she who knew twelve ways to kill a man with a paperclip - around in the early hours of the morning? One of the Administrator's goons, perhaps?

But then she recognized the gait, and became even more confused. Insane, indeed.

Pyro came around the corner, flamethrower-less as they usually were after-hours (by universal commandment), but flicking a lighter in their absent kind of way.

They paused, and seemed to poise to listen, or smell, or interpret the ley-lines, or do whatever it was that made them such a good Spy-checker.

Spy breathed lightly, and watched the flickering lightbulb nearby throw harsh shadows across that blank, inhuman gas mask, watched it glint sharp and pale off those empty lenses, heard the rasp and click-sizzle of the lighter as it flicked on and off. The smell of hot lighter fluid filled the air, and despite herself she felt a trickle of fear creep up her spine.

No matter that this Pyro was an obliging sort that would chase her down just to extinguish her, who ran the weekly campaign-game with the team, who cheerfully made too-large-piles of more-than-slightly-burnt grilled cheeses.

Because sometimes, when Spy looked deep into those lenses, she thought she saw a spark of red in their black depths.

Pyro turned, and kept walking down Spy's original path, and she frowned and watched them leave.

-—-

The next night she spent sleeplessly pacing the halls of BLU base, it happened again. And the third.

The fourth, she decided to take action. She would have called Pyro stubborn, if she was sure such a human adjective could apply to them. Single-minded, maybe. Intractable, perhaps.

She uncloaked behind them. "Well?"

Pyro gave a little squeak and a jump. They turned, and fluttered their rubber-gloved hand at their chest(?) like a Victorian dowager who had just heard that their young ward had fallen into a pond in front of all the great ladies and marriageable bachelors of the ton.

"Mmph," they said, meaningfully, and propped their hands on their hips.

"If I were easy to find, then I would not be fit for my position," returned Spy. "What is it that you want?"

"Mmph." Pyro handed her a scrap of paper.

It read thusly: "Mmph."

"Really," said Spy, surprised, and read it again. "Anytime I want, during the weekly game? You know certain members of the team will throw a fit if they realize."

A different woman would have worried about this being considered cheating. Spy knew very well that it was cheating, and hadn't the least concern about it, because it was she who got to do it.

Pyro tilted their head in the motion Spy had learned to interpret as the equivalent of them rolling their eyes, and flapped a hand dismissively.

"True. You are the master of the dungeon, as you like to say. Well, then." Spy said, nonplussed, and made the paper disappear into an inner pocket. "My thanks. Goodnight."

She started turning to leave, and was thus blindsided when Pyro flung their arms around her.

Every fiber of her being cringed at once, and the scent of burned marshmallows and sulfur flooded her nose. Abruptly, she realized that Pyro's arms didn't seem to have bones in the usual places, and her mind went blank with utter horror.

"Mmph!" Pyro said encouragingly, even more muffled than usual with their gas mask pressed against Spy's shoulder. They rubbed Spy's back in a child's parody of comfort, and their rubber-gloved hand made tiny squeaking noises. "Mmph."

Distantly, she found herself folding the knife back into her sleeve and patting Pyro's shoulder gingerly. She could swear something in there sloshed when she did it, or perhaps gave an awful squishing bounce, and she needed to stop thinking about this immediately before she too went insane -

"I shall take that under advisement," she said faintly. "Many thanks," she added, in a tone anyone should've been able to interpret as 'now kindly leave before you catch a terminal case of being dead.' Tone, however, bounced right off the gasmask, or perhaps passed straight through the head-shaped appendage inside and out the other side.

So instead, Spy stood there in locked-up, unbreathing horror until Pyro saw fit to release her.

They gave her a thumbs up, another bracing "Mmph!" and trotted off happily.

Spy gave a full body shudder.

-—-—-

"Little Spy is asthmatic toothpick," Heavy said, and picked up the refrigerator.

Spy stifled another cough and resigned herself to waiting. Her recent excessive chain-smoking had dried out her throat, and she had finally emerged from her rooms with the vague notion that a glass of milk might soothe it somewhat. Naturally, she was being stymied even here.

She didn't dignify the non sequitur with a response.

With her other hand, Heavy shoved her broom into the newly exposed floorspace. "Spy should join Heavy for weightlifting after dinner."

Best not to encourage such an idea. "Picking objects up and putting them down again is not my idea of fun."

"Could be, if Spy tried it. When pick up weights, they -" she cocked her head in thought "- they squish feelings out of head through ears. No space left in brain for bad memories."

Spy bit her tongue on the reflexive, cruel response. Heavy was being open and friendly, in her way, even if she was speaking utter nonsense.

"I'm terribly afraid I have a previous engagement."

Her voice was impeccably neutral. "Yes. Little Spy is very very busy, last few months."

"Espionage is a needy mistress," Spy murmured humbly, glaring at the back of her head.

Heavy set the fridge back in its place without a rattle. "Right. Boxing also is option. Also squeezes mind clean - Spy is welcome to try to land punch." She slapped her stomach and gave a bark of laughter.

"I get plenty of that from the enemy Heavy, I assure you." Spy sidled around her and to the fridge.

"That ancient старуха? She could not punch paper bag. If she is to be bothering you, you definitely need to train strength."

Cup in hand, Spy was already slithering towards the door and out of this conversation.

"Ah, Spy -" Heavy said, and despite her better judgment, Spy paused.

"What."

"Have something for you." She pulled a book out of her pocket. It was tiny in her hand.

"The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel, by the Strugatsky Brothers," read Spy, puzzled.

"да," said Heavy. "Is very silly book. Maybe will cheer you up."

She abruptly subjected Spy to one of her terrifying smiles, and Spy arrested the urge to flinch back. In moving overseas, Heavy had tried to pick up not only the language but also the typical American habit of smiling for non-private matters. But like the language it was still a work in progress, and as a result Heavy's smiles were broad, intense, and left one with the overwhelming impression of teeth.

"I do not require 'cheering up,' " said Spy, stiffly.

But Heavy just handed her the book, and went to pick up the dishwasher.

As Spy found, it was indeed a very silly book. But whenever she got to a particularly ridiculous part, she kept expecting a poke in her side and a Sniper craning over her shoulder to see what was making her snort-laugh like that.

Bless'em, they're trying to help.

For the record, the Pyros also got genderswapped, but since their true, eldritch pronouns in any gender are unpronounceable by the human tongue and are beyond human comprehension, they stick to they/them as a kindness towards their co-workers.

This chapter also drops a tasty tidbit for the huge community tracking dishwasher canon in my fics; that's right, while the REDs have the traditional three-sink style of wash/rinse/sanitize, the BLUs have an actual mechanical dishwasher. I know, this is very exciting news to all the dishwasherheads out there - happy to finally confirm that for y'all :)

The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is a charming 1970 Russian mystery novel, or perhaps an anti-mystery novel; it takes great pleasure in breaking murder mystery norms for some truly surprising twists. The Strugatsky brothers in general wrote some pretty funny books (as well as some more serious ones - you may recognize Roadside Picnic's descendents in video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.)

-—-—-

guten Appetit/bon appétit - German/French; lit. 'good appetite,' fig. 'enjoy your meal'

ton - Victorian English-French lol; basically, High Society. The community of the (usually aristocratic) wealthy.

старуха - Russian; 'old woman,' sometimes has negative or humorous connotations. Think 'crone'.

да - Russian; yes

bingus1man - xD Soon, soon! This fic only has 17 chapters, I can't procrastinate too hard on the kissing 3