Spy tapped twice on the door. "Room service," she called, smirking to herself.

She'd just gotten a neat stab on the RED Medic, who'd been fiddling with her watch and seemingly lost in (no doubt gory) daydreams nearby. As a result, Spy was preening, just a bit. Getting away scot-free with a Medic stab still brought satisfaction, even after all these years. The dreadful woman usually had bodyguards aplenty; most attempts on her life ended with Spy dying one way or another.

No response from inside, but Spy had seen the glint of a scope from this room's window shortly before the stab. Either Sniper was recently dead due to her ongoing duel with the BLU Sniper or - more likely - was so absorbed in her work she had practically forgotten to breathe. Again. So Spy mentally shrugged, and opened the door.

To see Sniper hunched over, supporting herself on the windowsill on arms that trembled.

She made an odd, choked sound.

Spy stood frozen, hand hanging in the air.

"Bushwoman?" No response. "Sniper?"

She squashed her initial urges before they had time to even register consciously, and instead hovered, foolishly, indecisively, in the doorway. Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée, she told herself, with a bitter twist.

With a heave, Sniper pushed herself up and back, slamming her back against the wall, and slid-staggered into a corner. One hand clawed futilely at her collar; the other hung limply at her side, as if numb.

It was the movement of that first hand that clued Spy in. The thin syringe-bolt of the RED Medic's crossbow was lodged obscenely in her neck, just above the clavicle. Two little vials of drugs were inside, Spy knew well, and this one's 'Enemy' portion was empty.

Her paranoid Spy's Spy started calculating the angles. Was this an accident? Betrayal? Trap?

Sniper's long legs were shaking like a newborn colt's. A lip curled back in a silent snarl.

Spy very nearly turned and left the room right then and there.

The wise, cautious choice would be to simply leave Sniper in peace until the drug wore off (if it even did - this looked like some new awful formula), or perhaps kill her and spare her the comedown. Spy hesitated, fingering the grip of her revolver, and made the mistake of looking at Sniper's pale, sweating face again.

Her glasses had been knocked off, and her eyes were naked and fevered. One pupil was shrunk down to a pinprink, the other blown out until the iris was barely visible. She didn't seem to see Spy there, or anything at all. Each breath was huge, shaky, and frantic, as though she was expecting to be dragged back into a torrent of floodwater at any moment and needed every atom of oxygen she could find.

Well. It wasn't as though Spy had anything better to do with her time.

Spy sidled toward her, warily circling in her approach, discarding thoughts around invisibility or disguises as soon as they arrived. If Sniper's current state of mind objected to her presence, any mess that ensued would be tidied up by Respawn easily enough.

Sniper remained blank-faced and frozen right up until she wasn't. Whip-fast, she lunged forward, grabbed Spy, wrapped the functional arm around her, and sank back into the corner.

And Spy wavered in indecision again, mentally flipping through four different excruciatingly painful (to Sniper, anyway) methods she could use to extract herself from the hold - but decided to agree to this for now. After all, she'd stopped by for platonic human touch session in the first place.

Spy was tucked now under Sniper's chin, but it was an awkward position with their respective heights, Spy being too tall and Sniper being half-slumped against the wall besides. Spy allowed it for the moment, though, because the position gave her an eyeful of the syringe.

"Step one," Spy said, keeping her voice low and nonthreatening, "Let's get rid of this uncivilized thing." Her upper arms were pinned to her sides, so she grabbed the syringe with her teeth and slid it from Sniper's neck. The needle was uncomfortably long, but hardly a drop of blood welled from the puncture.

Spy spat it onto the floor and - with perhaps a little more enthusiasm than was warranted - ground it to pieces with her heel. Her previous (thankfully rare) experiences with the RED Medic's enthusiastic forays into pharmacology did not incline her to think kindly of the woman.

Sniper did not respond to this at all. Her blank gaze flicked from the door to the window and back, and her teeth were bared in a rictus, showing off surprisingly long canines. Spy dearly hoped this wasn't some kind of vampire-creating serum. The things this job had taught her to expect were frankly ridiculous.

The syringe taken care of, Spy tried to relax, at least outwardly. People, she'd found, were simple animals at their core; they tended to reflect back the emotion you displayed to them. Even in her current barely conscious state, Sniper might pick up on that. So, carefully, Spy wormed her arms around the bushwoman, leaned her forehead against her collarbone, and focused on making her own breaths slow and calm. Staying well away from the awkward spot on the upper back, she rhythmically stroked a hand up and down Sniper's spine.

Their position was both thoroughly familiar and unnervingly wrong, and it took an uncomfortable amount of will not to give in to Spy's own default response to awkward situations and either remove herself from the situation or start the killing.

"Well, bushwoman," she said brightly. "You must realize you are now my favorite kind of audience, i.e. a captive one." Spy snuck a glance up - no response, of course. "Here, I have exactly the tedious anecdote about the last time I went in person to be fitted for a suit. Your very favorite subject, I'm sure. Have you ever even seen the inside of a tailor's? Now, as anyone with functioning taste may have noticed, I spend exorbitant amounts of money on looking absolutely spectacular at all times…"

Sniper's own hands seemed to be confused. One was as strong as ever around her back (Spy had a lot of distasteful memories of being held down by that hand before a final decapitating blow or thrust to the heart); the other, though, was clearly not fully obeying orders. It would start to slide down Spy's back and Sniper would haul it back up to its place with a perceptible effort that left those muscles trembling with exhaustion.

"...It was at this point that I observed that the assistant tailor's tape measure was, in fact, lined with wire in a manner that strongly implied potential use as a garotte. Thus forearmed, I…"

Sniper was shockingly warm, too, to the point where she shone with sweat. Her heartbeat beat, visibly, in her throat, and thundered in Spy's ear. Sour anxiety rolled off her in waves. She stank of salt and fear.

"…I was still undressed to my shirtsleeves at the time - shocking, I know - but was still in possession of my cufflinks and my underwiring, which were more than sufficient to pick the locks…"

Spy kept up a steady stream of speech, though she had no idea if Sniper could actually hear her, of course. Spy was not a naturally comforting person, and was completely at sea when it came to psychological and pharmacological distress. So all she could really do was be present and keep talking about herself. Easy enough.

They stayed like that for some time, and slowly, so slowly, Sniper's breathing calmed from 'actively dying' to 'just outran a bear.'

The off hand had gradually steadied, and while the hold had relaxed from threatening to crack bones, Sniper showed no signs of fully letting go anytime soon.

"…while they were diverted, I paused for a moment to sample the patisserie's wares; I was sufficiently disappointed by their over-creamed butter and stale saffron that I…"

For the moment, Spy was content to remain in Sniper's hold, half-supporting her as the tremors that wracked her became more intermittent. (Even if she did feel rather like she'd been volunteered into being a cross between a human shield and a teddy bear.) She kept up the careful strokes up and down the bits of Sniper's back she could reach with one hand, and wormed the other one free to grip Sniper's shoulder. Not having a hand free always made her itchy.

"...and so the moral of the story is that one cannot even trust one's tailor or, for that matter, one's baker. There truly is no respect for the sanctity of fashion or properly tempered chocolate anymore."

Sniper utterly refused, however, to move out of the corner. Her upper back was crammed against the wall to the point where Spy suspected she would have bruises on her shoulder blades later.

Time for a quick test.

"I suppose when you cannot run five kilometers away from your problems to shoot them, you instead find a corner to hide in? Typical sniper behavior," Spy said, injecting as much offensive smugness into her tone as possible. "I would be enjoying the part where you don't have the capacity to defend against my insults, but that's true even when you aren't drugged."

Nothing like a normal reaction, but Sniper's nostrils flared, just slightly, and her eyelids flickered. Annoyance was implied in the faintest tensing of muscles in her cheeks and forehead.

Still, progress was progress, and Spy began to think about how to deal with the inevitable awkwardness when Sniper was fully conscious again. Maybe she could play it off with a joke? Not mention it at all? She tried to decide what wouldn't make the odd woman panic and never engage in platonic human touch with her again. Their arrangement was quite useful, after all. It would be a shame to disrupt it over something so petty as being drugged out of one's mind.

"If it makes you feel any better," she said airily, "Your Medic's previous concoction tended to paralyze the limbs even more than you appear to be experiencing. I, naturally, contrived never to be hit by that particular formulation, but it was most droll whenever she got a syringe on our Soldier - she would land from a rocket jump directly onto her face. Or perhaps you did see that? You probably have an excellent view of all the little idiocies - "

Spy glanced out at the aforementioned view, and froze.

There was a flash of blue, diving from cover to cover but approaching their location. An urgent consultation of her mental map confirmed it - BLU's Scout had to be coming to take out the enemy Sniper.

Spy inhaled sharply, and looked up.

"Bushwoman, we will presently have BLU company. BLU Scout company. We must not be seen like this."

She started to move away, and Sniper -

- Sniper growled, actually growled, and pulled Spy in tighter.

The reverberations of that growl reached in and grabbed something in Spy's libido that she desperately wanted to think about at length, but she didn't have time right now because she could hear the door downstairs creaking open and -

"Sniper, we will be compromised, there is no time, you must release me," she hissed, attempting various nerve pinches to absolutely no effect. And even once she wriggled free, they would still have the other problem, wouldn't they - to wit, Sniper's continued inability to keep from reaching for her.

Sniper was still thoroughly drugged, but she'd come up out of it enough to have the barest flicker of consciousness behind those uneven, glassy grey eyes. Her face fluttered between confused, frustrated expressions until it landed on desperation.

Her arms were as firm as ever around Spy - if anything, they were clinging so desperately tight now that Spy could hardly breathe - but her chin tilted, ever-so-slightly, up.

Spy frowned up at her.

"As you wish," she said, quiet.

The knife slid from her sleeve with nary a whisper.

It opened with a soft click-snick.

-—-

Scout slammed open the door and threw herself inside in a wicked combat roll. You really couldn't stand still for a second with the RED Sniper, or she'd blow your head right off before you could say the badass line you'd spent the run over thinking up.

So she was pretty disappointed when she rolled back up on her feet, scattergun in hand, and saw her own team's Spy cooly standing over the RED Sniper's body, staring out the window and cleaning her knife with one of her fancy monogrammed handkerchiefs.

"Aww," said Scout, drooping. "You're telling me I ran all the way over just to see you posing? Save something for me next time, jeez."

Spy didn't even look at her, the smarmy jerk. "Ah, so you finally admit you're slow. Truly, a momentous day."

"Whoa whoa whoa, I did NOT say that. Just, like, call taking out the Sniper over the comm like usual next time, so I can go bother someone more fun."

Spy frowned for some reason. "It was a mere crime of necessity."

"Caught ya, huh?"

There was a pause, and Scout was about to ask again, and louder, 'cos that usually worked, when Spy said "Yes."

"Sucks ta suck."

Scout nudged the RED Sniper's body with her bat, and gave the slit throat a look with her superobservation skills. The chick wasn't totally dead yet, but was far enough gone that nothing Scout could do would change anything. Maybe the nudge would count as an assist on the kill, she thought, cheering up a bit. Probably best to save the badass line for next time, though.

She glanced over at Spy, who was still cleaning her knife, all the way to a mirror shine. Which didn't have much point, in Scout's opinion, because she was just gonna stick it in another soon-to-be-dead chick, right?

In her ongoing mentorship of the team, Scout found it super important that she be totally honest with them. So it was in this spirit of generosity that she said, "Dude, you look like SHIT. All old and tired and crap. Did you forget your makeup today or somethin'?"

Finally, Spy turned to face her, and gave her a look made of laser beams and angry spiders and snake venom.

"Even shit, as you say, has the advantage of not looking like you, Scout."

Usually, in Scout's experience, Spy would glare at a girl but in a way that said she was secretly rolling her eyes at you. But right now, there wasn't any of that going on. She looked like she was about to actually spit, and that would be seriously gross, venom or no.

Scout had a megasmart flash of insight. "Goooootcha, you're just mad 'cos she got blood on your suit. Yeah, wow, that is a lotta blood, huh -"

"And now that it's ruined, I would naturally find little issue in getting more on it," Spy said in a slow way, looking hard at Scout, and her superobservation skills super-smartly decided that this was what ya might call a threat.

"All right, jeez, I'm going! I'm going!" Scout threw up her hands, and turned to the door.

As she left, Scout cast one last look back, and paused at what she saw. At some point, the dying woman's hand had crept out and circled around Spy's ankle. Spy was looking down at it with an expression that Scout's superobservation skills somehow weren't quite super enough to figure out.

She hesitated, then kept moving. Spy could handle a ninety-nine-percent-dead chick. Besides, she was being a bitch today anyway.

Love ya, Scout.

I have wanted to do this scene for a long time - though for WaLHBE-readers, I don't think it would've happened quite like this in that fic, had Sniper been shot instead of Spy. The fem!mercs here have in some ways already surpassed their male counterparts.

For non-gamers, the Crusader's Crossbow is a Medic item that, if you shoot it and it hits an ally, it heals them; if it hits an enemy, it damages them. Knowing Medic, she would never be satisfied by *mere* injury, though - hence The Bad Drug.

-—-—-

Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée - French; lit. 'A door must be open or shut,' idiomatically, 'There is no middle ground.'