Spy knocked twice on the doorframe and slouched (or as close as she ever allowed herself to slouch) her way over to the crate by the window where Sniper was sitting. She spread a handkerchief on the filthy floor and sat on it, slumping back against the other woman's calf.

It was far too disgustingly hot for anything else. The weather was sticky and baking, and out on the field even the Scouts were dragging their bats. On her (slow, obscenity-filled) commute, she'd even seen a Heavy lying flat in the shade, swearing that she'd shave her head and be done with it. Her attendant Medic had been busy taking notes on symptoms instead of actually helping, of course. Only the Pyros seemed unaffected, though for all she knew they weren't even aware of the concept of temperature at all.

Spy refused to lift a finger more than she needed to on a day like today, when her sweat-soaked balaclava stuck to her face and her underwiring cut into her ribs. She allowed herself to unbutton her wool suit jacket for a moment to confirm that, yes, her shirt had gone translucent with sweat. Ugh.

It wasn't even her fault. Scout had laughed so hard last night that's she'd sprayed radioactive-purple soft drink out of her nose and all over Spy's her cotton ensemble, and there was a long rent in her seersucker's sleeve (thanks to an overenthusiastic gesture from a cleaver-waving-Medic) that she didn't have the right thread to repair to invisibility. So here she was, sweating to death when she should be drinking mint cocktails beside an alpine lake.

She couldn't quite bring herself to rebutton the jacket. Instead, she closed her eyes and tried to remember that one mission she'd had in Sweden. Nearly freezing to death sounded appetizing right about now, though the food certainly did not.

The bushwoman, of course, seemed sickeningly unruffled by the temperature.

Spy tilted her head back over Sniper's knee and stared up at her. Sniper's only apparent concession to the heat was the removal of her vest - currently tossed in a corner - and her red uniform shirt unbuttoned and tied by the sleeves around her waist. As Spy watched, a single bead of sweat ran along her collarbone and disappeared into her undershirt. The poor scrap of cotton had probably been white, once.

It also seemed that saying about Australian women and glowing was, tragically, true. How unfair it was that heat made Spy a bedraggled mess when it made Sniper into - well, Spy rather wanted to lick that sweat drop off her upper lip.

"Bushwoman," Spy said, with an imperious flourish of a hand, "Entertain me."

Sniper blinked up from her scope, clearly still mentally several hundred meters away. She stared blankly down at Spy for a long moment.

"Bushwoman."

"Er, what? When did you get here?"

"I will say this in short sentences so that you may understand the English tongue," said Spy. "It is hot. I am bored. Entertain me."

Sniper seemed to cast around for a topic. "Er…favorite ways to kill?"

Spy gave her a long, incredulous look.

"Okay, yeah, think we know that one already." Sniper hunched forward slightly. "I'm not good with talkin', you know that by now."

"I don't believe you," said Spy. "I have seen you, if grudgingly, speak to another human being before. Even me, on occasion."

"No, it's true! Usually have to make a list of what to talk about ahead of time." She glanced away. "And then go have a lie down after the conversation's over."

"Truly?" said Spy. "This is an alien concept to me." She could not remember a time before she had known instinctively how to spur and shape a conversation to her will.

Sniper shrugged, and rubbed her shoulder. "Yeah, most of the time, 'specially if they're strangers or not…restful people."

Spy wondered which category she fell into, or both. She was pretty sure no one had ever thought her restful.

"And you've been like this since you were a child? Were you raised by dingos, without human language?"

Sniper snorted and shook her head. "Don't tell me, you were manipulating people into giving you free croissants when you were four."

"Something like that," said Spy, and purely in the interests of keeping the conversation going added, "My cousins and I were the terror of our local sweet-shops."

"A whole mob of baby spies? Baby yous?" Sniper's voice trembled on the last word.

"I fail to see what is so humorous," sniffed Spy. "Those were some of our first confidence tricks and heists. All successful, may I stress. I have an impeccable record."

"Sure, sure," wheezed Sniper, burying her face in her hands. "All of you snotty ankle-biters, in lil' suits and balaclavas, backstabbin' the taffy and sappin' the fairy floss machine -"

"Of course not," said Spy, affronted. "We went in disguise, and were debriefed after."

Sniper started laughing outright, in breathy, rusty chuckles that shook the leg Spy was leaned against. It was her genuine laugh, too, not the 'oh look your hand is arrow-stapled to the wall and the health pack is just out of reach' laugh.

Spy dropped a few more allusions to her childhood misadventures, to Sniper's apparent delight, and permitted herself a nostalgic smile or two. It had probably been the last time her training had been used for purely facile, relatively benign purposes. The war had come soon after, and the consequences of failure were…higher.

Eventually, the conversation subsided into the comfortable, companionable silence that they often found themselves in, a silence that seemed to be Sniper's natural frequency without someone spurring her to converse.

Spy really did mean to let the silence rest, but when it got quiet she was reminded of how hot it was. Her damp shirt was sticking to her shoulder blades in a should-be-illegal way, and with that thought came a sweat droplet rolling down her spine and into her waistband. Ugh ugh ugh.

So she tipped her head back over Sniper's knee and pointed accusingly up at her. "Sniper, I came here to be entertained, and all that has happened is that you have been entertained. You are failing this contract."

"I don't remember signin' anything," muttered Sniper. "Er…all right. What's your least favorite way to die?"

"Are all of your icebreakers about killing or dying?"

"...Yeah, pretty much."

Spy took pity on her. "Very well. But you first."

"All right, give me a moment to think."

"There are rather a lot of options, aren't there."

Sniper quirked a crooked smile. "Yeah, never thought I'd have first-hand experiences enough to acquire a preference - er, cover your ears."

Spy didn't bother. Damaged eardrums would be repaired by medigun or Respawn soon enough. It was sweet, though, of Sniper to warn her.

Sniper fired, hands flicking with practiced grace to reload. Spy watched with a distant, lascivious appreciation. She did so enjoy watching competent hands at work.

"All right," Sniper said, the reverberations of the shot still echoing through the room, "Think I've got it. Gut wounds."

"Really," said Spy. "I'm a little offended."

Sniper nudged her with her knee. "Nah, mate, when you get me in the spine I die pretty quick. I've got some, er, associations with the spot but the deaths themselves are easy."

"I think I'm even more offended now," Spy mock-grumbled. "But truly, not Demo's stick-with-a-nail, or drowning, or burning, or falling, or lasers, or strangulation, or Soldier, or when a Heavy picks you up and pulls -"

"Nah, it's gut wounds. It's messy and you take forever to die. Smells real bad too, and the stomach acid burns like anything when it gets all over you."

Spy studied Sniper's face for a moment. "That's not all of it, is it."

Sniper wrinkled her nose at her. "You and your sneaky people-reading skills. Yeah, I just - you know how some people faint when they see blood, or a needle?"

"Another alien concept, but yes."

"Bet. Something about seeing my inside bits - organs and the like - from the outside gets me bad. Makes me hot and queasy and…rubbery, somehow. Ratshit, through and through."

"Blood is fine, but organs aren't?"

Sniper shrugged. "Can't explain it, but yeah - didn't know I had it before this job, but I do. When the Doc was putting the über-doover in, she pulled out my heart and waved it around for a bit while she yabbered about giant butterfly parts or some shite. She pulled out some other…bits…too and juggled them, but she wasn't very good at it and dropped one and it made a noise and - think I would've passed out if the medigun let me, and I've never fainted in my life."

"But that was years ago, and you've died hundreds if not thousands of times since. One would think you would get accustomed to it."

"You would think, yeah. But gut wounds happen a lot in this job, and it never seems to get easier." She sighed. "What about you? Gotta be burning, right?"

Spy allowed the abrupt shift - Sniper looked unusually pale under her tan. "Burning is very unpleasant, indeed," she temporized.

Sniper accepted this with a nod. "Makes sense."

Something, though, opened Spy's mouth and said, "Decapitation."

"Really? It's one of the faster, cleaner ways to go."

Spy, already cursing the disclosure, shrugged.

"Figured you might prefer it, if anything, because it doesn't mess up your suit."

Spy snorted. "Aside from the collar. And all the blood."

"Hell, I go for decappies when I can - figure it's the closest you can get to a headshot with a machete." Sniper sounded puzzled. Spy did not look up at her to see. "Besides, they're tricky to pull off, you'd be surprised by how much strength it takes to cut through all that muscle and bone in one go." There was a pause. "All right, maybe you wouldn't be surprised. So why's it your worst way to go?"

"It is indeed an easy way to die, compared to being, say, beaten to death with the half-rotted fish Scout keeps pulling out of somewhere." This got a rueful smile out of Sniper, but she didn't seem diverted. So Spy took a breath and continued, wretchedly. "I did not…always feel this way about decapitation. It used to be one of my favorites - if one can have a favorite way to die - for the reasons you listed."

Spy could almost hear it when the realization - and the memory - hit the other woman.

"Ah. Yeah. That was…certainly something, wasn't it. The Doc is a little…absolutely insane, isn't she."

"As previously established."

"How long was your head in that fridge? I, er. Didn't really pay attention, at the time."

"Two weeks, three days -" Spy said, and closed her lips firmly over '- six hours, forty-three minutes, twenty seconds' because this was shameful enough as it was.

Sniper sounded like she was frowning. "It was that bad? You didn't seem…bothered, after. You went right back to stabbing me like nothing happened. And the Doc, a lot, but she deserved it for that stunt."

"I was not bothered," said Spy, sounding stiff to even her ears. "I simply do not enjoy decapitation."

"Not sure anyone does, mate."

There was another long pause, but Spy didn't hear the sounds of her getting back into her riflework.

She glanced up to see Sniper looking back down at her, thoughtful. Her lips parted, then closed, and she looked away out the window.

"What," said Spy.

"Nothing."

Spy poked her thigh with her closed balisong. "Out with it."

"Let me guess," said Sniper. "Nightmares about cold and darkness? Claustrophobia? Feeling…vulnerable?"

Spy heard the creak of her leather glove around the knife, and forced her hand to relax.

"Yes." And the smell, she thought but did not say. It felt too real, too personal to admit. The smell would catch up to her when she didn't expect it, and her neck muscles would clench, as if them tensing hard enough could prevent them being separated again.

Spy wet her lips. "Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?"

"Yeah, when you wake up and you can't move? And your heart goes wild?"

"It was similar to that. The animal, visceral part of the brain does not, cannot understand how it has been separated from the body and yet remains alive. It keeps reaching out for it, consciously or otherwise, and when it cannot find it all it can do is panic. Adrenaline and cortisol, as your Medic was so very happy to inform me."

"I see," said Sniper, slowly.

"When you're decapitated normally," said Spy, flatly, "- normally, how amusing - that reaction occurs in the last seconds between the blow and brain death. But instead of that lasting a few seconds, it lasted- longer."

"Two weeks, three days," repeated Sniper, and took off her hat. "Bloody hell, I'm sorry."

Spy raised an eyebrow, struggling for a blasé tone around the tightness in her throat that always happened when she remembered the event. "Unless you were involved with the headnapping in some way, why apologize?"

"I didn't do a thing, I didn't realize -" she cut herself off. "No, I realized, I just didn't care. It was yet another weird experiment Medic was getting up to - like the time she laid out sixty feet of elephant intestines around the base and made Scout crawl around in 'em." She frowned. "At the time, I hated your guts, but it doesn't make it right to have stood by."

Spy eyed her askance. "I fail to see why you're feeling any kind of guilt about this. You had nothing to do with the affair. The Medic is on your team, besides, and both of them get very possessive about their work."

Sniper crumpled her hat in her hands. "No, it was unprofessional…it was wrong, and I didn't lift a finger to fix it. Didn't even think to think to lift a finger." She stared at the hat blankly. "I like to brag about having a code'n'all, but when you get down to it I'm just as bad as your average crim-for-hire."

She turned back to Spy. "So yeah, I'm damn sorry. I failed you, we all failed you, and I hope someday decapitation ain't, er, at the bottom of your list. That it gets better."

Spy had to break contact with that earnest gaze. Even if the pressure in her throat had eased a little. "Well, this conversation has gotten uncomfortable," she said lightly. "And I refuse to be uncomfortable on a hot day. Cease immediately, if you please. As I said, I am unbothered by the event."

Sniper looked down again at her. "Right," she said, quietly. She reached down and squeezed Spy's shoulder, briefly.

She raised her rifle again. "You've been to Spain, right? What's the best thing you ate there?"

It took Spy a while to notice, but Sniper did not decapitate her again, didn't even slit her throat. That was fair, because Spy wasn't inflicting gut wounds on her, either. An odd kind of backwards-blackmail, but somehow a satisfactory one, nonetheless.

Definitely standing on shaky ground scientifically when it comes to Spy's decapitation adventures - hormones like cortisol are made in the adrenal glands located by the kidneys, and naturally there would be no access to them in a decapitation situation lasting more than a few seconds. But then again, the brain does rely on regular blood circulation to wash away the remnants of hormones and other waste products, and sitting in a petri dish hooked up to a battery probably wouldn't provide anything like that so I can imagine the buildup there would be unpleasant.

Elephants really do have sixty feet of intestines - check out dissections on youtube if you're curious. And Sniper uses imperial measurements because at least in our timeline, Australian metrication didn't happen until '66.

Re: Australian women and glowing - I am not powerful enough to resist the temptation to reference hit single and Aussie national anthem Land Down Under, even if it comes out like 5 years in the future.

-—-—-

ratshit - Aussie; sick, wrong, broken, shoddy

doover - Aussie; thingamajig

yabber - Aussie; nonstop chatter