Adrenaline pumping through her, Spy rolled away from the counterattack and to her feet.

Sniper had a longer reach, of course, but if she could just duck inside that reach, that advantage would be obviated. It would also leave her own back unprotected, but if she was sufficiently on the offensive, perhaps Sniper would not have time or opportunity to riposte. Still, while Spy was somewhat protected by her layers of clothing, in previous engagements Sniper had shown herself frustratingly competent at circumventing those defenses.

Her eyes flicked over Sniper's weak points as she tried to decide on a target.

"Done with strategizin' yet?" Sniper taunted, panting. "From the looks of it, you're signing forms in triplicate in that corkscrew brain of yours."

Spy said nothing, and baited Sniper further with her most devilish, razor-in-the-candyfloss smirk.

"You're stonkered, mate. Done like a dog's dinn-"

Spy attacked.

A foot hooked around the bushwoman's ankle pulled her off balance, and Spy used the opening to slither inside Sniper's defenses and dive straight for the neck.

But Sniper knew well her own vulnerabilities, and leaned into her displaced foot to avoid the strike.

Spy already had her other hand thrusting toward Sniper's kidneys. It barely had time to land, however, before Sniper's devastating counterattack slid up her ribs.

Spy instinctively jerked her elbows back in to knock her away, but she was slow, so slow, too slow -

- and a single, childish giggle escaped her.

She clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late.

"And that beaut of a victory," Sniper crowed, dancing away and pumping a fist in the air, "Goes to the Down-Under Ticklemonger!"

"Not fair, bushwoman," Spy snapped, crossing her arms defensively. "Your laughter is much less obvious than mine! I am fighting at a disadvantage!"

"And you're wearing a balaclava and a good five layers of clothing. Don't think I didn't see those extra undershirts."

Spy hissed her displeasure and, spotting an open target under Sniper's raised arm, tackled her.

"Ya bloody cheating wuss -" but Sniper lost control of her voice, then, dissolving into rusty, half silent gasps of laughter as she squirmed and wriggled under Spy's dancing fingers.

-—-—-

Spy supposed that sitting in the shade of the scrubby tree, with the sun hidden by clouds, with a nice view and a lack of biting insects…being outdoors was almost, perhaps, maybe, very nearly a pleasant time. Not that she would admit that to her companion.

Sniper was (as she had suspected) one of those annoying people who could fall asleep anytime and anywhere. Within minutes of their conversation fading, she'd tossed her head onto Spy's (vaguely affronted) leg, placed her hat over her face to block the sun, and started snoring.

And because she was asleep and therefore unavailable for arguments or insults, Spy was pinned in place. Trapped, even. The worst tortures could not have extracted the intel that Spy would sooner have shoved a sleeping kitten off her lap.

So, with the long Sunday afternoon ahead of her and nothing better to do, Spy started fiddling with the hair now spread over her lap.

Usually, Sniper would tie it all back in a low ponytail or careless braid - Spy knew this well, because at times in their duels she'd used it as a handle to pin the woman down for easy knife-to-throat access. A thoroughly unsporting move, of course, but Spy was thoroughly unsporting both as a matter of necessity and inclination.

With the thrill of the forbidden, Spy took the opportunity to slip off the tie and finger-comb the long strands. They slipped smoothly through her gloved fingers, as straight and straightforward as the woman herself.

Sniper's roots were a dishwater blonde, but elsewhere lightened by long hours in the sun into a tawny golden brown. There was a hunk missing, though it seemed an old cut. Sniper's hair was long enough - and all the mercs' hair grew slower, because deaths reset their bodies to their state at the morning clock-ins - that the cut probably predated her contract with RED. Spy considered delving into the Administrator's files again (she supposed she could also just ask, but where was the fun in that?) for clues as to its cause. An assassination gone sideways? An encounter with the claws of some sort of dangerous megafauna? A close brush with another (inferior, contemptible) spy? An unwatched toddler with a pair of scissors?

At the thought - and perhaps a little intoxicated by the fresh breeze on her face - Spy had the sudden, childish impulse to braid daisies into that hair, and the ancient memories that conjured made her smile.

Not that there was much in the way of flowers in the badlands, especially at this time of year. Except for…ah, yes.

Her fingers went to the rose at her lapel, and hesitated.

Sniper, she knew, wasn't the most socially aware person - it was part of her charm, because Spy was always acutely, aggressively aware of it herself - but even Sniper would probably think to read romantic implications in the gift of a rose.

And that would be bad, because Spy did not dare threaten the stability of their arrangement. It served far too critical a function.

Instead, she diverted herself by plaiting Sniper's hair into the leather braid at the brim of her hat. There, that was an adequate bit of revenge for trapping Spy like this.

It occurred to Spy, with some amusement, that if Sniper ever wore it down (an astonishing idea in and of itself), her long, 'natural'-style hair would be exactly what was in style at the moment in the world outside. She was certain, though, that even if Sniper did keep up with the fashion plates under normal circumstances, it had diminished over the years of the Gravel War. Most of the time these days the radio and the three staticky television channels were the teams' (at least, the non-Spy portion of the teams') only real source of information, and the world they depicted seemed like a distant, strange place.

Spy herself - while not dropping a single standard when it came to dress and makeup - had started cutting her own hair shorter and shorter after that first baking summer at Dustbowl. The balaclava, she was certain, was not designed to keep one's head cool under the weight of pounds of hair. These days, her hair was scarcely an inch in length, no one had seemed to notice a thing, and she was infinitely cooler.

Unfeminine though it was, there was no one to judge her but herself, and she was well satisfied with it. If she needed a full head of hair anytime soon, she could always use the disguise kit or a wig.

She wondered if Sniper's hair had ever been in a different style, and made a mental note to raid the Administrator's files anyway, for photographic evidence.

And then it occurred to her that she could offer to cut Sniper's hair. It had been quite a while since that one mission where she'd been undercover as a salon assistant, and she rather missed the work. She entertained herself for a moment in imagining Sniper's reaction to Spy giving her a cut entirely chic and entirely unsuitable. Doing so would go against the Hairdresser's Code, of course. She wouldn't dare risk their (or Sniper's) wrath.

But then again, it would probably never happen. Sharp scissors in Spy's hands behind her back? Even with their peculiar friendship, that would be a step too far. Trust - even the marginal, circumscribed trust of people in their profession - was not so easily gained.

The thought brought a pang of frankly pathetic dismay, and then an even larger pang of horror.

They were friends?

She quickly flipped through the events of the past few weeks, with the not inconsiderable addition that at this very moment someone she would have named her primary target and nemesis was seemingly content dozing on her pinstriped leg.

Spy stared down at the hat shading Sniper's face from the sun. The bushwoman's chest rose and fell as she snored, neck cricked at an angle that should've been uncomfortable but, apparently, was not.

Spy had friends, of course. Well, professional rivals. And all the marks that she briefly befriended to trick information or passcodes from.

She frowned. Did her cousins count? She hadn't seen any of them in a decade or so. They were probably still alive. They sent heavily encoded postcards back and forth, occasionally.

Spy was good at being friendly, when she needed to be. And the full arsenal of her charms should've been banned under international treaty. This felt different, though.

She felt her way slowly, delicately, through the thought, as if disarming a booby trap by touch alone. Sniper seemed to almost enjoy her company. Or at least, her threats of violence when Spy hid her terrible jars were entirely unbelievable and quite likely physically impossible. And sometimes she would quirk that slight smile at Spy as though she was likeable, which was odd. Because Spy hadn't particularly been exerting herself to be likeable, or in fact exerting herself to be anything at all.

(Even back before The Proposition, she'd been slowly letting her standards lapse as the years went on; she hadn't respected Sniper enough to bother putting on much of an act, and spent many of Sniper's deaths snort-laughing in a distinctly undignified fashion.)

Though Sniper had spent a lot of her life without much in the way of sparkling conversation - perhaps her standards were unfussy enough to think Spy figuratively not bothering to put on her makeup and polish her knives was the best it got, socially.

Spy, of course, was only here for the exchanges of platonic touch. She repeated that thought a few times until she very nearly believed it.

She sighed, leaning her head back against the scrubby tree, and tried to ease around a particularly pointy bit of bark poking into her lower back. This was all very disturbing, but she found it surprisingly difficult to care. The sky was a beautiful blue, she had no pressing demands on her time, and all was quiet but for the faint sounds of hopefully non-venomous wildlife and Sniper's snores.

Perhaps, she thought, a siesta was in order.

But then the sun emerged from behind its cloud. Sniper twitched, then rolled away from it with a grumpy little noise. She slid an arm under Spy's knee as though her thigh was a pillow, and shoved her face into the crease of Spy's hip.

Spy went very still.

Ah. Torture was apparently on the program for today. Spy reached down and eased Sniper's glasses off, tucked them in a pocket, just as carefully replaced the hair-tangled hat in its sun-shading position -

And tried to figure out how she could get Sniper to shift into a less dangerous position before she woke up.

This was, perhaps, even less subtle than a rose.

-—-—-

Sniper was, uncharacteristically, fidgeting.

She turned a page in her book, then wriggled in place - or rather, Spy suddenly suspected, against the back of the seat.

"What on earth is going on over there?" Spy said.

"Nothing."

A minute later, she wriggled again, shoulders hitching back.

Spy put down the pair of gloves she'd been re-sewing a seam on (and occasionally accidentally sewing to the pair she was wearing; Sniper was rather better at threadcraft than she) and stared at her until she looked up.

"What?"

Spy gave her an expressive look.

"Just got an itch, is all," Sniper said, defensively.

She wriggled.

"Come," said Spy, pointing to the open spot on the booth next to her.

Sniper's eyes flickered over the top of her glasses, and she snapped, "Not a dog, thank you very much."

Spy rolled her eyes. "Then if it is not too much trouble, if you would be so very kind, it would be my great pleasure, nay, my honor, to extend an offer of a literal helping hand -"

"All right, all right!" Sniper wriggled fruitlessly once more, then sulked her way into the seat next to Spy. She looked profoundly uncomfortable. "It's…it's on my upper back. Where, er."

Spy paused. "I…see. We don't have to -"

"Nah, I can't reach it myself. Just…start slow."

"Stubborn as ever, bushwoman."

So Spy started slow, and intentionally too low. With overlapping circles she gradually crept higher, watching Sniper's reactions closely.

There was nothing but silence as the moment stretched, a delicate, tentative thing. Spy could feel the tension in Sniper's shoulders, the matching tension in her own.

As she approached the border between the thoracic and cervical vertebrae, Sniper let out a slow breath, shoulders relaxing. Spy took that as her cue to continue.

And even from a backstabbing Spy, even in gloves, the scratching was apparently acceptable enough that Sniper arched her back into it, making a deep noise of pleasure that made Spy hurriedly start thinking about cold showers. This was not the time for such thoughts.

"Down a hair." said Sniper. Spy complied, and Sniper leaned into Spy's hand. "Ah, yeah, right there mate"

Sniper rolled her shoulders, and Spy could feel those damn back muscles flexing under her fingers.

"Harder," Sniper said, voice husky. "Please. Harder."

Spy gritted her teeth and tried to focus on nothing but moving her arm. Cold showers, cold showers, cold showers -

Finally, Sniper relaxed, slumping back against Spy. "That's ace. Thanks, mate."

"Think nothing of it," said Spy, hastily shoving a casual carelessness into her tone. Feeling very daring, she crept that arm around Sniper's waist to support her.

Sniper tilted her head back against Spy's shoulder. "A little on the nose, don't you think?"

"What?" Spy said, thoroughly distracted.

"Y'know. You scratch my back, I scratch yours?"

Spy wrinkled her nose. "You may not scratch my back. Your nails are probably filthy."

But she thought about it a moment too long, and the mental image transformed into those strong, capable, callused hands giving her a full-body massage, and -

Icemelt waterfalls. Wine gone stale. Inkstains on her cuffs. Honest conversations.

-—-—-

BLU was going to lose this round.

A veteran of a thousand pushes, Spy knew it at a glance - the timer ticking down, their numbers thinning, the growing confidence in the enemy's shouts. The more insane members of BLU were throwing themselves at the RED defenses; the saner contingent were either attempting unorthodox maneuvers or considering their Humiliation Round hiding spots. Even the normally stoic Engineer was shoved up against the bomb cart, fiddling with its control panel. Probably trying to get those nutty rocket boosters to work again. The woman was stubbornness personified.

As Spy watched, Demo sticky-jumped into a nearby window, battleaxe in hand. There was a bloodcurdling warcry that aggravated Spy's headache, then the sound of a shotgun in response. The warcry cut off.

On the one hand, a mere headache was nothing compared to all the delightful varieties of acute pain one could acquire on the battlefield; on the other, Spy had clocked in this morning with it and thus with every respawn was reintroduced to it. And Spy had respawned a lot today - her targets had had an unfortunate propensity to turn around at awkward moments. And bump into her while she was invisible. And decapitate her with a massive broadsword. And happen to catch her on fire with a flare shot seemingly at random. And -

Her fingers itched, and she sourly got out a cigarette. She took a drag, sweet nicotine filled her lungs, and…her fingers still itched. She frowned at them in puzzlement a moment.

Ah. She hadn't visited Sniper for non-employment-related reasons yet today, had she.

Her invisible feet sidled themselves around the edge of the battlefield, in the direction of the most recent rifle shots. Complaining to Sniper about her terrible day for a while would be a rather more pleasant way to spend the Humiliation Round than being hunted down by bloodthirsty REDs. Sniper, Spy had found, was great for complaining at - on top of being a good listener, she never fell into the trap of offering actual solutions to one's problems when all one really wanted was to vent for a while.

Perhaps that tower there? She might make it before the round ended -

"Aw, hell," said Engie, sounding mildly disappointed.

Then the blast hit.

-—-

There was a firefly resting on her palm. It tickled, warm and faint on her hand, and Spy smiled at it a while.

Gently, she closed her fingers over it in a cage.

It slipped away, somehow.

"Non, non p'tite," she whispered. Her mouth was dusty and coppery. "Reviens, ma luciole."

She opened her hand, and it forgave her enough to alight on her palm again.

"Merci, mon amie."

Gradually, she realized the world was sideways. There were smoking bits of…stuff…lying around untidily. Unidentifiable, crumpled scraps of metal and wood. There was also a crumbling, warping pain at the back of her skull, sending lancing bolts down her neck and back.

"S'il te plaît," she begged the little red firefly. She wasn't sure, though, what she was asking for, nor what the friendly creature could possibly do to help.

Her watch buzzed, then clicked. An old woman's voice shrieked something out of it, staticky and angry. Horns around the battlefield blasted.

Adrenaline jerked her to her feet. Whatever was said, it was bad. If Spy's head would stop feeling like a bag of broken glass and porridge for even half a second, she could probably figure out the exact meaning. English was a cursed strange language sometimes.

But the abrupt movement made the back of her head scream and burn, and nausea churned through her guts. Only pure bloody-mindedness kept her on her feet and her lunch where it should be. She clung to a wall for a few breaths or a few hours, fruitlessly waiting for the pain to end.

Eventually, her eyes focused. The little red firefly-dot was still there, making worried little circles on the wall next to her head. As she watched, it trailed off to the right and landed on a wooden beam.

Spy found her feet shuffling to follow it, one hand against the wall to help her queasy balance. Following the dot was…good. Familiar. Safe. A few scattered mental fragments aligned. If she just kept her eyes on the dot, everything would turn out all right.

She walked for years, or perhaps a few steps. She never quite seemed to catch up. The dot was slow, but Spy was slower.

There were noises. Footsteps. The awful clanging of a metal bat dragged across a metal fence.

The dot flicked up and vanished.

Lacking any goal without it, Spy sagged against the wall. She felt unaccountably bereft.

"Aw man," said a young voice, obnoxiously. God, she despised that voice. "Snipes always steals the fun humiliation kills."

A glimmer of red caught Spy's eye, and with care she tilted her head down slightly. The dot was back, pressed to her heart. It felt like the brush of a warm finger, though with some concentration she decided she might be imagining that part.

The voice was directed away from Spy now, but was no less obnoxious. "Can't I bat her around first? You could get the killing shot when I'm done -" The sound of the bat tapped against a foot. "- Ugh, fine! I'm not a friggin' kill stealer!"

The footsteps started again, and left. The bat clanged back up the metal fence.

The dot vanished again, and a gun fired harmlessly into the dirt a ways away. Spy found it difficult to care, because the dot then returned to the bit of floorboard it had been resting on before the interruption started. She followed it with relief.

The dot led her to a doorway and circled on the floor before it a few times before vanishing.

A few scraps of her mind had come back at this point, and Spy deduced this to mean she should enter. Inside was nothing but a health pack. She looked at it a while, then sat by it.

Fortunately, her hands seemed to remember what to do.

-—-

"Just shoot me next time, bushwoman. Put me down like one of your emu."

Sniper just shrugged, and continued frying their eggs.

It was fully minutes later that she finally said, "Always thought Humiliation Round respawns were the worst ones."

"That they are, but ma chacal, you are…entirely too kind for my own good. Just shoot me."

Her voice was quiet. "Dacker."

The concussion scene at the end here isn't my very favorite bit of the fic, but it's definitely in my top 5. Bit of a companion piece to chapter 5, I feel.

70s women's hairstyles ran the gamut from Farrah Fawcett-y giant curls, to elaborate sweeps and bobs, to the natural curl of the afro. Spy's talking about the specific hippie-inspired trend of having long, straight, seemingly unstyled locks.

Doesn't seem like Spy knows that the emu basically won the Great Emu War lol

I've been editing some later chapters lately, and all I've gotta say is that y'all should enjoy this fluff while it lasts lol

-—-—-

candyfloss - British; equivalent to the U. 'cotton candy,' Australian 'fairy floss,' and French (adorably) 'barbe à papa' (papa's beard)

stonkered - Aussie; beaten, defeated, cornered, perplexed

done like a dog's dinner - Aussie; comprehensively outwitted or defeated

ace - Aussie;great

Non, p'tite...Reviens, ma luciole...Merci, mon amie...S'il te plaît. - French; "No, no little one...return to me, my firefly...thank you my friend...please (informal)." Obligatory mention that I do not speak french, though I did my best to keep genders straight here.

bingus1man - Aw thank you! I'll admit that there were Moments during the writing process where I was like "this is all self-indulgent nonsense, no one but my own dumb ass is going to like this" so I am glad to hear you say that haha