The Sniper looked down at his legs, eyeing the cuts in his thigh as they walked. Neck, stomach, and thighs, he thought, absently touching them with his free hand, good thing I didn't tell you I'd offer to eat my rifle if you managed. He looked over at her, looking at the browned rivulets on her stomach, neck, and down the back of her hands. A warm tingle ran up his spine and he smiled—I'll be keeping that memory for later, Birdie, he thought. He pulled her hand up and she looked over at him, a small frown on her face. "I think I'll keep mine," he said, voice still languid with the afterglow, "but you might want to go see the Medic before you make dinner."
The Cook looked the hand he was still clasping. Her palm was a mass of scabs and crusted blood, ground in sand and small fragments of rock. Her knife hand had scabbed more cleanly, but was still dirty. Her stomach was a hot line of pain. "My back hurts," she said, a question in her voice.
The Sniper ducked back to look at it—a large patch of skin on the top of her back was scraped and raw. "You've got a bit of a… rock burn. You'd better go see Nursie."
Her stomach clenched painfully. "I don't know if he'll help." She looked over at the Sniper. "I think I pissed him off earlier."
The Sniper ruffled his sweat-matted hair. "Better go fix that. Nursie's not a good man to have angry at you for long." Shower, he thought, preoccupied. And perhaps a bit of Sneak. He looked down. Or not. He liked these slacks.
She sighed. When they walked into the base, she headed bare-chested to the surgery without him, catching the Scout coming out of his room. The Scout looked her up and down, stopping in his doorway. "I see you started knife practice with Sniper from the blood stripes. I think you missed a few spots with the knife there." He reached out and tweaked a nipple before she could stop him. "At least you didn't cut those."
The Cook stared at him, levelly. "This might be a bad time, Scout." I swear to fuck, she thought, anger re-igniting with surprising ease, I will strangle you.
He held his hands up and smiled at her, a corner of his lower lip between his teeth. "No offense, toots." I ain't gonna smile, he thought. I ain't gonna do it, I'm going to wait until she leaves. Only Sniper could start with knife practice and end with fucking in the desert. Surprised she's not wearing a dead animal.
She turned and kept walking, pushing open the surgery doors to find the Medic working on a pile of papers. He looked up once, saw her, and went back to his paperwork, the pen scratching gently on the paper. The Cook grabbed a bedside chair and pulled it to the desk, then sat quietly, waiting for him. The blood had flaked as it dried and was itchy. She absently picked at the embedded stone chips, brushing dirt, blood flakes, and fragments of stone onto the floor.
The Medic made a quietly disgusted grunt, but said nothing, still staring at the charts in front of him. I do not want to know, he raged silently. Is it not enough that Alexi's nightmares are back? And I am thinking of him as Alexi again because of you, because he pitied you. Could you not have stayed simply another employee of RED? Could you not have managed to avoid getting kidnapped?
She raked her fingers through her hair, dislodging more dirt, bits of wood, and stone. You will acknowledge me, she commanded silently. Look up and see the mess I'm making.
His shoulders hiked, crawling up toward his ears, but he remained quiet, pen still scratching away at the paper. The tearing sound of a page turning was unmercifully sharp. The Heavy walked in from the bedroom, took one look at the Medic's shoulders and the half-naked Cook staring at him, and sighed. The Heavy opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head and left the room.
The Cook settled back in the chair, sitting carefully to avoid the raw patch on her back, and made herself comfortable for a long wait. It took only a few more minutes before the Medic spoke, his voice trembling with effort. "Can I help you, Fräulein?"
"I am sorry," she said, struggling to keep the anger out of her voice, "for this morning."
He looked at her over the small disks of his lenses. "Is that so. And why would you be sorry?" You cannot, he added silently, possibly understand the ways in which you should be sorry.
She shifted, sitting up, and closed her eyes, grinding her palms against her filthy pants to distract herself from the spill of rage that prickled her skin. "You were trying to help." Apologize, she told herself. Just apologize, get healed, and go.
"Nein, Fräulein," he said, voice harsh. "I was helping." He put the pen down slowly and pulled his hand from it with comical care. "And you were being... difficult."
She dug her fingers into her cut palm, starting a trickle of blood beneath the half-moons of her fingernails. "I've been a bit stressed."
He snorted. "A bad dream. You are very delicate, Kätzchen, if a little dream bothers you so." Nothing, he raged in the silence of his head. You understand nothing of what you've done to Alexi, to me, nothing of the trouble you leave in your wake. We are patchwork men, and you run rampant through us, ripping us to shreds.
The Cook's teeth ground together. "Delicate," she said, the word shattering the last fragments of her self-control. Her mind burned and she reached out with her bloody palm and smeared it across the charts, ruining the last several hours of work. "Nursie," she spat, "you could not possibly understand what I'm going through."
The Medic stood up, knocking his chair over with a bang. He reached across the desk and pulled her body over it by the upper arms. "Do not ever," he hissed, twin red spots burning high in his cheeks, "use that name on me. Did you need another lesson today, Kätzchen?"
He looked down at the mud, blood, sand and rocks. "Tell me, Fräulein," he said, voice like the heart of winter, "do you like the tier? Do you like being his animal?" He shook her, cutting the inside of her mouth on her cheek. "I will fix the hands, little beast, but you will come back later if ever you wish my help again."
Shocked by the speed and intensity of his reaction, she simply stared at him. His face was contorted, the normal down-turned lines of his frown and eyes gone, leaving a gleeful, demonic mask in its place—he is livid, she thought, too drained to do anything but stare.
The Medic let go, toppling her backward into her chair. "You will not get the gun. For you, it will be regular medicine." He turned, coat flaring, and walked to a cabinet. The Medic yanked the doors open and pulled a tall, brown bottle, a slim roll of tape and a roll of gauze from it, then pointed at the metal sink on the near wall.
The Cook watched him warily as she crossed the room, watching his nostrils flare, chest laboring under his shirt and pressing the mat of black hair beneath it against the cotton. The Medic wrenched open the cold tap and grabbed her hands, pulling them under the pounding spray. Liquid pain sizzled up her arms, and he watched her face. She stilled her face with effort and stared back, rage narrowing her eyes. The urge to pull her arms back made them tremble and she held them, rigid, under the spray.
The Medic laughed and let go, then turned off the taps. Opening the tall brown bottle, he poured it over her hands. The pain flashed behind her eyes in a concussive white flash and she could not stop herself from gasping. She felt before she saw his sense of satisfaction and looked down at the foam spilling down her fingers into the sink. He watched the foam, still pouring, for a few seconds, before pulling the bottle back and capping it.
The Medic wrapped her hands gently, still smiling at her with a nasty smile. "This should allow you to make dinner. Do not bother to dress if you intend to pay me your debt, Fräu." He pushed his hair back and looked down at her. "I will let you choose thenight, but you will make what you have done up to me before I help you again." He gave her a courtly, mocking nod—archaic and oddly fitting. "And now, you should get to dinner."
She surprised herself with a curtsey, a movement she had only seen done in movies, her bare breasts bobbing gently. Her smile was equally mocking. "Because they hired me, grandfather."
"They did not hire you to fuck us," he said, watching her breasts bob. "That you do because you like it."
They looked at each other.
"Honesty, Nursie?" The despair that blew through her was bitter and familiar. "Anything else you want to say?" Anything else you want to blame me for, she asked silently.
"Why should I lie to you," he said. "Anything else I have to say will wait. Go."
She left, hands flexing in their bandages.
The walk to her room was mercifully solitary. The cut on her stomach ached—deep, hot, worrisome—and the edges itched. Her back was a mass of heat that she was afraid to scratch. She walked to a drawer and opened it, looking at the t shirts and through them. She reached out for a shirt, then stopped. Rage warred with despair, and for a brief, dark second, she wanted to rip herself open and spill something out—a nameless desire to burn and destroy, saturated in lust. She kicked off her shoes and stood, naked but for her jeans, breathing heavily.
She was drowning, dissolving, dying.
The Cook closed the drawer slowly, gentle with self-control, and walked to the kitchen like a swimmer walking the sea bed. Slowly, drifting in self-loathing, she went to the refrigerator and started to remove packages and bottles. The sizzle and bubble of cooking was subsumed by the sound of blood rushing in her ears, and she slowly plated the food and walked it to the table.
She sat, blankly staring at the food, and the smell bought the mercenaries from their rooms.
"Dinner time," the Engineer called over his shoulder. "Uh, hey there Missy." Why, he thought, bewildered, is she sitting at the table shirtless and bloody? He crossed the room quietly and stood behind her, looking at the raw mess of her back. Turning to the Sniper, he said, "I don't know what the hell you did out there, but you fucked something up good."
The Sniper slid into the seat next to her, grinning. "I fucked something, and it was good." He reached out for the bandages, running a finger along them. "I see Nursie was annoyed at you." Following the bandages and her arm up, he reached the expression on her face. Bloody fucking hell, he thought. He turned her head, fingers on her chin, to look at him. "Birdie," he called softly. "Come back."
The Spy swore and slammed his hands on the table. "You told her to go see the Medic? Monsieur tragic-war-stories? Herr I-will-not-shut-up-about-my-morality?" Swearing sulfurously in mangled French, he started to pace behind her, incoherent in rage.
The Medic paused in the door. Did I disrupt your plans, jackals, he thought. Good. "I see the Fräu and I have an appointment tonight. Do not mind her. We have a matter to discuss." He sat at the other end of the table and started to serve himself. The Heavy sat down next to him, scowling.
"Hey Doc," the Scout said, "don't do nothing you can't fix."
The Cook shook herself like a dog, taking a deep breath, and looked up. "I'll be all right." No, I'm not, a little voice in her head screamed. I'm not fine and I'll never be fine again.
The Medic merely smiled into his soup.
The Demo grabbed a plate. Loading it, he went back to his room.
"You know, that looks like a good idea," the Engineer said. Loading a plate, he left the table.
The Scout looked around the table. "Well shit, this is starting to get complicated." He looked over at the Cook. "Toots, I don't know what's going on, but be careful." He snagged several rolls and left the dining room.
"I don't know what you have in mind, Docteur," the Spy said, his accent thickening with frustration, "but I think one of us should be present." He lit a cigarette, putting down the lighter and picking up the wine glass. "I will do it." If nothing else, he added silently, to keep you from undoing my hard work. Beat her. Hurt her. Just don't let her think. Not at this stage.
The Medic did not bother to look up. "I think not," he said, voice wry with amusement. "The Fräulein and I have something private to discuss."
The Spy stopped pacing long enough to stab his cigarette out into his plate with a snarl. "Do not go too far, bureaucrat."
"We may have a few things in common," the Medic said, eyes cold, "but I will make you regret it if you cross me."
The Sniper cleared his throat. "Look, Nursie, don't push it. You've got that look on your face, and I spent too much time trying to fix things for you to fuck it up again."
The Cook put her bandaged hands flat on the table and stood—I can't, she thought, letting it trail off into a ringing emptiness between her ears.
The Spy grabbed her wrist as she turned to go, fingers hard. "Vipere, this may not be a good time to play with the Docteur. I do not know what you think he is, but I have seen what the man can do." There is no man so cruel, he added silently, as a man who believes he is moral.
She twisted her wrist, pulling it from his grip, and stared at him, then walked out of the room. As she left, she heard the Spy spit. "We could have done this with pleasure, but no—you are all determined to make it pain." She kept walking, slowly losing the thread of his voice, reaching the surgery and pushing through its doors to sit down on an exam bed.
The Cook waited, head achingly full. Moments flashed through it like snippets of film: friends in her home town who stopped talking to her. Boys and men in the town who seemed to sprout hands every where, and her mother and father no longer touching her at all, a sere world that she took the first trucker's offer to escape. The sight of the BLU heavy falling, knee blown off, and the surprisingly bright red of his blood. The BLU soldier's head exploding, the feel of his finger on her foot and the weight of the collar. Flashes of the night before. Waking up in bed with Solly. Helplessness. Violence. Death. Her skin was full to the brim of memory and there was no one and nothing to save her from the endless replay.
The Medic took his time over dinner, letting the room clear. The Heavy left with an irritated snarl and a warning not to fuck the girl while he was hurting her. In the infirmary, he locked the door behind him and shrugged out of his coat, hanging it on the tree near the door. He looked over at her—the girl sat, feet dangling off the ground and staring at them, the silence no doubt filled with whatever memories kept her eyelids flickering though her gaze was rooted to her dangling feet.
"Come, Kätzchen," he said, not ungently. "To the bathroom." He rolled up his sleeves, folding the crisp white cotton back from muscular forearms, and walked through the bedroom doors. She followed, still drifting. I will do you something of a kindness tonight, he thought sardonically, but you will not thank me for it. Whether they realize it or not, you have hit the crisis, and they cannot fuck it out of you, they can only push it off. But you, masochist that you are, need to do penance. And the pain, he added, a warm shiver running through his body, I owe you for the trouble you have caused.
In the bathroom, he turned on the shower and put the lid down on the toilet, sitting back to rest himself against the back of the seat. He eyed her, lip curling in disgust. "Dirty, dirty animal. You have left your filth all over my surgery. First, you will bathe." He pointed to the shower. "Go."
She mechanically peeled the stiff, crackling denim from her thighs and stepped under the warm spray. To her left, a small tray held a handful of familiar bottles. She wet her hair, hissing as the dirt trickled down her skin, then leaned into the spray, her body going limp. The Cook put her bandaged hands, soaked and stinging again, against the wall of the shower and stood, swaying, under the spray.
"And will it wash off, Kätzchen," he called, voice deliberately pleasant and light. He paused, and her memories filled the silence. Never, he answered silently. It will never wash off. You will remember pulling that trigger until you die. "I think not," he said, tone darkening into a snarl. "Use thesoap, animal."
She jumped, then opened a bottle, lathering with something that smelled sharp. The foam that hit her back opened it like a door, pain reaching through with fire. The Cook whimpered, sound swallowed by the spray.
"Well?" His booted foot tapped against the tile floor, an audible reminder that she was on borrowed time. She ran her fingers through her hair to check for shampoo and turned off the water, opening the curtain. The Medic looked at her with an expression of mild annoyance. "Do not bother with clothes. You will only make yourself filthy again. Dry off."
Her shoulders hunched forward as she dried off, passing the towel roughly over herself and squeezing her damp hair before slinging it over her shoulders. The air was chilly, and her nipples tightened with a spiteful wrench. He watched her, letting his eyes idly roam her body—the goose flesh, the tight nipples, the servile cringe. You called me grandfather, he thought, taking a perverse enjoyment in it. And here you are, little girl, asking me for yet another favor.
"Beasts do not walk, Kätzchen. Down." He stood and watched her kneel down, then put her hands on the floor and wince. He turned and left the room, and she followed, crawling, her hair dripping a trail on the floor by her wet handprints. The Medic stopped by his desk and sat down, patting his knee. She crawled to it and sat on the floor, unsure what to do or say.
"What do you want from me, Kätzchen," he said, tilting his head to consider her down-turned face, eyes cool. Say it, he urged her silently. Take this part of the responsibility for yourself.
She started to sob quietly, staring at the leather of his boots.
He reached for her hair and pulled her head up, wrapping her hair around his fist. "Where is your head, Kätzchen? I can see the hate, the self-blame. I can see the burden. Would you like me to help you?"
The tears in her eyes made them feverish, shimmering, and her mouth worked, mute. He set the back of a hand gently against the side of her face, and when she leaned into it with her eyes closed, slapped her once, high on the cheek. "That, he said, "is for being rude."
She wrapped her arms around his boot and closed her eyes, resting her head on his knee. The Medic chuckled, a wicked sound. "Bitte helfen sie mir, großvater, eh?" He leaned in close, his eyes wide in false cheer. "Did you want grandfather to take it away?"
The Cook looked at him, tightening her arms.
"Großvater sagen was sie wollen, Kätzchen. What," he said, voice sharp, "do you want me to do?" The hand in her hair wound tighter, pulling her chin up to look at the hostility on his face. Say it, he urged her silently. Say it out loud so that you will know what you have asked for.
"I don't know what's happening to me," she whispered.
"Do you not," he asked, a smile crooking one of the corners of his mouth. "But how could you know. You make our lives difficult and you do not understand why."
Her eyebrows met and she glared at him.
"Ah, there it is," he said dryly, "the rage. Shall I tell what you're becoming?" He fought the urge to cup her face, to feel with his hands the exquisite pain the answer would bring her, and leaned down to bring his face close to hers. "We are making you into one of us, all for our own reasons, Kätzchen," he said softly, looking at the mixture of confusion and horror on her face. The Medic let his eyes drift down her face, shrouding them with his eyelashes. "Do you know," he murmured, "what you will be when the tier has finished shaping you?"
She hissed, the little hairs on her arms standing up.
"Sie werden ein tier sein, little girl. Lusting. Angry. Violent. While you still have guilt," he said, lips just brushing hers, slick with her spit, "you still have a soul." The Medic shuddered—pain, the years since he'd touched a woman, her yielding response, the sight of her crawling through his room—"you are fortunate," he said, voice thin with tension, "that I have some semblance of guilt." No, his conscience said to him, you have more than a semblance, but it is not enough to save you.
The Cook looked his face, hovering just above hers. "Please," she finally said. "I can't find myself anymore."
"And how," he said, drawing back slightly, "can I help you do that?"
She reached up for him, but he refused to let her draw him down.
"How," he said, voice thickening, "will fucking you help you find yourself?" Do not think for a moment, he thought, a tremor running up his arms, that grandfather is not thinking about taking you up on it and simply having a fight with Alexi later.
At that, she wept. He let her for some time, hand still wrapped in her hair, wetting his knee. When she ran out of tears, he spoke, mild curiosity coloring his tone. "Is crying enough, Kätzchen? Have you found yourself yet?" She drooped and he let her hair go with a sharp breath, fighting himself not to pick her up and hurt her. The Cook looked up, reddened eyes searching, arms still wrapped around his knee.
"Well," he asked, cocking an eyebrow, and waited.
"No," she whispered, tears clotting in her voice.
"Unlike our friends, I will offer you a choice," he said. "What you want is to leave, but you cannot. What our friends the Spy and Sniper want is to make you one of us. A few of us want you to have feelings for us."
"What do you want," she whispered.
"For you never to have come," he said, voice sibilant with hate. "Do you know what destroys us about you, Kätzchen? We cannot protect you from ourselves. We cannot protect you from each other. We have only the ability to make you one of us. We are a blight, Kätzchen, and we will eat you up."
The Medic took a calming breath. "Here is the choice: will you take a role in your shaping or will you let them remake you as they wish?" He could see it in her eyes, the idea sinking in. "Beast or woman, Kätzchen?"
"Woman," she said, tentatively.
"Do you not know?"
"Woman."
"There is something else," he said, fighting to keep the anticipation out of his voice. "There is something else teeming behind those eyes. Was stört deine seele, Kätzchen? What," he took a breath, "have you been struggling not to admit?" He looked down—the girl was wide-eyed, terrified, breath shallow, clinging to his knee—his hands were trembling. "Say it," he said. "What is it that you crave?"
She squeaked, burying her head against his leg. He jiggled it, pulling his knee away from her. "There is nowhere to hide in here," he said relentlessly and stood, towering above her, amused by the dramatic irony of it as only someone with an actor's soul could be.
"What," he said, his boots clicking on the floor as he circled her, "do you crave?"
She whispered the answer and he heard it.
"As long as you hide from it, Kätzchen, you make of it a weapon for anyone to take up, and they will take it up." He bent at the waist, reaching down to cup her skull and pull her up, fingers like steel in her hair. The Medic drew her up until she was standing on the edges of her toes.
"What you want," he whispered, "this is a good place to find, but you must be careful who you choose to give yourself to and how. The Spy will steal," he said, lips brushing her cheek. "The Sniper will take," he said, running his cheek against hers. "The Engineer misses his wife. The Scout simply wants to fuck. The Soldier," he said against her neck, "has no idea what he wants, and the Pyro wants to be your friend. The Demo," he said, lips feathering against her pulse, "wants to be loved. They speak so loudly, Kätzchen, as you do, spilling their desires sloppily all over the world around."
Her eyelids drifted shut. "What do you want," she whispered.
He drew the tension out in silence, an exquisite hunger sending barbed roots through him, before answering. "To eat you up," he said, lips on her ear to feel her shiver. "But I will not. Not unless you tell me what you want. And I will never," he said, drawing back to look at her while he said what his instincts goaded him to say, "love you."
Her breath was ragged, eyes wide and rimmed in white, salt, sweet, and musk rising around her like a cloud. And like a key in a lock, he realized why she had been sent. Helen, he thought, what have you done? The room brightened as his pupils dilated, fingers tightening until he could feel hairs breaking beneath them, the pain pulling from her a small gasp as she teetered on the edge of her toes. He wanted to eat it from her mouth, that little pain sound, and realized he was panting like a runner. And she simply yielded there, standing as he had put her, moving as he had moved her, enduring with every evidence of joy in it. The fracture lines it would take to make her, he thought, awed. Tying lust to pain and loveless cruelty. Helen, you didn't just find a masochist, you found a—hunger roared through him, obliterating the rest of the thought.
The Medic smiled, lips curling back into a particularly sharp grin. "If I tell you to go through those doors, will I be speaking to the beast or the woman?"
When he let go of her hair, she sank down onto all fours. "Very well," he said. He walked to the bedroom and held the door open for her to crawl through it, then through a second, small door. "Mischa is skilled with wood," he said and patted a crossed set of massive beams, sunk into the ceiling and floor of the room. "Up, animal."
She crouched, then stood, holding up her wrists for the cuffs set on short chains from the beams.
"Closer," he said, breath shallow, control teetering on the edge of mania.
She inched closer, face pressed to the beams, and he closed the shackles.
"Struggle." He hissed the word and it echoed in the room.
The Cook pulled tentatively, then harder, the sudden wash of fear pushing the litany of her despair from her head. The short chains on the cuffs clattered and pulled, and she threw herself backward, stopping only inches from the wood. Behind her, she heard something clinking. The Medic stretched, then opened a footlocker. She turned her head side to side, trying to find the source of the sound, but could only see the wood in front of her. "They hold Mischa," he said, leaning forward so that his breath would brush the side of her face. "You will not get out of them."
The first blow whistled through the air, and what felt like a fist hit her back, the tails thudding into her. The Medic loosened his wrist and struck again, the tails wrapping and leaving a line of sizzling pain along her side. The pain bloomed across her raw skin and she shook.
"I am quite angry, Kätzchen. Very angry." Another strike whistled through the air, making her nerves echo like a bell. "And I will not be treated as you would treat one of them."
The tails hissed like a snake, pain bleeding up from somewhere deep within her back, and she opened her arms to it like a lover.
"I will not be spoken to that way, not by you or anyone. I will not be disrespected, will not be—" she heard him take a deep breath, and then the only sound was the sizzle, the smack of the tails on the meat of her body, and the sound of their gasps.
The pain became an endless thing, a rippling force than ran through her like lightning, carrying her thoughts, her fears, the limitless poison of self-loathing, everything running through her and grounding somewhere else. Her breath flowed through her, empty, her whole body empty, mind empty, flowing out of her. Their breaths seemed to merge, becoming seamless, a strange organism made up of two bodies, each reaching for something.
Behind her, she could hear him gasping, winded, and the pain stopped. She realized that she was also gasping, sagging against the wood, soaking wet with sweat and the warm trickle of her blood. There was a clatter, and heat behind her, a body against hers whose salt made the empty space behind her eyes white with fire. The Medic hissed, fingers digging into her wrists just below the cuffs. "Do you understand, Kätzchen? Do you understand why you are dangerous to us?"
His skin ached and tingled, crawling with the desire to be inside the body he had just wounded, the body he had made wet. He stood, pressed to her with his eyes closed, her blood soaking the fabric between them. All I have to do, he thought, is reach down with a single hand. His grip tightened on her wrists and she moved, grinding her ass across him.
"You are dangerous," he said, head tilted back, breath ragged, "because you are a perfect vessel for our desires." His hips moved once, and she moved with him, sending liquid fire through the soaked cotton of his slacks. "Because the parts of you that would have learned to love have learned to fuck and yet you keep hoping, searching to be loved, promising everything any of us want."
He moved again, feeling her raise up on her toes to get him closer to her cunt, and shivered. "You are dangerous because you will make us feel what we cannot allow ourselves to feel."
"You make us," he hissed, hips sliding against her, "raw."
The Medic threw himself backward with a sharp exhale, staggering, and looked away. "I will not do it," he said. "You wanted a penance, Kätzchen, whether you knew it or not, and you were willing to pay. I will unlock you. Get the hell out before I do something I will regret."
He pulled a chain out of his shirt and unlocked her. When she reached for him, he scurried behind a padded bench. "Get out," he roared. "Raus, vor ich vergesse ich habe eine seele!"
When she ran out the doors to the surgery, the Heavy stopped her by grabbing her arm. Standing her still, he turned the medigun on her. She looked up at him, dumbly, while the gun closed the cuts and scrapes, bleaching the bruises from her back.
"Mышка," he said, "I am not hampered by desire for women, so it must be me that says it. It is not that you are bad, it is that you are not hard. They do not know how to treat you, and in their confusion, you pull from them things they would rather forget." The Heavy's eyes narrowed. "But do not mistake for love what is hunger. He does not respect you enough for love. Now, go."
She left.
The Cook didn't bother with clothing, instead collapsing on her bed and fumbling her blanket up to cover her shoulders. Despite the medigun, her bones ached as if the pain had somehow sunk beneath the skin and was etched on them. The room was quiet but for the rattling of a distant fan in the heating ducts—nothing to distract her from the litany of the Medic's words, her body still ringing and echoing with the warm lethargy of pain and hunger.
"I shouldn't be surprised," she whispered. "I shouldn't be…. I should just…."
His words sank into her, a mirror that reflected an absence where her heart should have been. "I'm empty," she said, words tumbling like stones from her lips. "I am empty and broken."
Broken. The word echoed louder and louder, tearing a hole in her that memory gushed out of: turned away faces in her hometown, a dreadful joy in her father's face as he beat her, men like a thicket of hands as puberty grated away the signs of her childhood, her face turned to the wall when—she shuddered, the familiar weight of guilt crushing down on her shoulders.
And the Demo, kneeling on her bed, telling her that she could not care, telling her that she was a doll they were using, that she had made herself a doll.
"I open my arms to them," she said. "I open my arms to them because I want to be loved, because I want to stop thinking and simply pretend they care." She took a breath, the acid of her thoughts hollowing her out.
"How very, perfectly stupid of me. How very perfectly like me." Unfelt tears streaked down her face, blurring the ceiling above her into a mass of white. "How many times do I have to make this mistake?"
Her lovers answered, years of hearing the same word—sick. They had called her sick, some part of her running over and over to pain as if coming home. The ones who hadn't left, she'd run from, sensing in them a devouring hunger that could cost her anything, everything, leaving her lonely again.
Loneliness. The key that turned her into a wild thing was loneliness, but she had to run, had to get away from anyone who might ask more from her than her arms, her legs wrapped around them and the transient joy of simply existing, not plagued my memory, or guilt, or the fear of failure, or any other of the monsters that haunted her. "If still feeling guilty means I have a soul, Medic," she hissed, "I have enough soul for the whole base. I know more about guilt than—"
Her memory interrupted her: the Sniper's face above hers, pleasure eating away doubt, fear, and anything but a need so profound that she realized she would do anything to feel it again, that she ached to pick up the knife again, to settle the weight of the rifle in the hollow of her shoulder and pull the trigger. She had no words to describe the feeling. No drug as a metaphor, no substance she had ever taken could touch the ache of a desire that made her feel like a wire stretched between earth and heaven.
His face in the nest, she realized, fingers over her mouth. This is how he feels when he kills, how I felt when we cut each other.
The Cook gagged, bile pushing at the back of her throat. "I'm a fucking monster," she whispered. "They've made me a fucking monster."
And in reply, some unnamed part of herself whispered back—it was always there. Your lovers saw it. Your family saw it. These men merely gave you room to let it out. She realized she was cackling, a bitter, wild sound that splintered and echoed through the room, her pulse hazing in front of her eyes. The terrible laughter twisted her voice, hoarsening it and she gagged again.
Outside her door, the Soldier leaned against the wall, listening, his face drawn in long, heavy lines. He put his head gently against the wall, hands flat beside it.
"Maybe, Rosie, we're too alike," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."
Her laughter cracked, turning to racking sobs, and he flinched, then pushed away from the wall and walked away.