The world jostled, then rumbled to a halt, and the Pyro woke up.
It took her a bewildering few seconds to sort out why the whole world was a slightly smoggy beige, instead of just half of it, or what on earth she was doing in a car. It came together, in the end, and she was left to take in her new surroundings.
The sun had sunk low into the horizon while she'd been asleep, and it cast everything in shadow. At most she could make out the high angles of buildings nearby, and the arch of what seemed to be a covered bridge in the distance. The dark had crept on enough that she nearly missed the shaded figure making its way toward them.
To her left, the Engineer killed the truck's engine. He hadn't any sooner opened his door when the person approaching them (a tall and thickset man with dark skin and stubbled face, and an eyepatch covering his right eye) slung an arm over the truck's roof and said, "Evenin', lad!"
"Evenin' yourself," Engineer said, shaking out his legs. "Almighty, that drive. Locks my knees stiff every time. I'm gettin' too old for this."
The man scoffed. "No such thing! An' it's always worth it, yeh?" He spoke in a long, drawling way, stretching his "O"s like taffy and rolling every "R", clearly foreign but not something she could place.
The Engineer gave him a sort of sharp, fierce grin, one the Pyro had never seen from him before. It looked strange on him. "Hell, wouldn't miss this for the world."
Hefting her flamethrower, the Pyro opened her door and stepped out onto dust and weeds and hard-packed soil. She wondered where her new employers had sent them; she had a sort of feeling that was something that had probably been in one of the gargantuan stacks of paper she had neglected to read. But it wasn't important, really. What was important was that the air filtering through her mask was dry and sharp and hurt her throat. Things would burn well here.
On the other side of the truck, the Engineer and his friend (one of her new teammates, she guessed—she didn't remember which one) chatted amiably about whatever. Bored, and because she hadn't been able to do it for what felt like fucking centuries, the Pyro pointed her flamethrower at a stunted patch of green poking up through the dirt and pulled the trigger.
Fire blossomed out of the nozzle, more stunning and beautiful than any flower. It consumed the plant without effort, blasting the ground around it with heat as it shriveled and curled and turned black. A familiar sense of glee bubbled up somewhere just around her lungs and floated all the way to her head, and she kept the heat on until the plant was nothing more than ash. When she finally stepped back, much more at peace with the world, she noticed that the men were watching her, silent.
Engineer cleared his throat. "S'pose you heard 'bout our new teammate?"
"Pyro, aye?"
"That's right. Pyro, meet Demoman. Demo, Pyro."
"Evenin' to ya," said the Demoman, and he leaned bodily over the hood of the trunk to offer her his hand. The Pyro stared at it for slightly longer than was proper before taking it, and when she did take it she wished she hadn't. Demo had a grip like a vice, and he smelled so strongly of alcohol that she could pick it up through her mask.
"Hi," she said.
If Demo understood her he sure didn't let her know. "Thas' a lot of rubber you're wearin', lad. It hot in there?"
She thought about it, and rolled her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug.
The Demo seemed to take her at her word, and let go of her hand. He and the Engineer spoke a bit more while she shook her fingers, trying to get the feeling back into them. When she looked up again, they were hauling things out of the back of the truck. Lacking anything better to do, she grabbed her lone blue suitcase from the pickup's bed and followed them toward the base.
Everything was quiet, and there seemed to be nothing but the two forts around for miles. On the way inside she saw exactly one raccoon, six ants, a collection of dry and drooping weeds, and what might have been a camper van, parked off way in the distance behind the BLU building.
Then they were inside. It was well-lit, enough that she needed to squint even under the mask, and Engineer winced and tilted his head down. It was cleaner than she'd expected. Safety posters kept cropping up on the blue-and-white cinderblock walls, until they turned to drywall and the industrial factory feel became significantly more relaxed. It occurred to her that she could hear something, and the something sounded like the racket of a television.
They turned a corner into what looked like someone's very loose idea of a living room. From the door, the Pyro could see a couch and a handful of raggedy-looking armchairs, gathered around a television that was entertaining itself. A wolfskin rug missing a leg and an ear was spread out on the floor, and a handful of faded and creased Playboy centerfolds smiled out at no one. A bookshelf mostly occupied by things that were not books stood off in a corner, and on the very far end of the room, by a window, was a table with two men sitting at it, playing cards.
"I'm back, boys!" roared Demo, dropping the Engineer's luggage without ceremony. "With friends!"
The man on the right looked up. The first thought that occurred to the Pyro was That isn't a person, it's a bear. He was enormous, an utter giant, with an equally huge jaw and hands she was reasonably certain rivaled basketballs in size. He was bald, and had fixed them with an intensely serious look. Opposite him, looking about as large as a rabbit by comparison and more concerned with his hand of cards than with the newcomers, sat a man with a pince-nez, and features so sharp you could cut yourself on them.
The giant spoke first, his intense stare becoming a grin. "Engineer, welcome back!" He had a huge, booming voice, as large as he was. This man was the Heavy. He couldn't be anyone else. "Who is tiny masked man?"
Oh. He meant her. The Pyro shifted the suitcase she was holding to under her arm and raised one gloved hand. She dropped both it and her flamethrower and yelped when the Demoman clapped her heartily on the back. "Our Pyro!"
"The Pyro has arrived?" said the man with the pince-nez, looking up at last as she scrambled to rescue her machine. He had knifelike eyes, and they were locked squarely on her. "I trust he has received the mandatory physical, ja?" He had an accent too: edged, and sort of nasal. German, she thought.
Then she processed what he had actually said. Her eyes narrowed under the mask. No one had said anything about a fucking examination. "What, hell no—"
The Engineer interrupted her muted answer, sounding unimpressed. "That's Medic, Pyro, and never you mind him. He just wants to see if he can get your stomach open. Be plenty of time for that on the battlefield, doc," he added, giving the Medic a deadpan stare.
The Medic grinned, with far more unnaturally white teeth than the Pyro thought was probably normal. "Had to try," he said breezily as he turned back to his game, and lay one of his cards down on the table. The Heavy scowled at it, and the Pyro was sort of surprised the card didn't melt or something when he did.
At her side, the Engineer shook his head and picked up the dropped luggage. "C'mon," he said, "We'll show you the barracks."
They led her further into the belly of the place, weaving through hallways. All was quiet for a while, until Demo said, "Y'were a bit cross with Medic, there."
The Engineer grunted.
"Weren't that your joke in the first place? Back when Scout came, aye? Ha! The look on 'is face when Doc pulled out that bonesaw!"
Engineer sighed, and didn't answer at first. "Don't mind me," he said after a while, and the Pyro missed the glance he cast at her. "Had a long drive, is all."
The barracks were huge, and dense. Twenty or more bunks, easily, tucked way in the back of the place, in a repurposed warehouse. The tiny windows high above them did nothing but make everything feel more crammed together.
The Demoman had left them, and now she could hear him howling with laughter at something all the way down the hall. For her part she had just walked the aisle between the bunks as Engineer unpacked, looking. She had so far determined which bed was the Demoman's (it smelled as strongly of whiskey as he did), and guessed the two next to each other, one with a huge gun sitting on the top bunk and one with a bust of someone labelled Hippocrates resting on the pillow, probably belonged to the Heavy and the Medic. All the rest were untouched.
"G'on and pick one, Pyro," Engineer said, drawing her out of her thoughts. He seemed to like having something to address her by that wasn't of his own invention. The Pyro watched him for a moment as he stacked books up next to his bunk. Most of them were thicker than her wrist, and had names like Practical Capacitors and Acceleration Vector Theory. He put a particularly beat-up one on top, admired his work, and then looked back to her.
A few seconds later, he was chewing his lip in thought. "Though. Don't guess you'd rather your own room?" Yes, she would most certainly rather that. Engineer had to hold up a hand to put a stop to her emphatic nodding. "Right, sure. That new mask of yours don't look too comfortable to sleep in. Plus, you bein' a lady and all."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Didn't catch that."
"You know what, forget it."
He looked at her a minute, all thoughts well-hidden behind those goggles. Then he just shook his head. "Got a room over the way Pauling stays in sometimes when she needs to stop in. Y'might have to fight Spy for it if he's here, though, he likes his privacy."
Spy? Spy—that was the masked man, that was right. The one who gave her cigarettes and disappeared and—
The spy was laid out on the white tile, and blood dripped from her rake, and her vision was fuzzy and flickering. She was having trouble holding onto—onto what? Reality? The thing, the, the man on the ground, she knew he was a man, and yet his legs kept changing, first like they were broken, then as if both his feet had been ripped off, then curled up like a dead spider—
—she looked at the thing on the ground, the thing that used to be the man in red, and instead of a man there was a coiling, writhing terror inside the suit, an ancient horror, and his bones had been sucked away and all that was left was sickening, writhing tentacles.
No-good dead rat, Conagher said.
Oh, she said.
… Engineer was saying something. "… react to havin' a woman on the team. I mean, s'up to you, but I'll keep on playin' like I don't know no better if that's what you want."
What the hell was he talking about? She stared at him a second before throwing him a thumbs-up. Sure, whatever. The Engineer glanced at her hand, and nodded and said, "Alrighty then," and that was that. Whatever "that" was.
It wasn't long before Engineer got her situated in her new room, which turned out to not have any spies in it at all. (She had checked. The walls now had scorch marks.) It had a bolt on the door, which was now turned, and the window overlooked some kind of canal that curved around the buildings, too high for anyone to look in. She was on the third or fourth story. She had a book, too: Engineer had brought some of his sci-fi novels along, even looked like he'd picked up some new ones. He'd left them here with her, her and her flamethrower. The one she had picked up first was called Dune and it wasn't terribly interesting so far. There was too much of things not happening. It seemed like a politics book, and anyway the words were giving her a headache.
Around the time she got fed up enough with it to put it down, hunger had kicked in, and she wandered back out into the base to look for the kitchen—the mess or the canteen or whatever it was in a military setting.
The whatever-it-was was actually quite nearby, just down the stairs, and she found it with no trouble. It had a low roof and one cracked light, and the floor was a linoleum tapestry of scuffmarks. There was a long table in one corner, with eight chairs around it. It, like everything else she could see in the kitchen, was made out of steel or aluminum or something. A tiny window behind the sink showed only the blackness that eclipsed the secluded base, and she could hear crickets as clear as if they were inside. Maybe they were.
She was alone, anyway. She pulled open the fridge and poked around until she found a slightly mushy apple, someone's sandwich, and an enormous chocolate bar. Satisfied, she took all three, and turned—
"Bit of advice, wouldn't take the sandwich."
The Pyro stopped dead, fingers clamping down on the food tightly enough to rival rigor mortis. She looked around wildly and saw nothing until something at the very darkest corner of the table shifted ever so slightly.
There was a hat, and it had one side of its brim pinned up to the crown. Under the hat was a long face, and the face was pointed down at a newspaper. The rest of the man (for it was a man) was slouched back deep into the chair. He was resting his feet on the table, near a pair of folded-up sunglasses. For a brief moment he glanced up at her. "Hear me?"
"Uh."
"I'd put it back if I were you, mate." He had the instantly recognizable drawl of an Australian. Everyone on this damn team had an accent. Did BLU hire people by spinning a globe and pointing? "Heavy's sandwich. Not fond of people touchin' his things, him."
She looked down at the sandwich in her hand, and considered how much she wanted to piss off the giant in the other room. Then, with care, she put it back. The man nodded, and went back to ignoring her.
She spent the walk back to her room trying to remember who in the folders had that hat. It had been in there somewhere, she was certain. She mulled over it as she re-bolted the door and shed the chemsuit, climbing into bed with food and a different book in hand.
Nothing. More of her memory jacking up. Fuck.
Fifteen minutes later, she pitched the book across the room, where it collided with the dresser and fell to the floor with a satisfying smack. None of the words made sense.
She went to sleep, and did not dream.
The Pyro woke the next morning, still dark outside, to screaming.
She was a light sleeper, had been as far back as she could remember. The screaming threw her scrambling for Shark so quickly that she fell out of the bed and right onto her ass.
Startled and sore, she picked herself up and pulled on the chemsuit and mask. The screaming continued. She grabbed the flamethrower, then flung open the door.
The screaming abruptly increased in volume.
On the other side of the door, inches away, was a man in a helmet that completely covered his eyes. He had carried on howling uninterrupted even after she had come face-to-face with him, and didn't stop while she took this in. Hell, he seemed to take it as encouragement.
It took a full five seconds, but she realized there was actually meaning to the noise rattling out of his ribcage: "—BREAKFAST AT 0600 HOURS, SHARP! I WILL NOT TOLERATE SORRY LAYABOUTS LIKE YOU IN MY RANKS! DO YOU THINK THIS IS A FUNLAND? DO YOU THINK—"
Jesus. She lowered the flamethrower and took a step back. "Who the fuck are you?"
"—INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO ME THAT THEY WOULD SEND WEASEL-NECKED CANDYASSES SUCH AS YOURSELF INTO WAR—"
Of course he couldn't understand her, she'd forgotten already. She glanced over her shoulder at the clock—6:12AM. It was too Goddamn early for this.
"—WANT TO SEE TERROR IN THAT MASK OF YOURS, FIREBUG! TERROR OF ME! TERROR OF—"
Automatically, she lifted up the flamethrower so the nozzle was directly under the man's chin and pulled the trigger.
There was a seething hiss of fire and the agonized screech of someone whose whole face has just been set alight. He staggered back until he hit the wall, trying to cover his face with his arms. The Pyro just followed, focusing the stream of (comforting soothing safe) flame on his head.
The fire stopped shortly after the screaming did, and the trigger only clicked when she pulled on it, spitting fumes. Letting the nozzle drop, she peered down quizzically at the burning mess on the ground. Why had she done that?
Firebug, whispered a voice in her head.
Oh, she thought, as the sprinkler system turned on.
The Pyro had ducked back into her room and bolted the door when the first of her teammates rounded the corner into the hallway. She had spent the last couple of minutes ignoring the knocks and trying to decide if she would die if she jumped out of the window or not. No matter what Ms. Pauling had said about BLU being enlightened and progressive, there was simply no way she still had a job after murdering one of her coworkers.
She had just decided to try her luck with the jump and had one boot planted on the windowsill when the door swung open. In spite of her better instincts, she turned to look.
What greeted her was not the shocked and outraged mob she had expected. Instead there was a wiry man in a blue mask and suit, holding a lockpick and looking wet and unimpressed. "Out the window, really?" he said in an accent that was all too familiar. "You'd break your neck."
She stared. Behind the man she knew to be the Spy, the Demoman leaned into view. "This your work out here, aye?" Baffled, she nodded. "Heh. Soldier's got that effect on people. Hell, can't say I haven't wanted t'do that a few times m'self!"
What the fuck. Slowly, she lowered her leg down from the window and turned. The Spy stepped out of view, pocketing the lockpick as he did, and the Engineer took his place. He was wearing the same getup as the spy in the garage had been, blue shirt, brown overalls. "You know," he said, "most people woulda just shut the door on him."
She made a disbelieving noise. "I just, just killed your fucking teammate and that's all you have to say about it?"
Engineer squinted slightly, uncomprehending. Beyond him she could see the rest of the people she had met the night before, all in a halfmoon around the charred corpse. None of them were looking at her, or shooting her that half-afraid, half-horrified look she had at some point become accustomed to. Instead they mostly looked annoyed, wringing out their clothes and glancing up at the sprinklers.
The Engineer glanced back at them, and then to her. He seemed to take the hint. "You ain't in trouble. C'mon. Need to show you somethin'."
The respawn room, as Engineer called it, looked nothing like the rest of the base. It was clear on the other end from the barracks and living quarters, closer to the bridge end of the outfit, and situated at the back of what looked like a locker room. It was pristine and perfectly white, separated from the lockers and benches by doors made of safety glass. It had tiled walls and a quiet, constant hum, and an ozone smell that got into her mask and wouldn't leave.
And the Soldier was standing inside of it, perfectly whole.
The Pyro balked the second she saw him, helmet and all, dusting off his clothing like nothing had happened. Before she could do anything at all, he was striding purposefully out between the glass doors, directly toward her.
She stopped dead, heart lurching up into her throat. She took one step back, then another. She had just twisted to bolt when Conagher touched her shoulder. "It's all right," he said.
"All right, are you fucking kidding, do you—"
"REPORT, CADET," barked the Soldier, stopping in front of them. "NEWS FROM THE FRONT?"
"Just an accident. Pyro's kinda got a hair-trigger," Engineer said. "Nothin' of concern."
"Ah-HA! Spy-checking already, were we?" The Pyro flinched as the Soldier rounded on her, positively beaming. "EXCELLENT! Sharp's the word, boys! Those filthy REDs could be anyone and anywhere. We'll make a trooper out of you yet! See you at breakfast!" He slapped her hard on the shoulder, and strolled out of the room.
The Pyro stared after him. She looked over at the wholly calm Engineer, then back at where Soldier had gone, and at last sank down to sit on the ground right where she stood.
At her side, Engineer chuckled. "Yep. That's what most of us did the first time we saw it happen."
"I fucking emptied my flamethrower on him."
"That's respawn for ya," Engineer said. "Give it a little blood, little DNA, you're immortal as long as you're in its range. Wipes the memory some, that's why he didn't know what killed him. Mandatory in our line'a work, actually. RED's got one too. Surprised BLU didn't tell you about it."
She had absolutely nothing to say. She gaped at him.
He chuckled, picking up on her dumbstruck silence even fully masked. "I know, I know. Scared me at first, too."
"I. So, what, we just—we can come back to life?"
"Yep. Death, killin' even—no consequences. Not here."
That was the moment, Pyro reflected later, that she lost interest in science fiction. There was no reason to read it anymore. She was living it.
The Scout was late, and very little else pissed him off more.
First off the train had been late. How the hell is a train late, okay, that didn't even make sense. By the time they'd pulled into Ramsey, the bigger town he took a bus from to get to Teufort and the BLU base, said bus had already left. The Scout was left waiting another hour and a half before the next one came along.
By the time he set foot on base, fingers drumming on the baseball bat slung over his shoulder impatiently, he was exactly three hours and twenty-six minutes late, and by God did he want to kill something.
It was a matter of personal pride. He was the Scout. Being fast, faster than anyone else, was literally his job. He wasn't late, ever, unless he meant to be. Like to Soldier's "mandatory" morning exercise regimes. As if he was going to lose a good hour's sleep to do jumping jacks and get hollered at.
So, pissed at the universe and starving (he'd skipped breakfast. And lunch), the Scout stalked toward the towering mess of metal that was BLU's Teufort headquarters. He ignored the Heavy just outside the door, who did likewise, too busy cleaning his stupidly huge minigun to look up; brushed off the Demoman's slurred greeting; carefully made his way unseen past the Medic's open infirmary door.
He dropped his luggage and bat off at the barracks and made a beeline for the canteen. If history repeated itself either the Spy or the Sniper would have made the team some ridiculously overdone breakfast. They had some kind of rivalry thing going, Scout didn't know, or care for that matter, hell, it meant good food (sometimes) and lots of it. Including leftovers for days.
He scarcely noticed the Sniper and the Engineer sitting at the table as he went striaght for the fridge. They were bent over something, one of Sniper's guns or lenses or whatever maybe. "You're late," Sniper said as he walked past.
"Hey, you can go screw a koala, you know that?" Scout snapped, and opened the fridge. "I ain't late, war don't start 'til tomorrow."
"Professionals, standards," Sniper answered in sort of a sing-song murmer.
"Oh my God shut up, I swear, your friggin' standards, keep 'em to yourself, alright? Christ, where's the food?" The fridge was barren of the leftovers he had expected. There was a bottle of ketchup, to start, and what might have at some point in its life been a block of cheese. "Sniper, what the hell."
The Sniper ignored him, fiddling with his gun's lens. Engineer glanced at him. "Say, yeah, ain't you and Spy still in a squabble 'bout food? Usually one of you two tryin' to show each other up at breakfasts, as I recall."
Sniper shrugged. "Thought about it. But you lot just don't appreciate Vegemite." Scout tilted his head back and made an exaggerated gagging sound. "See?"
"That's cuz it ain't food, it's like, it's freakin' salt in axel grease. You Aussies is cracked." Grumbling, the Scout picked out a banana that had seen better days from the racks. He turned, opening his mouth to say something, and then—stopped.
Someone new was sitting silently at the table, by the Engineer, someone in a bulky rubber suit and a shiny black gas mask. They were perfectly still, and their mask was pointed at him.
"… Jesus," Scout said, after a moment, "who's the gimp?"
Sniper laughed. Engineer snorted. "Our new Pyrotechnician," Sniper said, not looking up from the scope. "Nice bloke. Say hello, Scout."
Silence followed. The Scout glanced at the stranger again—took in the flame emblems on its shoulders, noticed the flamethrower laying on the ground by its feet—and slowly let out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, stopped fidgeting with the dog tags around his neck.
It was just a new teammate.
"Weird outfit," he told it, and left the room.
"That's Scout," Engineer told her after the guy with the dog tags had left. "Got kind of a temper on him, an' doesn't shut up besides, but he's alright."
The Pyro didn't hear him. She was thinking. She was thinking so hard it fucking hurt, but there was something—something just on the edge of her memory—
A sharp pain stabbed through her head, right behind one eye.
She hissed sharp and low, and it rattled out of the filter as a shaking wheeze. "Pyro?" Engineer said. "You alright?"
"I'm," she said, standing, one hand on her head. She waved off the Engineer when he lifted a hand, as if that could help. Instead she fumbled for a grip on her flamethrower. "I'm fine," she said, heaving it up, knocking it hard on the table as she went. "I. I need to go."
And she staggered off, dizzy and nauseous. Her heart was pounding. The Scout's words were bouncing around in her head like superballs—no, not the words themselves, just how they were shaped by his voice and his accent—the accent, that was it, she knew that accent like the back of her lighter, she'd heard it a thousand times in a thousand voices. Where? How?
It came to her with the force of a thunderclap, and she stumbled to a halt in the middle of the hall.
"Boston," she mumbled aloud. "Boston. I used to live in Boston."