Boston. The Pyro carried the word on her lips for the rest of the day, mouthing it silently to herself, learning the shape of it. She didn't remember living there, she didn't remember anything about it, but that was where she had lived—before. The conviction was almost paralyzing.
But her revelation aside, nothing much else happened that day. She did not see the Scout again until dinner, and by that time she was too mystified with what she had learned of the rest of the team to pay him much mind. The Medic kept uncaged doves in his office. The Demoman had worked his way through three and a half bottles of whiskey since the day began and he could still walk in a straight line. The Soldier could go for well over an hour without ever dropping his voice beneath a bellow or running out of things to say. And no one cared about her mask. There were comments made, sure, but she could count them on one hand. It was a relief.
The next morning, when the clock read 6AM, sirens snapped her awake. For the second time in as many days she lurched out of the covers in a panic, diving for where her flamethrower rested by the foot of the bed. By the time she'd strapped herself into her suit and mask, the piercing scream of the sirens faded. Disoriented, she stepped into the hall, leaving Shark behind lest there be a repeat of what happened to Soldier.
She didn't walk directly into the Engineer, but it was a very near thing. "Whoa, hoss," he said, putting out a hand to stop her. He gave her another of those sharp, cut-glass grins. "Mornin'. Ready for war?"
War. That was what they had called it at BLU headquarters, too. How the hell could it be a war if there were only nine men on either side?
They walked to the canteen, and Engineer gave her the low-down. They'd go over strategy at breakfasts, usually, though it was all fairly loose. Get some coffee in you, you'll want the caffeine. And don't wander off in the beginning, at least not at first.
Everyone else was already seated and eating by the time they got there, and the Pyro slipped in between Heavy and Spy. From what she could gather, sitting silently at the crowded table and listening to the eight mercenaries around her, their job was to obtain and capture sensitive intelligence from the RED base while preventing the enemy team from doing the same. It sounded easy enough, she thought, after it was mostly over and she was piling food onto her plate to take back to her room.
She was on her way out when someone said, "Hey, what the hell, you ditchin'? We ain't done talkin' strat here." Turning, she found the Scout, sitting at the end of the table nearest the door and watching her.
"I think I got the gist. I'm hungry."
"Man, no one can understand you mumblin' under that freakin' thing, just take it off already." When she did nothing, he leaned back far enough in his chair to tilt it and gave her a leer. "Oh, I'm sorry, what, you too ugly to show us your face? Is that it?"
The Pyro made a derisive sound and left, ignoring the eight pairs of eyes that followed after.
The war began at 9AM, and at 8:59 a sound as sharp as needles filtered through the speakers posted all around the base. "Mission begins in sixty seconds," it said in a woman's voice. "Prepare to capture the enemy intelligence." The Pyro, running her hands along the axe someone had given her and wondering what was going to happen, jumped when the Heavy nudged her.
"Voice is Administrator," he said. "Is very angry, all the time."
"Aw, she's a freakin' blowhard," Scout cut in. "Always yellin' about how we all suck, what's she know, she ain't the one down here gettin' shot an' stabbed an' blown up, whateva, she can bite me."
"Is also very dangerous," the Heavy rumbled low to the Pyro. "But, little masked man should not worry. Is just voice, mostly."
"Yeah, sure," she said, just in time for the sirens to blare the beginning of the fight. Everyone but her rushed out; more slowly, she followed.
From the battlements, just left of respawn, she could hear gunfire and shouting. She went to the right instead, down the stairs and into the enclosed courtyard. Engineer was in the corner, occupied with building something. She passed down into the first floor of the base, quietly, and found it deserted. Out front she could hear fighting.
Further in, she found a stairwell, two short sets of metal steps curving down beneath the base. Nobody had said anything about a basement. The Pyro glanced behind her, found no one, and headed down. She was midway down when she stopped dead.
Water. Brown, murky water lapped at the steps, swallowing up almost half of the second set of stairs. It flooded the lower floor, pooling in from a broad tunnel that went maybe two hundred feet before opening out somewhere brighter.
Water.
She stared at it, wondered why she hadn't put two and two together when she first saw the bridge. When bile started rising in the back of her throat as she looked, she bolted back up the stairs.
The base had gotten quieter in the few minutes she had been gone. Most of the noise was focused over on RED's side of the territory now. She scarcely noticed; she was having trouble breathing. The edges of her vision were filling up with sparkles and bubbles that vanished when she tried to look at them.
Fuck water.
Then she was on the battlements, watching Sniper. How the hell did she get here. Fucking—whatever.
"Hi," she said.
"Wouldn't stand there," he said.
Two seconds later, the RED sniper got her. Blew her head clean to pieces. Sniper told her later it was one of the most amateurish potshots he had ever seen, but the way her brain splattered the wall behind her had been a real treat.
Ten minutes later she came back with a huge panicked gasp, enough vertigo to send her crashing into the wall when she tried to walk, and no memory of what had killed her. Flawless white tile shone all around her, and she staggered through the respawn room's doors sucking down the clean air her oxygen tank fed to her. It wasn't until she was outside the locker room doors again that she realized her flamethrower was in her hands. She gazed at the weapon for a full ten seconds before choosing not to question it.
Still feeling a little sick, she took a right again, toward the base's courtyard. A soft, familiar beeping cut through the air. She froze until she saw the Engineer waving at her from across the wooden catwalk that stretched across the length of the yard.
"Hi," she said as she approached him and his sentry. It wasn't as big as she remembered. "Respawn sucks."
"What? Oh," he laughed, pulling out something from the toolkit he was building the sentry out of. "Yeah, I try to avoid it myself. Heck, Smoky, can't hardly understand a thing you're sayin' under all that. What was wrong with the old mask?"
She was about to answer when the sentry chirped in alarm, its muzzle jerking down at something—no, someone—that had just zipped into the courtyard. His shirt was crimson, and the Pyro thought she heard him say, "Aw, shit," just as the sentry began to fire.
Blood splattered the dirt, but the RED escaped as quick as he'd come. Next to her, the Engineer laughed to himself. He pulled out his pistol, checked it, and looked back toward the locker room. The Demoman was just walking out—swaggering, really. "Hey, Demo! Can I get a trap on the doors here?"
"Aye, lad! An' we got two uv'em comin' 'round the front door, fattie 'n rockets!"
Great, they had jargon. Tightening her grip on the flamethrower, the Pyro trotted down the stairs and watched as the Demoman shot bizarre-looking little spiked balls around the edges of the paths into the courtyard. "The hell are those?" she asked.
"Say wha'?"
"The … things," she repeated, gesturing to them. "What, are they—"
"Boyo, I haven't got a clue what you're sayin' an' I'm too drunk to care," he answered cheerfully. He swayed on his feet, jogged backwards, and called to the Engineer. "They're comin' in!"
"Right. Pyro, hey, c'mere." Engineer eased the sentry to the side as she joined him again, pointing its nose at the doorway. "Just in case. Now watch this. Three, two … one."
The Pyro looked down at the doors. A giant in red was bulling his way forward through the lower doors, an enormous minigun in hand, and behind him she could just see another man in a helmet much like the one their own Soldier wore. They barrelled around the corner, ignorant to the things on the doors behind them, and focused instantly on the Demoman. Demo just grinned and threw them the bird.
There was an enormous flash of light, a great booming of sound and screams. The Pyro flinched and threw herself backwards—
(—when what was left of the building exploded—it was huge, an imperious blaze—)
"Get down!" Engineer shouted over the roar, pulling her to the floor by her arm. She dropped just in time to have a rocket slam into the wall above her, where her head had been seconds ago.
"Jesus Christ," she said, suddenly nauseous. It was lost under the Demoman's hooting laughter. She looked down, and where the enemy heavy and soldier had been there were only bits and pieces of men.
Engineer said something to Demo. She didn't catch it, trying to get back to her feet on legs that felt like they had gone to jelly. By the time she managed it, the remnants of the bodies were gone. The Demoman was still crowing in victory, and as she watched he pulled out an honest-to-God Excalibur sword and charged in where the REDs had come.
When Engineer spoke again it was so sharp and sudden that she jumped. "The hell you doin' still here?" He sounded nothing like the Dell Conagher she had grown used to. There was something sparking in him, raring for blood. "Get damn well goin'!"
She got.
Two trips through respawn later, the unthinkable happened.
It was the RED soldier that did it. The Pyro had just walked out of their base's front door, high alert with nerves buzzing from her last death, when a madcap scream split the air above her. She looked up just in time to dive out of the airborne bastard's way before he landed with a crunch where she had been standing a second before.
She wasn't looking where she was going. Her foot slipped. She fell into the canal.
She came up screaming and thrashing, blind with panic. Water. Water, oh, fucking hell no, God please, no, not, she had to get out, it was slipping into the seams of her suit she was going to drown she was going to sink drown lungs filling up with water no no no she—
—had to—
—her feet were on the ground. She was on the ground, the gloriously dry ground, breathing so hard she was certain she was going to start hyperventilating. Her mouth tasted uniformly like the brackish, filthy water.
It could have been five minutes or an hour before she stopped shaking. By the time she did most of the excess water had dripped from her suit. Shark lay next to her on the cement, shiny under the fluorescent lights.
Cement. Fluorescent lights. Where the fuck was she?
The gentle slosh of more water caught her attention before anything else. She shot backwards, and her head hit the wall with a muted smack. Her muffled curse echoed in the tiny room. Squinting in the bright light, around her she saw walls of concrete, inset with humming machines she didn 't recognize. She was sitting on a sort of large, raised floor. Only a few feet and a handful of stair-steps away lay two gaping tunnel mouths, flooded with knee-deep water.
The Pyro stared at them, then twisted, looking for another exit. There wasn' t one. She was trapped.
In more ways than one.
A quiet splashing began to echo through the little room, from one of the tunnels, but she couldn't tell which. Clambering upright, she seized her flamethrower, waited to see what was making the horrible sound.
When the RED spy strolled out of the tunnel, her heart stopped.
"You," she said, unthinkingly. He was dead. Why wasn't he dead?
The spy stopped, looked at her. "Well," he said at last in that rich accent, pulling out his revolver, "how inconvenient."
He leveled it at her, and she scrambled out of the way almost too late; two reports echoed through the tiny room, and one clipped her suit. The spy's eyes cut to her flamethrower as she squared it on him, and his eyebrows lifted. At the same time she noticed the blue briefcase in his other hand.
The spy shot at her again, and this time he got her in the shoulder. She yowled, losing her grip on the flamethrower. Another bang and a bullet tore into her hip. Her legs gave out and she fell to her knees. Hands shaking, she fumbled for her shotgun as the spy checked both tunnels behind him, and advanced on her. "I had wondered what would become of you, my volatile friend. That was for my suit, by the way." He kicked her gun from her hands as she tried to find the trigger. "This is for the rake."
With a neat, efficient movement, he blew out both her kneecaps. The Pyro's vision went black.
It came back, seconds later, and through her blurring vision she could see him popping out the spent shells in the revolver. There was something else too, something small and blue off at the edge of the tunnel she could see down from where she lay—
"Yo ugly! Heads up!"
The spy whirled, and in the same instant the Pyro heard the distinct thunderclap of a bat hitting a ball. The spy's head pitched backwards with an ugly, audible snap, and half a second later Scout had darted up, bat in hand. There was a wet, heavy smack as he swung into the RED, and another, and then the spy was laid out at her feet. The briefcase clattered to the ground. Scout whooped. "Yeah, take that asshole, that's whatcha get!"
She hardly heard him. She was staring at the blood drooling from the unconscious spy's mouth, trying to figure out if it was supposed to be boiling like that or not.
Her thoughts were disrupted by an ear-splitting boom as the Scout unloaded the meat of his scattergun into the spy's back. The body jumped, and then was still. "Heh, you got no idea 'a how good that feels," Scout said, looking at her. He paused. "Oh, uhh, shit, he gotcha, huh. There's uh, like, there's some first-aid stuff ova' there, you want I should … ?"
A long time passed. She wet her blistered lips, drawing in one more agonized breath. Then she picked up the shotgun and put it under her chin.
"Aw, Christ, come on!" was all she heard Scout say before she pulled the trigger. When she came back, right as the sirens were blaring the end of the day, everything after falling into the canal was a blank.
They got the briefcase back, she heard later, despite the RED spy killing over half their team on his own. Scout got on her case about blowing her brains out after he'd gone to the trouble of saving her from the selfsame man. Later she cornered the Engineer and made frantic gestures and noises until he got the gist of what she was saying.
"Scout said the fucking RED spy almost took the, the thing, you killed that guy, we fucking burned his fucking body—"
"I told you back then," Engineer said, "wasn't even sure what we burned was him."
"But—but people don't just, they don't come back from the dead …"
"Like as not he's got some new gadget that lets him play dead like that, but I don't know." He watched her fidget for a moment, and all he wound up giving her was a shrug. "There's things and happenings 'round BLU and RED even I don't quite understand."