The sun rose.

The Pyro awoke, groaned, still exhausted. Bleary-eyed, she pushed herself upright and sat blinking for a moment.

When she looked up, she saw the man standing in the corner of the room, watching her.

It didn't register that she had grabbed the bedside lamp and flung it at him until it was already sailing through the air. Her aim was horrible; the lamp crashed into the wall beside him and shattered into a thousand pieces. The man didn't even blink. He did, though, flash her a hockey-player-gapped grin. "Well hi to you too, firebug."

The Pyro could feel the bile crawling up her throat, and she forced it down. It hurt. Everything hurt, all at once. Very slowly, she locked eyes with him, wondered why she wasn't surprised to see him. He was tall and gangly-limbed, wearing a charred red letterman jacket. Two dog tags jangled on a chain around his neck. There was hardly an inch of his skin that wasn't black or vicious red with burns. "You," she said, her voice raw.

"Me," he agreed.

This was impossible. She knew that somewhere under the rising buzz in her head. Hadn't Engineer said this might happen? Hall .. halluc … whatever the fucking word was, she couldn't remember, she couldn't fucking remember.

With shaky movements she climbed out of bed, afraid to look away. He was getting closer, larger, until he was leaning over her despite not having moved at all. "Aw, what, you gonna go run to Engie?" he said, words seeping mockery as he read her mind. "You gonna tell him you're seein' ghosts? Friggin' stupid, sheesh, how you gonna explain this one? He already thinks you're a freakin' psycho. 'Hi Engineer, you know what, turns out I killed Scout's brother last year and forgot all about it until yesterday!' Wow, great idea."

The Pyro tore her eyes away. She tried to ignore him, kicking off her nightclothes and pulling on the chemsuit. An unfamiliar jingle in her ammo pouch distracted her, and she opened it to find Scout's dog tags amid her collection of matchbooks and shells, still bloodstained. She picked them up without thinking, glanced back up at the ghost—hadn't he been wearing these a moment ago? They were gone now. "Hey, y'found my tags! Too bad you had to murder my little brother to get 'em, huh?"

Fuck. She shoved them back into her pouch and snapped it shut, then pulled on the mask and looked at him. "Yeah I'm still here, doll, you ain't gettin' rid of me again."

He followed her out of her room, a constant stream of acidic words and insults, to the canteen, where only Heavy and Soldier were to be found. Neither one of them paid her or her ghost any attention as she raided the fridge, making more noise than strictly necessary. She even started whistling to herself, trying to drown out the words that never got any louder but still cut right through to her brain.

It felt like she did that for ages. She hadn't realized her whistling had been increasing in volume until she looked up and both of her teammates were staring at her. The ghost was gone. Heavy raised an eyebrow. "Is happy day for Pyro?"

Ha. Hahaha.

An hour later she was out front of the base, trying to distract herself by playing target practice with her flare gun and RED's windows. When she saw motion in the corner of her eye she didn't turn at once, hoping—shit, praying, even—

"So you remember my name yet?"

The Pyro went dead still halfway into reloading her flare gun, frozen by the gush of nausea flooding her gut. Seconds, or years, passed, and she finished slotting in the new round. "You're not real," she said.

The ghost laughed, hopping off his perch on a metal drum in the shadows. "You're talkin' to me, ain'tcha? Hell, since when was you any good for figuring out what's real and what ain't anyway?"

"Engineer—"

"Oh, shut up," he said. He was circling her, and she turned with him to keep her back safe, sick and uneasy. Black blood oozed from his mouth, and the charred skin on his cheeks wrinkled unpleasantly as he spoke. "What does he knew about you, really? Jack shit, that's what, he shoulda shot you the minute he found you, hell, he woulda if he'd known what kinda Goddamn monster you really are."

"What do you want me to do?" she snapped, flinging her gun at him. It bounced off the dirt and skittered off the edge, into the water, but even that didn't seem important now. "You were already dead, what was I supposed to do? You were dead and my whole yard was on fire, I—I didn't know what to do, I was scared—"

"Scared," he repeated. "So that's why you just sat and watched me burn?"

"I…"

"You're a fucking voyeur."

The Pyro opened her mouth to object, deny it, but found no words at all.

Seconds passed as they stared at one another. She looked away first.

Someone was standing in the doorway, watching her. She jumped backwards, the ghost still leering at her from the edge of her vision, to find the Spy. He held a smoking cigarette between his fingers, and lifted one eyebrow when she looked at him. "What?" she said.

"Nothing, nothing," the Spy demurred. "Though, do you often engage in shouting matches with thin air?"

"Yeah, moron, you don't even got a clue'a what you freakin' look like do ya? Cripes, you're lucky Soldier's here bein' nuttier than you."

She flipped them both the bird, then stormed back inside. The ghost tagged along behind her, still hissing jabs and accusations.

She could not shut him out, try as she might, for the rest of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He flickered in and out of her senses with all the consistency of lightning, here one moment, there the next, but never gone. He was this hideous caustic venom dripping steadily through her brain at all hours, keeping her awake, haunting her, and he brought friends.

Three days had passed since Scout and the tower. When she woke that morning and found herself alone, she had a flicker of hope that it might be over. When the ghost did not appear all that day the flicker became a flame. On the field she was spectacular: she brought down a RED sentry gun on her own with a lucky compression blast from Shark, and got her revenge on their spy in his own base. He had died pitifully, flung into the corner and hacked to pieces with her axe. The barbed wire she had added to it worked even better than she had expected.

Now the only thing making her want to be sick was the blood loss from her fight with the enemy demoman a moment ago, and the water sloshing gently at her ankles. He had forced her down into the sewers, and she hadn't even noticed until her fires were extinguished as he splashed in, charred and unrecognizable. But it was okay, she thought, tentatively. It was just water. It was hardly any water at all.

She had started to head down the tunnel for the first-aid kit stowed at its end and the demoman's body reared up out of the water before her. She reeled back with a sharp cry, smacked her head straight into one of the pipes coming out of the walls.

When her vision cleared, what stood before her was not the demoman but someone she recognized instantly. He was tall and soaked to the bone, face bloated and pale, streaming water from his mouth and nose and ears.

(There was a horrible squeal of tires as the car sailed off the bridge, an awful crash when it slammed into the swollen river. Noise. Fear. Shouting as the water poured into her lungs. Her mother unconscious, her father panicking. Her brother, the last thing she saw, shoving her out of the window.)

His head tilted sharply to one side, a smile creeping too widely across his deformed features. The Pyro watched in abject horror as he reached into his own mouth and twisted out a tooth. He held it out to her and it became a lollipop, bright peppermint swirls of white and bloody red, and that was when she turned tail and bolted for the stairs. She didn't stop until she ran smack into their own Scout in the courtyard, nearly fell flat on her ass doing it. Scout didn't say anything. He hadn't spoken to her since they were interrupted by Sniper that night. He just looked at her like she was shit on his shoe, and shoved her into the wall as he passed.

That evening she had stumbled out into the canteen two hours late for dinner, starving and worn to nothing, and found the now-familiar sight of Sniper's hat peeking over the top of his newspaper. She hadn't paid it much mind until the paper rustled with the twitch of his fingers and he lowered it to peer out at her. She glanced over in spite of herself, aching for a friendly word. The Sniper was always friendly. It was part of being a professional, he said.

At first all she noticed that was out of place was that his aviators were missing, and his hat had disappeared since she last looked, too. It took a few seconds of concentrated staring for her to recognize the businessman and his red tie from so long ago, his casual smile replaced by pulverized flesh and old, thick blood. The smell of diesel hit her like, well, a bus.

The next thing she knew was gagging into the toilet, with the ghost leaning on the stall wall and saying, "Oh, what, now you're upset?"

But it wasn't until Engineer found her under the kitchen table at four in the morning two days later that she quite realized how bad it had become. He was in his pajamas, carrying blueprints and pencils. For her part she was knotted into as tight a ball as her suit would allow, face pressed to her knees and both arms over her head as she cowered against a table leg. Seconds ago the ghost had been describing to her, in detail, exactly what being gored through the heart and burning to death was like. So when Engineer said, "Pyro? That you?"—

"Shut the fuck up already!"

The Pyro did not hear him slowly put his things on the table, nor notice when he crouched down to her level, eyebrows quirked. He cleared his throat. "… Can I help you, ma'am?"

She wanted to throw something at him, attack him, and then realized she didn't know why. This was Engineer. This was Engineer and the ghost was nowhere in sight. She gave a great, shuddering sigh, and took his extended hand.

He asked her something as he helped her to stand, but she was too busy trying not to collapse to hear it. He had to repeat it twice before the Pyro fully understood. "When's the last time you ate?"

"Uh." Meals. Food. Right. She tried to think. It was like breathing mud. A wash of dizziness swept over her, and she wound up shrugging for lack of a better answer. Engineer's mouth twisted into a pensive frown. "Just, I haven't seen you at meals none for the last couple days. Ain't you hungry?"

Time was passing strangely. She must have said something, because when she could pay attention to reality again Engineer was rummaging in the fridge. "Here," he said, now suddenly back at the table and putting something in front of her, "these're from tonight. Some kinda Russian thing, I guess, Heavy's recipe. Ain't bad. Try it."

When she looked at it, pushing through the static that was her constant companion now, she saw bloody teeth and bright lollipops swimming in ash. She made a sick sound, turning her head aside, but when she glanced at it again it seemed—normal. Cabbage, beef. Across from her she heard Engineer sigh. "C'mon, Pyro, you got to eat."

On cue, her stomach snarled. She winced. Then she looked back up at Engineer (that wasn't his name, didn't he have another name? Hadn't she known it once?), exhaled slowly, and reached up to pull off the mask. Why not? It was Engineer, after all, and anyway her … "secret" didn't really matter any more, did it.

It didn't seem like anything did.

Without the mask the air seemed too cold and too sharp as she breathed in. Engineer was staring. The ghost was sitting next to him. ("Haha, shit, babe, you ain't lookin' too good.") She ignored them—tried to—and prodded at the food with the fork that had at some point appeared in her hand. The Engineer averted his eyes, silent. She had managed to choke down a whole two bites when he said, "Didn't ever think I'd see you take that off."

She snorted. "Lucky you."

He glanced at her, at her face. For a few seconds he searched her like that, like he was trying to understand. "It ain't that bad, y'know," he said, finally, as she tried to keep eating. "Nothin' worse than Demo's eye."

The third bite was like a mouthful of sulfur. She gagged, barely swallowed it, and dropped the fork. "Engineer," she said hoarsely, "shut up. Just, just shut up, I don't ... I don't want your opinion of how disfigured I am. I don't care."

"All right," he said. "Sorry. But you got to tell me what you were doin' under this table."

"I 'got' to do jack shit."

Engineer looked tired. "Spose not. But you did say you'd tell me if things started gettin' funny for you." He rapped his knuckles on the table, and the echo it made hurt her ears. "Hidin' under tables in the middle of the night? Hell, takin' off that mask in front'a me? I call that odd."

The ghost was sitting next to her, now. "Go on," he said, so close she could have bitten him. "Tell him. Tell him everything. We can take bets on how long before my brother finds out."

Engineer said, "Pyro?"

The Pyro swallowed, sick and suddenly starving. "Why are you even awake?" she said, picking up the fork again.

Her teammate made a quiet, exasperated sort of sound. He answered anyway. "Can't sleep, is all. Ideas, plans, that sort of thing. How's, uh. How's your flamethrower holding up?"

"I broke it over their sniper's head today." She hadn't known it was the RED sniper. The ghost had taken his place. Afterwards he had laughed about how she just couldn't kill him, could she? Not since that first time. "Snapped right in two."

"Respawn fix it?"

"Yeah."

He nodded, some, distracted. The Pyro forced down another four bites before he spoke again. "Look, Smoky. You got me worryin'. Let me help you."

Her pulse was throbbing in her ears. Engineer wouldn't stop looking at her like she was pathetic and helpless—was that how he saw her? As something to be pitied? She didn't want his pity, or his God-damn help, and she had opened her mouth to tell him as much when he added, "Please."

There was something in his voice that struck her, hard. This was Engineer. This was the man who had taken her in, helped her, when the sane thing to do would've been to put her out of her misery. "Help me?" she echoed, the fight gone out of her.

She looked back at Engineer and flinched. The ghost had swallowed him up. He leered at her, dripping blood on the table. Yeah, he said. Like help is something you deserve.

The final tenuous thread of calm she had been trying so hard to hold onto snapped. "Shut up!" she bawled, clapping her hands over her ears. "Shut up, shut up—"

"Whoa now," Engineer was saying, and he was Engineer again, all soft Texas drawl and the smell of machine oil. He already up and at her side. "Hey, c'mon, calm down—"

"Don't fucking touch me, leave me alone, why won't you just, just—"

The chair caught her feet as she tried to flee, and there was a hideous crack as she tripped right into the wall. Her vision fuzzed out, then sharpened. Engineer was staring at her. The way he was watching her—alarmed and bewildered—made her want to vomit.

Before he could get a word out she had forced herself back to her feet, shaking legs be fucked. She grabbed her mask from where it had fallen and shoved past him. "Pyro, wait," he said, but he did not follow her.

The Pyro stopped in the doorway, choking down her panicked breathing. Her heart was thundering in her chest, threatening to snap her very ribs. Her hands shook. Her head hurt. She inhaled deep and slow, staring out into the hall. The ghost stood at the end of it, waiting for her.

"Thanks for the food," she said, and pulled the mask back over her head.