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Family curses were like family crests. If you were Scottish, you tended to have one.
The DeGroot Family Crest was emblazoned with the phrase “In Regionem Caecorum Rex Est Luscus.” Tavish DeGroot had also found it to be true in the company of men who were neither blind nor eyeless, and though he held his colleagues in (relatively) high-esteem, there was no kind of traditional nobility about them. Certainly nothing like regency. Still, they were (passably) good men, and his friends.
This latter fact, somewhat tragically, was the problem.
The DeGroot Family Curse was a rather nastier issue, and it had been killing Tavish’s friends since boyhood. The effects of the curse—laid down by an ancient patriarch who had suffered a catastrophic betrayal at the hands of a friend—were not rendered upon Tavish himself, but upon anyone outside the bloodline who he grew to call a friend. Non-deGroots had been falling victim to the curse for centuries, dying horribly, promptly, and tragically, as soon as any member of his family got too close. The DeGroot family had therefore gained a reputation for clannish standoffishness, and Tavish had grown up to live a lonely and rather tragic existence, as so destined by his bloodline.
That was, at least, up until TFI and respawn. The job with Mann Co had been a stroke of unbelievable luck. At long last, the Demoman was surrounded by men who died horribly, promptly, and tragically on a day to day basis, and took it in stride. Who bounced back from the grave, whole and safe and apparently untroubled by having been knifed, bludgeoned, immolated or blown into scraps and shreds of bloody butchery.
Demo finally had enough time to grow to know the people around him, to find their common ground. He could count himself friends with men of science–the Engineer and the Medic, men who shared his own tenacity and oddball brilliance; men of nobility and culture–the Spy and the Heavy, both men of refined, subtle taste and learning. Men with high professional standards–the Soldier and the Sniper, with their wildly different approaches to the seriousness of their profession. And the Scout and the Pyro, young and madcap and gleeful with the sheer joy of violence. Men who Tavish could relate to. Life, at long last, was no longer lonely, but good.
But the deGroot Family Curse—being the sort of wily Scottish curse that weaseled its way through loopholes—found a way to inflict itself at the worst possible moment.
He’d only stepped away to retrieve a crate of beer, but he returned to the news that his colleagues were chockful of tumours, metastasized doing the very same job that had protected them from the curse for so long. In seventy-two hours his friends would be dead, he would be alone, and that, though secretly, was no one’s fault but his own.
They took it well and graciously, as men who are knifed, bludgeoned, immolated and blown to scraps on a daily basis are wont to do—but Tavish DeGroot had never before in his life been permitted to have friends such as these, and was not a man who was about to permit their tragic loss. Not in a permanent sense, anyway.
It was time, at long last, to break the curse.
It had always been on his to-do list. The only reason he hadn’t gotten around to it was that–well. Family curses were like family crests. There was something sort of comforting about having them, even when they were old, fairly nonsensical, and completely absent of any worthwhile use.
To break a curse was not necessarily difficult, but it was likely to be messy, impractical and tIme-consuming. With seventy-two hours with nothing (or anyway, very little) better to do, Tavish sought out the resident expert in matters messy, impractical, and time-consuming.
He found him in the bowels of the bread factory where they were spending their last hours. The door of the basement room where Soldier had set up shop to wait out the remainder of his life bzzt’d intermittently with a familiar burst of plasmatic light and electrical discharge. “Alrigh’ there, Doe?” he called, elbowing the door open.
A helmeted head popped up from behind a stack of old wooden crates, loosely constructed into a fort, and Soldier’s grin was broad and cheerful. Imminent death had failed to rattle him in the least and as he waved to Demo, over his head a jury-rigged Rube-Goldberg machine tumbled a loaf of bread from one end of the room to the other. This fell onto a whirring teleporter pad, frzzt’d out of existence and reappeared on the other side of the room. Soldier, when his energies were devoted to objectives that were without a discernible point, was one of the cleverest and most industrious men Tavish had ever met.
“Demo! Just the man I wanted to see! Have you brought any bread? I am going for the world record of bread teleported in a seventy hour period. It will be my legacy!”
“Nae, Soldier. Was hopin’ I might trouble ye for a favour?”
This, potentially, was one of the only things that could have diverted Soldier’s attention from what he expected to be his last earthly contribution to mankind. “For a friend and comrade in arms in the face of impending doom? It would be my honor!”
“It’s the impending doom I’m hopin’ to be clear of. Ye’ve got that roommate what’s a warlock or somesuch, aye? Was hopin’ he might have what you’d call some accouterments related to the craft lyin’ about. An’ that you wouldn’t be opposed to…to liberatin’ some of ‘em. Jus’ a few odds an’ ends, as it were. Basic curse-breaking kit an’ what-have-you.”
Soldier, having once infested his roommate’s house with racoons and fetid sour cream, has no objections whatsoever. “Merasmus is a wizard and a Tom Jones enthusiast! He has plenty worth stealing! It would be my honour!”
Demo grins at this. Housebreaking, theft and witchcraft; and he knows it for a fact that no one he could have asked would have batted an eye. What better friends could a man ask for?
Technically it hadn’t needed to be housebreaking, because the door hadn’t been locked, but Soldier had thrown a lawn chair through the back window anyway, and it had seemed a shame not to climb through once he’d gone to the trouble.
Merasmus was well-provisioned in both wizarding and Tom Jones paraphernalia, and having supplied themselves thoroughly with both—the latter having been crammed in Scout’s locker as a last ditch prank with sixty hours to go before everyone died, the sort of labyrinthine joke which Soldier found exceedingly funny—they’d settled back down in the basement room, the teleporter still blzzting bread from one end of it to the other, endlessly. The tops of the crates that clutter the room are covered with assorted objects, crystals, powders, a couple cases of beer, and a few spare loaves of bread. The one that’s been looping infinitely through the teleporter has started to twitch slightly.
“It’s nae a complicated piece o’ magic,” Tavish admits, as he lays out crystals, herbs and powders. The teleporters, curiously, are perfect for this sort of spell, and they’re both stopped for a moment so he can duct tape the appropriate components into place. When the machines whirr back to life, they’ll be configured into two perfect circles for the requisite spellery. “Known it for a while, truth be told, just never got round to it. It’s a nasty bugger of a curse, Jane. I cannae say for certain how it’ll manifest itself. I’ll nae blame ye if ye’d wish t’leave me to handle it myself.”
“Negative! To the bitter end, comrades in arms!” Soldier declares, and racks a convenient shotgun. “Once more, gloriously, unto the fray! Die with your boots on! If ye break faith with us who die, then my ghostly boot’ll cram its way up your traitorous ass! Other, additional war cry!”
Demo chuckles. “It’ll be a great deal o’ sittin’ here, while the witchery works itself through. T’is a smidge of simple poppetry, should transfer the curse off o’ me an’ onto whatever we send through the spell circles. When it comes clear off, we might be dealin’ with somethin’ proper nasty, Jane.”
The answer is another rack of the shotgun, and Tavish nods, dropping the twitching loaf of bread back onto the teleporter pad. If all went well, the curse would be stripped from him, and forced into the unfortunate loaf of bread. If not, well. He’d buried friends before, though never after as many long and happy years as he’d had with the other mercs. If these were to be the last hours of men such as these, then Tavish could think of no better way to spend them than in the company of a good friend, drinking beer and swapping stories, while bursts of strange science and stranger magic illuminated the room.
Fifty-eight hours later, in teeth and tentacles and gluten and rage, the curse was lifted and gone from the world, and those it would have been inflicted upon were none the wiser. In the aftermath, over the sounds of fluttering fire and awkward flirting, the scent of smoke and toasted bread, both grinning and better friends than they had been three days prior, Jane Doe and Tavish DeGroot knocked together the tops of two beer bottle. Life, indeed, was good.