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Medic wove his fingers together and cradled his forehead against them. The only sounds to be heard were the rhythmic ticking of a clock that was two hours slow and distant, murmured voices of his teammates. He remained like that for a few minutes, absorbing the silence of his office before sighing and rubbing his face. A mix of desperation and exhaustion were weighing on him, and he needed the time to let it all sink in.
He just felt so old.
All at once, he realized how stiff his body felt, how much his headache burned, how blurry his vision was, how every joint he possessed seemed to creak in protest to movement. Medic knew he wasn't a young man anymore, but it had never truly occurred to him just how up in the years he was getting, or how short life was, or how much he took for granted. He blamed respawn, if anything, because for years now, he and his team had been taught to not fear death. As long as the final blow was taken on the BLU and RED battlefield, death was nothing more than a brief setback that restarted one at his respective base. It was built on a complex and highly guarded technology that no one at headquarters was willing to explain to them, but they were quick to grow accustomed to the reset. Cuts and bruises were only temporary nuisances for his medigun to mend. Broken legs were nothing but quicker übercharges. Deaths became a meaningless and sometimes even beneficial occurrence.
They had grown to feel so invincible, perhaps, that it never occurred to the youngest of their team that leaving the field to meet the supplies truck was dangerous.
A telltale headshot easily pointed to an enemy sniper as the culprit. The boy hadn't been too far off grounds for a sniper to be unable to spot and shoot him. Aside from splattered blood, the body was clean and devoid of any bullets or cuts. What made it sadder, really, was that he was only barely outside the boundaries of the field. Had he been just several feet to the left, the headshot wouldn't have meant a thing. But more than anything, Medic hated how he could analyze these sorts of details in a situation like this. On the one hand, that was simply a part of his job description, but on the other…
On the other hand, this time the patient was a valued team member, and this time, respawn wasn't going to do anything.
Scout was dead.
He took another look over the two dog tags that Scout once wore, even though he knew they would tell him nothing new. The hope that one of them would have Scout's real name did pass briefly through Medic's mind, but of course, that was a stupid thing to hope for. Not even Scout would be careless enough to give away his true identity so easily. Instead, one tag had Proverbs 18:10 on it, and the other had the Mann Co. logo. After one last glance, he folded them up in a nice, clean napkin and tucked them into a box. Scout's mother would probably want these things back.
Medic sighed again, though no amount of sighing seemed to make breathing any easier. He wasn't used to any of this. The permanence of death was something that had not visited his thoughts in a long time. Just the other day, Scout had been in this very office, chattering away about this baseball team and that new fighting technique he'd come up with, and he was so vibrant and perfectly well. The idea, then, of the energetic young man passing away would have been ludicrous.
Medic was the kind of man who could tell someone having a heart attack to stop being a baby, drill open someone's skull and have the gall to joke that he could only find peanuts inside, watch someone absolutely come apart beneath his bonesaw and not even lift a brow. Medic was a doctor, a fighter, a professional. Doctors did not flinch. Fighters did not sorrow. Professionals did not shed even a single tear.
But Medic was finding it increasingly difficult to act professional.