Chapter Text
1.
The base feels emptier without him. He used to lurk around, wandering the halls as a mere gust of wind. It gave the empty place a sense of fullness despite his lack of visible presence. A meticulously designed mark had been left on the wall in the hall near Spy’s rooms, familiar in a way that had no words. It was etched into the wall after Pyro had spent thirty minutes knocking at the wrong door in the wrong hall, patiently waiting for someone who wouldn’t come.
It was something small. In that way, it was everything.
He had wandered up to them in the late hours of the night, drifting into sight like a ghost. A small, wry smile had pulled his lips upward, into a softer expression that Pyro still couldn’t describe correctly. It was fond, but it was sharp. A mixture of those two contradictory things. But, then again, Spy has always been a contradictory man. It was only fitting that anything describing him was just as confusing.
At the time, Pyro hadn’t known him well enough to really tell the difference between his sharps and his softs. It was all the same; the raise of his lips, the crease of his eyes in the corners, that near-silent puff of air from his nose that was the most of a laugh they would ever hear for ages.
That night, annoyed but not quite for the reasons they had assumed, Spy offered his hand to Pyro. They took it, and he led them off into the cold halls of the base.
2.
It takes ages for Spy to stop eyeing them each time they linger near his lovely collection of books. Ages and ages and ages, so long that they couldn’t remember why it had begun or when it had ended.
Suddenly, so suddenly, the man is relaxed as he lounges in his comfortable armchair. Smoke twines toward the ceiling and Pyro cannot help but watch him, so soft in the warm light of the fireplace. For someone so sharp and vicious, he has quite a few rounded edges, gentle rather than cutting. Perhaps they could even dare to graze a finger on him.
Pyro has never been very afraid of pain, not how they should be. It would be very easy, to reach out and touch. Spy was the most peaceful and content as they had ever seen him.
So they reached out.
… and tapped his shoe. Spy blinked his eyes open lazily like a cat basking in the sun, hardly as startled as they’d expected. Keen grey eyes focus on them, their hesitant hunch and the almost frozen way they remain still. Slowly, slowly, a little smile curls his lips upward. Pyro thinks that it will haunt them, how Spy has so often lingered in their mind as a poltergeist of tentative emotion.
Spy is very good at making people think of him, even when that’s the opposite of what he wants. Or, maybe that’s just Pyro. That smile, so small but so rare, shiny skin and little striped scars where countless blades and bullets grazed his skin.
He is an ocean and a sky all at once. The thought comes from nowhere at all, but Pyro knows it to be true.
A short huff disrupts their thoughts. A little puff of laughter, thick with smoke, eyes crinkling at the edges. All of their focus narrows into a point, unbeknownst to Spy.
All of their focus. Remembering is a hard thing. Pyro has never wanted to remember anything more in their life.
3.
In the end, it’s about coming back. After the end of each battle they all go back to their rooms, coming back to the place left empty by their parting. They refill its emptiness in moments, in laughter, with familiar habits that grew into fragile existence with infinite time.
It ends up like this; Pyro returns, Spy doesn’t. His absence leaves the halls empty. They knock on his door a dozen times and get no answer. They crack it open, hesitating guiltily, and find nobody inside.
No-body. No-thing. No-one. They reached into every corner with clumsy hands, wondering if they will contact an invisible man. But he never appeared. He never faded into sight as he should have. It left the halls near his rooms emptier than when the ghost that haunted them walked the silent, confusing paths. It made Pyro incredibly sad for a reason they could not yet discern.
Where did you go, they thought miserably, knowing where he went in their heart yet not their mind. Silent, empty, gone. If only they could find him in these empty rooms and empty halls, the ghost that haunted them absent. They would pull him away from the cold concrete floors and bring him into the smoking room; they would pull him to the floor to sit on the lush carpet, ignoring his spitting and hissing, and would tell him the most wonderful stories in return for all the times that Spy had told them his stories.
He would calm down, listen, never wavering from that light, attentive expression that overtook his annoyance within flickering moments. He would smile. He would laugh. And in that dream, it is as honest and wonderful as anything they could ever imagine.
In that dream, he is found. He comes back. Pyro knows that Spy has never been very good at coming back to the things he runs from, but it was still the principle of the matter. The trust, that he would eventually come back, no matter how long it has been or how much has changed. All that you ever needed to give a Spy was trust.
Still. That didn’t change the cold of the room, heavy with silence, sinking in their chest as a block of ice. Fire had burned in here for as long as they could remember. Never before, not in the last ten years, could they remember it dying.
Their hands lingered near the ash. Pressed into it, past the half-memory of an invisible man. He wasn’t there. He should’ve been.