Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was a man on the other end of the fishing line. He looked awfully unhappy to see him.

Sniper nearly toppled out of his seat in surprise when he first saw it, spluttering curses under his breath and fumbling to keep the rod from slipping out of his hands. He'd only been standing at the lakeside for a few minutes, and been rather excited to snag something this early into casting his line; curious then, when an inspecting tug revealed the weight on his hook to be much, much heavier than any fish he'd been expecting from this lake. Then, when he reeled it in a bit further and a scrawny, sallow, distinctively human face popped out of the water as if to greet him—well, suffice to say he'd been caught off guard. The cigarette perched in his mouth flopped down onto the pier and fizzled out against the soggy wood with a hiss, swiftly and thoroughly forgotten.

He sat motionless for a time, blinking profusely and briefly rubbing his eyes as if it could all be somehow just a trick of the light. It was definitely a man's face, or at least it looked like one from what he could see of it, obscured as it was by the murky water and the sopping dregs of its grey-streaked hair. Its high cheekbones and sunken eyes remained about as motionless as he did, each of its skeletal features completely frozen in a glassy, wide-eyed glare; after roughly mirroring the expression in bewilderment for a few seconds, he frowned, his brain tentatively coming to grips with what he was seeing and the fact that he had likely just reeled in a corpse.

It wouldn't be that out of the ordinary, really—shovels and gravel came cheap these days, but large, dark bodies of water had always been free—and it certainly wouldn't be the first time he'd been treated to the sight of a rotting carcass in an unexpected place. Now that the shock was wearing off, he found himself feeling rather disappointed, if anything; he'd really been hoping for some kind of lunker. As he slowly moved to grasp the reel, he couldn't help but think it was still a bit odd, though. He'd never seen a corpse look so... mortified?

His fingers brushed the reel handle. It was at that precise moment that the corpse's eyes widened—and suddenly, the spell was broken.

The man-corpse-creature-thing turned and dove back into the lake, vanishing in seconds beneath the algae-riddled water before he could so much as pull it closer. Sniper would have called out if not for the fact that his rod was still hooked onto it, and that he was already sitting far too close to the edge of the shoreline for comfort, and that suddenly his entire body was yanked forward and the surface of the lake was getting much closer to his face than he would've liked it to be and—

Shit, he had just enough time to think. Then the whole world turned blue.

He bit back the panicked gasp that threatened to tear out of his chest, kicked up and twisted about in place trying to reorient himself; water stung the lining of his nose and prickled at his eyes when he forced them open and tried to look toward the sunlight but the sunlight barely breached the water in any direction he looked. Had the lake always been so cloudy?

No—that was fine. This was fine, he told himself firmly. Nothing was attacking him, he still had a lungful of air, he was fine. He just needed to relax, sit tight, wait till he floated to the top, and as long as the large, tapered mass he could feel slinking along his leg didn't try anything funny—

Oh, bugger him.

He whipped around to try and catch it before it could constrict him, but all he could make out was a single long, inky-black tendril sprouting abruptly from the endless blue. More of it soon followed, latching onto different parts of his body and adjusting their grip as if making sure he wouldn't slip out of their hold—one around each wrist, one around each ankle, two around his waist... and then no more. He glanced vainly around in the darkness for some kind of movement, any kind of hint as to what they were planning to do next, his pulse hammering in his chest.

It was only when they started to pull, yanking him down and further into the deep with a force strong enough for his joints to make disquieting noises, that he finally began to panic.

He made a muffled noise of alarm and tugged frantically at his restraints as water rushed past his face, into his nose and his mouth and his lungs. The tentacles gripped like a vice and pulled like a riptide, stringing him helplessly along like a ragdoll in the current, and oh God he wasn't ready, he wasn't ready to go out yet, not like this—respawn was never on over the weekend, he never told anyone where he was going, no one was even going to know until they mailed his parents to tell them they couldn't find the body—

The water broke. Fresh air hit like a slap to the face.

He gulped it down for all he was worth as he was sent sprawling out over dust and sand, pausing between breaths to hack up seaweed and attempt to wrestle off whatever was still holding him. He pried the tentacles off his skin with a series of small wet pops, grimacing to himself even as he stomped down again and again on the more persistent ones until they too slinked away like a pack of frightened snakes, leaving him sopping wet, heaving for breath, coated head to toe in dirt and sand and algae but alive, still, thank God.

Alive, still. It was a thought so trivial while on the job that most of the time it just annoyed him, when it got in the way of an opportune sacrifice or subjected him to more pain via open wounds and further attacks—and yet now it felt like that was all he could think about, the only thing his panic-addled mind was able to consciously parse. He was still moving, still breathing, he was still alive and not dead, alive and not dead, alive and not dead alive alive alive he was alive. He was alive!

He was so busy rediscovering his love of breathing oxygen and having a heartbeat that he almost forgot the creature was still around; he turned and looked to see it slithering back into the lake, just barely able to catch a glimpse of lean, scarred muscle on a shirtless torso just before it disappeared beneath the water again, thankfully not taking him with it this time. He sat and stared long after at the trail of wet sand and algae it had left along the length of the shoreline, waiting patiently for his heart to climb back up from his stomach and his brain to finish processing what in the bloody hell had just happened to him. He'd been through some odd shit before, but that—that was certainly new.

No. No, it was more than just new. Ass-clenching terror of a near-death experience aside, it was interesting.

He stood up tentatively and dusted himself off, patting himself down to make sure everything was still where it was supposed to be. His clothes were completely soaked through, and there were some conspicuous red dots along the skin of his arms and legs in the places the tentacles grabbed him, but other than that everything seemed alright enough to get roughly back to living his life. He even still had the hat.

He trudged back to the dusty old pier he'd been standing on and took inventory of his things, casting a wary look over the lake's murky surface. The water was completely still now, no trace of anything that could have just broken it or fallen in left behind. Whatever the creature that he'd reeled in was, it must have known better than to hang around.

So what was it, then?

He pursed his lips, squatting down on the pier and scanning for his fishing rod. Some kind of octopus-person was the first idea to spring to mind. Cecaelia, he recalled from a brief fixation on cryptozoology back in high school: a mythical race of people with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a cephalopod, usually depicted as some kind of malicious sea witch with a penchant for destruction. But if that was the case, then how come it brought him back to the shoreline? Had it simply gotten lost on the way to the bottom of the lake to drown him? Seemed unlikely for a fish-person. He supposed he probably could have asked it what it wanted when it was still around to see if it could talk, but in his defense, he'd been preoccupied.

He was so caught up in his musing that it took a few moments to notice the fishing rod was nowhere to be found. He frowned, glancing back to where the creature dropped him off at shore, but it didn't seem like he'd left it there either. Strange. He never misplaced his things even in a panic, and it wasn't like it could have just fallen into the—

Ah.

He slumped, and turned to look over his shoulder at the lake again. A few solitary bubbles rose and popped against the water's surface, as if someone in the depths below were quietly laughing at him.

Piss.

"Herr Sniper, are you feeling quite alright?"

Sniper jumped despite himself, wheeling around to face the team's doctor in a show of atypically visible surprise. He schooled his features into the usual scowl just as quickly when he saw who it was, turning back to face the desert opposite the base's shabby porch. "I'm alright. Why ask?"

"Because this is the first time you've come back from an off-base trip without seeing me for injuries afterward," Medic admitted, scooting forward and leaning on the crumbling wooden fence beside him. "Quite frankly, I'm curious."

"Curious? About what, not havin' an excuse to carve me open on the operating table soon as I get back for once?" Sniper scoffed, taking a long drag from the cigarette between his fingers to mask the ruddy red flush of embarrassment quickly rising to his face. Did he really get beat up that often?

"I—no! No, pshh, of course not." Medic looked offended for a moment, then guilty, then an odd combination of the two as he flapped a dismissive hand in the other direction, his voice pitching up just high enough to be noticeable. "I was just wondering what it is you were up to this time that seemingly... didn't involve putting your life and wellness at risk, is all. Surely I'm allowed to wonder that?"

Sniper eyed him at an angle, weighing his options. It wasn't as though Medic wouldn't believe him if he told him what had happened outright; matter of fact, he'd probably be ecstatic. The doc had a bad habit of getting incredibly excited about things he should probably be terrified of, and was perfectly happy to poke his nose into things he figured he could get away with knowing if he was able—so much so that Sniper had more reason to worry about him venturing off to see the beast in person the moment he got a whiff of its existence than any real consequence to himself, especially considering how many people were banking on him showing up to work and not resting in pieces at the bottom of some deserted forest lake.

"Just out fishing," he said after some time, avoiding Medic's gaze. "Nothin' too extreme. Weren't any crocodiles or anything."

Medic blinked at him, then narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "We live in a desert."

"Deserts have water," Sniper retorted, growling in annoyance when Medic only narrowed his eyes further in response. "There's a forest there out woop woop, found it on a hunting trip. Didn't think it’d be as lush as it was, but it ain't the strangest thing to pop up out here."

"Hmm." Medic stroked his chin, looking Sniper over like a particularly intriguing specimen. Said specimen was very quickly starting to regret remaining in the conversation. "Hmmmm."

"Doc." His voice was a warning monotone. "I don't have time for this."

"And yet you have time to fish? Curious..." Medic's eyes narrowed even further. He leaned in uncomfortably close to Sniper in a gesture that might have seemed menacing to him if it didn't also make him substantially more annoyed.

"No, no it ain't. It's Sunday, I had free time, I spent it fishing. Simple as." Sniper briefly considered making a break for the door, or maybe for the van, then scrapped the thought. Medic was like a wolf in many ways; by far, the most notable was that he only closed in when you started to run.

"Fishing for what? Eels? Piranhas? Stingrays? Krakens?" Medic was pacing around behind him now, eyes narrowed so much it was unlikely he could actually see out of them anymore. Sniper pointedly refused to turn his head and follow the motions. "What, exactly, were you searching for in this so-called 'lake'?"

"Fish, doc." Sniper took another drag. He was so tired. "Carp, salmon, whatever—just fish. You know, the kind you eat?"

"And ab-solutely nothing of note occurred?" Medic quirked an eyebrow and tilted his head in what many on base liked to refer to as his 'calling your bullshit' face, though this time it lacked the accompanying pen and clipboard. "No animal attacks, no mysterious strangers, no mythical beasts attempting to communicate with you? You're certain?"

"...yeah." Sniper fought the urge to react to any one of the scenarios listed. As of now, he couldn't be too sure about any of them anyway. "Yeah, I'm certain."

"But are you really certain?"

Sniper met his gaze and leveled him with a look that alone could have razed a building to ashes. Medic courteously withered under the force of it, shrinking away and pouting as if he'd been physically scorned.

"Very well, then." He pushed back from the fence and gave an exaggeratedly disappointed sigh. "I suppose I'll see you at pregame time tomorrow?"

"Reckon." Sniper didn’t take his eyes off him. Medic huffed indignantly, but at least he could tell when he was being turned away.

The hem of his coat swept briefly against Sniper's leg as he turned on his heel and started for the door. Sniper watched as he stepped inside, throwing one last suspicious look over his shoulder just before he left, and shook his head. Drama queen.

After a few more minutes of enjoying the silence, he flicked the cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his heel. There was work to do tomorrow, and it wouldn't do him well to sit here mulling over the creature he fished up in a desert oasis with time he could be spending getting ready. That was something he could deal with when work was over.

...and when he was sure that Medic wouldn't try and hitch a ride to the lake the next time he went. Crafty, that one.

Chapter Text

For the next week, Sniper would continue to behave cagey and suspicious (uncomfortable and annoyed) whenever Medic was around him, and for that week, Medic would return the favor by continuing to not believe a single word that came out of his mouth.

He had his reasons, of course—the main one being it had been a very long time since something strange had happened to anyone on base, far too long for anything that happened recently not to be strange.

It was a running pattern he'd noticed sometime during his tenure at RED: long, consistent periods of mundanity that remained unbroken for deceptively long periods of time, lulling them all into a false sense of security before turning on a dime and nosediving back into the standard breed of nonsense. First there was that bread monster, then there was the living grill, and then there was the cough syrup incident—each of them spaced out months apart, the bouts of normalcy in between them lasting just long enough for everyone on base to slowly reacclimatize to it over time, gradually slipping back into the regular, everyday marks of their routine before suddenly fwip! The pot of insanity boiled over, and they were all of them left to wade around uselessly in the mess. Every single time.

Well, the pot of insanity had been boiling uneventfully for quite some time now, and Medic was beginning to grow restless. Things were getting a bit too normal around here—he was almost able to maintain a steady sleep schedule, going several nights at a time without being awoken at ungodly hours by massive explosions or bloodcurdling screams or surprise birthday parties for people nobody on base knew, and quite frankly it concerned him.

Even the everyday violence of their battles had become rote, simply another task to check off on his to-do list before returning to his office and trying to see how many limbs he could attach to his own body before his arteries gave up the ghost. The gut-wrenching terror of death by ordnance had long become more akin to spilling coffee at an office job, a fleeting and minor inconvenience that was mildly frustrating at worst and an excuse to dismember someone in broad daylight at best. Yes, the opportunity to flay people alive on the field was still great fun, and it was lovely having such a reliable influx of corpses and organs to toy around with in his spare time, but it was genuinely starting to worry him just how... routine all of it was becoming.

He'd started counting the days on his calendar, trying to calculate and predict when the next new thing was most likely to happen because surely it had to, it had to. It had been far too peaceful lately to last, it couldn't be a coincidence, there had to be something just on the horizon now. He was certain of it now more than ever.

(Also started arguing to Heavy and occasionally the doves that no, no he wasn't bored, he was far too brilliant to be troubled by something as trivial as boredom. He was simply anticipating an end to the growing monotony of the rigmarole, was all. Any points Heavy had to make about his definition of boredom were swiftly and duly ignored.)

Sniper was hiding something from him, he was sure of it now. It nagged at Medic's brain like a hungry tick, itching irritably and sapping away his ability to focus on anything else when the mystery lay so tantalizingly approachable in front of him. There had to be something happening here, and he needed to find out—there had to be, because otherwise nothing was happening, and he didn't think he could take another day of that.

In his defense, he had started by asking politely. It wasn't his fault he was being forced to resort to other methods for information.

The method that involved him peering in through the windows of Sniper's van and, finding the door to the living space unlocked, picking through his cabinets looking for any sort of clue as to what he'd actually been up to was perhaps a little bit harder to justify. In his mind, it seemed perfectly reasonable—Sniper clearly wasn't going to tell him outright, so what else was he supposed to do?—but saying so out loud was a great deal more difficult than thinking it, for some reason. He went through with the notion anyway, of course, but was inwardly grateful he wouldn't have to explain this to anyone if all went well.

To his disappointment, there wasn't all that much in the way of clues inside Sniper's van. Just a few musty articles of clothing, some spare clips of ammunition, the occasional odd-looking tchotchke that had him briefly distracted toying around with it before he shook himself back into focus and reminded himself of the task at hand. He could afford to get distracted later—he was here on business.

He shut the cabinet door and frowned, scratching his cheek as he glanced around the inside of the van. If Sniper held any incriminating evidence of sneaking off to survey a horrific monstrosity beyond human comprehension without telling anyone, he certainly did know how to hide it. Perhaps there was something of value in the cab?

He had just gotten started on the process of gently perforating the driver's seat window (hitting it with the nearest heavy solid object until he heard a crack) when he heard the sound of footsteps outside the garage door and froze.

"Yeah, I'll—yeah, I'll phone home if anything happens, Truckie. Swear on me mum," came a familiar voice from the other side. Medic's breath hitched in his chest.

The doorknob twitched, turned—then stilled. "Really, mate, it's no worries. She'll be right. I'll be back by evening, yeah?"

His eyes darted from point to point around the cramped, dusty garage, scanning frantically for hiding places. He hadn't locked the door. Why hadn't he locked the door? Or barricaded it? Or done something to keep Sniper occupied at base while he'd had the chance? God, maybe he really should have thought this through a little further—

The door creaked open properly, then stalled for a moment. Behind it, Sniper grunted as he fought the stubborn portion of the tiling it always got stuck against, and Medic no longer had time to beat himself up for being so careless and impulsive (or forgetting that the door to the garage didn't have a lock). He scrambled up the camper's ladder and flattened himself to the top of the vehicle as best he could just as Sniper finally got the floor to cooperate, thanking his lucky vertebrae that he chose to go without the coat today as he pressed his cheek down into the roof of the van and willed his body to stop uselessly firing off so many (so many) panic responses.

There was no need to panic. This was fine. He was fine. Sniper probably just wanted to grab something from in the van's cabinet, so if he just waited it out, eventually he'd be gone, and Medic would be free to do all the—investigating, he was investigating, not snooping he reminded himself—that he needed. He strained his ears and shut his eyes, listening as carefully as he could for what Sniper was doing as he patiently waited for his heart to quit jittering about in his chest like a frightened hummingbird.

Quiet muttering. Too quiet to parse, but getting closer. He could make out the jingling of keys, then footsteps as Sniper stepped around the back of the van, then a confused noise as he kicked away the large rock Medic had been about to use to get into the cab and pulled open the driver's door.

The van jiggled with the motion of him stepping inside, and Medic was just starting to relax again when the engine roared to life and the jiggling morphed into violent quaking. He instinctively clung tighter to the top of the vehicle as if it were attempting to shake him off, a bucking bull of shiny aluminum and puttering hydraulics, and by the time he realized the gate was open, it was already well on its way out.

"Wa—" He shot up and turned to look back at the base's garage, now retreating further and further off into the horizon behind him, with a squeak of bewilderment. Immediately afterward, he clapped a hand over his mouth and muffled a curse into the meat of his palm, tensing up for fear the sound might pierce through the thin roof of metal over Sniper's head and alert him to the passenger perched helplessly atop his car like some type of lost bird.

Oh shit.

Oh shit.

His brain went blank in panic for a moment, stuttering and stalling like a car that wouldn't start as it groped frantically for some next course of action. Hijack the vehicle? No, bad idea. Assuming he beat Sniper at hand-to-hand in the heat of the moment, he’d still have to worry about the car not crashing while they were fighting for the wheel, which would be even harder if he came in through the window. Throw himself off the roof and walk home? Well, it would definitely hurt, but it would save him a good deal of trouble. Out himself and ask politely to stop the van, hoping that Sniper wouldn’t gut him on the spot for his mere presence—what was he, stupid?

He shook himself out of his thoughts and peered over the side of the van to see if he could make out the dusty streak of asphalt underneath them. Ruddy red soil and the occasional indistinct desert shrub sped past beneath the camper, little bits of clay and gravel scattering behind the wheels, and his first thought was that it certainly did seem a lot less asphalt and a lot more regular ground than he remembered it being—why, if he didn't know any better, he might have assumed Sniper was off-roading. Which would be silly, of course, because that would mean that Medic could no longer reliably find the road back home and had no method of contacting help, which would mean he was stuck indefinitely on the back of Sniper’s van until further notice, which in turn would mean he had just massively, massively fucked this up, and had absolutely no one to blame but himself. None of which could possibly be the case, naturally.

Oh, who was he kidding?

He muffled another curse into his fist, quieter this time, and dutifully fought the urge to smack it against the roof of the van in frustration. This was fine. He was fine! Sniper wasn't too terrible of a driver—as long as he didn't make any sudden sharp turns, Medic should be able to hide out on top of his van just fine until everything blew over. Besides, hadn't he wanted to know exactly where Sniper had disappeared off to all those days ago? It may not have been the most ideal method of tailing his teammate on the way out into the desert, but he was an opportunist by nature, and this most certainly was an opportunity.

At least, it was an excellent opportunity to convince himself that this was simply an improvised portion of the plan he'd definitely had, and not that he had royally screwed himself over simply because he wasn't willing to give this all up and mind his own business. He could definitely take up an opportunity like that.

Something cold, wet, and distinctively goopy splashed onto his back. He was far too familiar with the source to mistake it for anything else. As he glanced up at the sky to see a veritable flock of birds gliding at an unhurried pace directly over the top of the van, he grimaced, but held fast to the edge of it anyway even as another splatter of droppings landed on the back of his pant leg. He hoped it would be a fast trip.

The trip was not nearly fast enough.

It was hot, so hot out here. Of course he was familiar by now with the suffocating heat of the desert's climate, had been battling in it five times a week for practically a decade now, but at least at work he was usually too preoccupied with keeping himself, seven other grown men and Pyro alive to worry about the heat. Here, though? Here, not only was he almost positive that he was just on the verge of heatstroke, he was also suffering from perhaps the most excruciating ailment of them all: being utterly bored out of his god damned mind.

There was a marinade of sweat and grime clinging unpleasantly to every point of contact between his skin and his clothes, so much so that he was surprised they hadn't been soaked sheer through by now. At the very least, it was a small mercy that he had chosen not to wear his coat today; had he decided otherwise, his blood would likely have boiled right out of his veins and cooked him from the inside out. Idly, he found himself wondering if the death that caused would have been less painful than the embarrassment he was avoiding by choosing not to out himself and quit while he was ahead.

...probably not, but by now it was far too late to start regretting what he'd done, and he did so hate to admit when he regretted something.

He could hear Sniper whistling a chipper tune to himself in the cabin below, completely unaware of the horrors taking place atop his vehicle. Must be nice, he thought bitterly, choosing to rightfully ignore the fact that he was here uninvited. Sniper had yet to stop at any gas stations, which meant either he was far too confident about how much he had in the tank or the destination was close at hand, and the idea of finally being able to climb down from the top of this wretched van made Medic want to cry out in joy.

The sun was just starting on the latter half of its course in the sky when the van slowed down, and Medic looked up to see—much to his disbelief—a lush, thriving forest very much like the one Sniper had mentioned, sprouting up out of seemingly nowhere in the midst of all the sand and clay. Its striking greens and blues and purples cut such a stark contrast to the lifeless desert landscape around it that it made him blink several times, wondering if the heat had grown tired of simply tormenting him and was ready to finish him off for real.

Sniper pulled over and parked under a particularly large tree, then stepped out and set off into the foliage. Medic took his chance the instant he looked away, scurrying down the ladder and collapsing into a miserable, sweat-soaked puddle at the foot of the van.

God. This was a bad idea.

He sat there for a while with his limbs in a tangle and his cheek to the dirt, unable to do anything more physically challenging than pant and sulk and swear under his breath in every earthly language he could think of. It was only after quite some time that the thought occured to him now would probably be a good time to take his leave, if any—the van was right there, and Sniper had trekked hundreds of miles through the desert on foot before, surely he wouldn't mind too terribly if his only other method of transportation were to mysteriously get up and vanish. Medic wasn't supposed to be here in the first place; turning tail and leaving would, in theory, be the most reasonable option at hand.

As he was sitting up to wipe the mud from his face, his eyes fell to the forest floor, where Sniper's footsteps had left defined imprints in the soil. They led most assuredly forward, trailing along down a small path of cleared foliage before abruptly veering to the side, disappearing into a small patch of bushels off the beaten pathway. Almost as though Sniper had known instinctively which direction to go.

Almost as though he had been here before...

Hmm.

Well, he thought, an eager grin creeping across his face as he slowly got to his feet. Never let it be said he didn't at least try to go for the reasonable option.

Chapter Text

In all honesty, Sniper really had no plan for what he meant to do when he got back to the lake. He'd had plenty of time to think, but so little to go off of: for one, he had no idea how to make sure he drew the creature in like the first time he encountered it, nor did he know just how exactly he planned to make certain of its intentions without risking his own life (again) in the process. For another—hell, he wasn't even entirely sure it would still be there the next time he arrived. For all he knew, this was a complete and total waste of time, effort, and gasoline.

A 15-minute drive, however, was still a 15-minute drive, and so he trudged onward, not wanting to get cold feet and leave so soon after he'd just arrived.

The tentacle lake, as he'd taken to calling it in the privacy of his mind whenever he thought of it the past few days, appeared on the surface to be just as serene and untroubled as it had been on the day he found it. Shifting the brim of his hat over his eyes to block out the sun, he sat himself back down on the weatherbeaten old pier jutting out and off from the shoreline, carefully adjusted his seating so he wasn't sinking his ass into the soggy wood, reached for the fishing rod he'd brought holstered to his back—cheap thing, store-bought and more plastic than wood, but at least it wouldn't be too disheartening if he lost this one too—and paused.

Something was in the water.

He bristled and jumped back instinctively, brandishing the rod like a knife, but the strange man-beast was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was an odd, glistening lump of something red and fleshy floating just atop the water, interspersed with little glittery white and silver somethings that glinted whenever the sunlight caught them. A closer look told him it was indeed flesh, with small fragments of sharp white bone sticking out at odd angles from inside the meat, and when Sniper bent down to pluck it gingerly out of the lake, it was cold and slippery in his hand. From somewhere under all the motionless red, a single glassy eye stared lifelessly back up at him.

It was difficult to tell exactly what kind of fish it was; it had been mangled so badly it was almost impossible to tell it had been a fish at all. He frowned, and cast another look over the lake's surface.

Now he was paying proper attention, this poor fish clearly hadn't been the only victim of its kind—the lake was practically littered with the corpses of smaller marine creatures dotting the water's murky surface, some of them barely intact and some of them so viciously mutilated he was having a hard time making them out from this distance. In fact, if he looked close enough into the water, he could have sworn it was a little bit darker than it was the last time he saw it, as if there was enough blood floating around in the depths to permanently alter its hues.

It occurred to him, then, that it may not have been the best idea to come here alone.

Taking a conscientious step back from the water's edge, he turned the carcass over in his hands, furrowing his brow in confusion. It had to have something to do with that creature, he knew that much—but as he examined it, it became apparent that there had been seemingly no attempts to consume the prey. All of the innards, while partially flattened and mashed together like a poorly-assembled salad, were otherwise intact, and the flesh showed no signs of being bitten, torn, or even scratched on purpose; as if it hadn't been mauled, but rather crushed so tightly in the grip of something that its body had given under the pressure, then tossed aside.

He bent down to pick up another mass, revealing much the same. Whatever the creature was capable of, it had clearly had no trouble at all taking its victims out like this—so if it wasn't to eat them, then what was it for?

Just then, another dead fish floated up to the surface with a gentle plop, and he started. A few bubbles followed shortly after it, and then shortly after that came another—then another, and another, one after the other in a merciless string of finishes. A few stray guts and shreds of viscera dotted the surface alongside the rising corpses, bleeding red into the blue like crimson comets streaked across a lustrous night sky.

Sniper swallowed thickly. Still had some work to do, it seemed. He got the sense it didn't want to be bothered.

He took another step back, turned away from the water, and looked back down at the fish he was holding, pursing his lips in thought. Sure it was messy, but seeing as its killer had been so wasteful with the rest of its victims, he felt like it would be doing a small justice to make good use of such an easy meal. There was, of course, the issue of getting all the scales and bone shards out... but then he heard another carcass pop up in the distance, and figured it was probably best to work that out a little bit further away from where he got it.

He moved toward the shore with intent to set himself up somewhere a safe distance from the lake, where he could sit and wait in the event the tentacled thing decided to poke its head out again, and made it exactly two and a half steps forward before something shot out and grabbed his ankle.

Shit! he had just enough time to think again, louder this time, before it pulled his feet out from under him.

He hit the pier chest-first, chin scraping against the ground as he was sent sprawling out onto all fours and his hands shot out to grab the nearest holdable object in reach. He sunk his fingers into the rotting, mold-eaten wood just as the tentacle around his ankle yanked backward with an iron-tight grip, sending jagged streaks of pain spiking up the bottom half of his leg.

"Piss," he snarled out and dug his fingers deeper into the wood. The tentacle tugged at him again, but he held firm, not at all intent on ending up a part of whatever the hell was going on in this lake. "Slimy bastard—lemmego!"

He tried to kick it off again, but it seemed like it was prepared after the last time; it barely budged even when he brought his boot down on it with his full strength, again and again and again. He briefly considered freeing one of his hands to try and unholster his weapon, but when he felt the distinctive, familiar sensation of foreign eyes burning into the back of his head, he froze as if the gaze were a loaded gun in itself.

The thing behind him was still, silent. For what seemed like an eternity, he could hear nothing but the labored rasps of his own breathing, the frenzied pounding of his heart in his throat; the ceaseless dripping of water from where it towered over him, almost as if it were contemplating something, considering him. It struck him then that this—this was not the stare of an animal.

"What," rasped a voice behind him in an accent he couldn't place, so cold with revulsion it coaxed the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end, "do you want."

He didn't respond for a moment, mouth jawing uselessly open and shut as he fought his stupefied brain for a sensible response to this scenario. What was he supposed to say? What could he say? "Mate, I was just on my way out. Swear I don't mean any trouble—"

Without warning, another tentacle coiled around his other leg, squeezing tight enough to make something crack. He clenched his teeth and stifled a groan of pain into his shoulder.

"You have been here before." There was the sound of water pattering in sheets onto the ledge, the lake's surface parting like curtains as more of the creature emerged from beneath it. He dared not turn to look at it just yet. "Were you looking for me?"

There was no good answer to this question. Sniper worried his teeth into his lower lip, weighing his frighteningly narrow pool of responses.

A "yes" implied that he reckoned he'd be able to deal with it better now he knew of its existence, that he thought he'd figured the creature out. "No" was a lie, and the way it reacted just a few seconds ago suggested it wasn't very fond of liars, either. If he tried anything else, it would almost certainly overpower him before he even had time to blink, and though it was a Friday afternoon and he knew he'd respawn, he would still have to rest every night afterward with the shame of knowing he'd let himself be filleted like a salmon by a monster in the woods because he just couldn't keep to his own damn business.

He could handle pain. He could handle dying. He could even handle dying slowly, painfully, and shamefully, at the hands of a monstrous being he stood no chance of fighting against. But dying for the sake of his own curiosity, with no one to blame but himself for being so stupid and reckless? Really, he'd hope to stay dead afterward if it ever came to that; he doubted he'd be willing to live with himself any longer.

There was something along the lines of that train of thought that ticked off a sense of familiarity, but he couldn't quite place it. He didn't get any more time to think about it, since the creature had apparently grown tired of messing around and yanked upward without warning, plucking him effortlessly off the pier before he could make his choice.

Panic shot through his veins like a bolt of lightning through metal. He spat out a choked-off "Bugger me!" and swung helplessly around in the tentacles' grip, scrambling for purchase on ground that was no longer in reach.

"I asked you a question, bushman,” the creature sneered, and there it was again, that tingle of recognition somewhere in the back of his mind, just firm enough to register but too faint to place. He was too busy flailing around like a terrified idiot to try and pin it down—that is, until the creature whirled him around to meet it face-to-face, and the tingle morphed into what felt like a sucker punch to the gut. "Or have you forgotten already?"

"Mate—" Sniper was lost for words again, blinking profusely as the creature—the man in front of him leaned in close, studying his face. Now that he had more time and material to work with, the upper half of the beast did indeed seem as humanoid as they came: there was the long, lean torso he remembered from last time, pale and streaked all across with faint white scars just as he’d remembered it; this time, though, it seemed almost emaciated, flesh thin with hunger and ribcage poking through in between every breath. The drenched locks of salt-and-pepper hair which clung to the man's face must once have made him handsome, but now they only made him look akin to a drowned show-dog, fine, elegant features marred by bitterness and neglect.

It was what he caught in the midst of all those features, though—those striking silver-blue eyes that bore into him like twin blades, terrifyingly cold and yet comically easy to recognize when they were so vibrant with emotion—that really struck him.

When it hit him, he couldn't help but let out a hoarse wheeze of laughter, just as much out of shock and terror as it was amusement. There was only one person in this godforsaken desert that called him "bushman", after all—how could he not have seen it sooner?

"Mate," he tried again, shoulders shaking despite himself. He watched his captor's eyes widen, felt the tentacles around him tighten with tension and figured well, the jig was up. Might as well muster up the nerve to crack an incredulous grin and tilt his head just so to the side, showing his own teeth in a playful, good-natured gesture as the look of surprise in those familiar eyes predictably morphed into one of complete and utter fury. "What in the bloody hell happened to you?"

The BLU Spy snapped his right leg clean in half. He didn't feel so much like smiling after that.

Chapter Text

It didn't take very long for Medic to find the end of Sniper's trail. Even if it had, the sound of his screaming would have been a dead giveaway.

He'd been walking with light, easy steps, navigating over fallen branches and through dales of hacked-off foliage; fortunately Sniper hadn't seemed to care much for covering his tracks at all, which made sense when taking into account that he was supposed to be here alone. When he heard his teammate's voice resonate through the forest in a shrill cry of agony that send birds scattering from the trees, though, he perked up.

That—that was certainly a sign of something. Whether or not it was a good something was unclear as of yet, but it was something, and that was enough to put a bit of an extra spring in his step. He trotted eagerly forward in the direction Sniper's voice had come from, thoughts of what could possibly be the cause bringing a curious smile to his face as he mulled it over. Sniper wasn't an easy screamer; this was not the result of a sprained ankle or insect bite. This was something else. Something new.

Something new, God, it had him giddy with excitement just thinking about it. He picked up his pace, practically skipping through the grass in his eagerness to finally discover the real purpose behind this little sabbatical.

Sniper didn't scream again, so either he was dead now or whatever was tormenting him had moved on to quieter tactics. Medic's head spun with anticipation thinking about what was happening now—was he getting stabbed? Bludgeoned? Gutted? Consumed? Was it the work of some particularly cruel wild animal, or perhaps some kind of gathering cult Sniper had managed to get in hot water with? Oh, the autopsy on that would be interesting for sure. Perhaps he should have thought to bring his portable setup.

His musing was interrupted by a whisper of noise behind a nearby tangle of shrubbery. He jolted, and leaned in its direction—if he listened closely enough, he could just about make out what sounded like a voice. Two voices, in fact. One of which seemed oddly familiar, come to think of it...

Carefully, he stepped closer and peeked his head just over the closest brush. There was a lake on the other side, stretched across the length of a large clearing just beneath a gap in the canopy and framed by a dusty shoreline patterned with footprints. Early afternoon sunlight streamed through the space in between the leaves, not blinding, but just bright enough for him to see that Sniper was currently being dangled above the water and strangled half-purple by what was most certainly not an ordinary human being.

He muffled a sharp inhale into his fist and ducked back down, biting back the instinctive urge to rush forward out of cover and... er... assist? No, he was off the job and Sniper would respawn anyway, there was no point risking himself right now. But the thing that was holding him—the person on the upper end of it, that torso and those scars—gave him pause.

It couldn't... it couldn't really be him, could it? All the way out here? It wouldn't make any sense. Not unless…

He chanced another peek. The strange tentacled man was waving his teammate around by the ankle with an effortless strength, snarling out obscenities in several different languages through an accent so thick with ire that it was difficult to make out even the simplest of words. He caught some Spanish, Romanian, a precious sprinkling of English—then, as he got a little closer, he picked up something in Russian about the nature of Sniper's parenthood. And his brains, and his genitalia. A few other things too, but mostly those three. It was only when the stranger started slipping into what was almost certainly Quebecois French that he finally heard a hint of something intelligible; unfortunately, it was also at that exact moment the stranger chose to start speaking at a normal volume.

He frowned and leaned just over the barrier of leaves, straining his ears. He was certainly a bit rusty in the French department, but if he could just get in a little bit closer…

"...idiot,” he heard the stranger snarl,“goddamned useless bastard idiot! God, I should've eaten you when I had the chance—"

Something crunched under his foot. Medic jerked his head down to see two split halves of a twig sitting innocently where his foot had been, then jerked up to see both men staring quite intently back at him, eyes wide with wildly differing emotions.

“Doc?” Sniper sputtered, the tendril wound around his neck seemingly easing up just enough for him to choke out words. Medic met his gaze for the briefest of moments, caught the rapidly-shifting range of reactions in his eyes: shock, relief, confusion, anger—

“You,” the stranger hissed, in English now, voice so thick with vitriol it was as though he might choke on it. He tossed Sniper off to the side with all the careless ease of a ragdoll and started dragging himself forward with the tentacles at his front, approaching from the lakeside at a rather alarming pace, silver eyes glittering with pure, unfettered rage. No, Medic thought, that was definitely him. He was completely certain of it now—or at least he was to a degree he was satisfied with, because he was starting to feel curiously little desire to hang around and double-check. “YOU!”

Medic opened his mouth. To say something, probably. Then the BLU Spy curled one tentacle around a particularly large tree trunk rooted in the sand, wrenched it clean out of the ground, and chucked it at him with enough force to splinter it midair.

Any thought of response promptly vanished far into the back of his mind. He yelped and dove sideways under a tangled clump of nearby brush; the trunk sailed forward and crashed into the tree a few steps short of where he stood, sending tufts of scattered foliage fluttering to the ground and showering him in fallen leaves. He spat a few stragglers out of his mouth and shook himself free of the brush, scrambling to his feet just in time to start running for his life.

”I’ll DESTROY you,” the BLU Spy called after him in what could only be described as a roar, the sharp edges of Medic’s native tongue only amplifying how livid he sounded. He tore through the underbrush after Medic with the unbridled ferocity of a tidal wave, tentacles slapping against the ground like huge sacks of wet soil and flattening patches of vegetation beneath him with every movement. “I’ll rip your spine out through your asshole and break it, you filthy fucking shit-licking scum, I’ll KILL YOU!”

Medic scrabbled for purchase on uneven ground and nearly tripped over himself just keeping out of reach. What the BLU Spy’s new body lacked in speed and precision, he was more than making up for in sheer physical power and furious, single-minded resolve; it was only by virtue of a decade’s experience fleeing from people who actively wanted to kill him that he wasn’t already a stain on the grass. But even then, that experience only extended so far—this time there was no cover to duck behind, no armed teammates to fall back into, no familiar territory to scurry for and hole himself up in until the threat could be neutralized—

The camper.

He sucked in a breath. Jerked his head up, scanned the forest around him. There was no end in sight to the sea of trees and bushes. But he couldn’t be that far from the clearing—if he turned around now and found his way back, he could retrace his steps and find the tail end of Sniper’s path. Then he could follow it all the way back to the van, and if he got to the van he could… what, lock himself inside? He’d probably just—

THWACK! One of the tentacles behind him slammed into a nearby tree trunk with a weighty thud, having lunged at him and missed by a hair’s breadth. The ground trembled beneath his feet with the impact and he staggered, fighting for balance. Fuck, he could figure that out when he got there, he just needed something to put between him and this thing now!

He made a sharp turn right, braced his heel against the base of a tree, and bounded off it into a mad dash back toward the clearing. The BLU Spy roared and swiped and almost swept him off his feet as he passed, heart racing desperately in his chest as he rounded the beast and stumbled onto roughly-flattened soil. If he could get to the clearing, then he could find the path, then he could reach the van. He ran through the sequence like a mantra in his mind, grounding the frenzied motions of his brain on the firm, unshakable shape of the words. Clearing, path, van. Clearing, path, van. Clearing. Clearing. Clearing.

There! In a gap between the trees, he saw it: the murky blue-green glimmer of the lake just a little up ahead, dented tree trunks framing the gap like primitive archways. He leapt over a protruding root and booked it, his calves aching and his sides burning with exertion.

The BLU Spy closed in from behind like snapping jaws at his heels, wildfire licking at his back. There was cracking and creaking and various wet thuds of increasing volume behind him and he dared not turn back, not when he could just barely see the beginnings of an escape at hand and smell the stink of the fish in the water and feel the tug of something thick and slippery catch on the toe of his boot—

Scheiße, he thought, and pitched forward so fast he felt a muscle pull in his leg.

The world abruptly snapped off-balance and for a fraction of a sliver of a quarter of a second he was weightless, boneless, the blood in his veins instantaneously cooled and turned to mist. Somewhere in the brief crossing between sky and ground, he thought a bit numbly that oh, this was rather embarrassing, wasn’t it?

Then time and gravity seemed to remember they both had a job to do, and suddenly it seemed to involve a great deal of pain. His face never met the ground, but there was an abrupt clamp of pressure around his torso that bound his arms and squeezed the air out of his chest like a blacksmith bellowing a fire, forcing a strangled gasp from his throat as it tugged him up and dragged him along the moistened soil, parallel to the clearing and despairingly close to the escape he’d barely even gotten started on making. He had no time to react, barely even any time to think; instinct took over.

“W-wait!” he gurgled out. His legs kicked out below him in search of ground he could no longer reach, his fists clenching and unclenching uselessly where they were pinned to his sides by the tendril around his chest. Words more familiar in his mouth than his own name and title bubbled up and spilled out before he could stop them. “I can explain!”

Miraculously, not only did the BLU Spy seem to hear him, but he paused as well. He held Medic stationary in the air for a few moments, then slowly rotated him until they were roughly face-to-face. The eyes that studied him were cold, cutting like the fangs of a venomous serpent.

“Can you, now,” he drew the words out like each individual one was a personal offense that Medic had delivered simply by being there to hear it. Interestingly enough, he noted that the BLU Spy’s actual teeth didn’t seem to have suffered any changes. This became abundantly clear when he leaned in close and sneered, nostrils flaring as he squeezed a bit harder and wrenched a wheezing cry from Medic’s throat. “Well, I’m all ears.”

The pressure around his neck eased up the slightest amount, just enough that the pulsing black dots at the corner of his vision were no longer all he could see. Medic sucked in a greedy lungful of oxygen and coughed wetly, struggling to get the words out. ”I—ghhk—you can’t possibly blame me—hack—there’s no way I could’ve known—!”

A sharp crack echoed through the clearing and rippled through the trees. He slammed his eyes shut, then tentatively opened them and was surprised to find that it had not in fact come from his neck.

The BLU Spy’s head whipped around to face the source of the sound. It had come from behind him. Medic craned his unsnapped neck as much as the tentacle around it would allow, trying to follow his lead. His glasses must have come off somewhere along the way; he had to squint in order to see through the haze of his vision.

Sniper stood leaning against one of the trees nearest the clearing, SMG trained on the BLU Spy’s face. His entire lower half was stained brown with mud and sand. His broken leg trailed uselessly in the dirt behind him and his shoulders heaved with shaky, labored breaths, but his hand remained perfectly, unflinchingly steady. Right, Medic thought. Sniper was here too.

“You wouldn’t dare,” the BLU Spy hissed and squeezed his neck again, as if to emphasize the stakes. Medic made a noise like a block of jelly in a woodchipper.

“I might,” Sniper panted, and didn’t lower the gun. His eyes darted to Medic for the briefest of moments. “Let’s all just… just cool it down a tick, yeah? Take a breather.”

The BLU Spy made a growl of displeasure, his tentacles lashing about restlessly like huge, deadly tails. For whatever reason, the threat actually seemed to hold some sort of leverage over him—he seemed genuinely conflicted for a few seconds, silently weighing his odds, until finally, mercifully, he relented.

“Fine,” he spat at last. He loosened his grip around Medic just enough that breathing didn’t hurt as much, then without warning released him entirely, letting him tumble gracelessly to the forest floor before he could even finish gasping for air.

His legs folded the instant he hit the ground. Medic groaned and crumpled in on himself like a fistful of bad origami, propping himself up on one arm and clutching at the newly red-raw skin of his neck with the other. He was acutely aware of the BLU Spy’s gaze boring into the back of his head as he made the slow, arduous process of getting to his feet.

“Herr Sniper,” he rasped. The words grated against the lining of his throat. “My thanks.”

Sniper didn’t move the gun, but when his eyes locked onto Medic and stayed there, he may as well have been training the sight on him. Medic bristled at the sense of two different stares bearing down on him at once, the blazing focus of a heatwave at his front and the ceaseless fury of a blizzard at his back.

“Doc,” the marksman muttered, with the tone of someone answering the door to a guest who was sorely and openly unwelcome. He glanced meaningfully at the BLU Spy, then back to him, and Medic was struck with the feeling that he was about to have something rather unsavory asked of him. “Said you could explain all this, didn’t you? Or did I hear that wrong?”

Ah. There it was. And it was the worst possible outcome, too. Oh, why couldn’t Sniper just shoot him?

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. Shifted his weight from one aching foot to the other. “Er. Well. I suppose I did say that, didn’t I?”

“You ridiculous fool, he’s lying,” the BLU Spy snarled and lunged for him again, only to stop dead in his tracks as Sniper flicked the gun sideways and fired.

BANG! The bullet missed the Frenchman’s head by a few deliberate centimeters, leaving a smoking crater planted squarely in the bark of a nearby tree. Medic looked up from where he was crouched and cowering set firmly in a defensive stance.

“Naw, mate. I say let him speak.” Sniper’s voice was very, very carefully even in a way that implied he would not be in the mood to forgive any more stalling. The loud and significantly more hostile sound the BLU Spy made in response suggested a similar case. “C’mon, doctor, let’s hear it. I reckon you owe it to us both now, don’t you?”

Medic gulped down a breath, looking desperately from him to the BLU Spy and back as if either side of the argument would somehow be at all in the mood to let him off the hook. When neither of them made any move to absolve him, he sighed shakily and resigned himself to defeat. Oh, he thought with a bit more gusto this time, why couldn’t Sniper just shoot him?

“Er,” he started tentatively, casting one more nervous glance between the rock and the hard place holding him hostage. Sniper made a little gesture to continue with the hand not holding his gun, and he huffed. Was this what prey felt like in the eyes of pack hunters? Medic was very much not accustomed to feeling like prey. “It’s, ah, a rather long story—”

“Get on with it,” the BLU Spy hissed, now much closer to his back than he remembered him being. Medic shot him an offended glance, then remembered that the man had been seconds away from crushing him like a soda can and duly averted his gaze.

“Alright, alright.” He took a deep, shuddering breath, slicked back his hair, and dusted off his front. Where did he even start? “Well…”

If the BLU Spy had retained his feet, one of them would be tapping impatiently. Medic let his eyes wander idly over the features of his body and tried not to look as fascinated as he felt—the threshold between bony human skin and soft, squishy mollusk flesh sat in an ill-defined ring around the man’s hips, both organic materials bleeding into each other like smoothly blended strokes of a paintbrush. Huge, razor-thin slits lined either side of his chest and followed the pale length of his torso all the way down to the waist, fluttering imperceptibly against his torso like little window shutters to reveal what appeared to be tiny, spine-like cilia underneath them. Gills, Medic thought. Calloused, faded scars crisscrossed up and down all across the space the gills didn’t occupy, a messy canvas of silver-pink gashes and keloid tissue all the way up to the unusually neat line of red that sat around his neck.

A-ha! He snapped his fingers and grinned. Yes, that would work. He looked away from the neck scar, mindful of the BLU Spy warily following his gaze, and cleared his throat again. “Well! It all started back when I first chopped off your head.”

Chapter Text

The RED Medic still refused to kill him. Spy was beginning to suspect that he never would.

He heaved a tired sigh from lungs that no longer connected to his throat and shut his eyes, sick of staring at the inside of the refrigerator door. It had been somewhere in the neighborhood of two days since he'd failed miserably at earning the stab on the doctor and his pocket whilst attempting to defend the point, which technically had not been entirely his fault—but when so much of it was ultimately a result of what amounted to awful, abysmal, once-in-a-lifetime levels of astronomically bad luck, it was impossible not to feel as though he had done something somewhere to deserve it.

He had already known that the Medi Gun was overdue for repairs that day; the RED Medic and Engineer tended to talk shop around the dispenser in their downtime, and it was difficult not to overhear a conversation when one of the Medics was involved. There was certainly no way he could've known it liable to shatter, though—whether it had been a stray projectile or an ounce too much pressure from the liquid inside was impossible to tell, but either way, his focus had slipped in the ensuing panic.

He'd missed the RED Medic's spinal cord by a solid inch and accidentally sunken the knife too deep into his back to retrieve it smoothly, shoes sliding unsteadily across wet ground and broken glass as he fumbled to recover. Then, as if that hadn't been humiliating enough, he'd wasted precious seconds trying to get the blade back out; pulled away too late to dodge the counterstrike when the doctor inevitably realized what was happening. And then, in one of those strange, stutter-still moments between living and not, when he'd felt the blade pierce his neck and instinctively braced himself for the swift tug of death as it tore through nerves and severed his skull from the rest of his spine—it had not come. Where the cold rush of being returned to respawn should have taken him, there was instead only the jarring sensation of tilting, of falling, and then finally of slick, slippery ground hitting his back. Not the back of his body, just the back of his head. And his neck. And parts of his shoulders—part of his lungs.

He had closed his eyes. Then he'd opened them. And then he'd started screaming.

The screaming had been short-lived, or so he was told. He'd come to learn that for all its miracles, the Medi Gun was not able to supply enough oxygen to keep a near fully-amputated head and the fragments that came with it conscious for longer than a few seconds by itself—but the sheer amount of regenerative chemicals he'd been exposed to were able to keep him on the barest edge of alive just long enough to escort what was left of him to a medical station, provided that all of the RED Medic's attention was immediately transferred to the head in question. When he'd awoken to find himself strapped to a metal disc and set atop a pile of unfinished documents on the doctor's desk like a glorified paperweight, the RED Medic had stopped to inform him of the BLU team's terrific victory that match, as if in consolation. Spy was not nearly as consoled by this as he imagined the man was thinking.

"Just finish me," he'd groaned, already plotting exactly how and where he'd mutilate the man in return for this when he got back into his body.

The RED Medic had only laughed, as mellow and good-humored as if he were entertaining an old friend. "After you've only just shown up? Please! I'd like to get to know you better, first."

Spy had been ready to snap back with something witty and biting about hostmanship, but the sprawling assortment of scalpels, syringes, and indistinct clinical instruments that were quickly being carted into his vision told him the doctor was unlikely to be speaking in the social sense.

"This will only take a minute," said the RED Medic with a smile, voice light and airy in a manner that couldn't be further from soothing if he tried. Spy couldn't help the feeling that this was going to take much, much longer than that.

He was shaken from his musings by a sharp click of the fridge door, and the rest of the infirmary spilling into his vision as it was pulled open. The RED Medic poked his head in and scanned the contents of the fridge briefly, then made a satisfied noise and reached for one of the smaller kidneys to the side of Spy's metallic base.

"Kill me," he reminded him, again, for perhaps the fifth time since he'd been tucked away in the fridge that day. It was by far the most common thing for Spy to say to him any time he showed his face. The only thing, usually.

The RED Medic waved a hand in his face and turned away, barely even looking at him. Again. "Later."

The fridge door closed once more, the muffled patter of conversation resuming outside as Spy was left abandoned by his lonesome with nothing but a cigarette worn down to the filter (one of the few dignities the man had seen fit to spare him if nothing else; it was his counterpart's brand and therefore rather unpleasantly woody to his tastes, but better than nothing) and empty promises of an eventual respite that he now knew better than to hope would ever come. Again.

He closed his eyes, let out a long, defeated exhale, and cursed. He should've asked for another cigarette.

The RED team had won today. He could hear the evidence across the building.

He sighed, the echo of it against the fridge's walls briefly drowning out the clamour that rang out in the halls outside. It was going on a week now; the REDs seemed to get especially pleased about victories on Fridays. Not that his own team didn't, but until now there had been no tells from his hosts as to whom precisely the victories went—from what he could glean, they had simply returned to their base, lingered in the main hall making conversation, then split off to do whatever it was that each of them spent their free time doing. Today, though, they seemed especially pleased with themselves, and especially excited to paint the town their team's colors.

The fridge was well-insulated, but not soundproof. Through the thick plastic of its walls, he could just about make out the din of various cheers, whoops, and yells somewhere off in the distance, likely the base's mess hall, interspersed with the occasional reverberating crash or bang as some article of furniture was no doubt sent toppling over or barreling into something in the heat of a moment. He could only presume they had something of a streak going now; either that, or his initial assumption about the universal love of Fridays held more merit than he'd thought.

He tried not to think much about how his own team was faring, without him; none of the potential answers were pleasing to imagine.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of footsteps, slightly shaky, entering the room. They padded in shuffling, rhythmless circles around the infirmary, pausing every few seconds as if to examine a feature of the space, before coming to an eventual stop roughly in front of the fridge.

Then the door clicked open, and without warning there was a grubby hand shoved inside and pawing at his face. Not the doctor's hand. Someone else's. Its calloused fingers jabbed at one of his eyes, smushed into his nose. Slipped, briefly, beneath the fabric of his mask.

And all of a sudden he was gripped by an animal sense of panic that he hadn't felt in years. There was no longer a heartbeat to quicken but now he was physically capable of feeling his blood pressure rise, the strained pulsing of his carotid and his jugular as they rapidly expanded and contracted to match the abrupt acceleration of blood flow, the phantom squeezing sensation around lungs he no longer had to hyperventilate with as his mind clouded with a primal terror that choked the sense from his brain like a frigid plunge into aphotic waters. He spat and sputtered and squirmed around on instinct, decades' worth of now-obsolete muscle memory urging arms that weren't there to bat the intruding limb away from him and clench his fists and draw a weapon and kill kill kill kill get off me get off me now don't touch me don't touch me DIE—

He'd been on the verge of saying to hell with it and biting down when the hand suddenly jerked and drew back, as if in pain. The panic receded with the contact like a wave from a shoreline, leaving in its wake only jagged pricks of shame and humiliation at how easily he'd folded to a gesture that posed no threat. How quickly he had almost let himself be driven to biting and tearing like a frightened dog. Had he really been brought that low?

There was a mutter of something under someone's breath, a cuss or some other. The voice was deep and accented, nasally, and he was far, far too familiar with it to mistake it for anything else. Some of the shame turned to dread, and the rest of it turned to dull, surly contempt as the face he was dreading leaned back down to view him.

"Bloody hell, was that a..." The RED Sniper squinted, as though the blinding fluorescent lights permanently illuminating the compartment were somehow not enough. He stared slack-jawed into the fridge for a good few seconds before the sight seemed to process, and then his eyes widened with an open surprise—an open fascination—that made Spy's phantom insides writhe. "Oh. Right. Keep forgettin' he keeps you in here. Sorry, mate."

"Of course," Spy said numbly. In truth the plan had been to keep him on the desk, ostensibly to give him access to fresh air but largely to keep him holding the doctor's papers in place, and to tuck him away in the fridge whenever an operation was taking place. The RED Medic had forgotten to take him back so many times by now, though, that eventually it had simply become the default. It was for the better, really; his doves could be such a terrible pain in the ass. Or the temple, he supposed. The eyes and ears, too. "Come to gloat now, have you?"

The RED Sniper blinked wordlessly. Then he blinked again and furrowed his brow, like a dog trying to figure out whether it had something to look guilty for or not. "What, me?"

"Yes you, you—" Spy shut his eyes and took a deep breath, desperately lamenting the lack of any hands with which to pinch the bridge of his nose. "What is it you want?"

The marksman looked as though he wanted to say something, then glanced from him to the RED Shed beer bottles stuffed into the corner of the fridge beside him, a glimmer of concern in his eyes like Spy would snap at him if he tried anything. He rolled his eyes and spoke before the man could open his mouth again. "Go on."

Another beat of hesitation. Spy met the man's stare with a firmly unimpressed scowl, idly noting down features in the corner of his vision. He was marginally paler than BLU team's own Sniper, and thinner in the lips. His hair was a lighter, more saturated shade of brown, his eyes closer to a moonlit teal than the near-electric blue of his counterpart. By the look of the stubble dotting his face, he shaved more often as well. Spy had witnessed all of these differences before, at approximately equivalent levels of detail, but when so much of his time recently had been spent staring at the featureless innards of a fridge stocked with nothing but organs and beer, just about anything was fascinating enough to study as though for the very first time.

Finally, the RED Sniper seemed to overcome his hesitation and reached into the fridge. He withdrew clutching a few bottlenecks in one hand, flecks of condensation dripping onto the metal frame of the device that kept Spy's brain oxygenated.

"Um." He leaned onto the door of the fridge, studying the labels on the bottles with unusual intent. His teeth were gritted, his face taut. The index on his free hand picked idly at a hangnail on the other. Nervous. His own Sniper would have closed the door and walked away by now. "...thanks."

"For what?" Spy scoffed, resisting the petty if justified urge to spit at him. The RED Sniper made a pained face, as though he'd only then just realized how ridiculous he sounded, and ducked his head. Spy relaxed as those sharp eyes left him, the ugly coil of apprehension in the gut he no longer had loosening its grip some.

"Nothing," he muttered and pulled away from the fridge. It was odd to see him so deferent; perhaps he feared that Spy's body was sitting crouched in a corner of the room somewhere, waiting to pounce at any moment should he ever cross the line of disrespect. There was no disgust in his eyes when Spy met them again, no contempt, but there was something else—something vague and not immediately nameable, impossible to read in just a glance. It disappeared when he looked away. "Bye."

The fridge door shut in his face. Spy heaved another lungless sigh, gnawing on the inside of his cheek as blank white descended upon him once more. He should have asked for another cigarette then, in hindsight. Too late now.

It may also have been a decent opportunity to inquire about the actual state of his body, come to think of it. He knew it hadn't been dissolved and spat back out like the usual remains; the last he'd seen of it was a few bloodless limbs dangling off the edge of a stretcher, wheeled swiftly across the infirmary and out of sight from the desk while the doctor chittered excitedly under his breath.

("It's really quite remarkable," he'd gushed out the moment Spy showed any visible interest, waving one of the body's arms around like a terribly morbid whiteboard pointer, "respawn must think it's still alive!")

Naturally, he doubted it would do him any meaningful good to know what the rest of him was up to now, considering his ability to act on it. But he would've thought it a courtesy, at the very least, to let a dead man know just what was in store for the corpse he'd left behind. Especially when said body had been left in the hands of someone like the RED Medic.

It was maybe a few hours into this (Dieu, but he did so miss having a watch) that the ruckus finally died down, enough time having passed that he could reasonably assume it was now sometime in the very, very early hours—when one half of the partaking had retreated stumbling to a bed or a toilet and the other lay slumped and unresponsive in piles around the room, leaving the few misfortunate sobers involved to listlessly roam the mess and attempt to clean up what they could. Given the clumsy footfalls echoing down the hall and the indistinct mumbles of German that approached with them, he could hazard a fairly good guess as to which party the doctor chose to associate with tonight.

There came a firm rapping of knuckles against the door of the fridge (pointless, but he could appreciate the courtesy), the dull thud of something slumping against its frame. Then there were a few more mumbles, a frustrated groan, and the RED Medic yanked the door abruptly open. His hand bumped against the doorframe before pausing halfway into the compartment, his eyes narrowing at Spy.

"Hello," he slurred. It took less than a second of inspection to see that he was swaying on his feet, face flushed a healthy red from the ears down; despite this, it almost appeared as though he were trying to look stern. "Why are you awake?"

Spy eyed him up and down, not bothering to hide the disgusted curl of his lip. "You're drunk."

"And you're a head," the man shot back, then appeared quite pleased with himself for the quick-witted response. He muffled a belch into his fist and steadied himself on the open fridge door. "It's 5 AM. You should—you need to sleep."

"So do you." Spy warily tracked the dip and sway of his body as he spoke—it wasn't like there was much he could do to dodge in the event of a collapse, but all the same he'd rather not be caught off guard. "What are you looking for, exactly?"

"The lights." A beat, then clarification. "I'm turning off the lights. For you."

Spy raised an eyebrow and indicated the modified light switch welded into the fridge wall. The man followed his eyes lazily, stared blankly at the switch for a few seconds, then dragged his gaze back to him and said nothing.

He seemed to study Spy for a moment, eyes hazy in a way that suggested deep thought and zero thought simultaneously. It took about seven seconds of this before Spy's patience wore thin.

"What?" he snapped. The doctor blinked and shook his head a bit, as if shaken awake by the interjection. "Something to tell me?"

"No," said the RED Medic. Then, after a few more seconds of silence, a synapse must have finished transmitting somewhere in the cavernous depths of his brain, because his eyes lit up and widened as though suddenly recalling something of immense and immediate importance. "Did you know cephalopod stem cells are surprisingly resilient?"

"I don't care," Spy stated quite plainly.

"Yes, it was a surprise to me too." The doctor nodded as though Spy had given some valuable insight, his mouth stretching wide in a thoughtful grin that Spy was learning to dread more and more by the day. "And here I was thinking how I was going to make use of them them without any embryonic cells to prime—"

"I did not ask," Spy cut in and was swiftly spoken over again.

"—when it turns out I—I didn't even need to do that! You see, the funny thing about the adult human male's immune system is that—"

He went on to elaborate in spite of Spy's protests for what had to be a good few minutes, slipping frequently into German when his knowledge of English failed to catch up with his eagerness to speak, punctuating certain phrases with grand, flourishing hand gestures that each time Spy prayed would tip him over his own feet and each time somehow did not. It took less than half of this time for Spy to officially give up on stopping him and resign to letting the man speak, occasionally tuning in to catch terms like "development niche" and "xenotransplant" and "in vivo fertilization" before slipping back into a semi-pleasant state of blithe, glassy indifference.

"—introducing newly naïve-like stem cells to an inattentive host environment, which poses a number of new questions like—"

"—if we aim to assess pluripotency without the use of blastocyst complementation, it only makes sense to use existing niches in the presence of necrotized flesh, which we can induce by—"

"—the exhibiting of phenotypic evidence appears to be delayed, likely due to the state of the host body, which leads me to believe that under optimal conditions—"

Christ, he was never this talkative sober. Was this what their own Medic was like under the same conditions? It was a wonder neither team's Heavy had been rendered catatonic.

"—and anyway, I just thought it was interesting to note," he finished at long last, having been gradually trailing down to a decibel level appropriate for the current time of day. Then, after a beat, he ended the tirade properly on a short, anticlimactic little hiccup. "What—what do you think?"

A few moments passed before Spy blinked back into focus. The RED Medic stared down at him, eyes wide and stupid like those of an expectant puppy. His lips were stretched into a little grin, as if pleased with himself for managing to get all the words out of his system.

"And you tell me this now because?" he asked after a few seconds, looking him tiredly in the stupid puppy eyes.

The doctor opened his mouth, then closed it. He pursed his lips, glancing up to the ceiling in thought. "Well—my usual partners are asleep. And I just thought it was so fascinating, I… oh, really, can you blame me?"

Spy leveled him with a stare of blatant disbelief, bordering on despair. A few more seconds of painful, painful silence followed, which the RED Medic seemed perfectly unfazed by regardless; his gaze slipped briefly out of focus after a moment, his brows furrowing as his attention seemed to drift elsewhere. "Hmm. There was something else I wanted to tell you, too. Something about the, er. The cells, I think, and your—"

"I don't want to hear it," Spy interjected the minute he detected a pause, almost frantically. The other man startled, like he'd forgotten his captive was capable of interrupting him back. "I'd like to sleep now, if you don't mind."

"I don't mind," the RED Medic retorted with a pout, then seemed to process the rest of what exactly he'd been told. He tilted his head, birdlike, and blinked. "Oh. Well, goodnight then, Spy."

Before Spy could get any opportunity to respond, he reached inside and killed the lights. Then the fridge door was unceremoniously pulled shut, leaving him isolated once more in a void of darkness and organs without so much as a chance to insult him one last time.

Well, at least he'd remembered the lights. Spy blinked, shook his neckless head a bit, then sighed. Then—after a few seconds—groaned.

He'd forgotten to ask for a cigarette. Again.

"And so I tried to let you know about the new project I was starting on," the doctor drawled, "but you didn't want to hear it. I suppose I ended up forgetting about it in the morning when I was done dealing with the hangover. I think I thought about telling you again a few times, but I never did get around to it when I was so busy… well, making progress."

Spy struggled briefly for words. For the first time in a long while, every slimy, writhing part of his body was completely and utterly still.

"And you… incidentally forgot," he spoke with voice carefully, carefully even, "to let me know that it was my body you were using. As a guinea pig."

"Well, no…" The RED Medic tucked one arm behind his back, raising the other to his chin in thought. "'Guinea pig' would imply a baseline consciousness in the subject. I'd argue it's more fitting to say it was a tool—”

Spy was struck with the sudden, uncontrollable urge to grip him by the throat and squeeze until he stopped struggling. His hands twitched at his sides, wrestling fervently with the instinct to lunge; his tentacles had yet to learn the concept of such restraint and were around the doctor's neck the instant the thought occurred to him. "You infantile little shit—"

BANG. A sharp, searing pain exploded from the point of contact, and he recoiled instinctively with a hiss, struggling to reel the offending limbs back into the squirming mess of his lower body. They flailed around without his input like separate entities entirely, spraying bluish-purple blood in chaotic arcs as the RED Medic fell to the ground and scrambled backward on his ass.

"So that's it, then?" The RED Sniper's eyes had shifted back to him. The familiar niggling sensation that came with being the center of attention began to crawl up and down what was left of his spine, radiating outward to all ten of his limbs and remaining extremities like pins and needles borne of active, animal dread. The constant aching heat in his skull picked up its pace, red-hot pokers pressed to the back of either eye socket and pulsing with his heartbeat. "You turned him into this… this thing?"

The RED Medic let out a wet, gurgling cough, gingerly rubbing at his neck, then had the audacity to look irritated. "I never altered him, I altered his body. What happened next was entirely—"

"What?" Spy growled, looming over him where he sat. The collective mass of tentacles set him easily several heads above his original height. The RED Medic craned his neck up, up, up to meet his eyes and went a rather fetching shade of pale. "It was my fault?"

He allowed himself to revel however briefly in how diminutive the doctor's figure appeared when dwarfed by his shadow, the blooming splotches of purple-red along the skin of his neck, the way the whites of his eyes marked the brightest points in the darkness that Spy's body cast. It was a rare and utterly fascinating sight to see true, proper fear on that face, a sight he had grown to miss so very dearly; it would be such a pleasure to see it again, after all this time.

"…I was going to say 'unrelated'," the RED Medic started, tentatively getting to his feet. There was a sick sort of glee to be found in the way his eyes darted reflexively to the tentacles nearest him, body wrung tense and taut as if prepared to bolt at a moment's notice. It was almost endearing, that he thought he stood a chance at running from Spy like this. "I could've procured a functioning body for you if you'd only asked me! It wasn't my fault you had to go and make everything more difficult for the both of us—"

"Doc!" the RED Sniper hissed, shooting his teammate the dirtiest of dirty looks that could be mustered while aiming a gun at someone else. He mimed a furious cut-it-out motion at the responding glare and jerked his head emphatically at Spy, to which the doctor mercifully took the hint and shut his mouth.

"Here is what's going to happen," Spy started, leaning forward and forcing the doctor to crane his neck further up in order to meet his gaze. Oh, but it was so lovely to be taller than someone again. "The both of you are going to leave this forest. You are not going to return. And if you value your miserable lives as they are right now, you are not going to tell a soul about anything that occurred here. Do I make myself clear?"

The RED Medic looked for a moment as if he wanted to say something. Another scathing look from his Sniper silenced him.

"Crystal," the marksman gritted out, wordlessly cueing that it was time for both of them to take their leave. The doctor made another displeased face, taking another long look at Spy as he shakily got to his feet. "We'll, er, be on our way then."

"You will," Spy agreed. He watched as the RED Medic gathered himself, plodding reluctantly across the muddy soil to meet his teammate by the tree, then stopped.

"Er," he opened his godforsaken mouth to say, casting a sidelong glance over his shoulder, "if I may ask—"

"You may not—"

"—what do you plan to do now, exactly?"

Spy paused. Inexplicably, halfway through rearing up to slither back into the lake where he could agonize alone and in peace, he paused. His eye twitched. "What."

"Here. With yourself." The RED Medic gestured vaguely to Spy's general countenance, his movements halting like he was aware he could be instantly demolished at any moment. The look on the RED Sniper's face was nothing short of murderous. "You clearly haven't decided to stay in the BLU team's base. Are you planning to go somewhere from here, or do you plan to live the rest of your natural life out here as an octopus-man-thing?"

The thought flashed behind his eyes and left dark, muddy streaks through the surface of his mind like a speeding semi truck over clean asphalt. He found himself wondering quite involuntarily whether or not the respawn machine would cover a death by old age; if he could spend a lifetime withering away in miserable solitude and hope to finally close his eyes for the last time, only to open them and find himself all the way back in that godforsaken room. There was no guarantee it would even be around for that long, but he'd have no way of knowing it was until he rotted to death and woke up right back in the room where it started, even more a monster than he'd been when he began—

Spy tongued at his canines. He realized he had been gritting his teeth hard enough to make his jaw ache. "Get out."

"You don't have to stay here, you know," the doctor murmured. He turned to face the clearing properly and took a slow, tentative step forward, not looking nearly as afraid as he ought to. "You don't have to struggle by yourself out here."

There was a little crack. One of his tentacles had curled around something and splintered it. His head throbbed viciously, the heat in his skull rocketing toward its peak. His hands were shaking. "Get out."

"If you come back with us," the RED Medic said softly, "I can find a way to fix you." He put his hands up in a pacifying gesture, took another step carefully forward, as if approaching a frightened animal in need of rescue. The RED Sniper put a hand on his arm. "I'm sure there are plenty of ways to reverse the process. You are far from a lost cause—"

"GET OUT!" Spy howled, rearing back and hurling the tree at full force. The trunk went wide and shattered like a cheap vase against the bulk of a nearby boulder, scattering woodchips and shards of rock in every which direction, and that seemed to get the message across splendidly.

Both REDs wasted no time scrambling to make their escape, ducking away from the blow and practically shoving each other forward in their attempts to get the hell away from him. He spat and swore and screamed curses in every language he knew until their silhouettes had long since vanished into the thick of the wood, only dying down when he finally heard the telltale putter of the RED Sniper's ramshackle camper firing to life and speeding out of the forest like he might try tailing them out on the way. His chest heaved with shaky, rattling breaths; the tapered flaps of skin lining his torso fluttered up and down like open window shutters, trying to filter out water that wasn't there.

He stared down at his hands, drenched and dripping as they now always were: the skin was still unwrinkled. He sucked in a deep, trembling breath and buried his face in them, muffling a furious string of groans and curses into the heels of his palms as his tentacles writhed and tore mindlessly at anything within reach. There was no use trying to compose himself out here, he thought bitterly, scrubbing uselessly at his temples. Why bother? Why bother with any of this? It wasn't as though he had any dignity left to lose.

It was only after a long minute of hesitation that he finally relented, slamming a tentacle against the trunk of the nearest tree and letting out a single ear-piercing scream as all the emotions and reactions he'd been struggling fruitlessly to temper flooded out of him in an avalanche of pure and utter rage, more animal than man. The merciless throbbing in his head only intensified with the outburst, fizzling scarlet starbursts of pain that swelled up and pounded against the walls of his skull like they were trying to escape. His gills flapped uselessly for oxygen as he collapsed to the ground, practically clawing at his face as the sensation overtook all other trains of thought, wave after wave of utter agony wracking his head. It hurt. Everything hurt. He didn't deserve this. He wanted to go home, he wanted to eat something, he wanted—he needed—he—

God, he needed a cigarette.