Every repost is a repost repost. By Owl Tiem.

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yeah i wrote this on /v/ just now


The RED base has chickens. They keep them in a coop out back. (BLU has a still. This means RED always has fresh breakfast, once in a while some soup or even, on special occasions, fried chicken for dinner, and BLU always has a plentiful supply of liquor distilled from the grain left in the silos from before the base was "repurposed.")

Scout's usually one of the first up, taking a morning run as soon as the sun shows over the horizon, so at the end of his exercise he gathers up the eggs and turns them over to Pyro for cooking while he grabs a quick nap before the others wake up and they have breakfast together.

One of the hens is speckled. Her name is Speckled Hen. She's the only one who will never, ever be made into soup, because she is the only one who never, ever pecks at Scout's hand while he's gathering up the eggs.

Not all of the eggs get scrambled, of course. That's no way to run a self-sustaining chicken coop. In fact, Speckled Hen, as the motherliest one, is often allowed to keep her eggs and roost on them.

This means, inevitably, that come spring, there are little baby peep-peeps.

The day the little baby peep-peeps hatch, Scout isn't even aware of it. He's been stopping by Speckled Hen's roost long enough to scratch her behind the head a little on his jog back to the kitchen, but he doesn't really stick around long enough to pay attention before handing the eggs off and slumping on a hay bale for a snooze.

When he wakes up, he finds Speckled Hen on his chest, feathers fluffed out in birdy contentment... and a good baker's dozen of little bundles of yellow puffball clustered under and around her.

"Aw, fucking hell," he says, which wakes them all up.

He is now stuck on his back under a pile of chirping baby peep-peeps.

Scout manages to brush the peep-peeps off his chest - carefully, you don't want to hurt the little things - and then looks around nervously to make sure nobody saw him being nice to the things, because come the fuck on that'd just ruin his image. Scout being /nice/? For serious. Come the fuck on, man.

He can hear Pyro shouting muffledly and banging a spoon against a plate - breakfast is ready - but as he starts to sprint down to get some food, the peep-peeps just /follow/ him. He shoos them away repeatedly, and Speckled Hen does her speckled-hen best to herd them - she's an obedient little thing for a chicken - but one of them just won't stop following him.

Goddammit.

If he leaves it there it'll get stepped on. If he carries it around he looks like a fucking sap.

So he picks it up and tucks it under his hat.

Heavy passes by just then, and Scout studiously ignores him, because he doesn't say good morning to people because he's a Masshole.

But the peep-peep in his hat has other ideas. "Peep! Peep!"

"Shut the fuck up!" Scout tells his hat automatically, which just draws Heavy's attention to the fact that it is peeping.

It also makes the peep-peep peep more, and that gets all the other peep-peeps peeping. Peep peep peep peep peep, a dozen tiny peep-peeps running toward him, flocking around his feet, and Speckled Hen bringing up the rear.

Holy fucking goddamn -

Heavy's just a big fucking kid, you know, and he sees those peep-peeps and goes all to pieces. "THEY ARE SO SMALL!" he shouts in his huge booming Russian voice, and the peep-peeps go still and terrified around Scout's feet, as the kid tries to dance around them and not step on any of them.

Medic comes around the corner - he's always nearby when you see Heavy, after all, especially when they've just gotten out of bed - and makes a face that would get Scout cracking up if he weren't trying not to step on the fucking chickens. "NO! DON'T BOZZER ZEM! YOU AH STRESSINK ZEM OUT!"

Oh, fuck, it's a fucking circus now.

"Eeee! Ww hwmph pheepheephs!" from the doorway, and Scout looks up - almost overbalancing as he tiptoes backwards away from the pile of peep-peeps - to see that, oh, fucking hooray, Pyro and Engineer are watching, too.

(Meanwhile, Sniper's in the kitchen eating all the scrambled eggs.)

The only thing that saves him from being /completely/ embarrassed by the whole situation (those of you who don't see what cause he has to be embarrassed have never been a barely-out-of-his-teens Masshole boy) is the perimeter alert going off, air raid sirens everywhere, giving him an excuse to jump out of the mass of chickens and giving everyone else a distraction as they run to grab weapons and head toward the front.

Scout's halfway to the point when his hat says "Peep-peep!" again.

Aww, Jesus Christ.

"Shhhh!" he says to his hat -

"I HEAR 'IM!" from the other side of the stack of crates he's hiding behind, and now 'aww, Jesus Christ' ain't even strong enough. Fuck fuck fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck - he can't go fighting with a fucking chicken in his hat - fuck fuck fuck -

Scout whips his hat off and kneels, shaking the chicken out onto the ground - get, you little yellow bastard, get get get I gotta get my gun - and a bullet pings off the wall behind him as the enemy comes around the corner and -

Stops dead. "A BABY CHICKEN!"

Scout just looks up, frozen.

The BLU Scout's just standing there grinning at the fucking peep-peep. "GUYS THEY GOT A BABY CHICKEN COME SEE IT!"

The fuck the fuck the fuck -

The little guy takes off - the chicken, I mean, not the Scout, they're both just staring, RED staring at BLU and BLU staring at the chicken - tiny little peep-peep legs propelling him out into the field, and the entire BLU team is weaving around him, entranced by the unexpected cuteness of a peep-peep in the middle of a fight.

The peep-peep doesn't seem scared. Naw, that little fuzzy bastard's eatin' it up, standing right on the center of the point while the BLUs crowd around cooing and going on about how fucking adorable he is.

Chicken hatched on a RED base apparently counts as RED team, though.

Fucking peep-peep caps it.

Later:

"Aw, ye got shown up by a wee totty burdie, didn't ye?"

And that was the second time Scout popped Demo in the eye.