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1 .

Once again, collaboration between me and OtherHazards.
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BAD DAY ON THE BATTLEFIELD

The Medic’s alarm clock sounded well before sunrise. As soon as he silenced it, he knew that he was in a state of blissful ignorance. A memory of something terrible that had happened yesterday was lurking just beyond his sight. He willed it away, even as it broke upon him.

The Heavy, in the sauna. The Scout’s laughter, the Soldier’s demand for an explanation. The filthy secret he had kept for decades was out. He stared bleakly at the ceiling. Today could only bring dishonor; the best he could hope for was death. However, the only way to be more detestable than he already was would be to cower in his bed. He got up and headed for the infirmary’s solo shower, not bothering to pick up the clothes on the floor or change his white-stained sheets.

After he dressed, the Medic went to the kitchen. His professional life was over, but he had breakfast duty. He made oatmeal. On another day, he might have fortified it with raisins or molasses; today, it was just plain and grey. He started some coffee and poured a glass of the metallic-tasting tinned orange juice. He drank it as if it were medicine, then sat down and mechanically ate his breakfast.

The rest of the team began to arrive in the kitchen.
"What tha fuck, man?" the Scout wanted to know, studying a glutenous spoonful of what appeared to be rehydrated wall-plaster, "-where's tha sugar in this? Yo Pyro, it's glazed awready, pass the sugar."

"Hmrr?" The Pyro looked up with a surprised and somewhat innocent head tilt, temporarily pausing the process of torch-caramelizing a layer of sugar onto its oatmeal.

"Well, it's food," the Sniper decided, digging in with the cheerful philosophy of someone who appreciates his food not trying to escape under it's own power.

Demo shuffled into the mess hall looking as though he hated both beast and man this morning, but perked up the moment he took a bite. "Naught bad, there..." He stirred in a quantity of butter, added a few healthy shakes from the saltshaker, and set to.

Heavy arrived later then usual. Spy crept past him looking hollow-eyed, struggled with the gleaming coffee-machine in the corner until it provided him with a tiny cup of very strong coffee, and muttered something darkly about how ‘this was made in Nantes,’ and 'distilled race-horse piss'.

Medic sat in his chair, ramrod straight, eyes straight ahead or fixed on his bowl. He did not dare to hope that yesterday's events had been forgotten. He let his eyes slide over to the Spy, but the man was hunched over his coffee and apparently oblivious to the world. Perhaps the Scout had not relayed his shameful news? The Medic's eyes flicked to the skinny runner's face.

Mercifully, the Scout wasn't looking in the Medic's direction, but he could feel eyes on him just as well as the next highly paranoid mercenary. The Scout looked over at the Medic. The Medic stared back like a man facing a firing squad. Scout dissolved in a fit of snickering.

Halfway down the table, Heavy watched the exchange, his jaw tight. This was hurting the Doktor. Badly. If he interceded now though, this would take ten times longer to die...

Do not, the Medic thought. Do not look over at the Heavy. He was afraid of what he would see, if he did. Hate? Disgust? A barely-controlled rage? The Medic knew that his teammate wasn't at his best until he'd had breakfast, and momentarily regretted not having put anything better in the oatmeal. He clenched his teeth and cursed his tender feelings toward the man. He looked at the Demoman instead- the Scot was tucking into the horrible gruel with every sign of enjoyment.

The oatmeal was not the Doktor's best effort, Heavy admitted to himself. It tasted like exhaustion, like the way Medic looked when they'd had to respawn a fourth time to attack the same point in the RED defenses. Ground down. Functional.

The Engineer showed up late to breakfast, a half-finished cup of coffee cunningly balanced with the clipboard of handwritten notes in his hands. "Mornin'," he said, glancing up from it.

Most of the team mumbled some variation on the theme of "good morning," with the exception of the Spy, who issued a Gallic grunt, and the Medic, who saw nothing good about the morning whatsoever. He nodded curtly to the Texan and stood. Moving robotically, he cleared his dishes and began running hot water in the wash sink. It was the Pyro's turn to wash the dishes, so there was no need to mix in any cold. His spoon clattered against the rim of his bowl as he placed them in the sink, betraying the tremor in his hands.

The Engineer looked over at the sound, frowning slightly behind his welding goggles. Adjusted as his eyes were to the low light behind those deeply polarized lenses, Medic's white coat still stood out almost as much as the overhead lights did, and the painfully tense set of the German's frame looked worryingly brittle.

As people began to get up and mill around prior to leaving, Heavy abruptly found himself looking down at the Scout.

"Didja make it up to 'im or what?" the Scout grinned.

Heavy momentarily imagined what it would look and sound like to slap Scout's face down onto the tabletop hard enough to crush all the bones in the boy's nose and jaw. His large hands closed into fists at his sides with a faint squeak of compressing glove-leather instead.
"Such concern you have, leetle Scout. I vill remember this."

The Medic looked over when the Scout spoke, and his eyes met Heavy's. His blank expression flickered, pure terror flashing out from beneath as he looked at his giant teammate. The Medic's lips parted, but he didn't know what he could possibly say. Instead, he slammed his teeth closed and turned on his heel. At least he had the pretext of gearing up for battle. Apparently, he would not be dismissed before the day's fight. Did the Administrator know yet? The uncertainty was agony.

Something in the big Russian's demeanor made the Scout uneasy, but the Heavy's crestfallen look as the Medic bolted at the sight of him was well worth it.

"THAT's a 'no'--" the Scout decided loudly, and darted out of range himself.

The Heavy sighed, and joined the rest of his teammates as they filed out to the weapons lockers. No-one jostled him today, Heavy noticed. The closest contact was when the edge of the Sniper's sleeve brushed past his arm. Usually, he was lucky if the Scout wasn't trying to jump or leap-frog OVER him. As a boy Heavy had seen a handful of American films, and one of them had featured Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster. He remembered it now.

In the infirmary, the Medic picked up his gear, and was momentarily irritated by the fact that he hadn't put it away properly. Then he realised that he didn't remember putting it away at all. He didn't remember carrying it out of the sauna. Someone else must have- who? He didn't know who else would do it, or why, and this worried him. However, he pushed the thought out of his mind. He had to get to formation, couldn't afford to waste time. He hefted the Medigun, but equipped himself with his Bonesaw and Blutsauger, as well. If today was going to be the last day of his life, he was going to take some of those RED schweinhunds with him, as well. He wondered if he could find some way to disable the respawn locators that let they system sweep up and re-integrate the gibs. This in mind, he strode out to join his team.

It was with no little relief that Heavy saw the Doctor enter the Respawn room at last, and take up his place in the pre-battle formation. He wasn't actually standing behind behind the Heavy today, but he was near enough to his elbow to make the thought count. ...Maybe, Heavy thought, just maybe, this would be all right.

"You are ready, Doktor?" Heavy asked conversationally, with an optimism he didn't yet trust.

"Of course," Medic said icily. He was gritting his teeth, trying not to shake. The big man was standing right there, normal as ever- possibly he had forgotten? How dazed by the Medigun fumes had he been? But then, who had put the Medigun away? Did he remember what had happened? The Scout certainly did. The Medic's hand clenched on the handle of his Bonesaw.

The Bonesaw, Heavy wondered, -now-? He wasn't about to break what was still clearly a fragile truce between them to quibble over weapons... but he was concerned. The starting bell sounded. Heavy made a mental note to keep a sharp eye out for sandviches today, and started forwards.

"Horrido!" The Medic sprinted out onto the field, leaving the Heavy far behind in favor of running serpentine at the advancing REDs. He met the RED Scout coming the other way first, and slashed viciously at the young runner's neck. The Scout had been fumbling with his scattergun, but raised a hand to ward off the blow. The heavy blade dug into the boy's ulna, snapping it as the Medic twisted it free. The German grinned in monstrous satisfaction at his young enemy's scream of pain, then silenced it by slicing his throat.


Heavy knew in that moment, as the arc of the RED Scout's blood flew up, that it was going to be a long, long day. He'd started running with the Medic instinctively, but even with the Doktor's pauses to carve up his enemies, he was already outrunning his Heavy. Seeing he would be more valuable from a short distance, Heavy stopped with his shoulder to the corner of a concrete building, and laid down a punishing line of covering fire for the Medic's murderous rampage.

The Medic lunged at the next available member of the RED team, the Demoman. Screaming abuse in German, he slashed at the man's face. He was instantly clubbed with a bottle for his efforts, but found an opening to hack at the Scot's arm. Bleeding and bristling with broken glass, the Medic rounded on the RED Heavy. The sight of the huge body-armored silhouette against the sky, so similar to the BLU Heavy, made the Medic stop in his tracks. This was all the time the RED needed to spin up his Minigun and reduce the Medic to a bloody mist.

Medic had been moving, swift and erratic, seeming not to feel any of the damage that streamed red down the front and side of his long white coat. He had fought like a man possessed, but Heavy had managed to keep up covering fire for him- -until to his horror the Doktor darted, ferret-like, out of sight around a broken wall. Heavy scrambled for a new position, boots sinking deep in the wind-piled snow, but the RED Soldier had been waiting for him. There was the impact in his side like a steel giant's fist, then tearing, and the sudden, impossible heat blasting up across his face as the RED Soldier's crit-rocket exploded in his chest.

The white light of the Respawn room burned the Medic's eyes. As he fought down a wave of nausea, he realized that he was disappointed that he was still alive. He jerked himself upright, his eyes finally adjusting enough to see the Heavy, Pyro and Demoman- they must have respawned in the same wave. Ignoring the ringing in his ears, he made to rejoin the battle.

And so it went, down through the cold of morning and into a long and bloody afternoon. Heavy no longer followed the Doktor with the same desperate pace of the day's first charge, but he was never far away. Heavy began using the Medic for bait in a way, flanking his unhinged teammate at a modest distance, and cutting down any RED who made a play for the Doktor's back while the German was attacking another target. Without the Medic's sharp eyes guarding the Heavy’s back however, the RED Spy made it his personal mission to send the Heavy through respawn as many times as possible. In one chilling incident, Heavy had Spy-checked the Medic coming at him, only to find that it was in fact HIS Doktor, and that the Sniper creeping up on Heavy's left was his intended target.


Blood glazed the snow near the outdoor control point, lingering body-heat momentarily melting it in patches, and re-freezing it as a solid crust. Time and again, boots broke through it. Time and again the BLUs were driven back, hamstrung by effective absence of the effective Medic on whom they'd slowly learned to rely...

After the Administrator's last, ringing "You have failed!" the BLU Engineer rebuilt his dispenser in the common room, and the rest of the team grouped around it. They had all noticed that the Medic wasn't doing much in the way of healing, that day. The Medic staggered in, but took a seat too far from the dispenser to absorb any of its healing rays. He did not want to deprive his more worthy teammates. He thought briefly of inhaling some fumes from his own Medigun, but recoiled instantly. Never, never again. The Soldier was ranting, but his screams about ignominious defeat went didn't penetrate the Medic's mental fog until the American rounded on him and shouted,
"You have dishonoured this entire unit!"

The Medic's eyes snapped open as if he had been stung.
"Schweinhund!" he shouted. "How dare you?" He grabbed at where the handle of his Bonesaw would be, but he had already shucked his weapons, leaving them carelessly on the floor.

"How dare I?" the Soldier mocked in a sing-song voice at the approximate decibel level of a jet engine. "Each and every one of us has a duty on this battlefield! Unlike some people, you USUALLY stay awake during the briefings and seemed to have grasped that simple concept! What in God's name was that, out there today? Your duty is to stand behind the Russki and make him a goddamn invincible tank! Running screaming at the enemy and ripping them apart with my bare hands is MY duty! Do I make myself clear?!"

For a moment, Heavy had the sinking feeling that he would be called on to physically restrain the enraged Medic, but the latter end of the Soldier's tirade seemed to have taken some of the wind out of the Doktor's sails. He stood, blood-spattered white shoulders rising and falling as he tried to contain his breathing, staring at the lowered rim of the Soldier's well-battered helmet as if he didn't know whether to attack the man or start weeping. The dark curl that drooped in disarray across the Medic's forehead trembled slightly at the end.

"I-" the Medic spat, then found himself at a loss. There was no rebuttal, nothing he could say to excuse his dereliction of duty. He had been found out, they all knew- he briefly planned to attack the Soldier and get killed so that he would at least fail to respawn until the battle resumed the following morning. Belatedly, he realized that his dereliction of duty was the only topic that the Soldier had brought up. Nothing about his inappropriate behaviour the night before, nothing about drumming him out of BLU. Indeed, he seemed to be assuming that the Medic would resume his normal role in upcoming battles. The Medic pulled himself upright, closing his eyes and breathing in through his nose. "It vas inexcusable." His voice sounded thick, his accent heavy with the effort of suppressing the tremor he felt.


"Whaddya know," the Scout cocked his head, watching with fascination out of the eye that wasn't swollen shut, "-wunna Soldier-boy's speeches actually DID somethin'..."

The Spy, once-immaculate suit coat still trailing flakes of ash whenever he moved, elbowed the Scout pointedly, the expression beneath his balaclava set and pleasant.

The Heavy had never been prouder of his team as at this ground-down, ambivalent, and generally annoyed moment. He put a comradely hand on the Medic's shoulder.

"Is vun day. Tomorrow ve work together again, da?"

The Medic flinched under his teammate's huge hand. At this moment he wanted nothing more than to believe that he was forgiven, to slump against the Heavy's broad chest and weep. Not possible. He was living on borrowed time. He ground his teeth together and simply said, "Ja, tomorrow," before turning to leave.

Heavy watched the Medic leave decisively for the second time that day, a small frown settling in deep between his eyebrows.

"Eeey you!" the Demoman, if anything wobblier than usual, shoved his way in between the Pyro and Soldier to stand breathing fumes up at the still-immobile Heavy. "Gittafter 'im yeh grreeat lump, it's yoor fault, yeh knoo?" Demo shoved his bottle of Scrumpy in Heavy's chest for emphasis.

"'E's right," the Sniper spoke up from the beneath the shadow of his hat, turning a long slashing cut on his forearm towards the dispenser as if warming himself by a fire, "Nobody gives a damn what y' get up to after hours, just go make noice, an' get that fella back on the field in 'is right frame a'mind, yeah?"

The Medic swept back along the hall, collecting his weaponry. He would have to reload the serum in the Ãœbersaw, restock the syringes in the Blutsauger. When he got to the infirmary, his hands were shaking too badly to handle the needles. He sat down at his desk, head in his hands.

Heavy looked from one teammate to another. They looked back at him with varying degrees of interest or exasperation. The Scout crossed his arms, sulkily.

Heavy left.

He walked alone down through the labyrinth of corridors towards the infirmary. The closer he got, the harder it seemed to move forward at all. The Doktor wasn't listening, they'd just proved that back in the common room. He was convinced he was no longer safe anywhere near his Heavy, and the rest of the team was looking to Heavy to smooth out a lover's quarrel with a man he'd... frankly never slept with. And that situation was looking more and more permanent all the time.

The Doktor was his comrade, though. So what if he was also handsome, or supremely efficient on the battlefield? The Doktor was his comrade, and... the Doktor was afraid. The meticulous German wore the emotion unnaturally, like starched overcoat. Heavy had seen the Doktor take every kind of risk on the battlefield, because he thought it was his duty. He'd seen the man reach into the ruins of Soldier's knee as the big American howled above him and draw out a thick Sniper round with his gloved fingers, gleaming and twisted. He'd seen the Doktor follow him into unfamiliar situations without a pause once the decision had been made... like the Doktor's having ventured into the sauna in the first place...


Fear didn't belong on him.

Heavy opened the door to the infirmary.

The Medic heard the Heavy's tread in the hallway outside, and went rigid. This was it. He couldn't imagine that the big man was willing to let the insult go unanswered. Was the man coming to threaten him, beat him? The Medic hated himself for being so weak. He could have been comrades with the man, had his respect for years, been friends. He had thrown it away. He made a pretext of slotting the Blutsauger syringes into place.

The Doktor was still pointedly ignoring him, Heavy saw. How could he break through this? What could he possibly say, that would get through the Doktor's impenetrable icy reserve? ...Nothing came to mind.

Heavy stood a few paces back from the Medic's shoulder in a thickening ominous silence, punctuated only by the sharp clicks of the Blutsauger's ammunition being loaded.
Then he remembered something. It was a small, silly thing, but it had its advantages. Heavy reached into the inner pocket of his flak vest, and drew out a Dalokohs bar. He'd picked it up earlier in the day, but had never found time during the firefight to actually eat it. It was a little the worse for wear, and inside the unopened blue wrapper the chocolate squares had clearly broken off from each other... but it was intact, and the Doktor hadn't strayed close enough to the dispenser in the common room to receive any benefit from it.

Heavy paused, set the Dalokohs bar squarely on the corner of the Medic's desk, and left.


The Medic stiffened when the Heavy moved in his peripheral vision, then stared at the chocolate bar as if he'd never seen one before. As if he'd never seen anything before. He didn't normally eat sweets... but today had been anything but normal, and the multiple respawns had left him very, very hungry. He set the Blutsauger carefully aside, and took the candy as if it were a rare treasure. He unwrapped it delicately, and took a tiny nibble. It spread bittersweet over his tongue, the best thing he had ever tasted. He had to put it back down on his desk, hands crossed over it, as tears ran down his face.