Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Herr Pyro?”

There was the lightest of touches on Constance’s shoulder, but all the same it felt as if she had been electrocuted. She whirled around, breath hissing through the filters of her mask, her fingers spread as if prepared to drop down on all fours and skitter away like a large rat. Medic was standing there before her. It must have been a brave choice to touch her, but perhaps he had been standing there a long time and she hadn’t noticed or heard him calling her name. Either way, Constance could see the regret plain on his face. He was clutching an empty plate, white-knuckled, ready to chuck it at her like a discus if needed to defend himself. 

Ah. Yes. She had been standing in front of the open fridge, that was the reason for the chill at her front and the whispers of the same temperature at her back. Constance straightened up and mechanically stepped to the side, resisting the electric shiver that rippled over her skin. Medic gave a curt nod in thanks and stepped forward to take her place, giving her a rather furtive look as if he was doing something that was incredibly secretive and it was inappropriate for her to witness. Constance stood there and watched him take out the fixings for a sandwich. Her head was all dull noise and stuffed thickly with cotton, and somewhere distantly, her stomach gave a lurch of angry, forgotten hunger. Yes, that was right. She had come here to eat something, and judging by Medic’s choice of fare it was lunchtime. Constance had skipped breakfast. She did not eat meals with the team - she was not the only one that didn’t - but it was more difficult to remember to eat when the food was not placed right in front of her, as it had always been. 

Spoiled , her mother shrieked inside her head, the pitch of her voice sharp and needling, and Constance flinched. Medic looked at her quickly as if he expected her to pounce on him and perhaps steal his sandwich. She wished suddenly, terribly, that he would make her a sandwich the way that he would always make one for Heavy, but of course he would not and it was a stupid thing to think about. Bubblegum pink ooze began to leak from the fridge, and Constance shifted her gaze to it. She had long learned that others did not see the things that she did. She had long learned that if she reacted to them, they would multiply and reproduce and cloud her vision with bright, stifling, suffocating color until she could not breathe. Constance would not, could not let that happen, and so she only stood there and looked at the pink spread over the floor like an oil slick. 

Three days she had been here, and they were supposed to start working tomorrow. She hadn’t been sure what at all to expect when her eyes had snapped open one month ago in the hospital and there was a petite woman sitting there, looking at Constance rather kindly considering the circumstances of what had landed the subject of her interest in the hospital. Constance had thought that she was a cop, or some spy of her mother’s, but she had been offered a job . It had almost seemed too good to be true. She would be shipped off to the middle of nowhere, she wouldn’t have a name once there, she wouldn’t exist anymore on the outside. Of course, there was the actual job itself, but how hard could it be? She’d always been athletic in school, and the years on the run had made her fit and lean. If anyone wanted to kill her, they’d have to catch her first. As for the killing of others, well, it wasn’t really killing if they kept coming back, was it? And even if it was, she honestly did not care. It was the money and security and anonymity that mattered, not what she had to do to get it. Constance was the only one that hadn’t flinched when Miss Pauling had lined them all up in front of the Engineer (Constance suspected dully that Miss Pauling must’ve done him sooner) and shot them, one by one. No one had run, but no one had looked exactly glad about it, either. Constance had stood there, impassively, looking at the revolver trained between her eyes. Miss Pauling had offered her a tight, small smile and then before she could think she was anew, on all fours, retching(thankfully nothing came up) inside her suit. After that, well. Who wouldn’t try to blow their own head off to see if it was still working? The Engineer didn’t say anything when Constance walked past him, out of respawn, good as new and trailing bright shiny bubbles. So it wasn’t real. They were killing and being killed over and over and she had a job now, a point , a purpose where no one would find her. That was something Constance had ensured beyond the mysterious job.

Miss Pauling had discussed it with her, actually. She was the only one that had ever seen Constance out of her suit, albeit bandaged up in the hospital but still exposed . A fireproof suit and respirator were a natural part of the job, but it was Constance’s choice to keep them on all the time. She liked it in there, that always slightly warm place, beyond its concealing qualities. She could hear the sound of her own breathing and it wasn’t as easy for the colors to reach her inside. It would not do for any of her fellow mercenaries to know what she looked like. This was because:

Constance knew that much of her body was covered in burns - she had not cared to look. She could feel the way the skin pulled taut when she turned this way and that, and she had had a chance to feel the scarring. She thought that if anyone saw how she must look and their face contorted in fright or disgust, in imitation of her mother, something inside her would snap.

They could recognize her and tell her mother where she was for more money than they were ever being paid here. She had been in the papers, after all, and on television.

She was the only girl on the team. Constance felt that surely Miss Pauling would have said something, but everyone referred to Constance as male, and for some reason she did not feel like it was wise to correct them. It would further make her stick out, make her more open to being looked at oddly or being recognizable.

“Herr Pyro,” Medic said again, standing there with his sandwich. He looked very uncomfortable at having to speak to her. “You have not yet reported to me for your adjustment. Please do so by this evening at the latest so you are prepared for work tomorrow.”

Oh yes, that . Constance stood there, very still, and Medic seemed to decide that was sufficient information on his end and left without another word. Miss Pauling had told them all that along with being input into the respawn system, they would need to undergo a type of surgery to make their bodies more compatible with the medical technology being used. They were put into the respawn system first to make sure that if they died during the surgery they could be brought back. Most of the mercenaries had done this in the first day or two, but Constance had not. Partially because information slipped out of her mind in a loose ooze if she was not grasping it between her fingers, and partially because she did not want to. Even if Medic did not make her take her mask off, he would still see her body. But Miss Pauling had made it seem non-negotiable, a condition of the job, and so Constance huffed a sigh and dragged her feet to the medbay. It was better to get it over with now, before she forgot again. After all, she had nowhere else to go if they fired her for being non-compliant.

If Medic seemed surprised to see her so soon, he did not indicate it. He merely dusted his hands of sandwich crumbs and stood up from his rolling stool, gesturing to the table. Constance did not mind medical stuff. When she was growing up, she had visited the doctor an awful lot to make sure she was perfect. She was far from perfect now (that thought gave her both massive satisfaction and a peculiar emptiness) and so went dutifully to the table, looking overhead at the massive thing aimed there. It was like the moveable light at the dentist, except more sinister looking, with an end that decidedly was supposed to be aimed at you. Constance soon realized that her exposure to medical procedures was nothing like what Medic had in mind.

“Take off your suit,” he said airily, busying himself with the preparation of an array of tools. She waited until he was looking at her to shake her head no .

“It will be ruined,” he pointed out, a little impatiently. “It is heart surgery, after all. Not exactly a tidy cleanup.”

Heart surgery . It was not that fact which shocked her. Constance was presented with a crystal-clear view in her mind’s eye of him running a scalpel right between her bare breasts - no, no, that definitely could not be allowed to happen. She had heard of doctor-patient confidentiality, but they were dead mercenaries in the middle of nowhere and Constance suspected Medic was not the type to be overly concerned about secrecy. She felt sweat roll down between her shoulder blades, and the uncertainty of what to do began to fog her head like a cold front had just rolled in. Uhhh, umm….

“Herr Pyro,” Medic said coolly, “There is no reason to be shy. If the nature of this work has not been fully explained to you, I will be knitting you back together on the battlefield in various states of dismemberment. Whatever your…state, I promise you I will see quite all of it at some point or another.”

He had a point. It did not stop Constance from slowly raising her hand. She had already understood that the thick filters of her respirator obscured her voice beyond any recognition, something which she was quite glad for, but it made communicating to the others very difficult. She lowered her gloved fingers to her thumb and rapidly opened and closed her hand, creating an imitation of a chattering mouth. Then she drew her thumb across her throat.

Medic scoffed, but he did not sound perhaps as vitriolic as intended. “Rest assured, I have better things to do than care to gossip about what you look like under there.”

Despite that, he had clearly not been expecting what he saw.

Constance was breathing heavily as she disrobed. She was shaking, too, maybe from the slight sterile chill in the room. She kept the mask on and her eyes trained upon Medic’s face. He did not take care to conceal his reaction as the thick material of the suit slid off her shoulders, exposing the skin-tight shirt and shorts she wore underneath that clearly outlined the curves of her body. Her arms were fuzzy at the edges as if she was looking through a frosty windowpane. She deliberately did not focus on them, how they looked, did not engage with the motions her body was performing. Far above, a cloying baby-blue gas was beginning to descend through the vents. Constance tugged at the neck of her mask and swallowed, hard.

To Medic’s credit, however, he did not see fit to make any sort of quip or comment. He seemed entirely in his own world as she laid on the table in her underwear and stared at the ceiling. There were birds up there, ones she would have thought were certainly a product of her mind had they not been mere shades of cream. They were carrying flowers in bright shades of pink, however, and raining them down upon her as if she was being buried. Constance involuntarily raised a hand to catch one. Medic spared her movement a mere glance as he worked, watching her working fingers clasping at nothing. He reached upwards to adjust some setting on the beam. The beam, the wonderful beam that was diffusing down into her body, muting what was happening below her neck, soothing the sting of the needle in her arm. The beam made Constance taste cherry candyfloss on the tip of her tongue, and her head lolled back and forth on the table, feeling her organs lurch this way and that. It did not hurt, exactly, she could feel what he was doing but it felt faraway. Oh, if only she could stay like this forever, and not be bothered so much by the way her skin pulled and stretched uncomfortably against scar tissue and not clash so much against her mind, which seemed determined to spread out like shards of shattered glass.

At some point Medic was clearly done with whatever he wanted to do, and he switched off the beam. A sudden chill spread over Constance’s body and the taste on her tongue turned iron. Medic’s face loomed in her vision, sharp and clear. “All finished,” he said, and put his hand on her arm to remove the needle. He had only inserted it when she was under the blessed beam, and this time his fingers landed on scarred, sensitive skin without any numbing. Constance jolted and flailed, one of her hands catching him across the side of his face, her finger sinking into his eye socket. He gave a grunt of surprise and pain and jerked away from her, backing into the rolling table of medical instruments with a crash. The noise was cacophonous, and the room exploded in purple, grape-flavored rain. It splattered the walls and floor and the smell was sickly sweet and she felt the urge to retch. Medic did not attempt to comfort her. He stood back, one hand holding the side of his face, and stared at her like she was a wild animal. Constance could not exactly blame him, but in that moment she was overheated and tearful and angry that he had touched her, seen her. She quickly got back into her suit, ignoring the uncomfortable twinging in her chest, and bolted out of there like a racehorse out the gate. 

Constance thought she had woken up before anyone else. It gave her a sort of iron-grip feeling, to be wide awake while everyone else would shuffle bleary-eyed around the base, but the morning did not go how she expected. Constance had been pilfering the fridge for breakfast in blessed silence for ten minutes, not bothering to turn on any lights, when a loud airhorn went off in the hall behind her. She dropped the carton of milk, splattering liquid all over herself and the floor.

“UP!” Someone was barking. Soldier . “Get up! We must meet the enemy in exactly two hours’ time! Get up!”

When he got to the kitchen, he stopped, his helmet swinging over his eyes. A gruff, begrudging smile spread over his lips.

“Well done, private,” he said to her. “I see that you are also taking the upcoming threat with the seriousness it deserves.”

Her shoulders were strung up so tightly her neck had almost disappeared. Soldier did not notice, and made the further call of crossing the room to slap Constance on the back. 

It felt as if an explosion of psychedelic color exploded inside her mask, and her every nerve was stinging as if she’d been set alight. It was on her face, inside her eyes, they were hurting with the brightness of it and there was a noise like a fire engine in her ears. Constance’s hand shot out to grasp the frying pan on the stove and she swung, hard. The metal colliding with the material of Soldier’s helmet made an impressive CLANG , and he stumbled backwards, clutching at his head with a yelp. Constance knew at once that he would probably be very angry and want to swing back, so she stood in a ready-to-spring stance, still clutching the pan and listening faintly to the roar of blood in her ears.

Sniper, who had come to stand in bleary-eyed the doorway holding an empty coffee mug, watched this whole display with one raised eyebrow. “See,” he said, “it isn’t just me that doesn’t like being woken up at the crack of dawn.”

Soldier left the room, muttering something about reviewing strategy for the morning, and Sniper did not seem interested in sticking around. Constance was left alone to clean up the milk, rolling her eyes every which way she could to try and clear them. Fuck, she did not want to be jumpy, or reactive, or volatile, or whatever it was she had been called. Keeping her temperament even and level was what she told herself she’d do, because if she flew off the handle too severely, Constance doubted she could bring herself back. She had a long day ahead of her, and she had to focus. Constance decided to skip breakfast and instead head straight to the respawn room, well-used to functioning on an empty stomach. On the way, she passed Medic, Engineer, and Soldier, who were looking over the maps. Constance supposed she could have stood to look too, to know where she was going when there were bullets flying, but she did not exactly think she would be welcome in there.

It had not taken much for Constance to alienate herself from the team in a very short amount of time. Firstly, she was the first mercenary that had shown up to the very first meeting already clad in uniform (except for Spy, who was half in uniform, his balaclava disappearing into a wool turtleneck). Some of the mercenaries were more polite about their surprise, but Scout had cast a very unpleasant, suspicious look in her direction. Sniper had asked her something at one point, Constance hadn’t heard, and when he tapped her on the shoulder she had started unpleasantly and the hoarse noise that came through her respirator seemed to perturb everyone. They seemed to think she was perhaps some sort of alien, or perhaps a mass murderer, a lit fuse, someone to tread carefully around for fear of setting off. Constance did not mind one bit. No, she did not mind at all. It did not bother her that a few alliances seemed to have already been established within the team - Medic and Heavy, Engineer and Medic, Demoman and Soldier. There were also feuds forming - Scout and Spy, mainly. But even the alliances Constance wasn’t sure if she would go so far as to call friendships just yet. All of them were uncertain about the events in the days to come, how quickly they would settle in and become normalized like permanent moisture in a house by the sea. Some of them were thinking about their families or bank accounts or in Constance’s case, realizing rapidly that she did not know how to be an adult. 

She had moved from a household with maids and butlers to private boarding school where all of her needs were accounted for to yes, living on her own, but even during that time she had never fully learned to do things. When her clothes were too burned or dirty, she stole new ones instead of washing them. When she was hungry, she stole. When she needed, she stole. Her skill as a thief had a downward trajectory throughout her life, even though she’d theoretically gotten better at it. At the start, no one suspected the beautiful doe-eyed girl with long flaxen hair, and it was really easy. But as she accumulated burns and a layer of dirt that never seemed to go away, her pixie cut permanently singed, she was a clear target for suspicion the minute she walked into a populated area. It was lucky that Nora had picked her up in the end; Constance’s ribs had begun to show through her skin. Here at the base everyone mostly kept to themselves and did their laundry and cooked their meals. Sometimes there was an effort at a group meal, a barbeque or something, but as Constance did not know how to cook and had nothing to contribute she never attended. Sometimes she would filch leftovers from the fridge afterwards, prepared to hiss like a cornered animal if she was confronted, but no one ever said anything. 

It was not good to think about Nora now and everything done she had ever done for Constance, or how good her food had tasted. Constance’s stomach grumbled pitifully. Inside her mask, she wrinkled her nose and proceeded to the respawn room. There was a dull hum in the background, but it was empty. All of their cubbies stood waiting, with weapons and uniforms and all that. Constance sat down on the bench and examined the contents of her cubby. One fire axe, a shotgun, and flamethrower. The fire axe had a nice balanced weight in her hand, and Constance had whet the blade herself. She had never used a shotgun before. The flamethrower she had only recently given up to allow to rest in its cubby before the match, by strict order of the Voice (Engineer muttered something about their weapons needing to be inspected, to be sure no illegal modifications had been made, which was preposterous - not the suggestion of unfair play, but the fact they weren’t allowed to make modifications). The rest of the time, Constance kept it with her. It was comforting, its ever-lit flame, and so was the awe of what she was allowed to do with it. Constance had overheard Engineer, who seemed to know a lot, saying to someone else that the structures outside were coated in a special fireproof chemical, so that they could not be set alight and burn down on top of them. But then whatever mysterious team had done this had backed away and left them to kill each other until a hold was established and they could advance territory. There was also the matter of her targets - was there another Pyro, on the other team? There must be. Was she a girl, too? Was she…like this? Constance wrapped her arms around the flamethrower, the muzzle pressed up against her cheek. With one eye, she watched the pilot light dance steadily.

She sat like that until the rest of the mercenaries began to file in. They all cast each other glances, up-down sort of looks that conveyed a type of unease. Even if they knew what to expect, what to do…well, none of them had ever really had a team before. And it did not feel like a team, not at all. For once, Constance felt included in that she was not the only one feeling as if she was alone.

There was not much time to dwell on it. She got to her feet as the mysterious Voice crackled to life and began a crisp countdown, gripping the handle of her flamethrower and gazing at the metal door ahead of them. Whatever awaited her, she would meet it with fire and blood.

Chapter Text

They lost the first match rather spectacularly.

When the metal door slid open, they all spread out like a fleet of rats, each and every mercenary with their own, individual, pre-concocted plan. Constance saw Engineer squat and begin to work on constructing something right outside the door; Medic and Heavy were already jogging away in the midst of conversation, and Constance’s eyes followed the beam longingly as it diffused from Medic’s medigun into Heavy. Spy had already disappeared (quite literally, in front of all of their surprised faces with a pompous little smirk) and Soldier, angered that he was not first to lead the charge, aimed his rocket launcher at his feet and fired. Constance cringed at the explosive noise, watching through narrowed eyes as he soared over their heads, his boots smoking. Demoman went, too, and Scout and Sniper were off, and then it was just Constance and Engineer. Whatever he was doing had begun to whir and spin, and she watched it somewhat uneasily, somewhat uncertainly. Engineer glanced up at her, and he made a shooing motion.

“Go on,” he said, in a bolstering sort of way. “Go light ‘em up.”

Constance’s feet began to move inside her thick, heavy rubber boots, faster and faster until she was at a trot, holding her flamethrower tightly in two hands. Its heft and weight were comforting. She was not winded yet, but her breathing came loud and fast inside her mask, echoing about like she was in a vast cavern. Okay. It would be all right, she could do this. After some time of weaving through a maze of open doorways, Constance followed the noises she heard and emerged out on a sort of landing, watching calamity unfold below.

There was a large central point, already spattered with blood. Constance could see quite clearly that there was a man in a uniform matching their own Scout’s, but in red. He lay sprawled out on the point staring upwards with an expression of shock on his pale, frozen face. Constance could not see how he’d died, but perhaps that was for the best. She did not see where Heavy had gone, or why he would leave, but Medic was grimly brandishing a bonesaw and having at it with the enemy Engineer while their Demoman shot pill-shaped bombs in an arc over a dividing wall. Something exploded, the enemy Engineer looked back instinctively, and Medic swung his saw. It connected with the meat of his target’s neck and he pulled, dousing himself in blood. He stood back, satisfied and panting, and Constance could only stand there and watch. She was vaguely aware that she was supposed to be down there, helping , it was not her job to dumbly stand here and gaze at the proceedings like an indifferent deity. But she seemed somewhat paralyzed, her mouth hanging ajar, watching fixedly at what was happening. Medic had stowed his saw and was focusing the beam on Demoman. The bodies of the enemy Scout and Engineer had disappeared, somehow. Constance noticed distantly that their Engineer had appeared below her, and was squatting again, setting up several metal toolboxes which proceeded to unfold and expand rapidly. He stood, pushing his hard hat backwards with one hand, and glanced upwards. He started when he saw her standing up there by the railing, and opened his mouth to say something. Constance did not hear it.

At once, she was in the respawn room, and there was an iron taste in her mouth. She blinked, shaking her head like a wet dog. What had happened? How did she get here? Oddly, she couldn’t remember.

It was a further shock when Scout materialized next to her, on all fours. “Fuck,” he spat instantly, and spotted her. Constance felt unnerved with the way he was glaring at her, and so stumbled out of the room, accidentally stepping right on the glowing, spinning disk Engineer had set up - and then she was somewhere else, there was a lot of beeping and whirring and she had popped up right next to a gigantic turret. 

“Alright?” Engineer asked distractedly, busy fiddling with something that was emitting…emitting the glorious beam! “Their Sniper nailed you. You better get going, I think they’re trying to push forward up ahead.”

Constance was terrifically disoriented and dizzy. She had died , evidently, for the first time since Miss Pauling had wanted to test the respawn system, and then she had somehow teleported across the map? And Spy had re-materialized out of thin air next to her, lighting a cigarette while the beam slowly knit up a gash across this abdomen that had stained his suit? What on Earth was going on? All of this technology…did the rest of the mercenaries know about it and she was the only one that didn’t? There was a loud explosion somewhere in the distance, and while Spy and Engineer barely flinched, Constance shrank down, closer to the wonderful beam-emitting machine. Spy gave her a strange, derisive look.

I am not like you, she wanted to scream, hoarse, like a cornered animal. I did not sign up for this . But she had, hadn’t she? This was her job now, and she had nowhere else to go. She had to stay, and to stay she had to fire the weapon clutched in her gloved hands. She had to earn her place here, no matter that death was happening all around her and at any moment she could be next. She had become immortal, had she not?

Her first kill was an act of complete surprise. When she stepped out around the corner, the enemy Medic was standing there, looking frantically behind him. Evidently he had become separated from whoever he was with, and Constance reacted instinctively, fearfully - she squeezed the trigger, and a tongue of flame erupted from the business end of her flamethrower. She watched in fascination as it engulfed the Medic, as it melted and bubbled his skin and clothes and how he screamed in utter, absolute agony. It took much less time than Constance expected for him to die, but then, he might’ve passed out from pain and shock. She looked at the smoldering form of his corpse, his face twisted in pain, and watched beautiful, glittering, iridescent beetles come out of the ground to perch on his limbs. 

“Ach-” she heard, a noise uttered in the sort of hurried, horrid way that one speaks when they are trying rapidly to move away from something that is causing nausea. Constance turned in time to see Demoman turning on his heel and going back the way he had come. She could hear him muttering to Engineer, things like I’m going to be sick and that’s beyond evil, that . His comments filled her with a strange sort of excitement. Constance had killed people before, accidentally at first and then maybe a little intentionally, but not like this…this deliberate, face-to-face execution. And she was allowed, asked, encouraged to do it. It was less about that and more about the opportunities to free the flame from the belly of the metal beast that resided in her arms; to see it spurt out and ignite gave her a wild, childish joy. It was life itself.

It was much easier to get going after that.

Of course, she had her fair share of deaths that became more and more disorienting. It seemed that the more violent the death, the more she remembered it (or her body did). There was sometimes a tingle between her shoulder blades or on her forehead and Constance could not remember at all what happened, but she came unfortunately face-to-face with the enemy Heavy or Soldier more often than not and the way her body was shredded with bullets or blown to smithereens seemed to carry on a sort of muscle memory. Her entire body would ache, almost as if in plea, but every time she marched back out the door and did it again. Constance learned quickly that a quick death was something to hope for, but sometimes the enemy team would not be so kind about dishing out a speedy respawn. The enemy Spy, for instance, seemed fond of slashing a gut wound and then leaving his prey to die in a curled position on the floor. Constance elicited a savage pleasure by learning just how long to keep the direct stream of flame on a member of RED before turning away, leaving them to burn to death, and in some cases beg for her to finish it. 

Despite the activities that Constance was busying herself with during the match, it came as a shock when the Voice came over the speakers and announced crisply that BLU team had lost. A second later, Constance was no longer looking at the enemy Soldier barreling around the corner with a gleam in his eye and was looking around at the rest of her team in the respawn room. There was a lot of muttering and dejected looks.

“Well,” Engineer started, “Can’t say I ain’t disappointed, but it was a good start, we learned a lot-”

“Learned?” Scout spluttered, his face turning red. “We didn’t learn nothing except how shitty we are! Like, I was all alone up there! How about some backup next time?”

“Maybe if you didn’t keep getting yourself blown to smithereens every five seconds, a hold could have been established,” Spy said coolly.

“Okay, now, no one’s to blame-” Engineer attempted to butt in, raising his hands, but Scout talked louder.

“Oh yeah? Bet it’s easy to be critical when your job is to slink around invisible the entire goddamn time! I’m the one taking bullets, I bet I was killed the most out of anybody!”

“That isn’t a badge of honor, laddie,” Demoman said quietly, and maybe only Soldier was supposed to hear, but Medic chortled and suddenly there was a lot of yelling and insulting and flying fists. Constance had not said anything at all (they wouldn’t have even understood her if she did), she simply stood in the corner next to Sniper, who was wearing a bemused, repulsed expression, and watched. But it seemed as if Scout had been waiting for an occasion to insult her, and suddenly he was in front of her, pointing his finger in her face while the tussle of limbs went on behind him.

“And you ,” he spat, “where were you? You were supposed to be up front helping me and Soldier, and what, you’re just standing there like you’re stupid or something?”

Constance did not answer. A cold fire was washing over her, licking at her nerves in an unpleasant, shifty way, and the taste of grape was unwelcome and too sweet in her mouth. Scout’s head looked so red it could have been a lollipop. 

“Do you even understand me in there?” Jab . “Do you know English?” Jab . “Fucking freak.”

Constance’s gloved hand shot out and seized Scout’s wrist. At once, she brought her other hand up to seize his elbow, and yanked backwards on his hand. His arm broke with an audible snap .

“ DON’T ,” she screamed, “Call me a freak!”

Oh, she wanted to do much worse. She wanted to thread her fingers through Scout’s hair and hold him to the nozzle of her flamethrower and watch him fucking melt . He was howling, clutching his arm, and the rest of the mercenaries were looking at the two of them, stunned, the spell broken. Heavy, whose hands were wrapped around Soldier’s neck, dropped him on the floor. 

“He broke my fucking arm!” Scout was sobbing and half-shouting, unnecessarily. “He’s fucking crazy!”

Constance decided she had heard enough. She was feeling strange, from the way that they were looking at her. Her eyes stung with tears and her face felt hot, and so she turned abruptly and left the room, still clutching her flamethrower. She could hear Scout wailing behind her, and Medic shushing him.

“A fucking freak!” he was exclaiming to anyone who would listen. “Why the hell is he even on the team?”

It was unsurprising that team relations seemed to sour quite a bit after that.

Gone were the hastily-erected team meals that most of the mercenaries had participated in before the first match. Constance had never participated anyway, but now she could not help but notice that the mercenaries either ate alone or in pairs, usually spread out across the base. The way they all eyed one another was clearly mistrustful, full of resentment. She picked up on snatches of conversation and gathered that contrary to what she had assumed, not everyone on BLU team was a seasoned killer. And even if they were, none of them were used to working on a team. However, as usual, they seemed united in that they were all now more suspicious of Constance than ever before.

She attempted to avoid Scout whenever possible, but he seemed to be everyone, whispering nastily to his team members that he had been insulting only a few days ago. He’d speak to Soldier in a loud voice in the hallway - didn’t he attack you, huh? Didn’t he hit you with a frying pan for no fucking reason ? He talked to Sniper in the kitchen - did you see what he does out there? Fucking burns people and leaves them to die? 

Only Engineer, for some bizarre reason, seemed to come to Constance’s defense. She was walking down the hall late at night on her way to the showers (she only went when she was sure that everyone was asleep, now more than ever), and overheard him talking in a low voice to Medic at one of their strategy meetings. 

“He was provoked, Medic, you know it,” Engineer said softly, “and, well, you can’t deny we haven’t exactly been the friendliest to him.”

“Herr Scout wishes him off the team,” Medic commented idly. Constance was still unsure why he had not revealed her gender, and the only conclusion she could fearfully draw is that he was waiting to drop this information when it suited him. “I disagree that he is ineffective, but I cannot deny that he does seem a bit…troubled.”

“That don’t matter, as long as he’s doing his job. Which he is. No worse than anyone else. The problem is we ain’t operating as a team.”

“You try and talk to them,” Medic said breezily. “They are all a bunch of heathens. Try and talk strategy one more time, and you will short-circuit their brains. I am tired of doing it. They are impossible to organize.”

Engineer did not reply, and Constance continued to slink down the hall like a noiseless shadow. So what if they didn’t like her. She was not here to be liked. If anything, it was better…if they did not like her and wanted to stay far away from her, they would not want to know about who she was or how she had come to be there. She would not be asked to share the information friends usually shared with one another. Constance knew she could handle Scout, the little twerp. He did not scare her. She had bigger and badder things to worry about than the likes of him, and if they were scared of her, they’d all leave her alone…

But as she stood under the shower spray, in the dark, Constance did not feel as confident as she wanted. She did not like it at all that Medic knew information about her. He knew she was a girl and had a lot of burns, and how many other girls like that were there? It wouldn’t take much digging to find news stories about her. Constance wrapped her arms around herself and leaned her forehead against the cold tile. She always chose the stall at the back of the room and kept an ear out for any sound. She hadn’t exactly imagined this job would be the most fun in the world, but she was rather miserable. It was really tiring, always looking over her shoulder, and now she had to do it here too. 

But maybe, she thought, maybe Medic didn’t know she was a girl? Maybe she had dreamed it…yes, that entire thing had seemed like a really bad dream. It was Scout that knew. Constance was convinced. It was why he was tormenting her, being so nasty, because he knew. He knew her secret, he knew her mother, he had probably called her and couldn’t resist gleefully taunting her while her mother was on the way. He could have gotten her phone number from the television or newspaper. Yes, that seemed right. Her fingers curled into fists, the scar tissue stretching painfully. She would not let him intimidate her, threaten her…no, she would make him call her mother right back and tell him he had been mistaken! And if that did not work, Constance would be gone, and Scout would be left to face her mother’s wrath. The more she thought about it, the more excited she became. Yes, this was a good plan!

Constance barreled down the hall of the base. It was the middle of the night at this point, but she was wide awake and enjoying chasing the little yellow butterflies that illuminated her path. However, she slowed…she wasn’t exactly sure which door was Scout’s, she had never seen him going in and out of one of the identical doors that lined the hall, and anyone else would probably be very angry if she woke them for no reason. She stood there in the hall and fidgeted before choosing to bang on a door at random.

It was Heavy. He was wearing a tasseled sleeping cap and loomed there silently in the doorway, gazing down at her with an unreadable expression.

“Yes?”

Constance made an extreme effort to enunciate the word Scout .

“Do not understand.”

What did it matter if she had to bang on every door in the place until she found Scout, this was a matter of life or death! 

Heavy seemed to realize it was not him she wanted, and backed into his room, closing the door with a soft click . Constance was pretty sure that Soldier’s door had the boots outside of it and she had seen Spy coming out of this one…she took another random guess, and got lucky. It was Scout, rubbing his eyes and looking around blearily.

“Wha…? Oh…it’s you.”

This was her chance!!!!

Constance pushed into him, and Scout was forced to back up. Constance reached out to throw the door shut behind them. They were about the same height, and she could see the terror in his eyes as he uttered some unintelligible plea. She was not surprised to see that his room was messy, covered in comics and drawings and baseball mitts. He tripped over a stray bat and landed hard on his ass, looking up at her and raising a trembling hand. 

“Hey, h-hey, wait! I’m sorry, okay! I was a jerk, I know it, Engineer already let me know…please don’t hurt me!”

“Did you call my mother?” she asked.

“I can’t understand you,” he said hastily, nervously. “I dunno what you’re saying.”

“Did you call my mother? ”

“I don’t understand,” he said again. “Look, Pyro, I’m sorry for what I said…it wasn’t right for me to say those things about you. I was being an asshole. I never…I never meant anything by it, I wasn’t seriously trying to get you off the team.”

“I don’t care about that,” she said impatiently, “did you call my mother or not?”

“Yo, take the mask off or something, I really can’t understand you!”

Take the mask off . Yes, that would be what he wanted…but she could just lift it a little, so he could hear her…and she could make her voice low and gravelly…she had to know.

Scout looked at her with pure fear as her gloved fingers worked at the neck of the mask. It was very dark in the room, so he could not see anything her hands did not cover. Her voice issued out from beneath the mask, rasping and deep, without much effort to change it from its natural tone. Constance had not realized how much her voice had changed, it sounded throaty and addled. 

“Did you call,” she managed to say, before a hacking cough overtook her. 

“Did I call ?” Scout asked, indignantly, doubtfully, staring at her. “No, no, I didn’t call anyone. You gotta make an appointment to speak with the Administrator, and you gotta talk to Miss Pauling first…and she asks you why, and when I said…she wouldn’t let me,” he finished lamely. “I’ve since cooled down, okay? I didn’t call anyone. Can’t even call my own mother without them listening on the other line and having me call at the ass crack of dawn, I ain’t calling anyone that I don’t have to.”

He was rambling, clearly attempting to convince her and escape certain death or mauling. Despite her furious anger at him, Constance’s confidence was quailing. If Miss Pauling was involved on every phone call…well, she knew all about Constance’s mother, didn’t she? She wouldn’t let Scout call her. She wouldn’t let Scout kick her off the team.

Suddenly, the door was opening behind them, Constance felt the rush of air. She turned to see Heavy, filling the doorway, and looking slightly irritated. Evidently he had been summoned by Scout’s whining. He looked back and forth between them, at Scout on the floor and Constance standing over him. Scout scrambled to his feet.

“Is time to sleep,” Heavy rumbled. “Can talk tomorrow.”

He was looking at her.

Scout did not say anything as Heavy moved to allow Constance to exit the room, and she had the sense that he was watching her, ensuring that she went back to her own room. Constance heard both doors click shut a minute later, and stood next to her bed, looking at the flamethrower resting on her pillow. The metal of it glinted in the moonlight coming in through the window. She was suddenly really angry and sad all at the same time, and wanted to burst into tears. Her face burned and prickled and the rubber suit felt hot and stifling and restrictive. It seemed to cling to her as she fought to get it off, and she lay crying silently in bed, her door triple-locked, feeling her tears dry on her cheeks in the stale air. Would it become harder to take off the longer she kept it on? Constance already missed it. Feeling so much air on her skin, the texture of the sheets…it was too much, too overstimulating. She felt stupid, then, really stupid, like Scout had said. What was wrong with her? He would really try and kick her off the team now. She was fucking it up, massively. Why hadn’t she stopped to think for a second before being so sure he was out to get her? But it was still fuzzy, she was still a little unsure…it was hard to keep track of who knew what, or what she had said and hadn’t said and thought and hadn’t thought. Constance clutched at her head, her fingers threading through her hair. It was a little longer now, and she could pull at it, but she dared not pull too hard lest her skull split and whatever fragments of her mind she was barely clinging to escaped for good. 

Chapter Text

They still weren’t winning any matches at the end of the week, but they were at least not losing so badly to RED. This was a fact that did not seem to permeate through the thick fog that hung around Constance’s head. It did not really matter who won or lost, she thought privately, they were all getting paid either way. But not everyone on BLU seemed to care as little as she. They were getting a little better at working together, more adequate at formulating and carrying out strategy, something that seemed to satisfy Engineer and Medic very much. They could often rope more and more of the mercenaries into a discussion about tactics, but Constance still slunk around and kept to herself. A positive that came out of her fuck-up regarding Scout, she supposed, was that he was most definitely leaving her alone. He wasn’t even being snippy about it, making any sort of whispered comments or snide faces. In fact, Scout’s expressions were wide and blank when Constance was around, as if he hoped by going utterly still she would pick new, more active prey and overlook him. She found she did not really care about this change in behavior. In fact, maybe a bit of rivalry would have kept her on her toes, instead of this… neutrality , this pretending that she did not exist, this overlooking of a particularly unpleasant part of BLU team that he had to bear, like a bad smell. 

Constance had been thinking about her counterpart on RED. They’d come face to face by now, of course. It was obviously impossible to see anything of real note, they wore the same uniform as she. Even if they were a girl, they were sworn enemies, and it wasn’t exactly like she would suddenly have a buddy to commiserate with. Despite this, Constance couldn’t help her curiosity. Their clashes were usually short, impatient. Their twin flameproof suits usually led to irritation-fueled shotgun blasts or hacking away at each other, sweaty and heaving, with honed axes. One time when she had been the victor Constance staggered over to pick numbly at the severed limbs with her thick-gloved fingers, trying to discern if she could see anything of detail, but soon blood loss got to her and she swayed on her feet before sailing to meet the ground. Maybe knowing more would have made her feel less alone, but fate seemed determined to keep that information from her grasp.

Now that Engineer seemed to have won some ground of his own inside the BLU base regarding getting more of the mercenaries interested in strategy, he seemed to have decided to Constance’s dismay that she was to be his next project. He actually had the audacity to start knocking on her door at mealtimes, standing there with a big smile that did not waver even when she slammed the door in his face. Why did he care so much if she came to eat, anyways? It was suspicious, if Constance thought about it. Maybe he was working together with Medic to get her out of her room, and as soon as she was, Medic would go poking around in her belongings. It was suspicious how Medic imitated Scout in being blank-faced around her, too. If they were trying to hide something, they weren’t doing a very good job of it!

The one mercenary that Constance did not mind too much was Sniper. He was one of the mercenaries that additionally did not seem to be craving the company of the others, but unlike Spy, he was not pompous or snobby or anything like that. He simply was , just sort of there as a silent, observant fixture, like a tall lamp. One day Constance was eating her breakfast outside (the rest of a bag of chips Scout had left in the kitchen), hastily cramming handfuls into her mouth underneath the neck of her mask, when she suddenly became aware that she was not alone. She felt herself bristle like a startled, angry cat, but it was only Sniper, who had come to lean against the wall and sip his coffee silently. Constance watched him with narrowed eyes, muscles taut, ready to spring at any moment. But he did not attempt conversation, just stood there and merely drank and after a while she relaxed a little. He was quiet like Heavy, but she felt quite a lot more confident about tussling with Sniper, if needed. Heavy was someone that Constance knew instinctively she should not tangle with, not if she was attempting to avoid a broken back. Scout, Demoman, and Soldier were too loud, Medic frightened her, Engineer was too cheerful and Spy was too irritating. She would never call Sniper her friend, but they just sort of existed in the same space together, which was more than Constance could say for anyone else. Of course, she wondered about him. It was easy for her to observe through her mask, without others being aware that she was looking. What was his story? Pointless to wonder, Constance, you aren’t here to make friends. It seemed that they were at least similar in the way he felt about the others as she did. That was a small comfort, a tiny spark that she was not entirely alone. 

Constance was standing in the kitchen at three in the afternoon. Slumping, really, against the door of the open fridge. She was sore and aching from the day’s match (they had come kind of close to winning, but still brought home no bacon) and unfortunately respawn did nothing about her physical sensations, such as muscle aches or hunger. There was nothing premade to filch and it was hard to focus on what she wanted to do when she did not feel very well. She was a little light-headed and dizzy and so did not notice Engineer come into the kitchen while she stood there with her eyes shut tight.

“Pyro!” He said brightly and clearly. They had all long learned to warn her loudly from far away when they came into the room. 

Great . Who else ate lunch at three? Constance shut the door of the fridge with some effort and turned around to look at him.

“Hungry? I didn’t see you at lunch,” Engineer informed her, as if this was an unusual occurrence. “Hey, speaking of food…I think we’re putting in an order tomorrow for the week’s rations, and I notice that you never put anything on, so…”

He was holding out a clipboard. Constance stood there motionlessly, her brows furrowed in surprise and confusion. They could request food? Miss Pauling had never mentioned it. Or maybe she had, and Constance had forgotten. That was more likely. She sighed, deeply, and reached out to take the clipboard. There was a bunch of scribbled writing on it, and check marks next to boxes and numbers. What was she supposed to be putting? What would she even ask for? Ummmmm….

Engineer was watching her closely. “You can ask for anything,” he offered helpfully. “They won’t always get it, but worth asking. What kind of things do you like to eat?”

What did she like to eat? 

Constance shut her eyes again. Oh, she could remember all too well when all she had to do was show up and sit down, and silver plates and bowls and tureens of mouthwatering dishes materialized in front of her at every meal. Of course, there had been the years she spent gnawing on thrown-out apple cores and whatever else she could scavenge or steal, and then briefly towards the end, home-cooked food again…but those years were fuzzier and harder to remember than the beginning. That was frustrating. The struggling had not mattered, because she had been free …it was not fair that what she remembered most clearly was what she wished dearly to forget. A pang of hunger rolled through her, an intense cramp that made all the blood rush to her head. 

“How about,” Engineer was saying, taking the clipboard back gently, “I’ll just add some extra of this and that. Do you like to cook, Pyro? Or are you a microwave meal kind of guy?”

She was getting overwhelmed and part of her just wanted to push past him and leave. Constance shrugged violently. No, she couldn’t cook, and it was embarrassing. Why on Earth would she have ever needed to learn how when she was younger and being waited on hand and foot, and there hadn’t exactly been ample opportunity when she was out in the wild! Constance was well enough aware that every other mercenary probably cooked, and did their own laundry, and knew how to do taxes.

“That’s just fine,” Engineer said kindly. “Pancakes are real easy, for instance, and you can make them morning and night. Be happy to show you if you ever want.”

He knew too much. He had observed that she had not touched the cooktop in all the time they’d been here. Something light and spidery had its fingers on the back of her neck, creeping and crawling and tracing patterns of warning. Constance did not understand why he would go out of his way to be nice to her unless he wanted something in return or he was trying to find something out about her. 

But not Nora, something inside her piped up. Nora never asked for anything in return .

But Nora had tried to find something out about her.

Memories began to flow like sticky, dark molasses. Nora, with her twin graying braids and her park ranger uniform. She had a pudgy stomach and a sort of wiry, older woman strength. She had lots of laugh lines and there was often dirt underneath her fingernails and was everything Constance’s mother was not. Nora, towards the end, who had found Constance deep in her woods and left food for her and eventually Constance came to live with her, like a wild animal lured out of a dingy alleyway. They’d really had something good, just the two of them against the world. Nora never asked for anything. She did not care that Constance was hiding and did not want to be found. They had fun and laughed together and Constance had felt that she could stay with Nora forever, why would anything ever need to change? But one day Constance had come back from a walk in the woods, her lantern held aloft, and saw Nora through the window on the phone, anxiously winding the phone cord around her finger. She could see very well the way Nora’s lips formed Constance’s name, her last name, clearly and slowly. Several times. And then, finally, slow-motion horror movie, thank you, Mrs. Harlow .

Noooooooooooooooo.

What had she done to make Nora give her up and call Constance’s mother, Constance would never know. She did not know how much money Nora had been offered. She did not like to remember what happened next. She squirmed under the memory of how she had stormed in there, blind with rage, thrown the lantern and screamed and screamed and how thin and brittle Nora’s neck had felt under her hands. Had those months together meant nothing, she had screamed, you were supposed to be my mom . Some time later the little house had burned so much that the big beam overhead came down over Constance’s head, and she lay down next to Nora’s big, wide and unseeing eyes, and not for the first time, wished for death. But the same thin cord tugging her along throughout life, making her dig through the trash for scraps of food and drinking water from rivers was not frayed yet, and she yet lived. 

Constance realized she was crying silently, and Engineer had left the room. She started, disoriented and too warm and upset and sticky with tears. There was a shiny red apple and a bag of chips on the counter, clearly waiting for her. She was too hungry to refuse the food, but as she ate in her room and ignored the million green worms that sprouted and danced from the apple, or the poison gas that came from the chip bag, she hated Engineer very much in that moment. She would not be so stupid again.

Despite her resolution to stay firmly away from him, that was not exactly what happened during their next match. Constance had nothing personal against the dispenser, after all, and its wonderful beam. It was not right to include it in her policy of ignoring its creator. However, she was noticing that in this match Engineer seemed to be dead a lot and his buildings were in pieces quite frequently, which was disruptive to her objective of enjoying the beam. He seemed angry and irritated and she heard him complaining bitterly that the enemy Soldier was having a good bit of target practice. However, even when he moved spots the same fate befell him. The Soldier’s rockets seemed to find him like heat-seeking missiles. Their team was having some trouble moving up, and so the Engineer was forced to perform a sort of miserable back-and-forth between defensible positions. Constance did not like this, either. She had already been blown to pieces enough, and sometimes upon respawning her joints ached terribly for a brief moment, as if remembering the way they were forced to knit back together after being atomized. 

After one occasion of having barely made it out of a fight with the enemy Heavy, being forced to dance around him but still ending up with plenty of lead embedded in her leg, Constance stood by the dispenser, breathing heavily and with severe annoyance. Suddenly, Engineer’s sentry beeped urgently and snapped to attention, firing off a round of rockets at an unseen foe. Engineer grimaced and held his wrench, seeming reluctant to meet certain death so soon after his last. Constance did not blame him. In fact, she blamed the enemy Soldier. She was not sure if she was just simply irritated as well and wishing for a welcome delay in the form of a trip to respawn, but she held her flamethrower and marched to the sentry with purpose. Maybe a little, tiny, squidgy bit of her motivation was that Engineer had kept dying over and over. Shiny red apple. Bag of chips. The offer of pancakes.

“Careful, Pyro!” Engineer shouted, but no , she was done with careful, she was going to get a visual and then go melt his face off from the flank. But unexpectedly, the enemy Soldier was much closer than Constance realized, grinning meanly and advancing on them, reloading his rocket launcher. There was no time to turn tail and run, he would smite her where she stood. Constance could only hope that he was close enough. He fired and she pulled the trigger and her finger slipped off the trigger to…to another trigger, she could feel it, to the left, it was slightly thicker, and a massive blast of air emanated from the business end of her flamethrower. It happened incredibly quickly and suddenly she was being rained in bits of enemy Soldier. 

Engineer had come to repair the sentry in the midst of the distraction, and he let out a high whistle. “I don’t know what that was, Pyro, but thank you much!”

She had killed him with his own rocket!!! She could use the air in her suit’s tank…oh, it drained the fuel some, but this was a thrilling revelation! Constance could not help it, she let out a whoop and felt positively giddy, inhaling the mouthwatering smell of warm pancakes. Oh, if she got to them before they knew what was coming…well, only Soldier and Demoman and maybe the enemy Engineer too, there wasn’t much else she could think to reflect, but still ! This was an advantage! 

It was an advantage that the enemy team caught on to quicker than Constance would have liked. Evidently this was something that their own Pyro had figured out already, but Constance did not care. It enabled her to be more aggressive without getting slaughtered in return for her boldness. Yes, she had to time it just right, but it was just as sweet seeing the horrified looks on her enemies’ faces as the surprised ones on the faces of her own team. It seemed that a few other mercenaries were having a particularly good day, and they emboldened one other. They were actually doing really well, and then before Constance knew it, they had won . The few of them left alive on the big point stood in stunned silence, as if the Voice had made a mistake. Then Scout started whooping and he actually clapped her on the back, recoiling a minute later as if realizing what he’d done, but Constance only looked at him and grinned, although he could not see. He seemed to take the lack of an axe buried in his skull as a good sign, however, and shot her a smile before jogging forward to fist-bump Medic. 

Despite how much she had thought she had not cared…! This was an amazing feeling. They really felt like a team as they trooped back to spawn, going over top plays and highlights and Constance felt rather bashful as Engineer recounted the story of her first airblast for the third time. Medic was pumping his fist, wild-eyed, and saying something eagerly to Heavy about the success of their new strategy, and even Spy did not look so cranky. Constance was so swept up in the energy of the team that she went right to the dinner table with the rest of them. It only hit her smack-dab in the face when her ass touched the hard wooden seat through the thick rubber of her suit and the noise of chatter seemed to swell in the tiny room around her. Constance began to sweat, furtively looking from side to side and going very still. Had they noticed she was still there, in their midst, an impostor that was usually the furthest away when this hour came around?
Apparently not. Demoman was dealing out a pack of cards like he did it all the time (and maybe he did, Constance certainly wouldn’t know) and he gave her a pointed, questioning glance that unmistakably meant are you in?

Constance shook her head quickly. “I’ll just watch,” she said, though of course he could not understand her. It seemed the message came across anyway, and she instead watched Soldier next to her as he grunted and fanned out his hand. She had no idea what they were playing, but he had a mix of threes, fours, and sevens, and surely that could not be very good. 

“Pyro, you wanna come help me if you’re not playing?” Engineer called from the stovetop, and glad for an excuse, Constance scuttled out of her seat and across the kitchen. She was not exactly sure what he expected her to do, but he lifted an elbow towards a cutting board with some bright red tomatoes and a head of lettuce on it. Engineer was busy pushing some ground meat bubbling in its own fat back and forth in a pan with a spatula, and flipping tortillas expertly in another pan with just two fingers. Constance watched him in stunning admiration.

“Chop all that, please,” he said, kindly. There was a knife waiting on the cutting board, and Constance took it with one gloved hand. She tilted it so she could see the warped view of her own reflection in the blade, and a loud burst of laughter came from behind her. She twisted her head around to see Soldier pulling down on the dangling straps of his helmet, grimacing, and Scout looking altogether too proud of himself. She turned to look at Engineer, who was chucking to himself and watching the proceedings. He flipped another tortilla. 

Constance did not understand him. Her heart felt like a fireplace that had gone cold and dark of any fuel, and these intrusions were like someone sparking a lighter but it just wouldn’t take, there was nothing to burn. She didn’t understand him but she didn’t want to disappoint him, and not because she was afraid (well, a little bit, but less afraid of him than everyone else) but because maybe he felt a bit like kindling. She chopped the tomatoes and lettuce carefully, studiously. The pieces, despite her best efforts, were a bit uneven and messy, but Engineer just smiled and thanked her and asked her to get the cheese from the fridge. 

When they were all done cooking (and she had helped! ) Constance took her plate of tacos to her room. It made her feel a bit melancholy to chew in the silence when she could hear everyone laughing in the dining room, but the food was really good, and she licked her gloved fingers. It tasted like something Nora would have made, full of flavor and spices, and the heat of the tacos made her nose run. Sniper had left to eat his dinner on his own too, but he was already back when Constance tentatively wandered into the kitchen, having a beer and playing cards. Scout was muttering to himself as he flicked through hazy channels on the beaten-up television set, evidently banished from cards. She stood there with her empty plate, and Engineer rose from his seat and came to take it from her.

“You enjoyed that, huh? You want any more, or are you full?”

The way he was looking at her, his blue eyes open and patient, made her own fill with sudden, hot tears. She could have eaten a horse, but she could only shake her head and sit down into his recently-vacated seat. He didn’t seem to mind, and took another across the table when he’d put her plate in the sink, the dishes left for someone to do later. No one offered to deal her in, perhaps too full and lazy and tired to teach her the rules, but that was okay. Constance simply sat and watched and felt herself relax, tiny inch by tiny inch, because maybe she could be a little bit like a lamp too - in the corner, but still there, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if every now and then someone appreciated it. 

Chapter Text

“Flip it now,” Engineer said, and gestured towards the spatula, but Constance did not have the best peripheral vision, and did not see the motion. She seized the handle of the pan and wrenched it upwards in her haste to obey. The half-cooked pancake sailed out of its pool of sizzling butter and landed wet-side up on the ceiling with a splat, sticking firmly.

Engineer’s mouth was an O of surprise, and instantly Constance felt her stomach curdle with shame and embarrassment. They were the only ones in the kitchen, she’d only agreed to his lesson if they were to be alone, but it felt like she was being laughed at by an entire crowd anyways. Her shame made way for anger, and she felt her shoulders rise around her ears. This was difficult to learn, too difficult. Had Engineer done this on purpose, to make her look a fool?

“Flippin’ ‘em with the pan takes some time to learn,” he said, smiling. “Don’t worry. You’ll get there, but maybe let’s just stick to the spatula for now, yeah? The, uh…the underside of it looks great. Perfectly cooked. Hopefully that’ll come down on Scout’s head later.”

He huffed a laugh at his own joke, and before she could help it, Constance did too. She saw Engineer’s eyes flick to her mask, but he only gestured for her to fill the pan with a scoop of pancake batter again.

While they stood there and watched it sizzle, Constance enjoyed the opportunity to study Engineer without him knowing about it. She had been expecting him to knock on her door, well, really any other time than Saturday morning. This was his recreational time too, and surely he had something better to do than what she usually did with her free time, which consisted of taking walks around the base or being shut up in her room or watching cartoons if the television was free. They were the easiest thing to follow on the screen and the pretty colors were soothing. It was after breakfast, so she had a full belly of bacon and sausage and eggs, and then the rest of the mercenaries had dispersed for the day. Engineer seemed sociable. Constance was not, and so was suspicious that he was not trying to have an animated conversation with her of the kind that he had with Medic, even if she was unlikely to respond. 

“Flip,” he said, and gestured to the pan. This time, Constance grabbed the spatula and shoved it underneath the pancake in one fluid movement, twisting her wrist. The pancake flopped back down in the pan with a renewed sizzle.

“Perfect! Hey, look at that!” Engineer crowed, and made a motion to clap her on the back, but seemed to think better of it. “Great job, Pyro.”

“I smell pancakes,” came Scout’s interested tone from the doorway of the kitchen. They both twisted around to look at him. He was wearing high white socks that were streaked with grass stains, and his ball cap was on backwards. “You gonna share?”

“You can’t still be hungry, boy,” Engineer scoffed good-naturedly.

“I’m workin’ up an appetite out there,” came the defensive reply. “Forgot my water, too.”

“You playin’ baseball?”

“Tryin’ to. Demo’s drunk already and Soldier keeps wanderin’ off.” Scout strode over to the cabinets, reaching up to retrieve his plastic water bottle from a high shelf. His shirt rose to reveal an expanse of toned stomach, and then there was the shhhhh of the sink as he filled his bottle. Sweat clung to his skin like he’d been out in the rain.

“Maybe Pyro will come play when we’re done here,” Engineer suggested airily. “How about it? The great American pastime?”

Constance did not like knowing that they were both standing there expectantly, waiting for her to respond, their eyes roving over her like starving beasts about to rip and tear. She didn’t know how to play baseball and would surely only embarrass herself. Her gloved fingers curled around the spatula so tightly the grip squeaked. 

“You can take that one out,” Engineer added, more softly. He nudged the plate that already held his own cooling and perfect example closer to the burner. Constance dutifully shoved the spatula under the pancake and deposited it on top of Engineer’s, hoping that Scout would leave. She turned her mask to the side jerkily to see if this was true - no luck. She then shook her head and flung off the droplets of greenish acid that had begun to slide down the curves of her treated lenses.

“Maybe another time,” Engineer said gently on Constance’s behalf.

“Yeah, whatever.” Scout shrugged. “I can teach you if you don’t know how to play,” he added, in case this was the deterrent, a mote of hope detectable in his voice.

Constance seized the still-steaming pancake with force, her grip nearly returning it to batter, and shoved it in Scout’s direction. She looked at the ceiling and gazed at the ooze that collected in the lines between the ceiling tiles, that condensed, that would drip onto Engineer’s shiny near-bald head and onto Scout’s crew cut, that would eat through her mask, that would expose her, that with luck would go straight through hair and skin and muscle and fat and leave only bone, a gaping eye socket with which to look out of; in the end indistinguishable from them all.

Scout had stuffed the pancake into his mouth. “Mmph,” he said, his eyes wide, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s really good.”

“Close your mouth when you chew, boy. Ain’t you ever learn any manners?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Scout’s hand shot out as fast as a piston to snatch the other pancake, and he trotted out of the kitchen, his water bottle tucked under his arm.

Engineer sighed. “All right, Pyro, let’s add some more butter and you can repair Scout’s damage with a few more. What did you even need me for? You’re great at this.”

Constance basked in his compliment with prickling fervor. If Engineer noticed the way that she sprung into action when he spoke like she was one of his machines, fine-tuned to his directive, he did not comment. At work, she liked to stick to him, she liked to make sure that he was well and good. He appreciated the sweep of her fire to make sure the enemy Spy was not lingering somewhere close to his nest; he would whistle and cheer when she was a severe deterrent to an enemy Soldier or Demoman that seemed keen to destroy his hard work, but this attachment was beginning to seep out from under the closed door of shift time and was starting to leak into personal time, like an overflowing toilet. 

Engineer was confident and calm. He was very intelligent. Constance most admired that he rarely felt the need to raise his voice, even when he was arguing, good-naturedly or otherwise, he was fond of smiling and shrugging and letting his teammates wear themselves out; maybe it could be seen as a sort of arrogance but Constance didn’t think so. Nora had been like that, a little, she had seen and done a lot and she was often right-

-except when she had betrayed Constance, that had been so opposite of right it had stunned her like she’d had a cattle prod smashed into her eye socket, it had made her question everything Nora had ever said and done-

-no, no, she could not think about Nora right now, and least of all compare her to Engineer. Something else - Medic.

Medic was very smart too, but he was shrill and emotional and fond of rolling his eyes and huffing. He reminded Constance of her mother, sort of, in the terrifying sense that she had always been sure her mother knew everything, that she was a horrifyingly omniscient force, that in the night her fingers would extend and skitter across the floorboards, under Constance’s door, up the side of her bed, under the covers, to caress the tip of her once-beautiful nose, her chin, her lips, and then peel them apart, and then go behind her eyes and in her ears, to pluck at the strings of Constance’s thoughts.

No, she could not think about her mother either. Something else - Heavy was smart. He liked to read a lot in his recreational time, in a different language, and he would play chess with Medic. They were often together, the bulwark of Heavy sure and steady, an observational presence, sort of like her father.. What did he see and not comment on and only share with Medic later? Had Medic already told him that she was a girl? Constance was unsure and it made her a little sick to think about.

Why did so many of her teammates remind her of people she had run ragged miles to get away from? Constance felt a wave of upset rising - in her stomach, an acidic nausea, behind her eyes, a prickle of frustrated tears. The pancakes in the skillet sizzled. Constance had the urge to place her hand flat in the pan instead, just to feel something. Would she smell good, burnt? Did she smell good when she had cooked, before the firemen had pulled her out, before she had been left to cool in a hospital bed, under the influence and swathes of bandages? Had she been the rawest red against the white of everything, the very opposite of sterile, all that she was bared to the world? 

Engineer did not seem surprised when Constance threw the spatula down on the counter and stormed out of the kitchen, leaving him to deal with the pancakes. He had wanted them in the first fucking place, he could make them.

The footfalls she was taking seemed to shudder her head into a little bit of a better shape, and by the time Constance got back to her room she was feeling a little better. She opened her door and sat down on the bed, the mattress springs sagging underneath her weight. The sweat had cooled somewhat on the back of her neck. She felt a little wry. Maybe she would go back to the kitchen and keep making pancakes. What really sounded nice was to go there and put some cartoons on the television; she hoped that no one else would want to watch anything, or if they did she could maybe look at some of Scout’s comics. It would be ideal to get some more things of her own, perhaps she could ask Engineer if this was something she could request on the clipboard. Yes, that was a nice thought. She could have a baseball just like Scout, to hold and caress. Oh - maybe even a stuffed animal! Constance’s steepled fingers fluttered against one another. Maybe she would like to learn how to play baseball. That could be fun, if there was no watching and it was just her and Scout at first - maybe Engineer could be there, and he could smile at them. Her excitement left her a little breathless. 

She was getting up to go when Constance noticed it.

Everything in her room was as she had left it that morning. Everything was as it should be, save for that her flamethrower was tilted very slightly more towards the bed than she had left it. Constance only noticed it because it reflected the overhead light in such a way. In that instant, she felt a sort of natural phenomenon - the crust of the earth, splitting and giving way to searing magma even as the frigid dark sea around it sought to quell its heat. 

Someone had been in her room. Someone had been in her room. Someone had been in her room. Someone had been in her room. Someone had been in her room. Someone had been in her room.

Her room did not lock. Well, it did, from the inside, but Constance did not know where the key was when she was not in it. This had been distressing but it also seemed somewhat clear that none of the mercenaries would dare intrude. But evidently one of them had. One of them had, Constance just knew, and it was with a furious, terrified frenzy that her hands moved about all over her possessions. Nothing had been taken? She did not understand. Nothing else even seemed touched, really. What had they been looking for? Did they find it? There was nothing to steal. There was nothing incriminating - ohhhhhhhhhhh, but there was, there was her closet, her dresser, she was careful but it was her fucking room-!

There was the high-pitched banshee screech of her mother in her head, CONSTANCEPICKUPYOURFUCKINGROOM, there was a discarded pair of Mann Co. issued women’s underwear crumpled in the corner, there was the drawer with her bras, with clean underwear, in her trash can there was the crumpled box of menstrual product packaging! Oh, sometimes, she heard the mercenaries snickering in amusement at her flowery-smelling toiletries, at her pink pajama pants, because she would not begrudge herself these small comforts of things she actually liked, and so ha, ha, like a girl, but they did not actually think she was one. It was something she was glad not to dispel. Whatever the reason, if they did not think that womanfolk could or should or would be found somewhere like here, in this gritty dusty base, in the muck with them, in the blood, whatever, no, she was just odd, she was just strange. But for her to actually be a girl - they would look at her differently. And it would identify her, it would distinguish her, it would extinguish her. Medic knew and Constance was still wary of him. Medic knew, but now someone else did, someone else had done this covertly and secretly and privately. She could think of reasons that any of them would want to know. They were all here for the money, after all, and wouldn’t turning her in make dollar signs flash in anyone’s eyes?

Had Engineer been in on it? Had he been the distraction? Or maybe she had been wrong about Scout. 

She was so angry she breathed like a charging bull, her fists clenching and unclenching, but her head spun so much and Constance was so lightheaded she did not move from her spot. She felt herself drift dizzyingly up to the ceiling on baby-blue clouds of cloying candyfloss. What was she supposed to do? What could she do? She could not kill them. Knowledge slunk sinuously between respawns. Whoever knew, they would know forever. This was a rot she could not cut out. Bruises of color blossomed in her vision and it hurt to look. Constance clapped her hands to her mask, swinging her body as if to throw herself like a battering ram at any physical invader. Instead she spun off-balance and landed on her mattress, her head narrowly missing a collision with the wall. She moaned. Oh, the torture of this was unbearable, she could not breathe around it. It had been stupid, stupid, to let her guard down, to think that anyone, even Engineer, might be her friend!

If Engineer noticed her distance from him on Monday, he did not show it on his face. Instead, he came over to her in the spawn room without hesitation, to where Constance had squirreled herself in the corner, clutching her flamethrower. 

“Hope you had a good Sunday,” he said easily, “Didn’t see ya.”

Yes, because she had been guarding her room like a dog, waiting to bark, waiting to bite!

It was payload today, which meant shoving her shoulder up against a cart, which meant gritting her teeth and sweat in her eyes, which meant good physical labor which distracted her somewhat and kept the colors at bay. Step by step, Constance’s boots dug into the laid track. Push, Medic shouted, and she pushed. Excellent, Herr Pyro! 

She got herself blown up an awful lot that Monday, mostly because she ignored or did not hear the shouts of warning. At one point the impact radius of the enemy Soldier’s missile blasted Constance somewhat close to Enginer’s nest and she sat slumped in a heap against the wall, watching him dully with pennies in her mouth. When he realized she was still alive he beckoned her over, somewhat irritatedly.

“Get yourself fixed up,” he said, when she had shuffled over, woefully unable to resist the beam. Engineer kept his eyes and ears on the sounds of skirmish ahead of them around the corner but glanced at her periodically. “You doin’ okay, Pyro? You seem distracted today.”

Did he think she liked getting blown to bits? Did he think she liked the vague phantom ache of her shoulder through respawn from it being rammed up against the cart, did he think she liked to feel the hoarseness of her own scream in her throat as it ripped out of her lungs? They were fighting a war. They were the honor guard of a bomb that somehow did not miraculously go off in front of them. Was there not enough to think about? He didn’t know her.

Constance muttered something nasty in reply and heaved herself upright.

But as she went to jog back to the cart, to help Heavy, she passed Spy. He gave her an odd sort of look. Spy never stared but the way his eyes slid over Constance this time was different, almost as if he was purposefully disinterested, as if he was purposefully-

“YOU,” Constance hollered, and then she was turning on her heel, her gloved fingers wrapping up in the front of his suit, she was pulling this thin twig of a man towards her, she was shorter but wider and she would snap him.

“Whoa, whoa!” Engineer cried, and Spy snarled something, his hand closing around her wrist, his gun already at her temple. Constance shook him like a leaf until he was blurry. Engineer’s yellow gloved hands - but he was going for Spy’s gun, not for her, shouting at them both to calm down. “Really, now!”

Constance quaked, and then remembered her flamethrower. Spy’s lip curled, but he glanced at it, and she could see that he knew and understood what she meant to do - now, or later. Maybe she would wait until he was nice and comfortable in his bed and then she would cook him and his scream would be like the steam.

“Leash your dog,” Spy snarled at Engineer, before he straightened the lapels of his suit and dematerialized, his voice drifting eerily between them. “He forgets what color the enemy is.”

Constance yanked at the trigger but he was gone already, and Engineer, aghast, watched her empty the tank of fuel.

Engineer approached her again after dinner, with a piece of cake, as perhaps a peace offering. The night was dark and full of crickets. Had they won? Was the team celebrating? Constance didn’t remember. She only knew the hot heavy weight of her head in her hands, the ache of her spine as she sat slumped, outside, willing the desert chill to make her numb to everything.

“Hey,” Engineer said, sitting down next to her. There was the soft clatter of plate and fork. “It’s, uh, Medic’s birthday. I brought you a piece of cake. They’re playing games in there, if you want to join.”

It was Medic’s birthday? Constance felt odd. She glanced at the cake - chocolate and cherry. It did look incredibly appetizing.

“Did Spy do somethin’ to you?” Engineer asked in a low, curt voice. “You seemed a little…well, you know. Ticked off at ‘im, like you were at Scout when he weren’t actin’ right towards you.”

What did he think he was doing, referring to her past like that, as if they had been in on it together, as if they were on the same side? Constance had tensed slightly when she had heard Engineer approach, but now she was boiling mad. She turned her head to stare at him. He, uncomprehending of her expression, offered her a small smile of encouragement, his fork halfway to his own mouth.

“It’s none of your fucking business,” Constance spat.

Engineer’s brow creased. “Sorry, I didn’t…one more time?”

“I hate you,” she said, some of the heat and volume dissipating from her tone.

He shook his head. “Sorry, Pyro. I’m still workin’ at it, but I’ll get there. It sounded like you said somethin’ else, just then. Did I get that, at least?”

She wanted to throttle him. She wanted to kill him, she wanted to perch on his corpse like a gargoyle and pummel it. She did. She did want to.

“Sorry,” Engineer said, and offered a sort of huffed, self-deprecating laugh. “I shouldn’t be all in your beeswax. I have a tendency to stick my nose in problems, even when they ain’t mine to solve.”

There was only the sound of the crickets, and a thin, high whistling of her anger leaving her like oxygen, leaving her lungs deflated with only a wretched, suffering melancholy. 

“I’ll leave you be,” Engineer said finally, after some time. “I know you can fight your own battles. I just want you to know, Pyro, you can always talk to me if somethin’s goin’ on. I think you’re a real important part of the team. The others do, too, even if they’re a little slow of the tongue to say so. We’re all a little kooky, but we’re a team, aren’t we? Ain’t no place for infightin’.”

It was a true miracle that Constance held herself together, albeit stiffly, until Engineer left. Then she broke down into a flood of sobs. Her fist came down onto the cake - the plate shattered and pretty iridescent pillbugs scuttled out from underneath it, psychedelic worms dove in and out between the cherries. And she had wanted the cake so this made her cry even harder. It sounded odd through her respirator, odd and fucked up, odd and rightly alien to this world. She did not fit in here, she would not, no matter how much she secretly wished to. She was utterly helpless and powerless. Engineer made her so uncomfortable; it was as if he was a bath and she was a frostbitten limb. He was so nice to her for no reason. But she could not possibly hope to tell him the depth of her problems. He was, after all, also here for the money, she could not rule out that he had been in on the room invasion, despite how much she craved to disbelieve it, she could not entirely banish the thought that maybe he was trying to know her to confirm his suspicious of a big old fish on the line.

When she had cried until she could not cry anymore, Constance dragged a finger through the cake and used her other hand to pull at the lip of her mask so she could shove her icing-coated digit against her lips and teeth and taste the sugar.

Chapter Text

It was difficult sometimes to separate dream and wish and reality; they were homogenous in her hands like grains of sand. She had wished fervently for a stuffed animal and then there was one in her hands but Constance didn’t know if she had actually remembered to put in a requisition. 

“Was the idea of Spy,” Heavy said to her in his rumbling voice, offering her a conspiring wink as he easily hefted two Mann Co. branded crates half the size of himself onto the kitchen table. One crate on the floor was already open and being pilfered by Soldier and Demoman, but they did not seem interested in what Heavy was saying. The innards of the crate were strewn about like guts and the two of them dug in its ribs, guffawing to each other about something. There was food and drink and books and stuff and Constance felt again a pang of wry regret that she had again forgotten to request anything. “Did not know when Pyro’s birthday was. Calendar is still blank.”

Spy?

Spy, who she could visualize in her room, whose fingers had touched her flamethrower, whose fingers had probably touched a lot else. What was this? Had he seen the empty space next to her pillow and knew this unicorn plush would go perfectly there? Had he seen inside her mind? Heavy did not say anything but merely watched Constance soundlessly as she bolted from the room, bolted from the tar-like muck of bubbling purple now oozing from the crates.

Constance had hoped to find Spy alone but she was not so lucky. He was talking with Miss Pauling in a low voice next to a truck outside the base as he smoked. Miss Pauling! It made sense for her to be here, she personally facilitated the delivery of supplies and sundries, but Constance had been in her room before on the times that she had come or she did not linger long enough for Constance to see her. It was such a shock to see her face again that Constance stopped in her tracks, clutching the unicorn to her chest. Its horn and hooves sparkled. Its fur was pink. It was perfect and beautiful and holy and did indeed glow in a way befitting of a true venerated relic. Miss Pauling glowed in her own way too. There was something beautiful about her imperfection - about the frizz of her hair, the wrinkles in her skirt, the run in her stockings. Constance had once been like a little girl doll, propped up in pageantry, every curl locked into place as the result of being suffocated in a gas chamber of hairspray. She had never been allowed to look unkempt and it was why she had taken such pleasure in her life on the run, when she was dirty and smelly and unattractive and repulsive. Except to Nora, who was so opposite Constance’s mother, and told Constance dirt underneath the fingernails was good for the immune system and the soul. Nora was old enough to be a mom but she was pudgy and wrinkly and had crooked teeth. Not like Constance’s mother, who seemed to constantly repel the buzzing mosquito threat of age like a citronella candle. 

Miss Pauling glanced to where Spy was gazing and smiled when she saw Constance and the unicorn. “Cute,” she remarked. Spy looked nonchalant and undisturbed, his face a still pond Constance longed to throw a rock at. He flicked the butt of his cigarette to the ground.

“I’m actually glad to catch you, Pyro, I had some things to go over with you.” Miss Pauling raised her clipboard and adjusted her glasses on her thin nose. “Is now a good time?”

It was and wasn’t. Constance felt like she had become a tree, roots through her feet and into the ground. She should tell Miss Pauling that she had an appointment to cook Spy in his own French trimmings, but she did not want to disappoint her. She squeezed the unicorn gently. Its soft resistance underneath her fingers was comforting and Constance wished there was enough room in her suit so she could carry it inside, next to her ribs.

“I guess,” she said.

Miss Pauling smiled a little uncertainly.

“He said yes,” Spy supplied, and lit another cigarette. Constance narrowed her eyes at him and bared her teeth underneath her mask. 

“Ah, great. Shall we chat in your quarters?”

A few minutes later Constance was sitting on her bed and Miss Pauling in a chair she had dragged in from somewhere. The clipboard was face down on her lap. 

“How is everything?” she asked. 

Constance studied Miss Pauling, who was looking at her patiently. She wondered how old the other woman was. Could it be Constance in that chair, in another life, doing such a job? A normal person job? Well, Miss Pauling’s job was probably not normal, but she seemed normal enough. A normal woman. But Constance had crawled into her suit and she was well aware that she could probably never crawl back out again; it had closed behind her, it cradled and drowned her like she was sinking in a grain silo. She was half sure the air outside was toxic to her anyway; only inside the suit could she live in her perfect habitat.

“Everything is fine,” Constance said, her hands clasped neatly in her lap. 

“I’m sorry,” Miss Pauling said, the corner of her mouth curled in a wry smile. “It’s a little hard for me to understand you.”

Miss Pauling had seen her. Miss Pauling had come when Constance lay in the hospital bed, wondering if she was in the place her mother said she would go for kissing girls, wondering if she was as good as Nora said and she had been forgiven for everything, wondering if she was somewhere in-between because God, like everyone else, could not decide what to do with her and find a place where she belonged. But Miss Pauling had come and she had not looked like she pitied Constance, she had been professional, kind, polite. When you are feeling better, she had said, My employer is very interested in your talents. No one had ever referred to it that way - as a talent. If one would refer to having a best friend, a sibling, as a talent - well, then that was what it was. Fire had whispered to her when she was young. It was wild and unpredictable and had no place in the mausoleum of her house and so naturally Constance had been drawn to it; it was so unlike herself, it was so everything she wanted to be. And then it had been her only companion, her justice, so it was only fitting she should learn everything about working together. 

Miss Pauling had seen her and part of Constance wanted to repulse her, to see if she could still maintain that mask of professionalism. And so she lifted her mask until it rose above her lips and cool air hit her scarred and mottled skin. She was effectively blind now, with the lenses resting somewhere on the top of her head, her body all warm and cozy save for the dry air that now licked at her neck and chin and lips and the bottom of her ears. 

She did not want to complain about anything. She did not want them to send her away.

“Everything is fine,” Constance said again. Her voice sounded weird in the open air - raspy and hoarse and gravelly, because fire and smoke had once licked the inside of her wet throat and now it often felt dry.

“Okay, great,” Miss Pauling replied cheerfully from somewhere in the ether. “I just wanted to check because, you know, you never requisition anything, or ask to make any phone calls, which is completely fine! I just thought to be sure it wasn’t because you were having any trouble with anything.”

“No trouble,” Constance said. She had no one to call. Most others did - she knew that most others had mothers who could still speak. Her eyes gazed wide and glazed and unseeing into the dark inch of air that separated her face and the mask stretched over her nose and forehead. Once she had sat on a bed and said the same things she was saying now. She had tried saying yes, she had tried denial. It had not stopped the hitting, the slapping, the claw and scratch of nails, the expulsion from boarding school after school. She had never quite figured out what to say; she had never solved the abysmal puzzle of making others satisfied.

“That’s a nice unicorn,” Miss Pauling said, and Constance could hear the smile in her voice. “Was it your birthday recently? I didn’t have that down.” 

“Spy got it for me.” Constance lifted the unicorn to her cheek and shivered when the soft fur of it touched her skin. She rubbed it there, again and again.

“Oh, really? That’s so sweet.”

“He knows about me,” Constance could not stop herself from saying, her mouth wrenched downwards, because she felt the odd necessity of puncturing the pleased balloon of Miss Pauling’s voice, she was sorry to disappoint but she was supposed to be honest, bad things happened when she lied. “He’s taunting me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Miss Pauling replied, somewhat hesitantly. “Spy knows…well, a lot. He likes to know everything about everyone. I think he feels uneasy otherwise. Er, don’t tell him I said that. But if he does know, he’d never tell anyone else, Pyro. I’m sure of it. If there’s one thing about Spy, he can keep a secret, and you being female doesn’t impact your performance in any way.”

Oh, Spy liked to know everything, did he? Maybe Constance would find out some dirt on him instead. She could bet he wouldn’t like that very much. There was the small problem, however, that she was unsure how to go about it, that she was sure someone like Spy was abundantly careful not to leave anything foolish laying around like she had. And Constance was clumsy and Spy was lithe, like a cat. No, that would never work.

“He knows about my mother.”

When her nose was sort of scrunched up against the material of her mask and she was blind in the warm dark, it was easy to open her mouth and let things come up.

“Has he called her?”

“No, no,” Miss Pauling assured her gently. “Pyro, it was my job to scrub your record when you signed your contract, remember? No one’s called anyone. I don’t have any intelligence that your mother is still searching for you, and even if she is, this base is locked down more tightly than…well, anywhere. Even if Spy did figure out your situation, you’re his teammate. He’d never…I know that he can be a bit stuffy, but he’s a good guy. I understand you don’t like the thought that someone else knows, but you can trust him. You can trust me on that.”

Constance could trust that she only had herself to blame, and she curled in on herself with shame, like a dry leaf. It had been her fault to leave the loose end of her mother but Constance had been terrifically afraid of her, because if she ever needed a mirror in the world of how she looked her mother was one. If she had only finished the job - her father did not care enough to look for her, there would be no one else that minded what became of her in the world and she would be free. But she had mucked it up, her mother’s beautiful haughty face was disfigured now, she did not have all of her limbs or her hair or her teeth, she had been like melting wax under the fire of Constance’s rage and fear and now she wanted to burn Constance back. 

“How have things been with everyone else?”

Did Miss Pauling have this tender gentle soft conversation with every mercenary, or was it just because they were girls together, or because Constance was pitiful? Had they been talking about her? Had they been reporting her?

“I know they talk about me,” Constance confirmed, so Miss Pauling would not feel as if she needed to deliver the news gently, “Scout talks to my mother. Medic does too. Engie tries to distract me from it but there’s no amount of pancakes that will work.”

“Pyro,” Miss Pauling said after a moment of heavy silence.

“You are paying me a lot of money to do my job.” Constance’s voice was husky and curt. The money did not matter - it sat in a bank account and she was not even sure what she would ever use it for; they could pay her pennies but for the security and anonymity she’d be there. “And I do it. I’m doing it.”

“You do,” Miss Pauling acquiesced, and then sighed. “Okay, then. Well, if you need anything, you can always call. And, uh, I’m technically required to give a status report but I really do mean it, you’re doing a great job, so keep doing what you’re doing. The Administrator sends her compliments.”

Maybe if she was not riding the deck of a rolling and tossing ship, maybe they could be girls together, maybe they could make pancakes together, but Constance felt hot and prickly and uncomfortable.

Miss Pauling seemed to sense that her welcome was well overstayed. She said goodbye to Constance and left with her clipboard. For the rest of the afternoon Constance lay curled up in her bed. She often wore her suit when she slept and so her bed always smelled of smoke. She curved her body around the soft unicorn and pressed her face into its fur. She could tell that below the bed was the bubbling purple ooze, but the unicorn acted as a sort of purifying thing, keeping it away. In the distance, she could hear Miss Pauling chatting to someone in the hall, the high friendly peal of her laugh. It only made Constance want to disappear. No one that did this job could be normal, that had to be true, who would come here, away from family and friends and agree to medical experiments and war and being blown to bits as a nine-to-five? They all had their reasons but at the same time they were not abnormal in the way Constance was. They were guarded for different reasons. And they should all be lonely and hate one another but they did not. Over the weeks and months that had passed the mercenaries had built rapport and even friendships and perhaps it was inevitable because maybe underneath they were normal enough, still human, still predictable. Even the especially solitary ones like Spy and Sniper oscillated around the outskirts of warm fire of team dinners, drawing ever-closer by the week. But Constance was an alien. She was alien to them. Maybe they were not afraid of her anymore, but they were still wary. They merely tolerated her. Constance opened her mouth and practiced laughing like Miss Pauling, but it sounded like a cat hacking up a hairball. Maybe it would be better if they hated her instead of this pantomime of acceptance. She would surely stick out here if she was a perfect pageant girl again but she was also too far on the other end of the scale and not really in the middle like everyone else; she was the outcast of outcasts. 

But maybe Medic could help. He had seen her once before too, like Miss Pauling. He had the wonderful beam like Engineer but he was a medical doctor, like the people that had helped sort her out after the fire at Nora’s house, like the people that had helped make her perfect when she was younger. It was this thought, this compulsion, that made Constance roll out of bed and burst out of her room, startling Miss Pauling and Engineer down the hall, the latter which was certainly looking at her with concern as she jogged away from them clutching her unicorn, her mask yanked down back over her face.

“Fix me,” Constance demanded, her mask yanked above her lips again. She said it before she realized Medic was not alone because he had been talking - but no, he was only talking to his doves. He straightened his spine and looked at her coolly.

“Have you sustained an injury, Herr Pyro?”

Constance strode to the examination table and heaved herself up onto it. She jabbed a gloved thumb at herself. “Fix me,” she repeated.

Medic muttered something to himself in German, but he stood from his stool and came over to her, reaching up to knock upon the door of the home of the glorious beam and coax it outside. There was the warm cherry candyfloss feeling, a sort of giddiness, but after a little time it faded and Constance felt no different. She felt a slow sense of dread wind through her like a piece of thread around a finger, slowly squeezing, constricting. If the beam could fix her, surely it would have already.

“There? Jetzt besser?”

“My head,” Constance clarified impatiently, and she could not see the exasperated roll of his eyes. 

“If you would only use the power of speech allotted to you-”

Her hands twitched. Constance wanted to seize him and shake the condescension out of his voice. Perhaps Medic noticed this, because his voice was suddenly further, as if he had stepped away. He cleared his throat and spoke to her in a decidedly more patient tone of voice.

“Are you perhaps referring to your…”

Her what? Her colors? Her oddity? Her everything? Constance nodded enthusiastically.

“You must recall that a copy was taken of you when you began your employment here,” Medic intoned, reciting like he had told her before and maybe he had, “I performed a checkup to ensure you were in your optimal state, and afterwards every respawn is pulled from that same copy. There is nothing to fix. You will always be as you were. As you are.”

Medic let out a squawk reminiscent of one of his birds when Constance leapt off the table, blindly, in his vague direction. So he was to blame! If he had only seen that she wasn’t right, if he had only used his doctor vision to foretell the consequences of the great wooden beam coming down over her head and making her head a little uneven, of the smoke she had inhaled and the time she spent deprived of oxygen, of when, years ago, she had gone chilly and clammy and realized that she could not take it anymore and only the white-hot heat of fire could clarify to her mother, to herself, to everyone, how she really felt, of how she was underneath. Constance’s gloved hands scrabbled at Medic’s face, at his throat, blind and full of rage, oh, in that moment she wished to do what she had done again - she had filched from her father’s garage, their perfect pretty house was always filled with pictures and words of her and of God, side by side, she was always supposed to be a pretty perfect girl, and she could not be, but if she could burn bright and hot enough God would notice and accept her anyways and her agonies would be gone, her wrongness cleansed, and her mother would be happy. And she had really been about to do it, Constance’s lip hadn’t trembled, but her mother had only shrieked, don’t ruin your dress, and then it had dawned on Constance what she should do instead. She had watched her mother writhe and scream and melt and it was only the quick action of the maid that saved her. It was really a miracle she survived, if God could love such a woman - but He did and so Constance did not think there was room in her head for God anymore.

She’d had a head start before her mother was able to communicate again and point her talon and think to look for Constance. But by that time, months and months on, she had found Nora. Nora the park ranger was cautious and wary of fire, of its destructive power to the natural cathedral around them, but she knew like Constance did that it was also a friend on cold and hungry and lonely nights, that there was nothing more cozy than a fire dancing in the hearth, that nothing tasted sweeter than a burnt marshmallow. Nora had taught her caution. Nora had ensured Constance would not leave a trail of burnt buildings in her wake again, always lingering, always unsure if she should step in and let herself be cradled and let it be over, but for some reason the very magic of it held her at bay and she never did. But then Nora had given up on her and Constance had burned her lovely old cabin to the ground with Nora and herself inside, with Nora throttled and purple, with Constance’s face streaked with tears. She was crying now, as her glove threaded through Medic’s hair and twisted and pulled his head off the floor to slam - she did not hate Medic quite so much as she hated her mother, but in the moment there was no better replacement. 

Suddenly Constance realized she was going to heaven.

Her vision was white and there was an earsplitting whine and a singing in her blood; she was being lifted up, up, up, far and away. There was a holy chorus of noise and she could see the sunbeams through the material of her mask.

“Get that thing away from me!” Medic screeched, and he let out an anguished, pained noise. Constance felt the air on her teeth, her lips wrenched in a snarl. She realized with a crushing disappointment that she was not going to heaven but someone was holding her - Heavy, who was like a vast oak, who did not budge no matter how she thrashed and kicked and slapped at him. He was taking her out of the medbay, and mounting terror cleared Constance’s head enough to yank her mask back down, so she was concealed and so she could see, but she wished she hadn’t, because half of the entire fucking team was in the hallway, and they were staring. Constance pulled uselessly at Heavy’s massive arm around her torso; her breasts were small but she was worried he would and could feel them, though maybe Medic had told him already. Her tantrum was only compounded when she realized suddenly that she did not have her unicorn anymore. She could not take the look of Spy, who was perhaps judgemental that she had lost her gift already. An apology came out gasped and garbled through her mask. Why had he given it to her if destruction followed her everywhere she went? Did he not think Constance would dirty it, ruin it? She wouldn’t, how dare he think such a thing, she would protect it with her life! The sunbeams had fizzled out into white-hot sparks that occasionally flared in her vision, that glittered painfully here and there, and with it perhaps a sort of clarity - did Spy know this? Had all his silent observation of her been for something, not a taunt but a kindness? Well, she had soiled it now.

Heavy set Constance down on the couch in the recreation room - dropped her, really, like a sack of potatoes. He leaned over until their eyes were level, but still a healthy distance away.

“You do not hurt Doctor,” he rumbled imperiously, “Or anyone. Understand?”

Engineer had come into the rec room behind them, and had his hands raised. “All right, Heavy,” he said. “All right.”

“We are team. Remember it.”

“He gets it.”

“He does not,” Heavy insisted, straightening up. “Do not coddle, Engineer. Is not your problem to fix. If he cannot understand, does not belong here. Could have killed Doctor.”

“That’s why we got respawn, ain’t it?” Engineer huffed a soft laugh, but Constance nor Heavy mirrored it. Constance had shrunk down with every one of Heavy’s punctuated jabs. “Look, you’re right, you’re right. He’s just…he’s just a fiery one. It’s just takin’ a little longer to adapt to all the other strong personalities here, is all. I’ll keep a closer eye on ‘im.”

Heavy did not say anything else as he left. Constance could not bear to raise her mask from her hands. Their words swum around her like bees, slowly dropping from woodsmoke. She was well aware that without Engineer to advocate for her there would likely be a phone call placed to Miss Pauling and she would be hauled out by the scruff of her neck. Why did he vouch for her? What had she done to deserve it?

There was the sound of the rec room door opening again, and to her even thicker, sluggish bemusement it was Scout coming over, clutching the unicorn. He placed it gingerly on the coffee table so that its embroidered dark eyes could stare into hers, its lashes fluttering with benevolence. 

“Spy said that was yours,” Scout said, somewhat unnecessarily. “It has some, uh…blood on it. I could wash it for you if you want. My mom taught me how to get all kinds of stains out of clothes. But you gotta promise to tell me the next time you're gonna take a swing at the Doc so I can come watch. I’d put money on you kicking his German ass.”

“Scout,” Engineer reprimanded, but a huff emanated from Constance’s mask, and then she was snorting, snickering, a laugh erupting out of her that made her need to hold her sides for the fear her guts would come spilling out, a laugh that made tears, renewed, stream from her eyes. Scout looked somewhat afraid, and he had backed away, but there was a crooked little smile on his face.