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Glaz was the first to notice it. (Kapkan would later joke about Glaz being so damn and too focused on the ‘details’. But Glaz would argue that Kapkan was a blind idiot for glossing over the fact that their own teammate was declining invitations to go out with them and spending less time with them in their free time.) Fuze had a habit of staying up too long to work on his cluster charges, not at all uncommon among the the other engineers, he stated that he worked better later at night when no one was around to bother him. Perhaps he was right, but Glaz wasn’t about to let his teammate stay up until the break of dawn and suffer the rest of the day just because he wanted to cram another grenade into his charges.
Glaz pushed open the workshop door silently. He thinks it was Mira who fixed the loose hinges that used to screech like Satan himself was making a grand appearance; if there was one person who hated to be bothered when working more than Fuze, it was Mira and she was a hell of a lot louder than the Uzbek.
He was about to call out for Fuze when the sight in front of him stopped him in his tracks. There was Fuze, back facing the door and hunched over a blueprint of what is probably a prototype matryoshka. But more importantly, in front of him, leaning over the table to point out something on the blue paper, was Thermite. But even more importantly, Fuze not only didn’t seem to mind his presence but was actually holding a civil conversation with the American; unless Thermite was a master ventriloquist that could recreate a perfect rendition of Fuze’s accent that is.
Now it wasn’t the most well kept secret that Fuze wasn’t a very socially adept man. If fact, Glaz would go as far as to say that Fuze was antisocial, with his only moments of extreme social interaction being fights of both the verbal and physical type. He didn’t like being critiqued in any way, he disagreed with everything on principal, and he was blunt. “You’re such a stereotypical, stoic Russian , and you’re not even Russian,” Tachanka would joke with Fuze, only receiving grumbles from him.
Fuze’s brash nature somehow pissed Frost off enough for her to throw a punch at him. (Glaz is still miffed on what Fuze could’ve said to provoke a reaction like that. The Canadian operators were quite polite, a trait that amused the Americans to no end.) This would have been fine if they didn’t decide to start fighting in the common room in plain sight of everyone, including Buck, Tachanka, and Kapkan. Sure, everyone as a whole was a team, a part of Rainbow. But loyalties were the strongest between people of the same nationality, perhaps it was the patriotism that every soldier had that strengthened those bonds. Let’s just say, Glaz was eternally grateful that Finka and Doc were there because Glaz would have never been able to stop the two teams on his own. But now his team has an ongoing feud with the Canadians that Glaz was unwillingly forced into by Tachanka, who would not allow him to not take Fuze’s side.
Glaz was still debating if he should go ahead and tell Fuze it was time for bed or come back later and get him; it was already close to 1 AM and Glaz wasn’t sure if he could get back up if went to bed now, Kapkan was an octopus when it came to cuddling; when Thermite looked up. He took one look at Glaz standing with the door still open, then down at Fuze who was mumbling something about volume over density, before giving Glaz a wide smile. ‘I’ve got him. One more hour,’ he mouthed silently to Glaz and held up a finger that went unseen by Fuze. Glaz nodded, backing out of the room and shutting the door silently behind him, trusting the American to make sure his teammate got to his room at an acceptable hour. He would have to tell Kapkan about Fuze and his new friend in the morning.