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It starts simple enough, with Spy saying, “Ah, to think one day we won’t have to worry about all this,” and in doing so seals his fate.
Engineer, groggy but at ease in the 3am moonlight with the threat of birdsong just outside his window, angles his head on the pillow. “Mmm. All a’ what, darlin’?”
“Sneaking around. Waking up in the middle of the night just to slide in a few furtive goodbyes.”
“Mmm,” Engineer says again, stretching out lazily. Preparing to return to sleep as soon as he’s seen Spy off. “And why won’t have to worry about it?”
“I’m sure you’ll desire to live somewhere painfully rustic.” Spy waves his hand. “Your bid for a quaint little ranch. My insistence that it’s off the grid. A perfect combination for waking up every morning serene and undisturbed.”
He’d meant it as a joke. A humorous observation on the absurdity of retirement, but somewhere between when the thought forms at the forefront of his cranium and when it leaves his lips, he means it. Truly. The statement lands flatly, delivered with gravity in every fricative, the recognition that post-mercenary life with this man is not a qualm but a given.
Which is why it stings so sharply when all Engineer does is scoff.
“What? Why tch?” Spy asks. “What’s so funny about that?”
“You and I both know you ain’t never making plans past the next fortnight, let alone making a commitment and sticking to it. You get schmaltzy on me like that, and I know you’re pulling my leg.”
The first rule of holes: when one is in a hole, it is best course to stop digging.
Spy, famous mutineer of best courses: “And what if I weren’t?”
“Then you’re foolin’ yourself instead ‘a foolin’ me.”
That is the thing Spy’s forgotten by wrapping himself in layer upon layer of identity, papering on the masks as if they’re the fine casings of a cocoon that will keep him from ever feeling the outside world. He’s forgotten what it means to peel them back. So many years being numb, he didn’t remember the reason he put them on in the first place is because people you open them for deliver an acute kind of pain that cannot be found anywhere else.
“Isn’t the fact that I am asking proof enough that I am serious?” he says.
That gives the Engineer the portentous, point-of-no-return pause. He sits up in bed, the gentle, sleepy expression Spy has come to love over these many mornings wiped from his face, replaced by dawning solemnity.
“Spy,” Engineer warns.
“Spy what? What is so wrong with discussing our future?”
“It ain’t a discussion. You brought it up on a whim, and now you’re pushing it on a whim. You’re happy to talk forever-promises when it’s dark and the walls are down, but if it ever came down to it, you’d chalk this whole thing up to pillow talk and laugh at me for ever taking you at face value.”
There. That acute pain again. Like someone twisting a screwdriver behind his cortex.
“I wouldn’t,” Spy says. “Not for you. This time is different.”
Engineer keeps his eyes boring straight into Spy’s. “How’m I supposed to believe that from a man who’s so good at lying it became his name?”
“That’s all you think of me as?” Spy asks desperately. “Even after all these years?”
Did it all mean so little? All the times he’d said I love you, a point that had been so excruciating to reach…and Engineer hadn’t believed a word of it? He’d been trying, truly he had. And he’d thought he’d done it, built something worthwhile.
“Leopard don’t change its spots,” Engineer says quietly.
The shame leaves Spy gripping the edge of the bed, poised where he’d been trying slip away with a bittersweet yet understanding goodbye.
Engineer can’t bring himself to look Spy in the eye any longer. He says, “I think you better get going.”
Spy does. Back to his own base without a word. What more is there to say?
It’s difficult to work after such an injury. Like being asked to keep fighting when there’s bits of shrapnel in your chest. It feels like that, certainly, and Spy knows it’s making his limbs as sluggish as if the wound were real.
It’s been weeks now since he and Engineer have spoken to each other. It really is over, it seems. Spy’s performance falters. When trying to get a clean backstab on the enemy Sniper, he fumbles so hard it’s embarrassing. He finds himself shoved against the wall by fistfuls of his suit, the bushman directly in his face.
“You need to get a bloody hold of yourself,” he snarls, giving Spy a shake. “Go talk to him, work it out, bloody something.”
“I don’t see how any of this is your concern,” Spy glances away with chagrin.
“It’s my concern when I’m gettin’ twice my portion of stabs because you’re too chicken-shit to go sap a fucking building.” Sniper gives the BLU another shake, but when Spy hardly reacts his shoulders slacken. “Look, whatever’s goin’ on between you two, it’s sure not going to get fixed with both of you moping and avoiding each other.”
The Engineer is miserable as well? This is news to Spy, having spent days going out of his way to avoid even the sight of his former lover. He finds himself with the barest bit of hope. Perhaps Engineer regrets what he said, hadn’t truly meant them after all?
But still, the bushman’s advice is useless. If Engineer doubted the very honesty of Spy’s words, what good was conversation filled with those words?
“Irksome as it is that you already seem to be aware of our personal issues,” Spy says, “I will tell you this much more of the situation: this distance is by the laborer’s request. For me to be the one to breach it would be against his wishes and…inappropriate.”
“Don’t give me that. Happened bloody overnight practically.” When Spy doesn’t respond, Sniper’s fists loosen, his aviators dancing away a bar of harsh sunlight until his eyes are visible through the tint. He asks, “C’mon Spook. Tell me what’s going on.”
Spy blows air from his nose. Bad enough that he’s dallying with the enemy Engineer, but this non-hostile relationship that’s sprung up between him and the Sniper is another block on this delicate balancing act he’s found himself in. He isn’t sure why he’s let it happen. Yet another risk; and he isn’t even getting sex out of this one. Just annoyingly well-meaning interventions, apparently.
“There’s not much to tell,” he admits. “I proposed we…commit so something long term. Engineer did not take me seriously. We have not spoken since.”
“You,” Sniper says, perplexed, “brought up getting tied down?”
“And was refused, yes. He does not believe me capable of such a thing.”
“He said that?”
“In harsher words.”
Spy can’t bring himself add the stinger, the lingering ganglion still lodged in his flesh that hurts more than the initial wound. That despite all his attempts he’ll never shake the double-faced, half-formed man his life has left him as.
Sniper pauses. He glances at the nearest camera, but they’re not within its cone, their furtive meeting belonging just to them for the moment. With a frown he says, “…Maybe he’s not talking about you.”
“What on earth does that mean, bushman?”
“What I’m saying is maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe when a bloke’s bad at talking about things, he says things about other people he’s maybe thinking about himself.”
“The subject of his mistrust was crystal clear,” Spy spits, finding his anger rising, the thing he couldn’t manage to muster up for Engineer now locating a target in Sniper. “What are you even doing involving yourself in this? In fact, you should be jumping at the opportunity. The Engineer has rid himself of his dead end, snake of a lover—now is your time to endear yourself to him!”
Sniper flinches.
“Oh yes, don’t think I don’t know about your affections toward him. Well you’re in luck: I am out of the picture, and you’re exactly the sort of honest and stable person he’s looking for.”
When it becomes clear he’s not escaping this situation through respawn—Sniper struck silent by bitter honesty and unearned accusation—Spy wriggles free of his grasp and disappears into the battlefield. His pool of targets to work out his frustrations on is now one less. Perhaps he’ll go make the RED Medic wish he’d never been born, and then he’ll feel less empty inside.
He might just go on forever like this. After all, it is he who has to seek out one of the REDs if there’s to be an altercation between them; he is the active participant in the dynamic of spy and spied upon. So he has not seen Engineer in days and he is fine with that, no matter what the ache in his heart tries to tell him.
Post-match, he curls into a ball and tries not to be found.
Turning into a pathetic, sniveling little ball is unbecoming to his profession, but he can’t help it. Some days he does have to slink and hide and cram himself into small spaces in order to do proper Spy work, but this is different and he knows it. He just wants the humiliation round to pass and let him escape back to his base. He’s tired of these REDs. And yet, the two he wants least in the world to find him pass right beneath his hiding spot.
“Just talk to ‘im. Tell ‘im you didn’t mean it.”
“And how am I supposed to do that? Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since…since the fight.”
The Engineer and Sniper. They stand under the rafters at the final point, clearly not going anywhere despite the dubious integrity of the support structures a Pyro’s fire has left them in. They don’t care, even as the roof creaks.
“Besides,” Engineer sighs, “I don’t know if it’s worth it. We…obviously wanted different things out of the relationship. Why go try to patch things up if we’re not going to come to a compromise anyway?”
“And that’s reason enough to leave it on a bad note? Not patch a hole in a tire just because you might sell the car one day?”
“People ain’t cars.”
“Yeah, they’re more important than cars, which is why you should hash it out. You care about him, don’t you?”
Engineer glances away. “Something real fierce,” he admits. “But I know you do too, and he only stopped talking to you because I made a mess of it. Maybe I just…step back. Take myself out ‘a the equation. You’re more each other’s speed than I ever was.”
The pain in Engineer’s voice makes Spy’s heart ache all the harder, but beyond that the confusion eclipses it. Surely he’s misunderstanding? The Sniper is interested Engineer, not in…
But the way Sniper flushes and rubs the back of his neck tells all, and suddenly Spy wants very much not to be listening in on this conversation. It is all too much, too personal—an impulse Spy has never felt before, but none the less acts on, trying to discreetly slip to the balcony where he can escape out a stairwell.
Sniper is saying, “Don’t worry about me during all this…” when the beam beneath Spy breaks, and send him sprawling pathetically in front of the two REDs.
The silence hangs for a moment; Sniper and Engineer knowing that Spy overheard, then Spy knowing that they know he knows. Spy stands, trying to regain a modicum of dignity, dusting off his suit with as much decorum as his mortification will allow.
“Apologies. I didn’t mean to intrude. I will simply go now and-”
Sniper elbows Engineer sharply forward.
Engineer blurts, “I’m sorry Spy. I shouldn’t have said those things about you.”
Spy stiffens.
“You ain’t…untrustworthy or nothing. And it was unfair and unkind ‘a me to say as much after all you done for me.”
“Then…you believe me when I say I love you?” Spy is almost scared to ask, memories of the last time he extended himself still fresh and searing.
“…No.”
Sniper clears his throat loudly.
“I mean,” Engineer goes on hastily, “I don’t, but that’s on me, not any fault of yours. I never thought anyone would want me…all the way…with everything that means. To think I would be the kind of person someone would be willing to spend the rest of their life with…Well. Trying to accept it proved…beyond what I was capable of.”
“So you trust me, but you don’t believe me?” Spy frowns.
“Sometimes…when you know there’s a lot wrong with you, it doesn’t matter how often people tell you you’re doin’ just fine. You’ll hear it, but you can’t believe it. No matter how much you love the person who’s saying it.”
Spy looks at him. Wonders how it could possibly run that deep, that feeling his family has put into him that he’s not enough despite all his accomplishments. But with the clear distress on his beloved’s face, it’s obvious it must.
“So I’m sorry,” Engineer says. “It was wrong of me to put it on you, and,” he takes a step forward, reaching for Spy’s wrist and gently brushing splinters off his sleeve, “I shouldn’t have asked you to leave. You have to do that enough already.”
“I think I understand.” Spy pauses, “And in that case, I will come back.”
Engineer’s shoulder slouch with relief.
But Spy eyes the Sniper, standing past the Engineer and still looking as flustered as when Spy first fell from the ceiling. Spy asks, “However. You still see no future for us?”
“I…” Engineer hesitates. “I don’t rightly know. It’s hard to imagine that far. Built my whole world around being the independent sort.”
“Then,” Spy says, “perhaps we start over. Take a few steps back, no more talk of retirement. Neither of us are mature enough for it, obviously. Maybe we even…work out a new arrangement.”
Engineer and turns and sees where Spy is making eye contact with Sniper, and raises an eyebrow.
“Me?” Sniper is red in the ears. “You lads don’t need to worry about me…You’ve got enough to work through together without throwing me into the mix.”
“We wouldn’t even be back together without you, partner,” Engineer points out wisely. “Plus…Spy’s right. We probably do have to start over from the beginning, with an understanding that this is something more serious, and not just a bizarrely long running series of hatefucks.”
Sniper coughs lightly into his fist.
“The amount of hatefucks would be as little or as much as you desire, bushman, don’t worry,” Spy assures.
“Never done something like this before-”
“Obviously,” Spy teases.
“-but if you lads are serious?” Sniper cuts through him. “I mean…I’d like that. I really would.” It’s clear from his posture he means it.
“That’s great to hear, Stretch. Now get over here.”
Sniper ambles closer, cautiously approaching their new little trifecta as they begin to sort out the nitty gritty of how this is going shake out. Despite various bruises and bits of wood still digging into his limbs, Spy feels more at ease than he ever did when he was hiding away.