Chapter Text
The strangest thing about having your head severed from your body was the fact that you could still hear your heartbeat thundering in your ears. That was what Spy found strangest, at least, alongside the fact that phantom pains were strictly confined to where he imagined would be his spinal cord. It was this dull, throbbing ache that got worse when he heard footsteps leading up to the refrigerator door. His breathing always got harsh, vision going blurry as he sweat through his mask. When he thought about it more, the heartbeat was probably nothing but his imagination, just like the long trail of pain that seemed to extend past his severed neck. How could he not think of a heart rushing and rumbling when he was sat next to a good few of them at all times? The cigarettes, given to him by the mad doctor that kept him alive, helped calm him down, although he could always feel himself start to sweat whenever the Medic’s hands got close enough to place one in his mouth. He’d been so desperate for a smoke that he would agree to whatever experiments the doctor wanted to try out in exchange for them, knowing that the other option was to have them done without the reward at the end.
“Kill me,” Spy had begged at the start, screaming and sobbing, unsure of how or why he was still alive. The RED Medic refused, keeping him as a sort of trinket up until he had the time to put together a series of tests. Despite Spy’s pleas, he was always careful to not kill him. That’d put an early end to the fun, he supposed. Eventually, the request became more of an inside joke to the two. He’d start off every interaction asking for death; Medic would reply with ‘later’ and continue on with whatever it was he was doing. Sometimes the experiments were painful. Sometimes they were purposely relaxing, like that time that Medic shot him up with a series of different drugs just to see how he’d react. Opiates were Spy’s favorite, morphine being the drug of choice. He remembered falling in and out of consciousness, laying on a small bed of towels the doctor had made for him. During that short, blissful period, he had a dream about his old team… Well, he supposed they weren’t the old team, but he had been stuck in that fridge for nearly six months at that point, leaving Blu without a professional Spy… Apparently they’d been doing fine in the battles without him, Medic coming back and angrily venting to Spy about the defeat of the day. Anyway, his dream was surprisingly happy. Peaceful, to say the least. He had imagined himself returning back to the base as nothing but a head, and out of the love in his Texan heart, Engineer had whipped him up a fancy robot body, capable of all sorts of amazing things. It was beautiful, and when the pair went out to test it out, they were fighting a team of nine RED Medic’s. Spy got to slaughter them one by one, torturing them with syringes and slow decapitation, strangulations and bullet holes, all of the methods that the sick quack had experimented on him with. When they died, they didn’t come back.
The dream, unfortunately, did not reflect reality. When BLU had pushed RED back far enough to take over their base, committing such a murder that they had forced the Administrator to start respawning RED in a new location (they kept coming back in that same base only to be kicked, laughed at, and killed once again,) it was only a week before they had fully assimilated into their new home. The RED Medic was never given enough time to get his things from the lab, and when the BLU Medic was given the opportunity to see what had been left behind, he found Spy in the fridge.
“Mein Gott,” Spy was pretty sure Medic said at the time of the finding. It had been, what, a year since he’d gone missing? They thought he was dead, that his respawn malfunctioned and he wouldn’t return. Then they found his body in the respawn chamber, twitching and writhing, completely decapitated with blood pouring out of its neck. It died, then respawned, then died, then respawned. It was the reason that BLU pushed themselves to work so hard, to completely capture the RED base. They hoped that being reassigned to a new respawn chamber would mean that the Spy’s body could be left behind in the old one, stuck in its infinite loop, but it unfortunately appeared in their new assignment as well… lucky them. Spy had to think for a moment. What else did Medic say? Something along the lines of “Spy, ve thought you veren’t coming back! Ve couldn’t shut your respawn process off either!”
Spy’s first words to Medic were “kill me.” Of course, the doctor refused.
It was another two weeks before Spy’s head was reattached to his body. The first issue was trying to get his decapitated corpse under control. Each time it died and respawned, a copy was left behind, giving Heavy plenty of compost for his garden at home and Medic an overload of spare organs for life altering procedures. It took a short ten minutes to fully bleed out each time, but that wasn’t the main issue with the procedure. Getting Spy’s head and body to work as one again was.
At first Medic attempted to rapidly perform the procedure, taking Spy’s head off of the battery pack and sewing it onto a newly respawned body, but that only ended with Spy being completely limp, throwing up blood uncontrollably as it oozed past any stitching. When the body died, the head was still alive and had to be removed from the corpse, a new one spawning in before Medic could free him. Next, Medic tried the same procedure but this time blasted it with radiation from the Medigun. It seemed to work for a moment, but as soon as the stream was off of Spy, the body went back to rotting, and he still couldn’t move a muscle that wasn’t in his face. It respawned again. Next they tried just killing the head, which respawned as a head, and after that they tried attaching the dead head to the dead body, which resulted in a full corpse. It was fascinating work to the doctor and utter torture for Spy. The solution ended up being a mixture of all of the trials.
The freshest respawn of Spy’s head was quickly sewn onto the newest body, a thick, concentrated paste made from the Medigun’s serum plastered in between like glue. Next, Medic rapidly sewed the two pieces together, creating a full, still living human being. Spy was then ushered to a hospital room, a stream of the Medigun’s fumes blasted at him. One was pointed at his neck, meant to heal the wound, and another was pumped into his body through oxygen tubes strapped to his face. It was all deeply uncomfortable, so much so to the point where Medic decided that painkillers would be the humane option (after a few days of Spy’s unintelligible mumblings getting on his nerves.) From there on, the Frenchman was put on a heavy enough dosage to clear his memory, but when he woke up, he could feel his hands and feet again, and his spine felt, for the first time in a year, like it was actually there… but feeling and using were two very different things, and the first was more awful than being decapitated itself.
Spy’s first instinct when he could move his limbs was to attempt to sit up, but he was essentially a newborn deer trying to walk for the first time, although it would take much longer than a couple of minutes to learn to stand. Feeling the itchy fabric of his hospital gown moving under his body, over his torso which he hadn’t felt in so long, was completely nauseating. Each little motion made his stomach lurch, and his stomach lurching was so unfamiliar that he burst into shuddering tears. It seemed that all he remembered how to do was cry, which he had done all throughout his stay with the RED Medic.
The sound of Spy awake instantly alerted the BLU Medic into the room, past the hospital green curtains where he watched Spy struggle and sob, arms and legs twitching aimlessly. His heart dropped as Spy gasped for breath with his new, old lungs, trying to cover his ears to deal with the actual sound of his own heartbeat. He had never felt bad for a patient before, but there was something so different about the Spy’s sheer panic that he almost couldn’t take it himself.
Spy, when he saw Medic, tried to calm himself down. He took deep breaths but only ended up choking on his own spit. He tried to count to ten mentally, but every number seemed to mesh together, alongside all of his other thoughts. He could feel his pulse in his wrists, and his skin was so sensitive to touch that every brush against the blankets was nearly painful. Yes, he had his body back, but he didn’t have any control over it, and that was scarier than being nothing but a head. If Medic wasn’t there to force him to present himself, he was sure he would’ve thrown up, which would have been a burning, revolting experience. He hadn’t eaten in a whole year, and neither had his body, meaning that there was nothing but bile inside of him eating away at the lining of his stomach. He could barely handle being awake, breathing, and having blood coursing through his body. What was eating going to be like? Or walking, talking, or even having a smoke? What about killing? He couldn’t work in a state like this. Was he going to be fired from his job?
Medic’s voice was one of the first normal experiences Spy had, as sound turned into his main sense as a disembodied head. Of course, hearing the RED Medic’s voice was always a panic inducing experience, but the BLU was much different. He was still sadistic, still a madman, but there was a sort of peace in his eyes that the RED didn’t have.
“It’s good to see you are avake, Spy,” Medic said softly, his accent stronger than the RED Medic’s. He seemed to have much more of a life outside of the lab than the other did, being in and out rather than constantly staying inside the sterile clinic to experiment. Work life balance was important to him. “You’ve been asleep for days. I almost zought that you veren’t going to vake up.”
“Kill me,” Spy requested. They were the only words he could get out through his choked breaths. If simply being alive was going to feel this awful for the rest of his life, he didn’t want to live. In his mind, he had already expired, back when his head was captured. He shouldn’t have been there. He should have been in heaven or hell, or wherever it was somebody went when they died. He didn’t believe in all of that, having respawned tens of thousands of times over the years he had worked for BLU, but even so, the idea of a permanent death was comforting. It made him wonder if he’d even respawn at all this time around.
Medic chuckled at the absurd request. “Kill you? Now vhy vould I do zat? Do you know how long it took to put you back together?” He expected a response, but Spy said nothing, simply staring at him with wide, horrified eyes. Medic rolled his own, continuing on. It didn’t seem like Spy wanted to talk much anyway. “Anyvay, as a doctor, it’s my job to make sure zat my patients are comfortable… and more importantly not sobbing like children and disvrupting my vork. So, vhat seems to be ze problem? Are you in pain?”
Spy shook his head, expecting the movement to hurt due to the stitching. Surprisingly, it wasn’t painful at all, but his neck seemed to lean towards the left as if his head was too heavy for his body. He cleared his throat, which was hopelessly dry. “No. I… Is zis my body?”
“Of course! Ve couldn’t get rid of it if ve tried. It kept respawning and respawning. Vun time, copies of it filled up ze room to ze brim, and Scout got crushed by them after an untimely death! After zat ve decided ve needed to either kill you or fix ze problem. Ze first… seemed impossible, and trust me, ve tried, so the latter became our best option.” Medic smiled wide at Spy, acting as if he was some sort of savior, like he genuinely took care of the issue. It made Spy’s blood boil. He imagined himself punching the doctor, but his right arm only limply scooted toward him, leaving his face red.
“Well, your experiment failed,” Spy spat, trying to cross his arms. He managed to turn his neck away, but his arms wouldn’t do much of anything he told them to. “I cannot move, and therefore I cannot be a mercenary. I’d rather you just… get my death over with at this point. I will not be stuck in bed for ze rest of my life.”
It wasn’t visible to Spy, who insisted on closing his eyes as a sign of disrespect, but Medic loudly made a face at him, sticking his tongue out and rolling his eyes. “Failed is not ze right vord, Herr Spy. You can move, even if it’s only slightly. Vhen someone goes through damage like you have, physical therapy is almost alvays required. You zink I am just going to leave you here to rot? Nonsense. Ze Administrator vants you back on ze team. It is my job to ensure it happens.”
“You already managed to capture zis base without me. Why would you need me back? Clearly, I am no longer a valuable member.” Spy’s eyes opened back up as he looked at the ground. He was sure he was already dead, currently residing in a terrible, personal hell. Medic chuckled at him, boiling his blood even hotter. “What? What is so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just zat your corpse vas vhat got us to put ze effort in. Honestly, so long as it isn’t ruining our respawn room anymore, ve don’t really care vhat happens on ze battlefield. If ze stalemate ends, ve stop getting paid, so vhy bother vith that? Also… it isn’t like you vere doing much for ze team in the first place. Even if you can’t regain control of your body well enough to fight again, it isn’t very much of a problem. At least you’ll be respawning as a whole zis time.” Medic stared at Spy with this horrible grin, as if what he had said was funny. Spy’s face had turned red, his jaw clenching alongside his fists. Medic’s attention lowered towards Spy’s hands. “Oh, look at zat. You can move.”
Spy looked down at his fingers, the strain of closing his fists feeling so odd. “Alright, but what does this prove? Usage of my fingers is nothing.”
“You aren’t understanding ze bigger picture. Eventually, and I promise you zis, Spy, I vill help you become the man you vunce vere… even if he vasn’t much in ze first place,” Medic laughs, standing up from the side of the bed. It seemed that Spy was fine, just burdened with the fact that he was a person again. “Anyvay, I’ve got to get home. I’ve been staying late to keep an eye on you, and overvorking myself is just no vay to live. Is zere anything you need before I go?”
Spy was hesitant to answer, looking down at his knees. His head felt so cloudy, like when he was forced through a painful experiment. He had learned to let his vision go blurry, clearing all of the thoughts from his mind as he pretended like he wasn’t in the moment, not having to pay attention to the pain. His eyes shifted off to the side. “Water,” was his request.
“Vater, okay,” Medic said before leaving the side of the bed. He came back in a few minutes with a glass in his hands, a straw inside of it. He sat it on the table next to them and helped Spy sit up. “I imagine your throat vould be dry. Your IV drip should be keeping your body hydrated, but it vill feel good to drink. Vere you able to eat and drink at all during your time vith ze RED’s?”
“No,” Spy mumbled, turning his head back to Medic, who lifted the cup so that he could take a sip. He placed his lips on the straw but hesitated to suck in, scared of what might happen. What if his head didn’t reattach properly and it all spilled out of his neck like during the first experiment where he nearly choked to death on his own blood? Medic didn’t look pleased.
“Can you please drink it? I have a boyfriend to return to. You, however, vill be staying here overnight. Ze medigun should help your body reattach itself. Drink. Zis is your only chance.”
Spy followed the Medic’s demands, feeling his face get hot with nervousness. He drank quickly, the water trickling down his throat making him feel like he was choking… yet the cool liquid brought a reprieve that he hadn’t had in a full year. He was a human again, the water reminded him, and he quickly finished the full glass, cheeks pink. The desperation he went through was horribly embarrassing, but what could he do? When he was done, he let the straw fall from his mouth. Medic sat up, satisfied as he sat the glass on the bedside table. “Good. Do you have any questions? Anything you vant to know?”
Spy shook his head, eyes trailing back down towards his legs under a blanket. In reality, there were dozens of questions swarming in his mind, but he didn’t dare annoy the Medic, not wanting to become a test subject again. Pleased, Medic stood, walking towards the television in the corner of the room. He turned it on, setting it on a channel showing the movies and television of the time. It was midway through an episode of Mission: Impossible, the volume was low enough that Spy could have tuned it out if he wanted to sleep, but Medic doubted he would do that. He’d already been asleep for a few days straight.
“Alright,” the doctor said, looking at Spy. “I’ll be here in ze morning to check on you. Try moving your hands and fingers tonight. It vill be a long, hard recovery, but ze sooner ve start on your physical therapy, ze faster you vill recover. Zere’s a bedpan under you if you need to use ze bathroom, and… zat’s about it. Don’t pick at your IV. Try to get rest if you can, but if not, just vatch some television. Goodnight, Spy.”
“Goodnight, Ludwig,” Spy mumbled as he stared at the TV. The doctor closed the curtain, and eventually his footsteps trailed out of the room, the surrounding lights suddenly shutting off. All that was left was him and the television, which quietly performed in black and white. He would have much rather been able to read a book or the news, but he probably wouldn’t have been able to hold it up anyway. His eyes went blank, only on the screen for an ounce of visual stimulation. He’d spend so long staring at the empty, white wall of a smelly fridge, listening to disembodied hearts croak as he sat next to beers he could not drink and sandwiches he could not eat. Ah, what he wouldn’t do for a glass of wine and some cheese and crackers, maybe some prosciutto too. He could feel his stomach rumble as he dreamt of food, hunger panging inside of his torso. He hadn’t been hungry in so long, as a battery powered head wasn’t something that really needed to eat, but now he wished that he’d requested a bite of something, anything, even that cheap fried chicken that Scout loved so much, before Medic left. Now there was nothing to do but wait until morning, watching TV and stretching his fingers as directed.
Spy’s eyes trailed from the television to his hands, barely visible in the dark. His fists were still clenched as if he had forgotten how to unfold them. He tried willing them apart, but they curled away from each other too slowly, although his thumbs seemed to move better than the rest. It took a few seconds, but eventually his palms were flat, or at least as flat as he could make them. He really couldn’t uncurl his fingers into much more than a resting position, frustrating him to no end. Damn it! He should have remembered how to use his body! He was giving his hands commands, yet they weren’t following his orders. It was like he had gone through a full body workout, every muscle tensed, thick bands tying them tight, pulling him away from his goal. It didn’t hurt, per se, but it was certainly infuriating.
After a failed minute of trying to get his palms to lay flat, Spy sighed in defeat, making a weak attempt to shuffle himself into a lying position again. He didn’t manage it with much success, but it showed him that his ankles, similar to his fingers and wrists, could also somewhat move. There was nothing to do that night but practice with his body, and it wasn’t like he would benefit from being too petty to do the exercises Medic told him to try. He kept making fists and releasing, trying to twist his wrists and ankles in circles. He felt his stiff bones pop, and the sound made him cringe, tears squeezing out of the corners of his eyes.
Right. Medic was gone. Spy could cry all he wanted.