Chapter Text
No man’s land just got uglier by the day.
Scarred didn’t cover it—mutilated was a better word, one that captured how the wounds upon the earth were still fresh, still a work in progress as bombs and rockets churned up new earth before the dust ever really settled on the old. There must have been buildings here at one point, what with the concrete and rebar exposing themselves to the sky like the ribcage of a giant animal, but that was long before Demoman’s time. In the year since he’d joined up, he’d seen the battlefield change guises a dozen times, but never become more than what it was. Which, in Demo’s opinion, was a demented place to spin out one’s boredom.
The mercenaries on the other side of the border could always be counted on for a fight—those fights being the actual reason Demo had taken a bilateral contract in the middle of New Mexico—but despite the constant threat of death looming on the horizon, your greatest enemy tended to be the long days of absolute monotony. For every hour of skirmish where his blood pumped and he skirted the edges between ecstasy and pure self-destruction, there was a week of emptiness to follow, where RED did nothing but sit on their hands and argue the next optimal teamfight. It was enough to drive a man mad, let alone a demoman, and Demo found himself wandering the badlands more and more if only for the faintest promise of a brawl.
As he crested the top of a crumbling, concrete mound where bits of grass had been foolish enough to try to grow, he reminded himself that he was being outrageously stupid. His wandering about was risking life for no reason, as any man caught alone out here—even one armed with a grenade launcher—was as good as dead if he ran into more than one enemy combatant.
There was also the fact that the BLUs were depraved sons of bitches.
Where RED had the decency to execute its prisoners, Demo had heard enough horror stories about mercs being dragged off to BLU base to be tortured for who knows how long, never to be heard from again. Scout had an endless bouquet of gleeful anecdotes lined up about some lone survivor of a BLU ambush having his teeth ripped out or his thumbs poked with screws until he was begging for death. Demo had asked Scout once that if, supposedly, all these poor RED bastards were never heard from again, how Scout knew what had happened to them? All he’d gotten in response was an eyeroll.
Still, it was enough to put a seed of worry in Demo’s gut. As he gazed across the urban remains of the desert town, he decided he’d had enough adventuring for one day.
That is, until he spotted an unattended red sentry overlooking the border.
Demo searched his memory, trying to recall if Engineer had said anything about posting up in the middle of the warzone today. It wasn’t that uncommon: sometimes small groups of REDs would split off for days or even weeks at a time if the were a point of interest they decided they just had to hold. What was odd was that there was no sign of the Engineer himself, just a dispenser and a sentry in the remains of an exposed two-story. It was dilapidated, yet still the highest point around.
The sentry beeped cheerfully at him as he approached. If something had happened to the Engineer, his sentry would have followed suit shortly after; its presence meant he had to be kicking around somewhere. Demo searched, and eventually found what used to be the south wall of the structure, now flattened into a relatively walkable angle and descending into a trench below ground level. At the bottom were Engineer and Sniper, passing a few beers and standing over a bleeding BLU.
It was a Soldier. RED had had a Soldier once upon a time, Demo recalled. He had liked the man, right up until he’d taken a risky rocket jump and ended up with a Sniper’s round through his head. That had been in the early days of Demo’s deployment. RED had still yet to replace him.
This Soldier was similarly dressed, only blue and sporting a slightly more gelid helmet. He was on his side, retrained, and looking like he’d been through hell and back. If Demo were to guess, the broken leg twisting the wrong way under him was how he’d gotten into this situation in the first place; probably a misaimed jump, likely to avoid the sentry Demo had just walked past.
Demo didn’t want to guess about the rest of his state.
“Ain’t no body’s gunna- shit.” Whatever Sniper was chattering to the Engineer about was cut short as the two of them finally noticed Demo walking down the hill. Sniper reached for his machete.
Demo rolled his eye. “Burgundy turtle,” he repeated the week’s code phrase tiredly. “It’s me. Now what the bloody hell is going on here?”
Satisfied he wasn’t a Spy, Sniper shoved the machete back into his belt and grinned. “Interrogation.”
“Interrogation?” Demo snorted bitterly, looking over the injured BLU on the ground not too far away. “What’s he going to know that we don’t already?”
Demo doubted BLU was giving any more information to its mercs than RED was to its own, and Demo knew that if he were ever grilled for information, his captors would be sorely disappointed. Anything of any import was kept in the briefcase, locked tight in the base’s intelligence room.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Engineer said, also smirking.
“You will get nothing from me.” The Soldier spoke up for the first time. His voice was exhausted, full of the same fervor that Demo had heard from his own Soldier in their brief acquaintanceship but missing the polish, and Demo felt a deep pity stir in his gut. It was the contrast between the defiance in his words and the fact that he’d looked he’d been...well. “Nothing.”
“Shut up,” Engineer said, delivering a quick kick to his stomach. The wind went out of the Soldier and he fell back on his side with a wheeze. “We weren’t talking to you yet.”
“You’re just in time,” Sniper proclaimed cheerfully, either ignoring or delighting in the Demoman’s disgust. “Want one?” He offered up a bottle of Red Shed from the case near his feet, a few empties on a flat plane of concrete the two had apparently been using as a table.
Demo wrinkled his nose. The stuff was so weak it was practically lemonade, and disliked it on principal for the fact that his teammates drank nothing but the stuff. “I’m good,” he said tersely.
“Well hell must be freezing over,” the Engineer chuckled scathingly. “Demo turning down a drink. Sure you’re going to able to walk if you ain’t three bottles deep?”
Yet another reason he left base as often as he could. He couldn’t get an ounce of respect from these gits, and he had reason to believe it was more than just his preferred method of sating his thirst. Demo did nothing but purse his lips.
That just made Sniper and Engineer laugh harder. “Ah don’t look like that Demo,” Sniper said. “We’re just having some fun. If you don’t like it, you can head back to base.”
“That’s Demoman to you,” Demo said. Nicknames were reserved for people who weren’t reprobates. “And I’ve got a better idea: kill him and be done with it.”
“Ha!” Soldier barked feebly. “Good. At least one of you maggots has some honor.”
“I don’t think you quite understand the point of interrogation, boy,” Engineer replied darkly. “We don’t get anything out of him if he’s dead.”
“Oh I bet you’re getting something out of this alright,” Demo snarled right back, stepping until and Engineer were nose to nose. “And that wasn’t a suggestion. You’re you going to finish with him, go back to your bloody camping nests, and kill BLUs like you’re fucking supposed to.”
The goggles shinned menacingly up at him, pitiless black reflections that were as bottomless as the soul they concealed. The moment hung on and on, ice between the two men even as the sun beat down hot on upturned pavement.
“No,” Engineer mused. “I don’t rightly think I will.”
“Fine,” Demo said, turning toward the Soldier. “I’ll do it myself.”
He intended to, fully, and took the first step toward the pitiful mess that had once been a Soldier. Behind him, there was the sound of a safety clicking off.
Demo, who already had his hand on the neck of his scrumpy bottle, reacted with the sharpened reflexes of an overly itchy trigger finger. He spun, catching the Engineer hard in the side of the head with the full force of the bottle, stunning him before he could fully draw his pistol. The glass shattered. In one more motion, Demo thrust the now razor sharp end forward, digging hard into the stomach of a man still reeling.
There was a pause, then the Engineer slumped, falling off the end of the bottle and into a heap. Demo turned to Sniper.
The Sniper, who’d been reaching for his machete, saw the attention fall on him and quickly put up his hands. “No problem here, alright?” he said hastily. “Totally justified, he was ‘bout to shoot you in the back.”
“Aye,” Demo breathed heavily. “That he was.” He stepped forward and jabbed Sniper in the neck.
It was messier than the Engineer. Sniper gaped, falling to his knees and scrabbling at his throat as he tried in vain to stop the blood spurting through his fingers. It took him a good fifteen seconds to die, Demo standing over with his twice-bloodied bottle and making sure he wouldn’t be getting back up.
When it was done, he was surrounded by two dead teammates and a dozen empty bottles of beer. There was only one set of eyes left on him now, and when he looked at the Soldier they met his own.
The BLU thought for a moment, then spit. “Good fucking riddance.” The glob that hit the dirt looked to be more blood than saliva.
Demo exhaled, the full weight of what he’d just done bearing down on him. But he didn’t regret it. Some men just don’t belong in the world, regardless of whether they were on his team or not. He stepped forward, no bastards to stop him this time.
The Soldier saw him approaching and laid his cheek down on the ground. That was all. No last insults, no bitter words; in fact, before the Soldier closed his eyes, Demo swore he saw the briefest flash of relief.
He hovered over the prone captive, catching in detail the bruising and the way his uniform had been ripped. As if that weren't enough, someone had been breaking his fingers, starting with the thumb and moving all the way down to the pinky, which had yet to be turned into a mass of mismatched bone fragments poking under the skin.
His scrumpy bottle suddenly felt like an obscenely brutal way to go. There was no way to do it neatly, no matter where he shanked it’d still leave the half-dead man’s last few minutes in miserable and unsightly. It might even be longer if Demo failed hit an artery. So there Demo was, knuckles clenched firmly around glass neck, trying to force himself to just do it. He needed to finish up and get out of here before someone could pin the death of his teammates on him, but to do that he needed complete what he’d set out to do in the first place. His goal to put the damn Soldier out of his misery. To make this morning a fucking hat trick.
“Fucking hell,” Demo muttered.
There was slight movement from the Soldier. He looked up at Demo with the barest hint of raised eyebrows beneath the helmet, resignation and confusion.
“Hell,” Demo repeated. Then he leaned down and used the jagged edge of his scrumpy to cut the binding around Soldier’s arms.
“What are you doing RED?” Soldier coughed as Demo tossed the bottle aside and lifted Soldier under his one good arm.
“Do you want to ask questions, or do you want to live?” Demo demanded. “Can you walk if I hold you up?”
“…I think so?” the Soldier admitted.
Demo didn’t have time to explain an entire guilt complex, so he simply said, “alright. C’mon, there’s a dispenser inside the building.”
Hopping up a hill one-footed was not an easy task, even with a sworn enemy holding you under the arm, and the going was so slow that Demo’s jumpsuit turned sticky with sweat as they marched under the noonday sun. At the second story, he finally set the Soldier down, and went inside to deal with the sentry.
“Sorry,” he told the thing as he rolled a few stickies underneath it. Poor machine was just doing its damn job.
When it let out its last agonized whine, Demo helped Soldier up against the dispenser.
The BLU hadn’t taken his eyes off Demo the entire time, trying to uncover what sort of secret motivations had led him to turn on his team just to save the life of a man that would probably kill him as soon as he was patched up. If Soldier found any answers to those questions, Demo hoped he would let him know; Demo certainly didn’t have any idea.
When a few seconds passed without the dispenser making any effort at all, Demo said, “ach, hold on.”
He came back with the Sniper’s jacket, and dropped it over Soldier’s front. Recognizing a friendly, the device finally whirred to life. Miracle of science that it may have been, watching bones set themselves back in the right place was still unnerving, each little fracture healing with a sickening snap as a leg became leg-shaped again. Even if dispensers and mediguns couldn’t bring back severed limbs (or missing eyes), they still never failed to amaze him.
Soldier wasn’t as enthralled. He didn’t even notice the magic happening to him, his own flesh moving under skin, and kept his attention still locked unwavering on the Demoman. To distract himself—both from the ogling and from the awful sounds—Demo got up and began to search around.
“Here,” he said, a half hour later, depositing weapons into the lap of the now fit Soldier.
Soldier’s hand darted forward, and Demo tensed, thinking he knew what was about to happen. But instead of reaching for his shotgun, the Soldier instead grabbed the shovel out of the pile, snapping it open and giving it the saddest look Demo had ever seen thrust upon a mêlée weapon. After a moment, he folded it back up again, and got to his feet.
Demo waited. He wasn’t sure for what—for Soldier to say something? For the other shoe drop? But there was nothing crashing to meet his expectations, only lolling waves of not-being-murdered as the Soldier clipped his rocket launcher back onto its sling.
“You should go,” Demo said finally when it was clear there was literally nothing else to do. “I have to ah…get out of here. Before someone finds them.” He jerked his thumb down the hill.
Soldier looked at him, that slightly off-shade helmet as blank as the set mouth beneath it. “Okay,” was all he said.
As Demo left down the stairs, back the way he’d come, he heard the unmistakable sound of rocket jump, then another more distant. And then that was that, and he left the horrid place as quickly as he could without outright running.
As unsettled as he felt, Demo had to admit he’d gotten away with it fairly easily.
At the time he’d been so worried about the BLU turning on him and the ethical implications of helping someone who was hell-bent on grinding you and your entire mercenary company to the dirt, he had failed to consider that teamkilling was a far bigger stain against his honor. Even if Sniper hadn’t been a part of the equation, self-defense wasn’t adequate insurance when justice was delivered in trial by mob. If it had come down to his repute against his crimes, RED’s opinion of him was so dismal they would feed him to the lions any day of the week. The court of public opinion was almighty when you were among your fellow monsters.
So when someone had eventually stumbled on the bodies, it hit Demo how perilous the situation still might be. He did his best to act surprised as everyone else, and washed his hands extra hard under the cold of the rusted tap, just in case blood was somehow still under his fingernails.
But although the lack of structure outside of their little base meant there was a singular judge, jury, and executioner, it also meant that “detective” wasn’t an occupation filled by their mini society. When you find a dead co-worker, you don’t even register the question, ‘what happened?’ You just think to yourself, ‘well. damn.’
Within a few hours of discovering the brutalized sentry nest, everyone had cursed the BLU attack and moved on. (Not mourned, just cursed. Mourning implied the two dead were popular enough for anyone to be moved by their passing.) Medic had declared it tragic, everyone had shrugged, and then they put in a request to RED for two more class replacements.
Demo was free to go back to thinking about the BLU Solider. He wondered what the man thought of him, if he would explain his miraculous survival to the rest of the team. Demo hoped BLUs wouldn’t expect mercy from him now; lobbing bombs at hapless nobodies was one of the only perks of this job. If they were expecting pity, it’d take all the fun out of it. Already he felt like he’d betrayed some sort of trust.
This anxiety manifested itself not on the battlefield, but as a knock on the Demoman’s door one night.
“I’m coming, I’m coming- Spy?” Demo blinked blearily at the RED before him. He knew Spy was up at all odd hours, but Demo had never had his sleep disturbed like this before except when they were under attack.
“Demoman,” Spy replied evenly. “I am in need of somewhere to stay for the moment. Might come in for a few hours?”
“Er…no?” That was by far the strangest thing he’d ever heard Spy say, considering they barely had a working relationship, let alone one where they would willingly exist in each other’s space. “‘M sleeping, go away.”
Spy fleetingly glanced over his shoulder. “I assure you, it is of the upmost importance that I am not in this hallway in the next few minutes. I will owe you a great favor.”
It struck Demo in his drowsy state that there was a rusted edge in Spy’s voice: he’d gotten into some sort of trouble, the signs written into every inch of his posture. And if it was Spy’s sort of trouble, Demo wanted no part of it. “I don’t want you to owe me any favors. This is- whatever this is, I can’t help you.” He tried to close the door, despite Spy’s foot.
“Fine,” Spy frowned. “I will tell you why you should help me, and that is because last week when I discovered the bodies of the Sniper and the Engineer, they had sustained wounds that did not match the weapons of any known BLU class. There were shards of glass in the Engineer’s stomach. A bottle of your favorite brand of whiskey was broken and covered in blood, rolled to the bottom of the hill. Now might I come in?”
Demo felt like he’d been stuck upside the head. The bottle, how had he not went back and grabbed the bloody bottle? But now he was caught, and all he could do was swallow and nod, letting the Spy into his dingy little room.
“Thank you,” Spy said curtly, as though this were a perfectly mutual exchange. “If anyone comes looking for me, you have not seen me.”
“Why would someone be banging on doors in the middle of-?”
“Shh!” Spy held up his hand suddenly. Then, he flickered to invisibility.
Demo halted, and it took him an extra second before he heard it: footsteps coming down the hall, swift and determined. Demo waited with baited breath, hoping that this was all some sort of paranoid miscommunication.
His hopes were dashed with an abrupt knock at the door. “Herr Demoman?”
With a sharp intake, Demo reached for the knob only, to freeze as he realized what he was doing. Cautiously, he tiptoed back to bed, then made a much bigger racket as he pretended to roll out and storm to the door.
“Cannee help ya, doc?” he mumbled, doing his best impression of a man who just woke up, even though that man had been chased out of Demo’s consciousness with a broom.
“I am looking for the Spy,” Medic said, a twitch in the corner of his eye. “Has he come by this way tonight?”
“Cannae say ‘e has, nooo,” Demo slurred. He hoped that if acted as drunk and unhelpful as possible, Medic might just go away. It was usually a very successful deterrent. “Why ya lookin’ fer ‘im this time ‘o night, lad?”
“Someone has…tampered with one of my experiments. I was hoping Spy might be…helpful in figuring out what happened.”
“Ach, s’ sorry tae hear tha’ doc.” Demo knew he was laying it on thick at this point, but his heart was beating so fast he hoped his rambling would cover up the sound of its pounding. “Ah hope everythin’ turns ou’ fer ya.”
Medic shot him a look of such open distaste, Demo was shocked to think Medic might honestly look at him like that every time he thought he was too drunk to notice.
“Thank you, Herr Demoman. Sweet dreams.”
Demo spent several moments with his ear against the door, making absolutely certain the doctor was gone before spinning back on the room.
“So,” he asked of the now reappeared Spy. “You going to tell me what that was all about?”
Spy removed a cigarette from his disguise kit. He took a long, long draw, but finally Spy admitted, “it is like he said. I interfered with something he was amusing himself with.”
“Now why would you go and do something like that? The man’s a lunatic, he’d going to grind you into little bits and decorate a cake with them.”
Spy smoked for a moment longer. “Several days ago, we captured the BLU Scout. Alive.”
“Oh.” Demo wrinkled his nose. “I didn’t know that.”
“Indeed. Medic wanted it kept quiet, he claimed he could learn more about countering the BLU’s ÜberCharge by examining the Scout.” Spy took another drag. “This was a lie of course. The Scout has been kept in a state of continuous agony as the good doctor proceeds to perform unrelated experiments on him.”
“Jesus…” Demo muttered. “And you, er, tampered with that?”
Spy puffed. “…The Scout is no longer in any pain.”
“I see. That’s good then, I guess.” Demoman eyed his unintended guest. “You know, if anyone keeps looking for you, they’re going to take one step in this room and sniff out that you’ve been here.”
Spy looked down at his cigarette and frowned. Sighing, he flicked it away and crushed it under his heel. “I suppose you are right.”
“So what happens now? You just live in my room forever?”
“No, I think a night will do, if only to ride out the initial round of questions, and Medic’s annoyance.” Spy turned to Demo. “However, if I ever need to hide in the future I may ask for your compliance again.”
“Bloody great. Blackmailed until our contracts are up, so glad I have something to look forward to.” Demo glared. “Aren’t worried I’ll kill you just to cover it all up? I’ve carved my way through two REDs already, who’s to say I’ll stop?”
“Unarmed in close quarters? No, I very much think I could take you.” Demo grit his teeth, but despite the nonchalant way Spy was now leaned against the wall, he had seen what those hands could do with a butterfly knife. He might have a chance against the Spy, but very slim one. “Besides, the Sniper and the Engineer? I’m sure you had your reasons. They were not very good men.”
“None of us are good men,” Demo reminded.
“True.” Spy looked at the door, though his gaze was a long way away. “Though some worse than others.”