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Each merc had an automatic low-health alarm installed into their bodies. How exactly it worked, Medic never explained to them, much like the other modifications he had so graciously done to their feeble flesh in order to improve it for combat. Though, this one wasn’t his idea, and he rather detested it; the Administrator had taken issue with his inability to locate certain members of his team, since less healing meant more deaths meant more Respawns meant more financial burden on her. He understood, to an extent– that hunk of freak-tech couldn’t be cheap to run, and after all, it was his job to make sure his teammates didn’t die.
Where his understanding ended, however, was with the fact that she wanted him to somehow locate, and keep alive, the smallest and most hyperactive member of their team, one who loved to run off into the fray and be immediately torn apart by a thousand pieces of lead. Speed and stupidity aside, as he was surprisingly able to keep up with him, the Scout was so physically weak that he couldn’t wrap his head around why they’d hired him. Sure, he could have held his own if he were up against people his age, his size, but not a team of fully-grown men.
So, to keep himself from going mad, Medic had turned the threshold for ‘low-health’ as far down as possible, to the point that if the boy was so damaged, he would surely be dead within seconds anyways. He would deal with their boss’s furious shoutings later– he’d already written up a counter-argument to throw back at her when that inevitably came to be– for now he just wanted to focus on the important parts of the job.
It wouldn’t stop dinging into his comm.
At first, he’d let a minute pass, annoyed but anticipating imminent relief. Then five. Then ten. It was still going. He could barely focus on healing the people right around him, much less seeking out others or positioning himself into a more advantageous area. He swore there was a time the Heavy had needed to practically drag him by the arm to get him out of the line of fire, though he couldn’t be sure, because he’d barely been paying attention. He couldn’t even remember what he’d just done! This was insanity! Was it broken? Had it been ripped out of him by an enemy and thrown on the ground as some kind of distraction tactic? In that case, Scout would have respawned by now, right?
“Nyet, not seen leetle Scout.”
“That is a negatory!”
“Nah, sorry, sawbones. He okay?”
“Mmnph-nnph!”
“Nah, but I’ll look fer ‘im with my scope.”
“Yer even askin’ the drunk guy?”
“Non.”
Medic just stood there, dumbfounded, as the Spy cloaked and stepped into the shadows. Well, that pretty much blew his theory to pieces. Perhaps the Scout had gotten pinned by one of the enemy sentries and was trying to wait it out until they moved up, then take the objective from behind? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d thought of a strategy like that, and the doctor had to admit, he was always impressed by them. He must’ve really been losing it from the alarm’s constant noise, because he even started to mull over how Scout’s past plans had saved them in quite a few pinches, started to even consider the idea that he might be smart. At least, smarter than he seemed, Medic thought over his internal monologue, frowning.
“I’m going to look for him,” he suddenly blurted, eyebrows shooting up as he heard his own voice. Heavy turned to him with a worried, pensive face, and nodded as he pulled a sandwich from his pocket. He handed it to the other and said something about giving it to the boy if need be. Medic barely registered the words, shoving it into a pouch on his belt and peeling away from the mercs holding a defensive formation around their own point.
As the sound of gunfire faded behind him, the ding, ding, ding, became almost unbearable without something else to focus his hearing on. He thought about ripping the comm right out of his ear, throwing it on the ground, stomping until it was crushed to pieces, and– oh, it was a two-way comm, wasn’t it? Oh, in his frenzy, he’d completely forgotten to just… open a channel. He vaguely recalled someone mumbling a concern about what must have happened to the Scout for him to lose his headset, and… yeah, they definitely all thought he’d tried that already.
In his defence, an injured teammate should have called to him first, not the other way around, and secondly, it was unusual for him to go out and find someone. He normally found a few fellow mercs in a cluster and hung around them, only breaking away when necessary for a push.
But he sighed, depressed the button behind his ear, and spoke. “Scout? Scout, can you hear me?”
Mere seconds later, the line crackled on, a raspy voice barely audible over it. “O-Oh, hey, Doc. Th… Thought you’d… forgotten about me.” A weak laugh was more grimace-inducing than amusing.
“How could I have forgotten, when I’ve been painfully aware of your alarm blaring for fifteen minutes now?” He didn’t mean for it to come out so harsh, but the realisation that the boy was both alive and– just based on how he sounded– barely hanging onto that status, it bothered him. There wasn’t a better word he could come up with. It didn’t annoy him, not exactly, and it surprised him to realise he wasn’t all that angry, either. But he was displeased. Upset. Bothered.
A small choke, wet, probably on either saliva or blood. “S-S-Sorry, I… ‘m kinda… stuck. Woulda… woulda killed myself a while ago, b-but I dropped, dropped my guns, ‘n can’ move.”
“You’re stuck? Where?” And he didn’t mean for that to come out so… so… he didn’t have a word for this one, either.
“Uh… ng–” The line briefly cut off, presumably for him to cough. His breathing was shaky when it came back into the comm. “Hah, it’s– ‘s a bit funny, ‘m just… ‘m jus’ in the shack next to th’ center. Think… think ‘ve heard a coupl’a people walk by, actually.”
“And why didn’t you say anything? Your headset has worked fine this entire time, ja? Why didn’t you call out to them, or better yet, why not tell us where you were?” He was walking just slow enough that he could keep his breathing, and therefore speech, controlled and even. Just slow enough, and no slower. The clearing was coming into view now, and he was fairly certain he could spot the structure Scout was talking about. A shallow little building, barely big enough for someone to sit down in, though wide enough that it could fit a teleporter, maybe a dispenser, certainly a sniper.
“Uh… I… I didn’t… didn’t wanna bother ya.”
In his mind, Medic used not talking on the comms as a justification for his boots beating the grass, and the speed at which he ran as justification for not talking on the comms.
The scene he found made his gut twist, and he didn’t like that, he didn’t like that at all. He’d seen horrifically gory things– he’d seen them since he was a child, he’d been just a teenager when all that broken glass littered the streets, his family and friends– and he’d caused a fair deal of it himself, from experiments to slashing his enemies usually in self-defence, and besides, besides, he thought, resisting the urge to shake his head, it wasn’t even his stomach that was pierced through with a metal pole.
His body-brain connection reestablished when Scout gave him an unenthusiastic wave from where he half-sat, half-lay on a crate, upper body positioned awkwardly against the wall behind him. It seemed he was trying to use his meagre weight to apply pressure to the wound, something his arms weren’t contributing to in the slightest, limp and shaking where they rested around the debris. As Medic approached, he was pleasantly surprised upon seeing that it had been more or less effective; while he was covered in his own blood, from what flowed from his nose to the absolute mess that was his soaked clothing, most of it had coagulated, or begun to.
“Alright, then, eh…” The alarm had stopped due to its proximity feature, which should have been blissful, but it was replaced by rapid, thin panting, and that was somehow worse. “Well, I can’t heal you with… that… present,” the doctor said, setting his medi-gun onto the only brown part of the crate. “I’ll need to pull it out.”
“Why not just… kill me?” Scout asked, offering what was probably supposed to be a smile.
Medic actually shook his head this time. “Nein, Respawn is far away and they keep moving up. You’re in an advantageous position, well, at least physically. Er… locationally.” He glanced back at the medi-gun.
It was his initial prototype, upon which he’d later built his standard one. After doing so, it’d mostly sat among spare parts and unfinished projects, but he’d decided to tune it up and see if it could prove useful in battle. His further iterations had to balance functionality and bulk, so he’d sacrificed some healing power for invulnerability and the like. This one, lacking anything of the sort, was one hundred percent optimised for stitching its target back together. So far, it proved useful in certain situations, but he’d never been able to see it work up close. Up close, on a severe wound, close enough to see the flesh re-adhere and smooth over. He was awfully, dreadfully curious about what it would look like.
“I’ll get you fixed up in minutes, no need to wait for Respawn, then come all the way back here,” he finished, hoping the pause between sentences hadn’t been too long.
The boy’s eyes were a bit glazed over as he mumbled a vague understanding. Probably too out of it to care either way, or even really understand the options available to him.
After quite the difficulty of taking off his backpack in the cramped space, Medic was able to get himself in the gap between the crate and wall opposite the one Scout sat slumped against. He grabbed the merc’s hips and slid him down so that he lay flat against the bloodstained surface, clots breaking loose at the extension of his abdomen, brighter bubbles of red fluid streaming over their deoxygenated brethren.
The sound of it was awful. Not the wet thud as his back hit the crate, not the exit edge of the pipe scraping against its wood, not even the distant screams of the others who were certainly dying without the team’s doctor. No, it just had to be the pained whimper he made, cracking through an obvious attempt at suppression. His fingers, sticky with his own innards, grasped weakly at the leaking wound but proved no mechanical function. It must have been a subconscious attempt to soothe himself, a basic instinct of guarding an injury, a response to what was likely blinding amounts of pain.
Guilt began to settle itself into Medic’s chest.
He swallowed thickly and leaned over his patient. Removing impaling objects was much easier when you didn’t have to worry about bleeding, a tank of instant regeneration sitting right next to them, but there was still the decision of how to physically take it out. Since it was a through wound, and the object was rather short, pushing was an option. On the other hand, since the far edge of the pipe appeared smooth, pulling was also possible. Though, he didn’t know about the section that was inside the abdominal cavity, and it had gone in cleanly enough, so perhaps pushing was better after all.
In the end, he opted for putting one hand on the back of Scout’s waist, around the exposed debris, and lifting him up off of the crate. Doing so was too easy. It was more reminiscent of picking up a kid than his coworker who was fighting an endless gravel war with him. He tried not to think about that, tried to focus on the peritoneal fluid dripping down his forearm that felt a few degrees below human body temperature, tried to focus on holding the boy firm enough that he wouldn’t slip around from all the gore covering him. It worked, to an extent.
The faint sound of dirt crunching and shouting reminded Medic that he needed to hurry up, that the whole point of this was to save time, collect data he could use to better aid the rest of his team, the rest who he actually healed, then get back to them and do just that. He needed to focus, he needed to stop thinking all of these strange, foreign things, the type that he’d sworn to himself he’d eradicate from his mind after one too many times crying over lost friends.
“You must be very quiet, ja?” he murmured, able to feel Scout’s racing pulse through the inflamed wound, see the droplets of sweat on his clammy skin, hear his breathing hitch, then increase in pace, as the piece of metal was gently prodded to test its positioning. “If you yell, they will hear us, and then we’ll just end up in Respawn anyways. Better to get some benefit from this whole thing, mm?”
He expected some kind of sarcastic, even boasting comment in response, something that aligned with the usual antics of the merc. Instead, he received earnest, rapid nodding, and wide, frightened eyes, shiny with tears. The guilt rooted itself deeper, spread. And so did something else, some kind of nauseating fondness, some kind of sensation that could even be described as affection. How often did the boy stop talking and listen, how often did he obey even simple commands? And above all else, his expression, his nervousness– he was even shaking so much that he’d surely be sore from tension later– it all suddenly made Medic’s chest hurt.
Push that away, he thought, ignore it, cast it out of your mind. You’ve done it before, it’s so easy!, he pleaded.
The doctor braced himself and pressed on the metal, but paused when met with resistance, the muscles around it having clenched. He was about to bark out something about not making his job harder, but the words died on his tongue before he could form more than a breath.
“Is… is this gonna hurt?”
A stupid question. Childish, even. He had a metal pipe penetrating straight through his abdomen, which he was obviously well, well aware of, had been so for at least a quarter hour. If Medic had to guess, he’d probably lost a litre and a half of blood. He didn’t look like he could even see properly, eyes unfocused and flicking randomly between the doctor and the door. And in any other circumstances, Medic would have responded with his own sarcastic comment, his own impersonal and exasperated reaction to his teammates’ incompetency. But the boy’s voice was so… quiet. Scared. Small.
“Well… ah… yes,” was all he could think to say. “I’m sorry. But it’ll be over soon.”
And then he pressed his palm down onto the near edge of the pipe, forcing the piece of metal through to the other side. Fluid ran through the fingers of his other hand, splattered onto the crate and floor below, and made the exiting length of debris so slippery that his grasp on it failed several times when he reached around to pull. Agonising, it must have been agonising, and he really, really couldn’t have blamed Scout if he yelled after all. In fact, the man was so far gone that he even thought he might apologise to him when they both came out of Respawn. But he didn’t. He sure convulsed, but that was inevitable, and once the pipe’s near edge was pulled inside his abdomen, Medic held him flush, putting pressure on the wound and keeping him from moving, so it didn’t matter all too much. And he didn’t yell. No, he barely made a sound. He smeared the doctor’s lab coat with blood, little hands balling up in the– his hands , just hands, balling up in the fabric, and that would be annoying to clean, sure, but he barely made a sound.
The vocalisation he did have was like when he’d been moved to be flat onto the crate, only worse, somehow, a lot worse. So much worse, and Medic’s palms were sweating under his gloves, and the stupid, insolent, horrible piece of metal slipped in his fingers once more, jostling the wound, and the poor thing sounded so sad and hurt, all the while desperately trying not to, twitching against him and breathing impossibly fast and shallow, cap skewed to the side and sweaty forehead pressed against his neck, and his head was spinning. Violently.
“Gut gemacht,” he said, not really thinking. His mouth was dry. Had he been breathing through it, instead of his nose? “Almost done. Gut.”
And when it finally came free, after what felt like several hours but was probably half a minute at most, he really should have dropped him back down onto the crate to better maneuver the medi-gun. He really should have. And yet, he found himself fumbling one-handed to angle it and pull back the upper handle, which was not particularly easy when everything had become covered in bodily fluids. Against his own judgement, he found himself doing it. The worst part was that he wasn’t even particularly upset with his own idiocy. What else was he supposed to do, after all?
He let go of the Scout much too slowly, lowering him down so that he’d be more sat against the wall than laid on the crate. Minimal contact with your old guts was probably preferable. Medic didn’t care about anyone else’s preferences, especially not when it interfered with his work, and that’s why he was thinking about wrapping the boy’s now-healed abdomen with a bandage, one that would be better used for actual medicine, so that there wouldn’t be a gap of exposed skin.
Scout sniffled and wiped off his face onto his hands, exchanging tears and mucus for blood. The doctor’s handkerchief was burning in his pocket, but he told himself it would be better for the enemy team to be distracted, either assuming he was injured and underestimating him, or that he was on a rampage and being too panicked to hit their shots. It still burned.
They remained there for a while; Scout caught his breath, drumming his fingers over the skin that didn’t have a scar to show for its trial. Medic just… watched him. Standing before the crate, looking down at the small, slouched merc, not even leaning on the wall behind him. He knew he should have said his goodbyes, turned, and ran back into the fray, but he didn’t. He only stood there and watched. He received the distinct impression that something had changed inside his brain, and he didn’t like that, but had no idea what to do to reverse the effect.
He stood there so long, in fact, that it was the Scout who moved first, stiffly shifting himself to the edge of the crate as if every muscle and tendon in his body were made of stretched rubber bands. Worst of all, the thing that ended up propelling the doctor into motion was not the sound of the enemy team approaching, nor the sudden burst of yelling over the comms about half their own men being in Respawn, but watching his technically-no-longer patient struggle to stand. He moved to Scout’s side, offering a hand and pulling him up when he took it.
“Uh, th… thanks. Thanks, doc. Sorry about…” The Scout gestured at the mess of gore that some hopefully well-paid person would have to clean. “…all of that.”
And Medic must have not said anything for quite a while, because then the boy turned and ran off with a wave, leaving him to suddenly remember the sandwich in his pocket which he’d forgotten to give to him. Well, he didn’t need it now, being healed back to relative normal. And there was absolutely no amount of pride associated with the thought, since that’s simply what the job of a Medic was. None at all.