//------------------------------//
// (Panicked Screaming in Prench) 
// Story: The Tirek Who Tolerated Me 
// by Kotatsu Neko 
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The battlefield's codename was Well, and insofar as any of the mercenaries thought about it at all, they didn't know why.  Most of the places they fought had names that made at least some sense: Harvest was situated in the middle of a farm, the tracks for the payload cart in Upward went generally, well, upward, Hydro had a dam and hydroelectric power plant, and Sawmill included giant freestanding exposed sawblades in its central building, which would have been a severe OSHA violation if the facility was ever used for anything other than armed combat.  The area known as Well, however, did not have a well.  It did have a small moat on either side, just outside of the RED and BLU bases, but these were barely tactically significant.  Of greater interest was the railroad track running through the middle of the battleground, and the trains that came barrelling through with surprising frequency.  Why, then, wasn't it called Railway?  Or Depot?  Or Mind the Tracks?  It was a mystery, but since it was one they weren't paid to solve, they didn't.

The RED team's current opponents were more stubborn than usual.  Though they had fallen back from the central control point, their defense of their own territory was remarkably solid.  The BLU team's sentry was both well-placed and well-maintained, and each RED attempt to gain entry to their base was stymied by coordinated tactics.  Even the use of the Medic's Übercharge, which wrapped both him and a teammate in a wreath of invincibility, was literally pushed back by the opposing Medic's own Übercharge and bursts of compressed air from the BLU Pyro.

Outside the base, hunkered against a dispenser, the Demoman reloaded his sticky bomb launcher.  "I can't get a clean line to their turret," he shouted over the constant gunfire, "an' their hardhat has a bloody Short Circuit!  I cannae push through, an' time's roonin' out!"

"Spy will have that sentry down," Engineer insisted.  "We've gotta give him more time!"





Tirek was regretting the bacon.  The stomach in this body was clearly not accustomed to the very reasonable amount of grease-laden fried meat the former centaur had ingested, and was making its opinion known with every step he took.  He couldn't even think about snacking on his pocket bacon, which was a tragedy.

He was working his way through the central building, peering intently at the ground.  He had found a cart somewhere, a flat four-wheeled dolly upon which rested a pile of well-oiled lethality.  Occasionally he would find a weapon dropped by the BLU team during their retreat, toss it on the pile, then push the cart onward.

Sooner or later he would have all the guns, and then he would have true power.

As he picked over a fallen BLU soldier and, with some difficulty, dragged a rocket launcher to his cart, a sudden shift in shadows made him look up.  Tirek took in the figure before him, his eyes widening.  "...you?!  How?!"

"I am the Spy," said the RED Spy.

"How in Tartarus did you get here?!" Tirek demanded.  He looked the newcomer up and down once again.  "...and with your own body, no less?"

The other Spy looked nonplussed, but shrugged nonchalantly.  "All in a day's work."

Tirek scowled.  "Oh, keep your secrets, then.  I don't care.  But what about Cozy Glow?  Did you at least leave the little urchin behind?"

"Naturally."

"Well, at least you did something right."  He considered the Spy for a long moment.  "I can't give you your body back at the moment, but it seems you found a way around that anyway..." He stopped as a thought occurred.  "...wait, what happened to my body?"

The Spy thought about this.  "I am the Spy," he said finally.

"Yes, yes, you are the Spy and I am the Tirek!  Where is my body?!"

Slowly, a smile appeared on the Spy's face.  "To the left!"

Tirek glanced in the indicated direction and saw an open wide doorway leading outside.  "You brought it with you?  Well... I suppose I might be able to work with that."  Then his head tilted curiously.  "I must say, you're being very obliging for somecreature I left trapped in Tartarus."

"...I am-"

"The Spy, yes, I know.  Well, let's go see what you did with it."

The Spy gestured graciously.  "After you."

"How kind," Tirek sneered.  He managed to throw the rocket launcher onto the cart, which he then pushed through the doorway.

He didn't hear the footstep behind him, didn't hear the metallic click of a butterfly knife being unfolded, didn't hear the quiet chuckle...

Tirek squinted as he stepped into the sunlight, then looked around.  "Well?  Where is it?"  He turned angrily.  "If you've damaged it, I-"

He stopped.  The RED Spy was just behind him, arm raised and knife at the ready.

He was also on fire.

"I appear to have burst into flames," he commented, surprisingly calmly as the blaze consumed him.  Then he collapsed bonelessly to the ground.

Tirek stared at the corpse, then lifted his gaze to the figure who had been just behind it.

The RED Pyro was also staring at the fallen Spy, their strange weapon still pointing at the burning body.  Then, ever so slowly, the Pyro lifted their head until the black mask was pointed directly at Tirek, his own borrowed face reflected in those soulless lenses.  The Pyro waited until they were sure they had Tirek's full attention, then pulled the trigger on the weapon.  A gout of flame leapt from the nozzle on the device and added to the flames still licking at the now blue-suited figure.

(In the Pyro's mind, the BLU Spy was simply overcome with laughter due to being smothered in tickling bubbles.  They knew the others didn't approve of bubbles and so didn't share them with the rest of the team, but Pyro was feeling uncharacteristically angry and was inclined to break that rule for this not-Spy imposter.)

Tirek watched, horrified, as the mouth of the flamethrower was raised to point at his face.  The pilot light flickered ominously as he took a step backwards, only to fetch up against the cart.  "I feel as if we have gotten off on the wrong hoof," he said desperately.

Pyro paused, puzzled, but only for an instant.  They said nothing, their gloved grip tightening on the flamethrower's handle.

The former centaur quickly circled around the cart, turning it to give the Pyro a better view of its contents.  "Would you like some guns?  I have many-"

A boot lashed out, launching the cart toward and onto the nearby tracks.  Five seconds later a train atomized it.

Tirek scrabbled yet further away from the beast before him, until finally there was a metal fence at his back.  "What is it you want?!"

"Hrrrrrrrrr...!"  It was a rising growl, the noise a hound makes when it's about to bite...

"There y'are, Spy!  What the hell are you doin' all the way back here?"

They turned to see Engineer trotting closer.  His goggles and hardhat tended to obscure some of his facial expressions, but he definitely looked annoyed.  "You were supposed to be workin' on takin' out that sentry!  Good thing Scout finally managed to distract it with that radium-flavored swill of his and..."  He stopped, taking in the tense situation between his teammates, and the burning corpse on the ground. "...is, uh... is there a problem, fellas?"

Pyro looked back at Tirek for a long moment, then holstered their flamethrower.  "...nrr."  They turned and trudged toward the RED base, not looking back.

Engineer scratched his head under the hardhat, concerned, then delivered a light smack to Tirek's temple.  "Well?" he asked as the former centaur glared at him.  "I hope y'all had a good reason for abandonin' the mission."

Tirek glanced at the train tracks where his cart of munitions had met its end, but realized the Engineer probably wouldn't accept 'I was collecting guns for personal gain' as a valid excuse.  "I... had my own mission to complete."

"Huh?  The hell are you talkin' about?"

Inspiration flashed.  "It was given to me by... the dragon herself."

The Engineer's annoyance seemed to ebb slightly, replaced by uncertainty.  "The Administrator gave you a separate mission?  She ain't never done that before.  What kind of mission?"

"I'm not at liberty to say."

The Engineer frowned.  "I don't like it, folks being given secret objectives, but I guess complainin' won't do any good. And maybe this ain't much different than the contracts Miss Pauling sometimes gives us..."  Then he looked at Tirek.  "Fine, then. But couldja at least make sure you tell us if you're gonna run off on your own?"

"...very well."  He tried not to look relieved, which was not actually difficult.  He was relieved, but that was tempered by the loss of his stockpile of weaponry, and it didn't seem like he'd be able to get away with that again.  He'd have to think of something else...

"C'mon, then.  Let's get packed up and ready to go."

"Go where?" Tirek didn't ask.  He felt he was treading on thin crystal in the 'being found out' department as it was.  "Yes, of course," he said instead, and trailed after the Engineer to where, he assumed, the strange conveyance that had brought them here was waiting.  It was cramped, shook unpleasantly and smelled of unfamiliar chemicals and body odor, but at least it was a reprieve from the constant danger of the battlefield.

Besides, he considered, after facing down that... thing and its fire weapon, their next destination couldn't be that bad.

Which only goes to show you could be a centuries-old megalomaniacal tyrant and still make the dumbest possible assumptions.





The rest of the day went past in a blood-red haze for Tirek.  Most of his experiences he would work very hard to forget, with little success.

Probably the worst happened in a huge white room filled with whirring machinery, where his legs were separated from his body by a small, unassumingly spiky blue sphere.  Given that he had woken up once recently missing a pair of limbs, having it happen again seemed rather unfair.  Soldier had carried him to the one called Medic while Scout tracked down the wayward appendages.  He'd cringed at the sight of the Medic's strange device, as it reminded him a bit too much of the Pyro's weapon, but getting the limbs reattached was oddly straightforward, even though Scout tried to set them in place backwards as a joke.

Or perhaps the worst was when they'd returned to the site of his initial victory, near the town of Teufort, which had given him a certain confidence. He'd been experimenting with the invisibility talisman on his wrist, and took what seemed to be the obvious tactic of strolling up to the enemy's briefcase and walking away with it.  The BLU team's engineers and their sentient explosion machines wouldn't notice a thing!  But when his hand touched the case, for some reason the spell chose that exact moment to fail.  He wasn't sure how he'd made it out of there alive.

Then there was lunch, and that had been horrific in its own special way.  He'd spurned the waxy blocks and oozing pouches within the "MRE" that Soldier had pressed upon him as if it had been finest cuisine, and instead finished off his pocket bacon.  Admittedly, it had been quite cold, extremely greasy, lint-covered, and rather damp with brackish water from when he'd fallen into the moat at Well, but it had tasted fine at first.  And then they'd gotten back in the transport van - the stuffy, jolting, odorous van - and... things had happened.  The team had had to take a detour to something called a 'rest stop' while the back of the van was washed out.  It seemed to Tirek that much of the good will he'd felt that morning was wearing thin at that point.

They'd arrived at a place called 'Coal Town', and the sight of giant metal mercenaries didn't worry Tirek much.  He'd seen stranger things in his long life.  Even the huge boxes called tanks didn't concern him.  But as he'd been leaning against the Engineer's dispenser, letting its healing aura soothe his flesh wounds and abrasions, his teammate had said something about a 'sentrybuster', packed up his explosion machine with one swift motion, and trotted away.  Tirek had peered over the top of the dispenser to see a huge unassumingly spiky blue sphere.  With legs.  That had been particularly uncalled for, and felt like a personal attack. Especially when it exploded.

And then they'd been deployed to Mann Manor, which was what had been described as a "transphasic anomalous holiday zone".  Tirek had only been out of Tartarus for a single Nightmare Night, but it seemed similar, filled with gaudy decorations of an allegedly 'spooky' nature.  As aesthetics went, he didn't mind it too much.  Until... until the massive skeletal human with a pumpkin for a head climbed out of the ground itself, wielding an axe bigger than he was. His reattached legs had gotten a serious workout there.

By the time they reached Sawmill, the rest of the team had apparently gotten quite tired of rescuing Tirek from his misfortunes, and while the Heavy and Engineer kept the enemy team contained within their base, the others cheered on the Pyro as the thing repeatedly bounced Tirek over the giant spinning sawblades that were the battleground's namesake.  They made bets to see where his limbs would go next.  He was sure he was missing a toe or two at the end of it.

But then at last the day was over, and the mercenaries piled back in the van, with Tirek (or what was left of him) thrown in any old how.

He never thought he'd miss his time in Tartarus.





It turned out his troubles that day had not quite ended.

"...of all the boneheaded displays I've ever seen, pardner, you take the cake!" The Engineer's begoggled face was mere inches from the one Tirek was borrowing.  "What in Sam Hill was that all about?"

"What exactly are you referring to?" he said carefully.

"What am I referrin' to?!  Spy, you're always goin' on about what an expert you are, actin' like you're better'n all of us put together!  What I saw out there today would put the greenest rookie to shame!  What's goin' on with you?"

"Nothing is going on with me!  You're... you're just imagining things!"

Engineer scowled and leaned back.  "Is it somethin' to do with the Administrator?  Did she put you up to this?"

Tirek hadn't spent long in the draconic female's presence, but he'd acquired a fairly good idea of what would happen if he implicated her.  "I... can't say."

"That ain't good enough!" Engineer snarled, pounding the table.  "We're supposed to be a team, goddammit!  Why are you-?!"

A huge hand fell on the Engineer's shoulder.  "Perhaps our friend is just hungry," the Heavy suggested, an odd expression on his face.  "He did not keep down his lunch, after all."

Engineer looked up at the Russian incredulously.  "You think that kinda incompetence happened because of a missed meal?!"

Heavy shrugged.  "Spy lost very much blood at Turbine.  Medigun has limits."  He reached into a triangular holster and pulled out a bundle of bread, lettuce, tomato, and alleged meat, offering it to Tirek.  "Here.  Have sandvich."

The Engineer stared at the edible device in confusion.  "But... Spy doesn't..." Then he stopped and fell silent.

Tirek cautiously took the sandvich, examining it carefully.  It was room temperature and smelled odd, but not bad.  And it had indeed been a long time since breakfast.  He took a small bite, then a larger one.  "Mmm.  This is... actually rather good."  Another bite.  "Yes, that's much better."

The huge man nodded, then straightened up.  "Heavy is going to do weapons check."

As he left, he bumped heavily into Engineer, who got the message.  "Yeah, and, uh, I'll go... look at the van."  He looked again at Tirek, who was already halfway through the sandvich.  He started to speak, then stopped and walked outside.

As he stepped into the moonlight, he saw Heavy leaning against a wall, arms crossed.  "Heavy has met many Spies since being hired," he said, apparently to himself.  "Fought alongside some, killed many more."  He lifted his head and met the Engineer's gaze.  "I have never met Spy who actually liked sandvich."

Engineer nodded slowly.  "I think," he said, "that we'd better have a nice long chat with our buddy in there."

"May be difficult," Heavy pointed out.  "If Administrator involved, he may not want to talk."

A light flared in the darkness, and Pyro stepped out from the shadows, flamethrower held at the ready.

Engineer inclined his head to the newcomer, a gesture of apology.  "Maybe so," he said, "but I bet he just needs the right motivation."