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thetriggeredhappy · 4 years

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Sniperscout 34 because. Well

arin im gonna make you SAPPY AGAIN NERD (warnings for mention of violence and blood)

#34: Returned from the dead kiss.

Sniper didn’t know what to expect when he opened the door to his camper, but it wasn’t Scout.

“Hey,” Scout said, looking him up and down.

Sniper’s mouth moved wordlessly for a few seconds before he found something to say. “Uh. Hey,” was all he could think of, and he winced at it.

Scout’s eyes fell off to one side of him, hands in his pockets. Sniper knew that something had happened to Scout during the months after the team disbanded, something that made him hesitant all of a sudden, fidgety, but he didn’t think he had any right to pry. “Remember when you said you’d take me on a road trip when the war was over?” he asked, tone flatter than Sniper remembered it being, but maybe that’s what he deserved, because…

“Yeah,” Sniper admitted, voice quiet. He had said that. But he’d said it because he thought he’d have time, thought he’d have a few months or years to try and get the courage to tell Scout a couple things, thought that when they went on a road trip it’d be something they’d do together not as the unlikely and close-knit friends they’d somehow stumbled into being, but as… “Yeah, I do.”

Scout looked up at him, only for a couple of seconds. There were dark circles under his eyes, a hallowness to him that felt uncomfortably like looking in a mirror. “Well, guess you have another chance,” he said, setting up like he was certain he’d be knocked right back down.

And Sniper hadn’t exactly thought of it that way. The team had banded back together again for the Grey Mann business (excluding Engie, who was apparently doing okay but simply couldn’t make it back for some reason he couldn’t say), returning to the base and everything once the Classic Team was sufficiently dead, only for Miss Pauling to suddenly break the news, that very morning, three days into their arriving there, that their final job had been completed and the money had been wired to their accounts and they were all free to go. In a way, it really was a second chance, one he didn’t think he particularly deserved.

He’d been getting a lot of those lately.

“Okay,” was all he could think to say, still too surprised to think of anything clever to say.

They left the next morning before sunrise, and if Sniper was being honest, he didn’t really have a destination in mind. He just started driving northwest, thinking about pine trees and quiet and time to think. Luckily, Scout didn’t ask for a destination. He just sat down in the passenger seat and turned on the radio.

The radio sufficed to fill in the uncomfortable silence between them for three days of driving. There was no talking, really. Even after months apart, they were capable of reading each other’s signals well enough that directions weren’t necessary. They’d wake up just before sunrise to eat a quick brekkie and start driving, they’d pull over once a day at a rest stop to top off the fuel and for Scout to go inside to get them something to eat, and they’d eat it standing up and leaning on the hood to stretch their legs, and then they’d keep driving until just before it got dark, then they’d pull over somewhere for the night to eat and go to sleep. Sniper would set up a tent for them, they’d both grab their sleeping bags, rinse and repeat.

No words needed. It hurt something in Sniper’s chest to realize that Scout still remembered what food he liked from their various 2AM weekend excursions to damn near anywhere that was still open and willing to sell food to strange half-drunk men.

Sniper hadn’t thought about their lack of words at first. Not until the moment when they’d briefly gone through somewhere with particularly bad radio reception and Scout couldn’t find a station for something like twenty minutes. That was the time when he most felt their silence, the empty space between them. From then on, once he noticed it, he didn’t have the courage to break the spell, the task seeming more and more daunting with each passing day of quiet, more and more like it’d need to be something truly important to not seem hollow, fake.

It was Scout who finally broke the silence.

“Aren’t you tired?” Scout asked, voice so quiet that Sniper was almost positive that he imagined it. But he looked over at Scout out of the corner of his eye, and Scout was looking at him instead of staring out the window. He swallowed hard, and realized all at once that he hadn’t actually spoken in a couple days.

“What do you mean?” he asked, voice a little sandy.

Scout kept looking at him, and Sniper had to break eye contact to look back at the road again. “It’s just… getting pretty late. We should stop for the night,” Scout said.

Sniper realized he was right. It had gotten dark at some point. They usually stopped sometime around sunset so Sniper would have plenty of light to set up the tent, but he’d lost track of time. Zoned out. Suddenly he became aware of how bone-deep tired he was. “Just a little further,” he mumbled, voice still rough, and Scout didn’t respond to that, just looking back out the window.

When they finally pulled over, it was into a proper campground, with fire pits and grills and picnic tables and everything. He set up a little fire before anything else, happy with the fact that it wasn’t exactly prime camping season and there were places for them to go be by themselves. The tent was up next, put up as quickly as he could without risking mistakes, partially because he was sure Scout was tired.

But Scout sat and waited by the fire instead of turning in the moment he could, just watching the flames idly. His face looked even more sunken in the flickering light, and it unnerved Sniper a little to see the way that life had faded out of his eyes just over the course of the little time they’d spent apart.

For a while, quiet. Sniper decided he might as well cook what meat he had left in his camper before it went bad, now that he had the chance, and he did so, bland as it was with so minimal a kitchen available to them. Scout ate without complaint, without even really looking at Sniper.

It occurred to him, trying not to be obvious about the way he was watching Scout, that the reason he unnerved Sniper so much was because he looked half-dead in a lot of ways.

The illusion was only furthered when Scout tossed his paper plate and napkins into the fire and moved to grab his bag.

Every morning and every night, Sniper now knew that Scout had a brief routine. Usually he’d do it while Sniper was setting up or taking down the tent. He had to change his gauze daily, the wound still lingering in some ways from where he’d gotten slashed open. He was no longer on the verge of death, but a few days of on-and-off medical fluid whenever Medic managed to dig up another batch didn’t do much for him, it seemed. Even after years of hunting and killing, Sniper couldn’t force himself to look directly at the wound marring the entirety of Scout’s side, instead watching the detached set of Scout’s expression as he rewrapped it.

But Scout caught him looking, apparently, because he spoke again. “Doc says I‘ll probably never climb again,” he murmured.

It felt very much like he was shot through the chest again. “Yeah?” he asked, voice soft.

“Yeah. And I just…” He paused as he finished up with re-wrapping the wound, pulling his shirt back down into place. “I just didn’t wanna go home until it healed.”

Sniper kept his expression controlled. That could take weeks, months even. And the scarring would probably never properly go away.

“And I know you probably won’t wanna deal with me that whole time,” Scout said next, giving him a tight almost-smile, immediately averting his eyes again. “But… I dunno. However long you’ll let me stick around.”

Sniper didn’t know how long he planned to “stick around”. There was the house, he supposed, probably still falling into ruin, but not much else to go back to.

“I heard about your parents,” Scout finally said, as if he read his mind. “I’m sorry.”

Sniper still didn’t know how to reply to that when people said it to him. He went with a simple “It’s okay.”

“Nah,” Scout replied easily, back to staring into the fire. “But… I dunno. Would you mind giving me a warning in advance for when you want me to leave you alone? I just wanna call my Ma to tell her when I’m going back.”

“Alright,” Sniper said hesitantly.

They started speaking again, mostly in little ways. A day’s rest at the campground before they hit the road again did wonders for morale, and communications being opened between them made things feel… easier, in little ways. In Sniper mentioning “Give me five minutes” when they went to a rest stop before he walked away to use the bathroom or something, in Scout going “hey, turn it back” when Sniper changed the radio station. For some reason, it made Sniper choke up a bit when one day, Scout so quietly murmured a “good night” out into the darkness of the tent.

They reached the upper parts of Washington, and hooked a right. They made it through Montana and into North Dakota before Scout asked the all-important question.

“Where are we going?”

It was asked over another campfire, at yet another campground, half-abandoned. Sniper stoked the flames for a few seconds before he decided on his answer.

“Anywhere you’d like,” he finally murmured.

Quiet. “I’ll get back to you on that,” he seemed to decide. They kept driving.

By the Great Lakes, they still didn’t have a destination, so Sniper broke out a map for the first time and figured out how to try to get them to Florida, for no reason other than the fact that it was far away, and bought him time, something he’d already run out of twice before—once when the team disbanded, and once when he died.

But they were talking more. They found themselves trying to catch up with each other without quite saying that they were catching up. They were back to discussing things, news mostly, although apparently Scout had gotten the time to do some reading during the months before the team got back together.

It was one night when Sniper was changing for bed and Scout ducked in to ask him a question that a topic was finally broached, a landline finally stepped on.

“What the hell is that?” Scout asked, sounding startled, and when Sniper looked up, Scout was staring at his chest. At his stitches.

He pulled on a shirt before anything else, suddenly self-conscious about the way the very tail-end of the stitching peeked out of the short sleeves under his arms. “It’s from when I got shot, and I…”

Died. The word hung in the air between them, paralyzing, horrifying. All at once, real.

“Did I tell you they tried to hang me?” Scout suddenly said.

Sniper blinked. “What?”

“After the trial. We lost the trial. They tried to hang me.”

“I thought Pauling saved you,” Sniper said hesitantly.

“Yeah.” Scout’s jaw was tight. “After they already pulled the lever. When you hang people usually it’s supposed to snap your neck. It didn’t. She got me down about a minute after they pulled the lever. Then I almost died on the way to get Heavy because I got clawed by a bear. Then Saxton Hale and his buff girlfriend almost killed me. Then I got stabbed fighting the Classics.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Sniper asked, voice tight.

“Because I need you to know that I get it.”

Sniper didn’t have words, all of a sudden, and Scout hesitated for a second longer before finally just ducking back out of the tent, looking a little disappointed. “No, wait,” he said, following Scout out quickly, into the light of the campfire, where he looked far too much like a corpse, far too much like delirium in a hallway, almost dying alone. “Wait.”

Scout just stared, waiting. Waiting for Sniper to be the one to speak first for once.

“When I got shot,” Sniper said, and his voice was already choked, damn him. “Even before that, I just, alone in that house, I…” He swallowed hard to dislodge the lump in his throat. “I thought about it a lot. Regretted it a lot. How I never got to say goodbye.”

Scout’s expression softened a touch, and he looked a little closer to the way he’d been before, a little more life back behind his eyes, and it gave Sniper the courage to keep talking.

“I wish I did,” he managed. “You deserved a real goodbye. You deserved something, anything. I should’ve said something.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you. And I knew if I ended up on a road trip with you, I’d… I’d never want to let go of you.” He wished desperately that he had his glasses on to hide his eyes, to hide how damp they were starting to get. “You were the first good thing to ever happen to me and I was scared you’d be the last and I just… I didn’t know what to do. But you deserved better. You always deserved better.”

There was suspicion in Scout’s expression now—not like finding out bad news, like realizing someone was trying to surprise you with something, like good news, like hope. Scout swallowed hard, looking down at the fire for a second, thinking over his words. “I know where I wanna go,” he said.

“Where?” Sniper asked, weak, damn everything he was weak.

“Take me home to Australia with you.”

Hope like nothing else he’d ever had before. He wanted to ask, “Forever?”, but all he managed was “Really?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed again, not meeting Sniper’s eyes. “We died and came back to life, man. I think that means we get to do whatever we want now.”

“Whatever we want?” Sniper repeated.

When Scout looked back up at him, he seemed more curious than anything else. He looked down between them, took a half-step closer, close enough that the toes of their shoes were lined up and touching each other. Then his gaze rose again. “Whatever we want,” he confirmed.

Out of all the things that came to mind when Scout said that, there was only one thing that he really cared about doing in any meaningful way, and he was lucky, so much luckier than he ever thought he’d be, because he didn’t even really need to move to do it. He leaned down to kiss Scout, and Scout met him halfway.

#tf2 #team fortress 2 #sniperscout #speeding bullet #shut up me #everybody talks #the fiendship tag #THERE YOU GO NERD #THEN THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER #my fanfiction

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