Chapter Text
Engineer remembers the day he arrived at the base, and the young woman who was showing him around brought him to the lab.
“Here's your workspace,” she said, adjusting her cats'-eye glasses. “It's state-of-the-art and should have everything you need to build anything you want. Anything according to company policy, anyway.”
“It sure looks nice,” he had said, taken in by the clean surfaces and gleaming metal. When he actually took stock of the equipment, he had noticed there were duplicates of several things, indicating two people. “Are y'all expecting another Engineer?”
“Oh, no, there's only one of each of you to a team. The second set of materials is for your team's Demoman – he builds his own equipment, too, and the base only had two labs, and we figured the Medic probably couldn't share as easily. So the two of you are sharing. Is that going to be a problem?” Miss Pauling asked it like she meant it, but her eyes said “too bad if it is”.
“Not at all,” Engie had said, though he worried for the safety of his machines around an explosives expert. But he was sure that the Demoman was a professional, and the two of them would get along fine.
Demo's side of the lab is quickly scorched and pockmarked from explosion after explosion (“testing”, he calls it, though Engineer would call it “working while drunk”). Engineer's side has a couple of bullet holes from a wayward sentry, but is otherwise unharmed.
“Ka-BOOM!” Demo shouts as another bomb goes off, this time even on purpose.
“Rule number one,” Engie says. “No battle cries in the lab.”
“It's part of me process,” Demo replies. “I don't complain about your awful cowboy music.”
Engie hits a button and shuts off the radio. “Rule number two: no cowboy music.”
“Watch out, mate, one of me bombs has rolled over there again,” Demo says, a few weeks later, when there are sixty-eight rules between them. “I'm coming to get it.”
Engie, for his part, grabs the sentry part he's working on and shelters behind the upturned table he uses specifically for this purpose. He's been sent to the Medic and through Respawn too many times to believe Demo will amble over and disarm it quickly enough.
“As soon as I finish this sentry, the next thing I'm going to build is a wall between your side and my side,” Engineer tells him.
Demo frowns. “Why's that?”
“Because I get tired of doing the Duck and Cover every ten minutes because you can't keep your damn hands on your bombs!”
“If it'll make you feel better, lad,” he says, holding the disabled grenade up for Engie to see.
The wall is only a ledge, in truth, meant to keep anything round from rolling onto Engie's side of the lab. But it serves its purpose, and Engineer's various gadgets and gizmos are safe from being blown to smithereens, even when he lays them out on the floor.
Things improve after that, now that Engie's not constantly worrying about his machinery and they've got their rules in place.
“Rule seventy-one, lad,” Demo says, stepping over the wall and borrowing some of Engie's tools. “Taking these for a few minutes.”
“Rule seventy-two, put them back when you're done," he says, not even looking up from his welding.
“I always do,” he says, and it's true. The Demoman borrows from Engineer's more expansive tool collection frequently, but not once has he even had to ask for something back, because Demo will hop over the ledge and put them back the second he's done with them.
“I was thinking,” Engie says, after they've been working together about two months, “I could use some help on the newest sentry upgrade.”
“You're making that monstrosity even more powerful?” Engineer nods. “I like your style, mate!”
“I want to make it a bit more explosion-resistant, for one thing – the other team's Demo keeps blasting them apart – and add a rocket launcher.”
“I'll come up with some rocket fuel for you right away – got plenty of the stuff, thanks to Soldier – and then we can get to the fun stuff.”
“And what's that?”
“Testing all me bombs on sheets of metal.”
He's right; it turns out to be insanely fun to prop a sheet of thick metal against the wall and blast away at it with one of Demo's grenade launchers. It's also insanely noisy.
“What on earth are you doing in here?” Medic shouts, starting even before he gets in the door. “I can hear you at the other end of the building! I am trying to do surgery and it is very delicate work!”
He opens the door to find the two of them wearing Engie's hardhats and goggles, Demo's grenade launchers in hand. A stray bomb explodes.
“It's for science,” they answer in unison.