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Spy paces across the floor of the Engineer’s workshop, shoes clicking sharply against the concrete, echoing in the near silent room. It’s rather comforting, she thinks, the crisp, repetitive sound giving him something to focus on besides the anxiety swirling in his chest. She checks her watch again, then glances up at the clock on the wall, and yes, they both still display the same time - a bit past 8 pm, now. The Spy purses his lips, eyes flicking toward the door, and then goes right back to pacing, tucking her arms behind her back, brows furrowed in concern.
He should have returned already.
The Engineer had left the base early in the morning, manila folder tucked under one arm, promising to be back by sundown. It was just a pick-up, he’d said, that Miss Pauling had requested he complete - shouldn’t take more than a few hours, and while he was out he may as well do some grocery shopping for the team, too. By sunset, he’d told Spy, with a quick kiss goodbye. He’d promised.
Sunset had arrived at precisely 7:13 pm. The Engineer had not.
Spy hisses through his teeth and turns to pace back across the room, glaring at the floor.
She knows he can take care of himself. And it’s not like he’s never been late to things before. Dell is a busy man, and he’s not great at time management in the first place, always too focused on his projects to pay much attention to the clock. She had given him half an hour of buffer after the first stars appeared in the sky before starting to worry, expecting that he wouldn’t arrive exactly on time.
But contracts can get dangerous. Spy himself has been to a few quick pick-ups that turned lethal with one wrong word. Dell can talk himself out of a bad situation, and he’s an excellent fighter, but there’s always that what if lurking in the back of Spy’s mind - that what if the droppers are hostile, what if Dell’s truck has been sabotaged somehow, what if he’s lying dead somewhere on the side of the road, never to return to her arms.
He glances at his watch, then at the clock.
8:26 pm.
She worries.
He knows he shouldn’t. And maybe there once was a time that he had convinced himself he didn’t. Worrying means you’ve gotten attached. Worrying means you care, means you love, means you’ve formed a connection. Worrying means watching them get hurt hurts you just as much, and when your nine-to-five is repeatedly killing and being killed, worry, care, love - they become a hindrance. They soften you up and hold you back. One can’t be a Spy and have meaningful, intimate attachments, and come out of any of it alive and whole, physically and mentally.
Or at least, that’s what she’s told herself all these years. What she’s been told. What she simply has to believe, because if she doesn’t, if she lets it slip from her mind for too long, if she lets herself worry, care, love just a touch too hard…
Well, the product of the last time that happened is currently somewhere with him in this hellhole of a base, twenty-seven years too late for him to change things.
And still, he worries.
Spy paces across the floor of the Engineer’s workshop. He has been doing this for two hours. He can’t light a cigarette to calm himself down, too sick with worry to operate the lighter, hands trembling too hard to not scorch his gloves with the flame.
It is 9:18 pm.
She doesn’t know where Engineer went. The contract was for him and him alone, and sharing details of individual contracts is strictly forbidden. Of course, Spy could have snooped. He usually does. That’s her job, and the way she sees it, her job overrides everyone else’s. But he hadn’t gotten a chance to take a peek, Engineer in and out of the room with the folder in a flurry, only stopping to give a quick goodbye.
She had put a tracker on his truck, at one point, but he had found it only days after, and it had been discarded. “I appreciate you worryin’,” he’d said, to which Spy had desperately wanted to reply that he doesn't worry, he doesn’t care, it was a precaution only taken for professional safety reasons, it would be such a hassle to have to find a new Engineer. “But I can handle myself. ‘Sides, Medic’s probably already got one of these suckers in all’a us.”
He doesn’t. Spy has checked.
The clock strikes 9:30, and Engineer still does not return.
The door opens at 10:41.
Spy whips around, the constant click, click, click of shoes on the concrete cut off in an instant. And then it starts up again, frantic and quick, because standing in the doorway is Dell.
She stops on a dime before him, eyes wide, hands held out before her, and he blinks, and then he startles, pulling back in surprise.
“Mon amour, mon cher, ma vie, where have you been,” she asks, and then the rest of everything dies in her throat, because he looks like he’s been through hell.
“Hey, darlin’,” he says, but it doesn’t sound quite right, voice raw and rough. There’s blood on his clothes, dark, jagged cuts across the fabric, and his hardhat has a crack so large she’s almost scared to ask what caused it. On instinct, she reaches for him, grabbing his shoulder right as he starts to tilt, and suddenly Spy’s shaky grip seems to be the only thing keeping him upright. He looks up at her through cracked, smudged goggles, blinking sluggishly, and all thoughts of getting the full story evaporate instantly from her mind.
Spy’s gaze hardens and he grabs Engineer’s other shoulder, a cold spike of fear shooting through him when Dell sways bonelessly with the motion. “Medic. Now.”
Dell blinks again, and that seems to be all he can really do with his own body. “…what?”
“Mon Dieu - the doctor, homme bête, you need him. We are going to the infirmary.”
Spy turns him around and starts to gently push him, gloved hands holding firmly to his shoulders, even as he blearily begins protesting, stumbling with every step. “No- no, he- Spy, it-”
He trips over his own boot and Spy decides that they’re getting nowhere like this. Without pausing her stride, she scoops him up bridal style and sets off in something close to a jog, careful not to jostle him too much. He struggles in her arms, continuing to blabber out fruitless objections that she only distantly hears. His helmet clatters to the ground at some point and he gripes and groans and twists around and Spy ignores all of it.
“Sp- Spy, Spy, it’s- it’s so late, don’t- I’m f-”
“You are not fine,” he snaps, and Dell’s face contorts in a painted attempt at frustration, and Spy walks a bit faster. “Ingénieur, it is nearly eleven at night, it is not late. The Medic will most certainly still be awake, and even if he is not, you are wounded. It is his job to help. I will bang pots and pans outside his door if I must.”
“Spy-“
“Hush, mon bélier. Do not argue. You are injured. I am not going to simply let you bleed out because you don’t want to disturb our good doctor, who most likely would still be awake no matter how long you took to return.”
She won’t ask what happened. Not yet. This isn’t the time nor place. But oh how she desperately wishes to. How strongly she wants to hold his face in her trembling hands and press kisses against it everywhere she can. How much she aches to tug him close under a warm blanket and nuzzle into his broad chest and fall asleep knowing he’s safe, and nothing bad has happened to him.
But it has. And so she can’t. Not yet.
(He ignores the voice in the back of his head, the nagging little warning that he’s worrying again, that he’s gotten too close, that this fear and this affection are a liability that will only hold him back. He can overthink about that later.)
Spy paces across the floor of the infirmary waiting room, shoes clicking sharply against the pristine white tile. He has been doing this for half an hour.
It seems that all he can do tonight is wait.
The good doctor had, indeed, still been awake when Spy slammed open the doors, a heavily bleeding Engineer in her arms, and had not protested her demands to fix him, now, s’il vous plait, he is too stubborn to ask for help himself. He had also not protested when Spy did not leave the room, waiting patiently by her lover’s side - at least, not until she had begun pacing once more, and then she had been kicked out, with an irritated, “if you are so impatient that you must make that incessant tapping to ease your worry you can wait outside until I am done.”
So here she is.
God, she needs a cigarette.
Spy reaches into his suit for his cigarette case and starts to pull it out, before pausing. He holds his leather-gloved hands out in front of himself, studying them with a distracted sort of curiosity, and realizes something.
His hands are shaking.
He had noticed already, quite a while ago, he thinks. He has something of a detached memory of being unable to light a cigarette, the flame flickering in and out between his unsteady fingers, turning the leather on his fingertips a darker shade than the rest of the gloves. In his panic, his fear, it hadn’t really sunk in - but here, and now, things have been somewhat calmed, and everything is starting to register all at once. Like the fact that her legs are sore, and oh, the edge of the mask on her face, around her eyes, feels a bit damp against her skin. And suddenly she’s tired, and suddenly she’s thirsty, and suddenly there’s blood on her arms and her hands that she somehow hadn’t noticed until now-
“Frau Spy?”
Her hands are shaking.
Spy looks up. The Medic is standing in the double doorway, brow furrowed, a tiredness in his eyes that the Spy would not have expected to see any time before two in the morning. He looks her over, his expression unreadable, and the drying blood on his lab coat is rarely a cause for alarm but it hadn’t been there when Spy had arrived.
“Are you vell, mein Freund?” the doctor asks, softly, and there’s a thousand things that Spy wants to say, wants to get off his chest, wants to clarify before Medic can tell just how worried he is, how much he truly does care.
But when she opens her mouth, only one thing comes out.
“Is he?”
Medic doesn’t seem surprised by the question, or lack of a response to his own. Instead, he only nods, and then steps out of the way of the entrance. Spy is inside without a second thought, gaze flitting around until she spots the only occupied bed in the room, and the fact that Dell is awake and sitting up doesn’t register until she’s next to him and he’s got a loving, crooked little smile on his face.
“Howdy, butterfly.”
She cups his cheeks with trembling hands and pulls him into a kiss.
It’s slow, and gentle, even despite the desperation on Spy’s end that is quickly softened by the way Engineer reaches for him, winds an arm around his waist, presses him ever closer. Spy breaks off before he allows himself to get lost in the embrace and chooses instead to lean his forehead against Dell’s, eyes fluttering closed.
“You scared me, amour.”
“I know, I know,” he sighs, “I’m sorry, hun. But I’m alright now, ain’t I?”
“You very nearly were not!” calls the sudden voice of Medic, who Spy is only now remembering is still standing in the doorway of his own infirmary. They pull apart as the doctor steps further into the room, moving back to the desk he had been sitting at before they first arrived, and begins shuffling through hastily strewn papers. “The only reason I took so long to ‘fix you,’ as Frau Spy put it, was due to the multiple bullet shards I had to pick out of your body before I could use the Medigun on you.”
He looks up at the couple, face twisted in a contorted grin that is more threatening than comforting.
“You are lucky you came to me when you did, Herr Conagher,” he says, in a rather forced cheerful tone, and the Engineer chuckles nervously.
“Apologies, doc. I, uh…” He shrugs, glancing down at his prosthetic. “Guess I’m just use’ta workin’ through pain. Hadn’t realized it was that bad.”
“You cracked your helmet,” Spy says bluntly, but Dell waves him off, looking wholly unconcerned about the fact that he had nearly managed to spit his protective hardhat in half.
“It did its job, darlin’. None of those injuries were from the crash.”
“The crash-?”
“As your doctor,” the Medic interrupts, before Spy can really get upset, “I am sure it would be of both of our best interests if I stayed to hear the story of how exactly you received your injuries.” He straightens from where he’d been hunched over his desk, pressing a hastily organized pile of papers to his chest with one arm. “But as your coworker, I don’t care. Gute Nacht.”
And with that said, and a tired sigh given, Medic disappears through the side door that leads to his living quarters, flicking off a light switch behind him.
They watch him go, and the sudden silence that follows his absence fills Spy with an unwanted sense of… dread, maybe. A feeling she can’t quite place settles in her chest, and though she has so many questions for her partner, the darkness of the infirmary seems to swallow every one before she can properly voice them. It’s suffocating, and confusing, and maybe it’s just how mentally exhausted she’s starting to realize that she is, but all at once she wants to be anywhere but here.
A hand over his own shocks him out of his steadily spiraling thoughts, and he glances over to see Engineer looking directly at him. Their eyes lock, and no words are exchanged, and together they decide that this is their cue to leave.
Dell pushes himself off the bed, accepting the steadying hand offered to him, and his brows raise in concern as their fingers twist together, but maybe he also feels like a single word will shatter reality, as the only sound heard while they leave is the click-thump of one pair of heels and one pair of boots, stepping in a clumsy sort of synchronization across the white tile floor.
A dove coos quietly as the double doors swing shut behind them.
There’s a light on in the hallway, a harsh yellow fluorescent that flickers and splutters and hums loudly in the night. It’s a different world across the threshold of the medbay doors, something not necessarily more inviting, but maybe just… easier.
“You crashed,” Spy says.
“An’ rolled,” Dell chuckles.
“Mon Dieu.” Spy reaches up to knead at the bridge of her nose, feeling all the exhaustion that hadn’t previously gotten a chance to register settle heavily on her shoulders all at once. “Ingénieur. Will you please explain to me what happened.”
“Well, uh…” His goggles, cracked and bloody, have been hung around his neck rather than over his eyes, and when he goes momentarily silent Spy glances over to see that he is very purposefully avoiding her gaze. “The, the pickup didn’t go… great.”
“I gathered.”
“Drove for hours. Turned out to be a trap when I actually arrived, hadn’t gotten five feet away from my truck before they started shooting. Shattered a damn window, they did. Wasn’t nobody there to pick anything up from in the first place.” Here he sighs, dragging his organic hand down his face where he holds it over his mouth in thought, voice muffled behind the palm. “Gotta call Miss Pauling about that one, let her know…”
He doesn’t say anything else for a moment, the only sound around them that of footsteps against the concrete. “And the crash, mon cher?” Spy prods gently in order to snap him out of his own distracted thoughts.
The Engineer blinks, then shrugs, dropping his hand. “Dog in the road,” he says, so nonchalantly, like that explains everything, like that excuses being gone from sunrise to sunset and beyond, like adding nothing else to help fill in the blank spots of that story will make any part of Spy stop trembling as badly as she is.
Spy isn’t supposed to care. He’s not. Spy isn’t supposed to care, because when he does, he finds himself stopping in the middle of a cold, concrete hallway at almost midnight on a Sunday, staring at his partner with wide, tired eyes, so many emotions swirling through his head that he can’t even pretend to put on a neutral expression when Dell stops a few steps ahead of him to turn back and meet his gaze in confusion.
“A dog in the road,” Spy repeats, incredulous. “You crashed and rolled your truck, were late returning to the base, cracked your helmet in half, because there was a dog in the road?”
“I didn’t wanna hit it,” Dell explains weakly, sheepishly. “I’m sorry.”