1 . Name: Reavv @ 2012-03-29 23:14

So this is actually already on FF.net. And no I’m not stealing, these are mine. I wasn’t going to upload here since it’s not really adult or anything, but I figured whatever. Just really character pieces.
(Also, is this the right place to put this? Or would workshop be better?)
/
The medic had spent most of his life imprisoned in some fashion.
As a boy it had been in his father's wealthy estate, surrounded by tutors and servants who would fearfully shy away from him in his father's absence. They were afraid of the petite, quiet boy who plucked butterfly wings off and drowned his sister's canary.
As a young man it had been at the university he had been forced to go to, surrounded by idiots and snobs that never understood the satisfaction of a dissection. They became so very nervous around him after the stray dogs started disappearing.
As an adult it had been the military camp he assisted in. He was usually overlooked when it came to promotions, but there was one man there who saw his brilliance. He wasn't affiliated with the camp, or the war, or even with the country. He was simply a stranger who pulled him aside one day and quietly showed him the wonders of a freshly skinned corpse.
There was never any real freedom in his life. Whether bound by duty or by steal walls, it didn't matter. He just kept exchanging on prison for another. And this was just another prison.
At first it had been terribly thrilling, being able to first handily experience, and administer, such horrors as decapitation and eviscerations. He was able to experience and understand the human body so much better now, after all the hours he spent tearing it up only to put it back together again. But soon that too became dull, and he started finding other ways to entertain himself.
There was an assortment of genetic materials to work with on the battle field itself, and it was no hard task to simply gather up various limbs and innards after the day's work. There was no shortage of test subjects either, and even if he had to "give" them back after the bell rang, during working time anything was game.
Even human experimentation.
He's own team he was more limited too. He had to work with them after all, and he wouldn't be surprised if he found himself dead in the middle of the night waiting for the respawn if he ever overstepped his bounds. It was so very hard to convince his team of any kind of "adjustments" that in the end he had to practice one of his most hated skills.
He had to charm his teammates to volunteering. For some it was easy, the Heavy after all was not very smart and had a high pain tolerance, the Engineer was easy to convince as long as the upgrades involved mechanics in some fashion, and the Scout was still naïve enough and vain enough to want "personal improvements".
For others it was a little more difficult. The Soldier was suspicious enough of the Medic that even with promises of being a better fighter he still resisted. The spy had seen what had happen to his double and simply avoided the Medic whenever not on the field and anything remotely close to switching body parts around had the Demoman ranting about conspiracy and monster men all night.
(He wasn't that far off.)
The Sniper already knew what he got up to in his free time and promptly refused, citing wanting to keep his limbs in the right order and not enjoying the taste of cyanide.
Schlappschwanz.
And who knew what the Pyro's reasons where. As the teams doctor the Medic was the only one to know what was under the suit, but even than he had never seen him without the mask. It was impossible to understand the man either way.
So days past and he was, if not happy than content. Life was fulfilling, if not rewarding, wreaking havoc as he had always dreamed, elbow deep in some poor kerl's chest well he performed brain surgery to a downed Soldier. At night's he secluded himself with some of he's country's finest medical journals and listened to classical music on the base's only radio.
And yet it was still a prison.
One would think that after all the years he had been caged he would have gotten used to it, but no animal can be completely tamed, and in the end he was nothing more than an animal.
He was not the only one, but he was perhaps the most calm in his dealings with the feelings of entrapment. At the end of a match you could usually find the two Scouts conversing through the fence, brass and cocky and the topic mostly about the female kind, as if those few moments could erase the pain of having your leg blown off, or the feeling of your intestines spewing out of your gut.
When not trying to kill each other or competing on assassinations, the Spy's where just as likely to share a cigarette and share strange coded speech.
The Pyro and Engineer had become good friends, and sometimes you could find a pair of them on the hill, setting up some sort of contraption (engineer) and gesturing madly (Pyro). They would eventually be joined by the other teams set, and you would have what looked like a very odd party.
And then there was the terrible threesome. The Soldier, the Demoman and the Heavy shared a bond on their veteran war statuses and all three could be found trading gruesome story's while trying to one up each other. This usually involved some sort of alcohol provided by the Demoman, and ended with the Heavy as the only one conscious.
And the Sniper, well he was just unsocial. And coming from a functioning sociopath that meant a lot. And yet even he was beginning to crack. Maybe he couldn't justify it as a "just a job" when the people he was killing never really died. Maybe he couldn't satisfy himself with the tightly restrained environments. The Medic didn't even try to understand the team's lone wolf.
They had all found their own little escapes.
But he knew from experience that little soon would not be enough. It never was, whether it be a "little" experimentation, "a little improvement", a "little escape". Eventually it would escalate, and these petty pleasures would end up being complete rebellion.
He was a patient man though, and he could wait for how long it took to nurture those unbalanced thoughts. When the storm finally breaks upon the base he knows he won't be the first to gather arms and blast his way out of the cage. He knows he won't be the first accused of treason. And yet he will probably be the first one to think of it.
He has become so accustomed to his prisons he was just fallowing the motions now.
And yet…
And yet he wonders what true freedom will feel like, when the Spy inadvertently destroys their records, when the Demoman blows up both bases, when the Sniper aims a gun at the Announcers head and the arterial spray crashes against the wall.
He wonders how it will end.
Will they be chased down and killed?
Will they replace them with some other, newer mercenaries?
Will real society destroy them when even death couldn't?
/
…That's deep Medic, deep.
Pyro time.
…..
He'd spent years of his life behind the glare of two five-inch thick, ash covered goggles. The lenses were never quite clean due to condensation and the perpetual warping and twisting effect of the heat, and they blended the colours of the world around him in weird ways. He was practically colour blind.
It had been disconcerting, almost eerie, how similar the teams looked without their distinctive insignia. He had frozen more than once at the sight of what looked like himself at the business end of his gun. He had had to develop a strong hearing to compensate, and learnt how to recognise his teammates through more than just their looks; through their footsteps, their individual quirks, their breath. He probably knew more about their habits than even the Spy, who had spent months learning how to emulate the other classes.
It was not enough; sometimes, he would lash out at a teammate that talked a little too fast, or whose accent slipped a little too much. The team grumbled, but since the machines that beeped all around them minimised friendly fire there really wasn't anything they could do.
It came in handy though; when it had saved him and the others, against enemy Spies. It became so common place to have lighted up some unfortunate spook that he even started looking forward to it, hanging around the Engineer's vulnerable machines, lying in wait and with twitching fingers. It seemed to unsettle his team, and he supposed the laughing was maybe a little too much, but the Engineer seemed to appreciate it, and it wasn't like the whole thing was a popularity contest.
And at the end of the day, no matter how much you hated the person next to you, if he could work a BBQ you sucked it up and brown nosed your way into a full stomach.
So he spent his days hanging around a bunch of men who thought he was a girl, who couldn't understand a word he said, and who most likely were insane by some degree. He didn't mind so much, since he considered himself mostly just a simple guy. A little bit of mayhem, some good music to go with it, and a lot of fire was how he lived his life; something the company was all the more willing to provide, along with a decent pay check and some neat gadgets.
Except…
Except, well…
It was getting kind of boring.
At the beginning of the whole shin dig there was some sense of accomplishment, as if things where actually progressing. Now everything was stale. You stole a briefcase, you lost a control point, you pushed a bomb into a hole. Sometimes you died and sometimes you killed.
There was onlyso many times you could kill someone before it got old, and he was pretty sure he had reached that point when he started using a flair gun to snipe; something that seemed to always get the Sniper on a rant, even if he looked slightly impressed with his aim... what aim? He just randomly shot the shell closest to the sounds of fighting.
It had gotten so bad that he would lounge by the Engineer's dispenser and duck-tape random things together, once in a while getting up to try to trick the other team into a trap, or looking for cloaked Spies.
He wasn't the only one either; the Scouts were practically playing baseball in the middle of the battles, he'd seen Demomans passed out in the respawn, Engineers setting up turrets in the enemy base's intelligence room, and Snipers stalking Spies.
It wasn't just during working hours either. The only one that seemed to ever act normal was the Medic, if you could count dissecting strange creatures, Spies without bodies and birds in people's chest 'normal'. Even worse than the permanent ennui was the frayed tempers that inevitably came about when living with eight other clinically insane mercenaries who were paid to kill a set of mercenaries that looked exactly like you did. And certain people just didn'twork well with others, especially if you worked with guns.
It had gotten to the point that the teams spent more time fighting themselves than they did fighting the other team. So far, there hadn't been much impact on the field itself, but during cease-fire times you were more likely to blow up your own base than you were to spend any time planning for the next battle.
He figured that would change soon. Either the whole operation fell through, or some sort of really spectacular teamwork emerged. Dysfunctional, but spectacular.
He'd seen it before, back when he wasn't so restricted by the meta-aramid* cloth that protected his scarred and twisted body. Years ago when his goggles were just for show. When he used a can of hairspray and a lighter and hung out with a wanna-be rock group that played bad Rolling Stones covers and had more failing grades per person than the whole school combined.
Now he would go into cardiac arrest if he ever took a breath without his mask, and even one slash in his suit could kill him. It was something the company had promised to look into, and it was true that with the Medic there his chances had drastically improved, but it didn't change the fact that he was never likely to see his fortieth birthday. He didn't really mind.
No, wait; that was a lie.
He minded, he really minded. He didn't want to waste away, didn't want to be forgotten on some god forsaken piece of land, forever fighting some stupid 'old man's' rivalry. It was strange to say that a guy who took so much pleasure in burning people up also wanted to get the most out of his life. Whether that was playing air guitar, or giggling uncontrollably while watching people jump into water when he sets them aflame, to finally completing his signature burger, or spending a day just playing poker with the team.
He wants years more of fun, of burning bodies and the Demoman's singing. Trying to set the Sniper's hair on fire and stealing the Soldier's helmet. He wants to continue insulting people without them realising, and most importantly...
He wants to keep living.
….
*Meta-aramid is what they use in flame resistant things, similar to Kevlar which is Alpha-aramid.
…
He liked to think of himself as someone with a genteel soul. Someone who had been brought up with manners and a friendly attitude; he was southern-bred hospitality at its finest, guns included.
There were only a couple of things that could set him off; someone tampering with his machines; someone disregarding his personal boundaries; and things that were based solely on emotions.
He was, after all, a rather practical person.
So he was not all that impressed with Blutarch Mann, who wasn't a practical man by any measure. What was worse was that he had no concept of space and was most definitely a man ruled by emotions. By the first meeting he already wanted to rip the man's hand off. But he had agreed to repair his grandfather's machine, and somewhere along the way a pen had been shoved in his hand, along with a legal document.
It was a contract.
He had read it over with a strict eye that had the company owner twitching, though that was more of a pretense. He was already aware of what it said. He'd known what it said before he had walked into the room. His grandfather had had one exactly the same, after all.
And like his grandfather, he knew before he had even signed the papers that there was a very good chance he would not come back alive. The brothers had shown to be rather… possessive with their toys, and he had no allusions to being anything but a toy. He would most likely only be released after his death, and with the machines he was building, that wouldn't be for some time yet. He could, he supposed, have refused the contract. It would have been the smart thing to do, maybe even the sane thing to do. But he had to only take one glimpse at the pile of notes and schematics strewn across the desk to know he was neither.
When RED had first approached him to make the machine for them, which technically didn't break the contract with BLU in letter but rather in spirit, he'd known that the whole thing was a setup. There was no way that both companies had that kind of surveillance on each other without the other knowing, and since BLU had not mentioned anything about not going to RED… it meant they had known and endorsed the double-crossing. For some reason the companies wanted to continue their feud, and based on what he had perceived at BLU, it was most likely that the Manns were just figure heads.
He had had no idea who really was controlling the companies, had no interest in finding out. His mind had been fixated completely on his grandfather's documents.
He could feel his face stretch to compensate for the grin that slashed across his face, his heart beat as possibilities raced through his mind. He would take the Australium and make the Mann's life machine, close the door on ever living his life in a world without constant surveillance and direction… he would sell his soul. Because in the coded and dirt soiled papers was more than some old man's dream, was more than some gluttonous rivalry.
It was parallax motors, lynxmotion Pan's and pistons. It was direct drives, NanoCores and microcontrollers and things that had not been invented yet. It was big guns and bigger rockets.
And he knew that was only the beginning. His grandfather had developed more than what the Manns where aware of, and the puny pile of notes BLU had handed him was only a drop in the bucket of his genius. With a little digging, a couple of adjustments, the things he could make would revolutionise the world of engineering.
Would revolutionise the world.
At the beginning that was truly all he thought about. The machines where his life after all, he hadn't really thought of the consequence of them being built. But it was standing on the site of a freshly constructed base, in the middle of nowhere, watching men go and die, only to be reborn, did he truly understand the impact.
That night he went into his workshop, locked the door and burnt all his notes. It wouldn't matter if he no longer had the blueprints, because they were all imprinted in his head. But now at least no one else would be able to get to them, no one would realise what he had created, would create.
He had thought that would be the end of it. A naïve thought, but well justified by the fact that so far the war was based on who had the technological advantage. He had thought that now that BLU was the one with that advantage it would all end. He hadn't anticipated the RED's to have already gotten a copy of his notes. But it was more than they had gotten the notes; they had been given a prototype. The exact same one he had given the company when they had found out about him ignoring their commands to not build anything but the life machine.
And with this realisation came a surge of anger. They had tampered with his machines. Not perhaps in a physical sense, but in his mind it was still tampering.
This was truly the turning point.
This was when he went from not caring what the companies where doing and going along with their plans for the sake of the devices, to not caring and actively going against them for the sake of the devices.
He nursed his antagonism like he did everything else; calmly and with precision. It was subtle, more subtle than the snail-eating bastard Spy himself. He kept a smile on his face and never so much as blinked when he saw his competition building his machines.
He didn't bother mentioning the sabotage to his team, one muttered accusation of Spy had them assuming it was the enemy who had stolen the files, but he did keep an eye on those he thought most likely to have been screwed by the company.
He wasn't surprised to see that that was nearly all of them. They all had different reasons for being there, but they all had the same reason for not leaving. The contracts had been constructed with a deal of care not usually found when talking about a morally inept company such as BLU.
If ever the contract was terminated before the set date they had the right to repossess all property and to destroy any and all trace of the contract, or involvement of the company. This included the signatory, and all people with a close connection to the signatory.
With one wrong move the whole group could sign their own death warrant.
It was devious, and something that had obviously been done over the head of Blutarch Mann, because there was no way that man had the kind of smarts to dream up something like that. They had been lured into a trap like a group of hogs. He was just waiting for when they realised they still had their teeth.
He knows it will only take a little push for the team to rebel, he knows he is in the right position to give that little push. He is well liked, and thought of as intelligent. People will listen to him.
And if they don't listen to him they will damn well listen to his guns.
He was still a genteel soul from Texas, who was friendly but more likely to start a conversation on bio-mechanics than sports. He connected with a couple of his co-workers, built things for various people when needed, even joined in on the Friday night poker games. And if he looked at the walls around him with contempt, well you could chalk that up to the lack of heat.