1 . Name: Quiz @ 2011-11-28 17:11

Done during Slashfic Sunday #1 on 11/27/11, with the following prompt:

“Sniper and Demoman get into a drunken argument about British imperialism. In the world of Team Fortress 2, as Scotland is still part of the UK and Australia has been an independent country since at least 1850 if not earlier, there’s quite a bit to argue about. And in Sniper’s case, “My queen can beat up your queen” wouldn’t be exaggeration.

(RED team, please.)”

This story was written and illustrated in front of a live studio audience by Quiz and Toxo (Snuff, Law and Order: Blu). The illustration is here: http://tf2chan.net/fanart/src/132251692880.jpg

(We plan on doing this a lot more if there's interest.)

***

“Don’t sing.”

“Why not?”

“You’re awful at it.”

“Tha’s not the point o’ singin’.”

Days off became intolerable after the first few hours of freedom wore off. While the other men on RED team were reliable in battle, their interpersonal skills wore thin in the stress and horror of the war; the constant dust or snow or gravel worming its way into places you couldn’t pay a hooker to touch, waking up every morning feeling like you should be sore, but aren’t—the process had muddled most of them to the point where they salvaged what personality they could in the crap alcohol ration provided by the Company. In a word, they were men after their fathers’ own hearts.

“YOU’RE awful at singin’,” Demo added after thirty seconds, feeling a wave of intense pride overtake him over the ferocity of his insult, if not its sharpness; it was an ancient, peculiarly Scottish emotion that had once, in the mists of the past, allowed a pack of psychotic highlands savages to watch the Romans constructing a wall outside their territory and think it was done out of fear.

Sniper, for his part, had nothing to rebut this. He pulled the brim of his hat down over his shades and drifted into a stupor.

—-

Three hours later, Sniper’s sunburn woke him up. He sat bolt upright, muttering, “Lube first, ya Eurotrash animal,” before the fog cleared and he realized he’d been dreaming. To his right, his drinking companion slid glacially towards the edge of the corrugated roof, limp and drooling.

Sniper caught the top of the flak vest just as one hobnailed boot scraped off the edge, swinging into space. “Wake up, you fat bastard.”

“YOU are,” Demo slurred, flopping himself up the slope like a walrus. This wasn’t the first time, and Sniper caught himself wondering once again how he managed to roll bonelessly uphill like that. Had he known many Scots, of course, he’d have had no cause to wonder.

“First of all, mate, I got the BMI of a hobo in a fightin’ pit and you know it. Second: can we find something else to discuss, please?”

“Somethin’ apart from how you’re the fattest, worst-singin’, shitfacedesth, sunburningest mother I ever had the misfortune to get stuck in a stick with? An’ another thing—” Demo was on a roll, really finding a rhythm as the abuse became more fluent. That Sniper had attempted a surrender beforehand only made it sweeter — reminded him of his first kiss. Sniper flinched as he made out something filthy about his father, his mother, and a “wabbalee farm”.

“—the Australocrats!” Demo finished. He was hoarse; Sniper checked his watch—the monologue had taken nearly twenty minutes, each of them excruciating.

“That may be,” he began smoothly—he’d been waiting for this for about fifteen minutes— “But at least we’re well weaned off yer horsey Queen’s royal tit.”

It was as though he had lit a fuse. A long, long fuse.

Demo sat up slowly, as if galvanized by a lightning strike, a thrown switch, some inner mad genius. The monster creaked as he turned to fix Sniper with a cyclopean gaze. His was the bloodshot calm of a crust over a magma reservoir.

“‘Ow DARE ye,” he whispered, noble highland pipes nearly audible in the distance. “I shared my cider with ye.”

Sniper returned the stare. Doubled it, in fact.

“I cannot ken why ye’d say somethin’ so ‘orrible to your old friend.”

Did he sniff? Sniper couldn’t tell if the dust was tickling his nose or if the pathos had so welled within his adversary that he’d started to choke up. He handed the man one of his cigarettes, and leaned far back as it was lit—god knows what sort of combustible contaminants coated the huge hands.

“Now my Queen, there’s a real monarch for ya.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“How’d your prissy miss petticoats ascend to the throne, eh? Inheritance, the unworthiest way of coming into anything!”

“It’s no easy, growin’ up Queen!” Demo said, proud of the way he sidestepped at least five dirty puns.

“Bull. Maybe once, her palanquin bearers trip, y’know, because they’re stepping on the bodies of the poor, and she chokes on a sherbet spoon. The butler’s right there to yank it out of her swan-like throat.”

Demo made a dismissive grunt and swatted at the air. Sniper continued, unphased. That crack about his sister and the “rabbit-proof fence” had really chapped his hide, and the only acceptable balm was victory.

“Let me tell you something about your Queen, shite-for-brains. She’s all the proof you need that the old decadent monarchy is what’s holdin’ your sad little colonies back from joining the modern era. It’s primitive! Like you’re worshippin’ some kind of totem pole, some tarted-up—sorry, tartaned-up—tribal pretender to real power!”

“Her Royal Highness does not wear tartan. She dresses in the nicest stuff—real hand embroidery, and silk and—”

“Yeah, and a bunch of other tripe you can’t fight in.”

Demo’s face screwed up in confusion and he blinked/winked — it had always been impossible to tell whether the man was vexed or just being coy — a few times before he realized Sniper wasn’t talking about food. “Why would a queen be fightin’?”

Sniper split into a laugh, palming his face, nearly burning himself on his cigarette. “‘Why would a queen need to fight?’ See, this right here, this is what I’m talking about. Absolutely precious.”

“Precious?” Demo snarled. He pushed Sniper away and clomped up to the top of the roof, where he struck a noble pose and pointed to the sky. “Precious is yer notion that individual might makes a lick o’ difference when it comes t’governance! So yer queen can stare a koala —”

“—drop bear—”

“—whatever, git! So your queen can stare a drop bear outta a tree and wrestle away its leaves. So what? Whass that got t’do with matters a’state? Yer queen’s one lass, man, but my queen commands a whole military’s loyalty!”

Sniper cocked an eyebrow and poked the brim of his hat up with his thumb.

“So, ah, you tryin’ to imply that Australia don’t have a military? I’m not clear here, mate. Seems like ya might be sun strokin’ it. Want me to fetch Medic?”

“Och! Let the Prussian poofter listen to his Wagner in peace,” Demo said. He plopped down on the top of the roof and pulled an unmarked bottle from somewhere sensible minds wouldn’t spend too long seeking after. One long swig later he pointed at Sniper and said, “And no, o’ course Australia’s got a military…technically speakin’, anyhow…”

“Do go on,” Sniper said, as he sauntered up and plopped down beside his comrade. The mad cyclops was about to say something that would get any other man blinded and left in the outback, Sniper knew, but he gritted his teeth and let him continue anyway.

“Well, ya got a pack o’ men with guns and uniforms and such, I’ll grant ya that lad. But…”

“But?”

“But it’s an army of Australians, innit?”

Sniper lowered his shades just so Demo could watch his eyebrows knit themselves together into a kind of superbrow.

“I mean me and me kin of the highlands, we got a strong fightin’ spirit, no doubtin’, but — and I mean no offense — Australians are criminals and the kin of criminals. Scrappy enough by themselves, sure, but armies stand and fall more on discipline an’ loyalty than scrap and grit, an’ it just so happens that we got just as much o’ either as any Aussie. So yer Queen has her sword arm —” Demo clapped his bicep to demonstrate, “but my Queen’s sword arm is made up of hundreds o’ thousands o’ rifles, all pointed at her enemies.”

Sniper nodded silently. He sucked on his lower lip, pulled his hat off, gave it a vigorous shake, and ran his fingers through his hair. He put it back on carefully, then took off his glasses and polished each lens, all while still nodding. Finally, he held out a hand and took Demo’s bottle, kicking back the remaining half of its contents — apparently some accelerant nicked from Engineer’s store room, by the taste — and managed to swallow without making a face. Then he stared off into the distance for a long, quiet moment, rubbing idly at the sunburn on his cheeks.

“Criminals,” he said flatly. “We got no discipline, no loyalty, because our grandies and great-grandies were thieves and debtors, s’at right?”

Demo shrugged ruefully.

“Y’know, there was another pack of criminals and pirates that founded a country, way back in history. You mighta heard of ‘em. Called themselves Romans, if I remember right. Known mostly for their lack of discipline and disloyalty in the face of barbarians and such.”

Demo’s eye narrowed.

“Barbarians,” Sniper said, “like the Gauls, and the Germanic tribes, and —”

“—don’t ya say it,” Demo growled. “Don’t ya dare, laddie!”

“AND THE SCOTS!” Sniper howled triumphantly. He ducked and rolled down the roof just in time to miss the whistling claymore that sailed through the space his head had just occupied.

“Take it back!” Demo said, pointing his blade at the Australian. “Take it back and admit yer mongrel queen’s nothin’ more than an Australian Davey Crockett with ovaries or I’ll cleave ya so hard the respawn’ll feel it!”

“We have more in common with Romans than our superiority over your dress-wearing kin,” Sniper said, as he calmly dusted off his pants. “You know the first emperors were called princeps, meanin’ something like ‘first among equals’. They commanded respect because they were respectable, not because they were the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of a bloke who actually had ambition.”

Demo kept his sword up but didn’t charge. “Oh aye, I’m sure. All this flowery talk o’ history and linguistics and I’m supposed ta believe you’re tough, let alone yer queen?”

Sniper laughed, suddenly, as a realization hit him. “You really don’t know,” he said.

“Know what?” Demoman scratched his cap and let the tip of his blade droop.

“About the trials. About what it is that makes the queen so tough, what makes her superiority so undeniable that even we, a pack of untrustworthy criminals and liars, have no choice but to be loyal and obedient.”

“Trials? Like with a powdered wig and a fancy robe and that?”

“No, trials as in being the single survivor of a naked, bare-fisted battle royale—a literal battle royale—of fifty of the nation’s hardest, most vicious Sheilas. Trials as in the victor chugging an entire keg of Foster’s laced with arsenic and transmutin’ it into the water of life inside her own body.”

“The water of—?”

“It’s just regular Foster’s,” Sniper said, waving a hand at him. “Stay quiet mate, I’m on a roll.” He started counting off on his fingers. “Trials, as in solving the riddle of the Spider King and also killing the Spider King. Trials, as in surfin’ a tidal wave on a great white and also killing the great white. Trials, as in goin’ walkabout with nothin’ to live on but a pound of boot leather and a VHS copy of Soldiers of the Cross.”

“What’s vee-aitch-ess?”

Sniper took his first breath in almost a minute as he built up to a crescendo.

“Trials,” he said, “as in unitin’ all the tribes of Fremen against Saxton Hale and revealing herself to be the chosen one, the hand of fate, the God-Empress of the Eternal Australian Empire!”

Sniper realized that, at some point in his speech, his hands had shot up toward the sun in a kind of religious ecstasy. He lowered them, stuffed them in his pockets, and coughed awkwardly in the silence that followed.

“All that, aye?” Demo said, stuffing his own hands into his armored pockets.

“S’what they tell us in school, anyhow.”

“Okay then,” he said, shrugging. “Guess ya win then, laddie.”

Demo whistled and walked away from Sniper, toward the maintenance hatch on the roof. The Australian looked after him in stunned silence.

“What?” he said. “Like that? You’re just givin’ up that easy?”

“‘Course,” Demo said over his shoulder. “What sort o’ ponce actually cares about civics?”

Sniper spent a few minutes watching him leave. Then, when the hatch closed, he sat down, pulled a Foster’s out of a nearby cooler, and cracked it open.

“God save the queen,” he said, to no one in particular.