There are nineteen parts in all, so there are a few updates left to go. I'm glad you're enjoying them. The structure and vocabulary were deliberate style choices; I'm sorry to hear they detracted from your enjoyment rather than contributing to it. It's true there were sections I could have edited more heavily, but I was getting impatient and ready to post. -- 11. It took three months and five missions for everyone to look at me like normal. The bitch of it was things had always been normal, they’d never stopped being normal, and it was up to me to remind everyone that we had to get back to fucking normal. Okay, maybe not normal, since life on the team never got calm enough to get to anything we could call normal. But regular, typical, average, shit like that. We were a goddamn team, and things wouldn’t work if everyone else didn’t remember that – and if I had to remind them by pulling their asses out of trouble every goddamn day, I was fucking fine with that. Our first mission after Sawmill was back down in Gravel Pit and I’d thought, fine, they think I’m crazy, I’ll run out there with a goddamn rubber glove on my head, but it didn’t take long before I knew fuck me, I’d had enough of acting batshit crazy because everyone thought I was. I was done with that shit. We had a little time to ourselves up in Viaduct in January after we secured the point before BLU had a chance, and I spent most of that helping Engie fix and upgrade the stove and some of it watching Heavy and Scout play in the snow until Scout yelled at me to join in. After that we got sent over to Junction, then Offblast – and by March they weren’t giving me the looks my parents gave me, and by April things were pretty much back to where they should’ve stayed. I’d gotten a lot of mileage out of my homewrecker – that thing was a fucking blessing when I knew Sniper was watching me taking out a BLU teleporter or when I’d listen Engie go on how I’d saved his ass by knocking sappers off his sentries when he was halfway across the base setting up a teleporter. It let everyone to see me doing my fucking job, and got them to look at me like their goddamn teammate again. I was happy enough that I figured I’d get a new bed. I’d wanted one for a while, but never got around to it because I didn’t think I spent that much time in New York and the one I had worked fine. But it wasn’t any better than one at a base, even Junction, and fuck it, I wanted something nice to sleep on when I didn’t have to go for industrial-grade shit-for-standards. I’d gotten my bed as a package deal with the mattress so I’d been able to move into my place as soon as I could. When I picked out the new mattress and bed, I went ahead and paid for next-day delivery. I’d been in New York for four days and RED could call me next week or next month and I wouldn’t know until I’d get a call telling me to come to one of their offices for a briefing, so why the fuck not go for it. The guys could’ve passed for some of Heavy’s cousins, and they got the new bed set up and my old one out in just a couple of hours. Most of that was getting the stuff up and down the fucking stairs, and I gave them all huge tips for dealing with a walk-up and because I could. When they were done and I’d put on the sheets and blankets, I turned around and fell backwards onto it. I rolled over and over and still had space left for another little roll, and then did it the other way. It made it feel less weird to have something new. It wasn’t like I didn’t spend money, I bought stuff all the time – soap, pizza, museum passes, movie tickets, Mexican take-out – but I didn’t buy things too much. It’d been months since I’d gotten any new weapons and before the bed, the last things I’d gotten were a six-pack of boxers because the waistband on some of my old ones were slipping down and there’s no fucking way I’m going to stop chopping someone to death just to readjust my underwear. Buying something new always took me a while to get used to having it around. Three days later on the train, I’d thought at least I’d have something to look forward to when the mission was over. When I got back to Brooklyn from Badlands two-and-a-half weeks later, it was with my fucking tail tucked between my legs and I couldn’t give a fuck about the bed. We hadn’t gotten our shit together long enough or fast enough for a goddamn two-point cap, and the next mission was just the same, like we’d never fought at Watchtower before. The best way I knew to get an advantage was pull out something they’d never seen before and couldn’t be prepared for. Sometimes that meant a flowery tea hat or gluing a fake beard to my mask to confuse the shit out of everyone, and sometimes that meant a new weapon. And right now, a new weapon meant making a new flamethrower, and that meant getting off my ass and figuring out what the hell that was supposed to be. I wanted something lighter and easier to run with, and that’d mean it wouldn’t burn so hot for as long, but I could make that trade. I’d really play around with the design to get that going, though, and it took me most of a day wandering around Brooklyn to find something I thought might work. When I did, it was over in Williamsburg at a store that reminded me of my grandfather’s old garage down to the grease I could smell through the scarf. I had to buy the whole fucking stove right there and pay one of the guys to take off the burners because I sure as fuck didn’t have the stuff to take apart a stove in my apartment. I got most of the rest of what I’d work with at one of the better junkyards, then decided to go for it and got a new fire extinguisher. I wasn’t painting anything this time, so I didn’t have to put off going to sleep the first night out in Dustbowl. I just had to work on it for three nights straight instead of watching Scout watch baseball games or play cards with Soldier and Demo, but it was so fucking worth it when I was done and got to show it off to Engie first, basically begging him to put down his guitar and notes and take a look. When he finally did, he didn’t say anything at first, just looked at it real carefully all over, turning it around to look at the welding and pulled off his glove to run his metal fingers down its side. I like machines fine, but Engie just fucking loved machines. “That’s a pretty clever contraption – not what I’d make myself, but I figure you know your way around offensive combustion engines.†He chuckled, and when I got what he said I laughed a bit and threw him thumbs-up, and he handed it back with a sigh. “I know, I keep sayin’ I’ll take a few days to make something new myself.†“You made your hand,†I said, and pointed to it in case he hadn’t hear me right. “Oh, this?†He flexed his fingers and pulled the glove back on. “Yeah, I suppose, but it ain’t original work, is what I mean.†“Fuck you. You’re busy because you’re keeping our asses safe out there and have to make sure all your shit’s together to keep that going, not because you’re fucking lazy. You do more work than pretty much anyone.†I patted and squeezed him on the shoulder. He looked at my hand, sighed again, and smiled at me. “If that’s supposed to cheer me, I think it did the trick.†I patted and squeezed his shoulder again, and threw him an A-Okay just in case. There wasn’t any time that night to test it out, not if I wanted some fucking sleep, so I had to wait for the next day to see how well it worked, which turned out to be pretty damn good. We had to keep BLU from jacking into RED’s network, it had something to do with Yugoslavia and human traffic, and this time we weren’t going to play cap-the-point tag, we were going to hand them their fucking asses on a plate. When I ran out to see who I’d be killing first, it turned out to be their Demoman, who sent me through respawn five minutes after I sent him there, thanks to a couple of fucking stickies way up in the corners where I didn’t see them. The next ten days were all pretty much like that, dashing around and ambushing and running away as soon as there was someone else I needed to take care of. There was one day Medic was busy with Demo so it was me and Heavy holding a point, and another where Soldier and me tried to break through BLU’s defense and he shot a rocket to me so I could airblast it right for me to jump up with him, and when we finally heard the bell ring at the end after BLU hadn’t jacked shit, I knew I’d helped get that to happen. Just by doing my fucking job the best I could. It didn’t always go our way. Sometimes BLU got to a base early and chocked us off when we could’ve done some fucking good if we’d gotten more time to get to know the place, or they knew exactly what shit they had to grab to send us home early. And the less about the time Soldier pissed off that magician, the better – two weeks in fucking Medieval Scotland, and I’d never been as grateful for indoor plumbing as I was when he finally sent us back.