closing out this #bushmedbday with a few of my favorite little details from the comic that started it all... HEHE! i really love the cover art. like its SO good... sniper's class patch with the frayed threads, evidence of archimedes' mischief with his bloody footprints... ahh!!
sniper and archimedes being lil blood brothers.. i mention this in my fics quite a bit, but i think it's interesting that sniper is the only one that medic has ever used his best friend's blood on! thanks for your help with the revival, archimedes!
i have Lots Of Thoughts about snipers other scars that medic graced him with, too! aside from the Obvious Reason that scars are sexy and sniper looks good with them, here are some of my thoughts on what they could be from! ^v^ i love being a little unconventional with this stuff!
sniper's strength after being freshly-revived was also really impressive... able to push/pull/hoist up medic (who is, as we know, quite burly! hehe!) with just one hand...? you're a miracle worker, doc!
sniper doesn't steal the dying spotlight for too long! he and medic actually share a very similar fate! classic team sure does love shooting Two Bullets into people, don't they?! hoo!
ive also made note in the past of some comparisons (and contrasts!) in their respective death scenes in the comics, too... imo sniper and medic have Vastly different beliefs when it comes to death (respecting vs defying it, etc), too! very fun and makes for Delicious Chemistry!
going to close this lil thread with one of my favorite things... he's medic's Crowning Medical Achievement! ;u; sniper's revival really was a total labor of love... and classic team's money! doctor ludwig, you've really outdone yourself! who can blame him for bragging!
i just want to say thank you SO much to everyone who participated, retweeted, commented and just shared the love for this ship today! ;u; it's a pairing that means so much to me and i'm so happy to have found such a wonderful, supportive community! ;; ILYASM!!! BUSHMED 5 EVA!!
I just realized I've never posted these here! ;_; This was from last year's bushmedicine week, hosted yearly right here on tumblr! I'm eagerly anticipating this year's prompts, but until then, have some older ficlets to tide you over while we celebrate #bushmedbday!
Day 1: Battlefield Feelings Battlefields and feelings, notoriously, do not mix. No, they shouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean that feelings can’t find a way to be precisely where they shouldn’t be.
Day 2: Nested Birds “Guten morgen, my darling,” Medic murmured, striding over to the minute breakfast table and putting on his glasses, running a hand through his own hair that was messy with sleep, and from being… tugged on. A lot.
Day 3: Saws and Shanks Grace came naturally to Medic, Sniper thought, anyway, and watching him use such a weapon - be it in the heat of battle or in more domestic settings like this - was something he never tired of.
Day 4: Dark Duties There was a darkness to the doctor, thunderclouds rolling beneath his muscles that struck enemies harshly and cruelly; Sniper found himself entranced, when he’d let himself look and want.
Day 5: Trick and Treat “Vampires are known to be most unpredictable!” Medic giggled, baring his teeth in a playful hiss as Sniper smirked and stalked closer, even more slowly. “Yeah, heh, I know the type.” Sniper quipped with an equally-playful growl.
Day 6: Pumpkin Carving “Sorry we didn’t do this in your lab, dovey. Could’a used some of your fancy toys,” Sniper ventured as the small camper began to smell of toasted pumpkin seeds.
Day 7: All Dressed Up "His infirmary, turned into a cozy den of romance, delicious-smelling food waiting to be devoured… and speaking of in danger of being devoured… the real treat of this whole thing was Sniper himself."
This is a very special day… it’s Old Wounds day! And so I think now is the perfect time to post my next fic companion piece, a brief little commentary/analysis on part 6 of Thou Giveth Fever... Fever!! I know I say this about a lot of my series because, well, I do put a lot of “myself” (experiences, feelings, thoughts, commentary etc) into my fics, but this one was an extremely personal fic for me. My long-time followers might remember me posting about Sniper’s apricot dream over a year ago! Wow! Without further ado, let's tear into it! Happy #bushmedbday everymerc!
Sniper’s apricot dream is the culmination of his growing desire for Medic, romantically but also most importantly, sexually. His feelings for Medic pull him away from everything he’s ever held dear and pushes him into this unfamiliar new frontier that’s requiring him to be more emotionally in-touch with himself than he ever has been. I think at this point in my series they’ve both started falling hard, but spent a lot of the formative time hoping it was perhaps just physical desire or friendship. Sniper starts getting nervous when he realizes that oh shit, not only is this desire sexual, it’s also romantic. And that means commitment. Ahh! Run!
And yet… he finds himself not wanting to flee from it. He’s constantly tortured by his desire and his resistance of it, unable to find an “in-between way” to feel these feelings (any other autistics know what I mean by this...?). Now they’re starting to consume him, starting to seep into other aspects of his life that he’d previously kept so far removed from any kind of outside force. And Medic, what an outside force indeed! Hoo!
When he dreams about his desire, we see that Medic isn’t present. That’s absolutely intentional! Something that’s important to me to communicate in my fics is that the concept of desire, especially when pining, begins with the self. While this is absolutely a metaphor/stand-in for him having wet dreams about Medic, it was more important to me to place emphasis on how it feels to feel desire in the first place. He’s in a place that’s something like a personal Eden, surrounded by things he holds dear and comforting (the grass from his childhood, the apricots that he quite enjoys the taste of, being nude, the weather and time of day, etc).
It’s as if the concept of comfort to him was a physical place that he could take literal shelter in and feel things freely, be authentic to himself in a place where there would be no judgment, by himself or others. He of course has no actual physical place to do this (his van is definitely a safe place for him, but it’s not the same!), which is why the times that he’s the most honest with himself is here, asleep, in his subconscious.
And, as I’m sure my readers have noticed, there has been a lot of use of sleep as a recurring motif for Sniper. Eternal sleep as in when he died before getting revived by Medic, and the sleep emphasized in this fic, the times in which he has a pretty intense revelation about desire and how it feels to feel it… almost completely untethered.
Which of course brings us to the cover! Red poppies! Glorious poppies! We don’t see much of Medic in this fic, but his influence is definitely felt; he often likens red poppies to the way that blush blooms on Sniper’s face, citing the uneven flushes on his skin to look like the rounding bits of poppy petals. In art, poppies are also symbolic of… yes! Sleep! And death! And the connection between the two! Oh Medic, was that intentional? Hoo! Yes! And this won’t be the last time we hear of this connection either…!
And the title… fever… This is signifying when the feelings are really taking hold in both of them, burrowing deep into them and stoking a fire that both of them might have been content to let fizzle out before, but it’s only growing, roaring to life for both of them and beginning to consume them. The fever that they’re inflicting upon each other by desiring each other, so much so that it really feels palpable to the reader, and to them, too, and yet… they refrain. Part of feeling feverish is the uncertainty, wondering when it’s going to break… is it going to break? The light-headedness of it and out-of-touch feeling… it’s intense!
Speaking of Medic, let’s talk about that hunger Sniper feels for him. We’ve spent enough time with Sniper at this point to see that he absolutely has issues with regulating, and feeling, his emotions, no matter what they may be. He lives in “fear” of this hypothetical concept of losing control and feeling too much, and swears he’s better off with sticking to what he knows (work), what makes him happy (work), and what he’s good at (work). Unfortunately for him, Medic isn’t just someone he met in a bar or a mercenary that he got to know from talking to in their off-time… he and Medic are tethered together.
Intertwined in this messy mass of business and, now, pleasure, and the more Sniper tries to keep the two separate, the more they bleed into each other. Now he’s infected his hobbies (hanging out with his bird, billiards, etc), his routines and habits (sharing food with him before/during matches)... he’s everywhere! And so much! It should scare him, maybe even make him angry. But instead he feels himself leaning into it, wanting that affection and attention from Medic and wanting him to coax out that part of him that he wants so badly to hate… but lately… doesn’t.
Which, of course, this is all just one big sexual repression metaphor and the painful feeling of knowing who you are, truly, and looking that identity and those feelings in the eyes and acknowledging how lonely it can be, dealing with that weight for so long and now finding out how badly you want to be anything but alone. That you might now love who you are, but where does that leave you with all of that weight you’ve been carrying?
“I've mistreated you, hunger. I’ve hated you.”
He’s resented the part of himself that, really, there was never anything wrong with in the first place. That hunger is part of who he is, and as Medic already knows, it’s a beautiful thing! And it should be cherished! Not pushed down and hated!
It became easier to feel nothing and savor even less.
This fic is absolutely rife with my own ruminations on being butch and how lonely it feels at times and how, when I was coming into myself, I tried to resist it. I swore that apathy and denial were not only the only ways that I thought I could live, but that it was what I deserved to feel. And Sniper’s feeling that too! It’s strange for him to be around someone like Medic, who so freely feels and does what he wants, and we’ve seen before that Sniper envies him for that. He can’t imagine what it’s like to feel something, immediately understand your own feelings, and seize your feelings and do something about them. Unheard of! But he’s trying now. And it’s hard, and it sucks. But he’s trying!
Of course, the apricots are also just a great fruit that suits Sniper perfectly, given the cheeky little air freshener and “apricot spot” joke-reference Valve put in canonically… I think they’re very much like how Sniper sees himself, or maybe wants to see himself, or maybe- he’s not sure. Soft on the outside, but hard at the heart… I think that’s very Sniper, even though he probably wishes he had a bit more of an icy exterior (easier to encourage folks to keep their distances and whatnot), it’s not who he is. We can see in the comics, and game, and how he talks to his parents (and the fact that he cares so deeply for them) in his intro short, that he is in fact a very emotional person, someone with a great capacity for love!
Not any kind of prince charming, but I have… loving feelings… to give… doesn’t that count for something?
Being saddled with the burden of worthiness, if you really and truly deserve the good things in your life when they come to you, is another struggle of his (and mine!) that I wanted to highlight across the series. We see him going from “No way! I don’t have loving feelings! I’m a stone-cold operator!” to “Okay, maybe I have some… feelings…” to now, most recently, “I do have feelings. Loving ones. I want to love! And be loved!”... but do his feelings really matter, anyway? Yes! Of course! Would anyone want my love?
But with one step forward, sometimes we take two steps back. He confirms his own fear by getting absolutely lost in “pleasure” (the eating of the cake Medic baked him) and immediately feeling guilty for not only indulging, but overindulging! Michael, you beast! Don’t you have any self control?! Yes, this is another internalized homophobia moment about being “predatory”, or feeling like you’re doing something diabolical by pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Of course, we know there’s nothing wrong with that, but feelings are feelings, and sometimes they’re unsavory and complicated, even though we have good intentions! Poor Sniper!
You’re gonna be a slob, you’re gonna be a mediocre tradie, you’re gonna be a soft-hearted pansy. Sniper scowled. He hadn’t wound up as a slob, or a mediocre tradie. Avoiding two out of three wasn’t bad. And he remembered there being a time in his life where he couldn’t imagine anything worse than being a soft-hearted pansy.
The way his old man had spit the phrase out made it sound like it was the worst thing anyone could be. Maybe up until a few months ago, Sniper would have sworn he’d agreed.
Again… Sniper wanting to emulate his father’s masculinity in his youth but ultimately failed to do so in a way that made his old man proud, but absolutely internalizing all of the things he’d heard growing up and now struggling to unpack them and unlearn them in his adult life. Sniper is soft hearted, and he’d spent so long trying to chase that feeling away, but now… he’s trying to hold it close to himself, trying to cherish it… he’s working on it!
I wanted to convey concepts of internalized homophobia in the way that I felt them, without going more “stereotypical” routes of just… making the character homophobic at the expense of another character, if that makes sense. This is an internal battle for Sniper and something he’s now reflecting on in a way that doesn’t manifest by taking it out on others. I think he’s more likely to withdraw into himself with things like this. He knows it’s wrong, wouldn’t dare judge or apply this logic to others, and he’s trying to unlearn it. But it’s hard to give himself the same kindness that he gives others when he feels like he doesn’t deserve kindness or forgiveness!
Medic, in his own zany way, turns Sniper’s entire perspective on its head. We all know Sniper’s professional creed, and we also know how Medic breaks just about every single one of those neat and tidy rules! Medic isn’t polite, he’s… only sometimes efficient (he’s quite scatterbrained!), and doesn’t often plan that far ahead! And yet, he’s one of the most talented mercenaries on the team, the absolute linchpin to their team’s success as a unit. Wow! Now that really makes him think. Well, if Medic can be the opposite of all of those things and still do a bang-up job and gets to feel what he wants, then… can’t I do the same, at least every now and then?
We see very little of Medic’s internal monologue throughout the series, and this too is intentional! Medic wouldn’t want others to know what he’s thinking, and so I think it makes sense to keep the readers “in the dark” about how he’s feeling at any given time; plus, what he wants to feel… he does! So he’s much more direct and seems perfectly fine with his feelings for Sniper; no internalized hatred! Good for him! We know that while he might not relate to Sniper’s feelings, he does sympathize with them, content to draw out their flirting and pining for the sake of making his crush comfortable. Sniper takes notice of this and appreciates it; that kind of unconditional care is something he’s always denied himself, and yet Medic gives it to him freely, from the very beginning!
And Medic isn’t without his own sexual desires for Sniper! He quite likes that pesky hunger that Sniper’s always smothering… and he wants more of it. This of course refers to the use of the word in a broader symbolic sense; he knows Sniper sexually desires him, romantically desires him, and he reciprocates, but knows Sniper isn’t ready to make a move yet (or to have one made upon him). That’s just fine with him, he’s content to daydream! Whatever he wants, in the pace and time he requires.
The Devil’s Trill Sonata was a no-brainer choice for the backdrop of Medic’s steamy fantasies. It’s got everything that makes it so fundamentally Medic: whimsy, darkness, perhaps-somber undertones that flit away just as you’re getting to notice them… hoo! This won’t be the last time we see this symbolism either (if you’ve read this far you know how I love continuation of symbolism!), but if you don’t know the history behind the song, its creator heard it in a dream in a meeting with the devil, in which the devil offered to serve him.
The work itself is an extremely difficult passage to play, and its own creator lamented about not being able to replicate the vision of it that he’d had in his dream. Something truly remarkable, that was achieved by pure ambition and vision… that felt dreamlike in its execution and would be impossible to replicate… hmm… perhaps Medic has had a similar relationship with a creation of his…?
He’d see it flash through Sniper’s eyes when they’d touched on occasion, before the bushman would muzzle it and force it back into submission. Medic didn’t want Sniper to smother it. He wanted to coax it out, warm it up and let it bask in the heat before pulling it out with nothing more than gentle touch and passionate words. Wanted to show Sniper that there was nothing wrong with hunger, no sense in suffering for something that could be so wonderful if you only let it live and feast as its instinct required.
If Medic had it his way, there would be nothing Sniper could ever hope to hunger for.
The lungs, and Sniper’s body… Medic, you have such a way with words! It makes perfect sense that the good doctor focuses on the internal aspects of Sniper… those are the parts of him he knows better than anything else! While they’ve become closer of course, Medic still primarily knows him as his doctor, so he has a special relationship with those vital organs of his… the mind, the lungs, the heart… he wants to hold, cherish and captivate it all!
And lastly, we have the closing scene of the fic. Ah, food sharing. A recurring theme in how I ship bushmedicine, but also a trope that is so dear to my heart because of my love for my girlfriend’s own generosity. I have so many fond memories of us sharing food together before we were a couple, the look in our eyes and the feeling of share this with me, because I care about you and want to share my meal, my sustenance, with you. I want to see your joy when you bite into this and enjoy it. So tender, such a place for romance to bloom and strengthen. Is there anything more intimate than indulging in one’s basic desires together? Feelings of desire, feelings of hunger, the objective need for sustenance and the sharing of it as one…
And they’re basking in that joy now, more than ever! I suppose we’ll have to see what happens next in Tachycardia!
