Midseason Shakeup
Fem Boots n Bombs, competitive 6v6 format, rivals to lovers (Roamer!Soldier/Demowoman) 5K
Read on SquidgeWorld
“There are stairs you know,” Medic said idly, appearing in the wind-caught airs of the rotunda as if she’d been blown in, so soft-footed her appearance made Demo jump.
“Bloody hell,” Demo said as she de-prickled. “Warn a lass, aye?”
“Oh I’m sorry. I’ll be sure to use the cacophonous echo of a sticky jump to announce my next arrival.” Medic joined her at the railing of the lighthouse, a building made redundant both by the blue-spiraled one just across the map and the lack of any soft of light fixture at its center. “If you were attempting to catch some alone time, you’ve picked the wrong venue. This is the best location to watch the scrims from.”
“Is, yeah.”
Demo had been studying their opponents for a half hour now, the six BLUs skittering about mid as they shouted callouts and wore down flank routes. She was trying to pack in what she could in the dwindling hours before her first ever sixes match, information about the format she knew from pamphlets and introductory videos, but still a long ways off from the world she’d come from.
“Any particular concerns?” Medic asked.
“I’ve been watching their Roamer.” Very, very intently watching, but Medic didn’t need to know that. “And their Demoman seems good too. Er,” Demo squinted. “Demowoman.”
“Just Demo works, as I’m sure you’re personally aware. Though, I believe her designated nickname is ‘Cookie’.”
The BLU Demo had a swagger about her, the kind that came with four decades on your peers in a profession that liked to kill young and leave only the meanest and most vicious for the nursing homes. She reminded Demo of what her own Mum might have been if she wasn’t so committed to the family tradition of losing eyeballs. As though sensing the attention, the BLU Demo turned and, noticing the two REDs watching her from the lighthouse, grinned around her well-chewed cigar. She drew her thumb meaningfully across her throat and flicked it.
“…That doesn’t bode well. Wait,” Demo said, Medic’s words finally catching up with her. “What do you mean ‘designated nickname’?”
“…I’m sure you’ll see soon enough.”
“Oh hey there!” a voice bellowed suddenly from the lighthouse stairs. “No one told me there was a welcome party going on up here!”
“Ah. Speak of the devil and she appears.”
She was old for a Scout, but ‘old for a Scout’ isn’t much, and as the redhead with the bright pink cheeks vigorously shook Demo’s hand she guessed they were about the same age. Her standard uniform had washed so vigorously it’d become some sort of off-pink salmon instead of the regulation red, and Demo had a feeling that had been intentional.
“Our new Demo, ain’t ‘cha?” It appeared to a rhetorical question. “Nice to meet you darling. Scout Position Two, but you can call me Peaches.”
“Peaches?” Demo raised an eyebrow, and withdrew her hand before she started to lose feeling in it. “What’s wrong with ‘Scout’?”
Peaches snickered. “That’s fine if you want, but Scouts’ come when they’re called.”
“Yo, you guys talking about me?”
As another voice emanated out of the stairwell, Medic said, “I told you this was a popular spot.”
“Right,” Demo said, mostly to herself. “Two Scouts.”
This second one was shorter and leaner than Peaches, sporting a ponytail out of the back of her ball cap. Peaches wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed.
“We call this one Noodle, on the count ‘a her skinny little noodle arms,” Peaches explained brightly.
“Hey, these arms can still knock your block off,” Noodle shoved her back. Her eyes landed on Demo. “Yo. You’re from Highlander right? What the fuck didja do to get kicked all the way down here?”
Peaches smacked the other Scout upside the head. “‘The matter with you? You don’t go asking that to the new girl!”
“Ow! What? If she’s shit I wanna know. You don’t get moved to sixes for being good, and plus it’s the middle of the freaking season! I’ve never seen a roster change in the middle of the season in like…ever. That’s weird right? Tell me that’s weird.”
“You’re weird,” Peaches said.
In a quick diversion of the subject, Demo asked, “so every one’s got these other names I got to keep track of?”
“Peaches’ nicknames tend to…stick,” Medic explained.
“Yeah. Whish they freaking didn’t,” Noodle added. “Try to eat before matches, by the way. Otherwise callouts are going to make you really freaking hungry.”
“I’m not going to get saddled with one of those, am I?” Demo asked dubiously.
“Give it time,” Peaches smiled, lifting her rosy cheeks in a way that might have been sweet on an old grandmother, but at this juncture just made Demo kind of nervous.
“As much as I hate to interrupt a good hazing, I’m afraid the time for introductions are over if we want to get our own scrimmage in,” Medic pointed out. Sure enough, when Demo looked over her shoulder, the BLUs were dispersing, dusty footprints in their wake as the only sign they’d been there at all. “The Soldiers are busy at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll join us shortly, and you can acquaint yourself with them as well.”
“Sure. Busy.” Noodle made an obscene hand gesture, and despite the fact that her voice was all whispers and she was at least half a flight behind the others, Medic turned at her and glared.
An hour later, Demo’s heart hammered, pounding to get out of her chest just she was clamoring to get out of the starting garage. No more scrims, no more waiting. Her first official match and she burst from the right gates like a devil, throwing a sticky beneath her feet whooping through the air like a pigeon shot from a canon. This was an entirely different beast from Highlander. Before that knowledge had been on a logical level, but now the training wheels of flight zones and boundary boxes were taken off, allow her to truly scour the heavens. Her rollout was impeccable, she was flying-
Something collided with the side of her head at just as impeccable a velocity.
It nearly killed her first blow, and her momentum sent her crashing over to the BLU’s side of mid, only stopping when a concrete wall brought her body to an involuntary stop. What in the seven hells? Had she hit a bird or something? Certainly it couldn’t have been the enemy Demo, no way she could have beaten her here, the BLU’s rollout was at least three seconds slower…
But when Demo lifted her head, she found her guess hadn’t been too far off. It wasn’t the BLU’s Demo that had beaten her here, but their Roamer, her shovel glistening with Demo’s blood where it’d struck her mid-flight. There was something unholy about the way she grinned, as though her unhidden mouth truly was her whole face.
“What? How…?”
“You’re fast, I’m faster Cyclops,” the Soldier replied, and brought the deathblow down with that red painted shovel.
“I don’t understand,” Demo said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“We know, dummy,” Noodle said, pushing around her Mann Co Protein Rich ‘Meat’ Product with her fork. “We heard you the first bazillion times you said it.”
They’d played five matches today. Five matches where every single time the BLU Soldier had beaten Demo to mid. It was enough to drive a woman crazy, especially since the only reason she’d been saved her job after the debacle last month was because this was something she was supposed to be the best at.
“How’s she doing it though?” Demo turned to the Soldiers. “Shouldn’t be possible, right?”
“Skill,” Mac said, sipping a cup of coffee with the words ‘#4 Soldier’ on it, despite the fact that it was 6pm. “She’s just good bub, no way around it.”
“But that good? With moves like that, she should be at least in Executioner Rank one or two, not down here with…”
Demo hastily shut her mouth. That didn’t stop the rest of the table from glaring at her—all except Gummy, who had his feet on the table and his helmet over his eyes. He might have even been asleep.
“Something to say, Frau Demo?” Medic said icily.
“You know what? You’re right Highlander,” Noodle jumped in suddenly. She jammed her fork in Demo’s direction. “Everyone’s down here because they either A, suck, or B, because they got some fucking defect that no body wants at high ranks. So that’s why she’s here; whadda ‘bout you?”
“Hey now,” Peaches warned.
“Nah, I wanna hear it. You obviously don’t suck, so you gotta tell us: why’d you get kicked out of nines?”
“It is not our concern-” Medic tried.
“Bullshit! We got a right to know.”
“Shove off, how’s that for why?” Demo cut in before this could go any further. She stood. “I’m going into town to get a proper drink.”
She left her dinner half finished, stamping toward the door and only stopping to briefly stand at Gummy’s side. Not giving any other indication he had heard her, the Pocket reached into his vest, picked out the keys to the company car, and put it into her waiting palm. He then put his arm back behind his head. Demo stormed out the door and into the coastal rain that had blossomed along the doorstop and about the world beyond.
The drive into town was miserable, and Demo didn’t bother being choosy. She stopped at the first bar she found, went inside, and placed herself upon a stool she didn’t plan on leaving for the next several hours.
The beers left her slightly hazy. Hazy, but not the ‘better’ she had been hoping for when she’d ditched her new team. Same as the last lot. What a fucking joke. What was she even doing here, playing this damn bloodsport day in and day out when she knew she’d never get anywhere again? She’d had her shot and lost it. Now she was stuck: her whole life of demolition work wasn’t going to get her anywhere outside of this stupid competition.
“Sorry bunch ‘a losers we are,” she mumbled. “And here’s me, top ‘o the shite pile. Good on me.”
“I’ll toast that that,” a voice beside her said.
Just like that morning, the appearance of the BLU Soldier made absolutely no sense. Yet the world often refused to make sense in Demo’s book, and after several strangled syllables failed to leave her throat, she resigned herself.
“How long have you been sitting there?” she huffed out.
“Long enough that you should be embarrassed! A soldier’s acuity to danger is her greatest weapon against attack! If I had been an enemy who had seen you sitting here, pathetic, completely dead to your surroundings, you would have been dead before you could say procyon lotor.”
“You are there enemy.” Demo noticed that Soldier had a mug of beer in front of her, a wet ring on the bar’s thinly-finished wood. “…There’s rules against fraternizing with other teams.”
“We are not fraternizing. I am taunting you! You and your miserable performance today have given me reason to celebrate, so that is what I’m going to do regardless of whether there happens to be a sloppy-aimed RED in close proximity to me.”
“Sloppy-aimed?” Demo demanded, the first emotion she’d felt in hours besides clammy. “I’ll have you know I can still land my pills after two pints ‘o ale while you’re struggling to hit the broad side of a barn!”
“You’re already one pint down on that threat, maggot,” Soldier noted.
Demo’s eye narrowed. “Darts.”
“What was that, RED? Your inebriation is making you talk nonsense.”
“I challenge you to darts you self-inflated yank!” Demo poked a finger into the Roamer’s chest. “I can show you I can out-play you any day ‘o the week without your team to back you up.”
“You’re team won’t be back you up either.”
Demo glared. “You playing or what?”
Soldier tilted her head, the helmet bobbling, a strap falling on the uniform still dusty from the day’s match. “…You’re on, sister.”
The dartboard was fifty cents per game. They each contributed a quarter, and then paid that fee a total of eighteen times that evening, growing more and more ferocious as the drinks piled higher. Demo, her tolerance greater and her rage just as potent, began to pull ahead in the later matches, hitting bull’s-eyes and near-enoughs while Soldier’s score suffered.
“Not bad, rookie,” Soldier chuckled. Her smile was drunken, her laugh was drunken. Her swagger, her throws, the way she slapped Demo on the back: all of it spoke of inebriation, but her mood was bright sunlight from a droplet-clung window. “Keep it up, and some day you might be as good as my ten year old nephew!”
“I’m winning you prat,” Demo pointed out. “And I’m no rookie, I’ve been playing at least as long as you.”
“Mm,” Soldier said. She tossed, and her dart landed in the wooden wall a foot or so below the board. “Rumor is you used to play in Highlander. Real shakeup when they pulled that old Demo out and stuck you in. They don’t do that for no reason.”
“Maybe they do. You wouldn’t know, would you?”
“Guess not.” Soldier had made it back to her seat, not even seeming to notice that she’d lost the game. “I do know something else though. Wanna hear?”
Her stool had gotten closer. Whether it had been just now or an army marched by inches Demo couldn’t tell, but suddenly the closeness of their heads felt intimate. Conspiratorial.
“What?” Demo found herself whispering.
“Doesn’t matter where they put you,” Soldier said. “If you’re good you go up and if you’re bottom-scoring you go down, but it doesn’t matter because BLU’s doing it to. If they were smart, tactically sound generals to make Sun Tzu proud, they would care about claiming territory, getting most wins under their belts and balls to the rest. But they don’t. They want exactly the same skill of you fighting the exact same skill of us.”
“Er, yeah. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“They’re in cahoots, private,” Soldier insisted. “They’re working together! Or at least unknowingly are. My money’s on those little purple women running around, always telling you when you can and can’t take over a small desert town and declare martial law. They’re pulling the strings, you can bet your behind on that.”
Demo blinked. The woman was crazy. Completely bonkers. No wonder she was in Mercenary ranks despite all her rocket jumping skills—and yet. Demo found she couldn’t draw herself away from the shoulder pressed against her own, the warm breath that smelled of booze and the faint hint of tobacco.
“That’s lunacy,” Demo said.
“I didn’t start the lunacy, I only observe it.”
“…You’re not half bad, BLU. Not half bad.”
“The other half is from Ohio.”
“Still going to kick your arse tomorrow, though.”
“You can certainly try.” Soldier took a swig of her beer. “But, after I send you to respawn another dozen times, I’ll probably swing by here again. Need to let off steam.”
“…‘S a good bar.”
“That it is.”
Demo held out her beer. “To good bars.”
They toasted, and Demo got the horrid feeling they were sealing their fates.
Scouts are Scouts, not matter where you go.
That was the wonderfully poignant thought that ran through Demo’s head as she watched glumly from the corner of her eye—there was no point getting involved in a Scout fight, just four little blips of color darting about and trying to annoy each other to death. Sometimes it was better to just focus on the objective and see how everything panned out in the aftermath.
“C’mon Pickles,” Peaches taunted, hands reloading with the rhythmic thwick thwick thwick of the scattergun’s catch. “Know you can shoot better than that, darling.”
“Stop callin’ me Pickles!” the BLU Scout that had become the target of Peaches’ torment spat back. “My shirt ain’t even green! It don’t make any sense!”
Peaches, just slightly out of effective scattergun range, flicked a cleaver up in the air and caught it. “I know a Sniper down in Swiftwater that could change that.”
“You’re disgus-”
What she was exactly the world would never know, since at that moment Noodle used the distraction to get in close and bring a baseball bat across Pickles’ head.
“Bonk! Pay attention next time, dummy.”
The other BLU Scout, seeing their teammate land crumpled in a way that indicated she wouldn’t be getting back up, went hard into a backpedal, sprinting off down the valley toward BLU base. The RED Scouts gave chase. They moved in tandem, like a pair of hunting dogs, aided by the fact that they had a whistle-based communication system only they could understand. It honestly unsettled Demo a little, watching them so in sync, with only those short, sharp notes to give away what they were about to do.
She shook herself. With that irritating back and forth at an end, the team could freely push toward the BLU lighthouse, and she turned to Medic to say so. But, as she looked to her left where she’d last seen them, neither Medic nor her Pocket were anywhere to be found.
“Shite,” Demo cursed.
She knew she shouldn’t have let herself be distracted by a bunch of jumpy, caffeine-high Scouts. Rolling a few stickies onto the ground, she mentally mapped out where her jump would need to take her, calculating how far the two could have gotten in the meantime. BLU’s combo had retreated out the chokepoint less than a minute ago—no doubt pursued by the rest of RED. If she could just catch up-
“Screaming eagles!” a split-second warning came from above.
The rocket blast that preempted the Soldier was a few feet to the side, scattering Demo’s stickies and forcing her to dart inside the nearest café before more accurate projectiles came her way. The initial damage was minimal, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
Soldier landed, and immediately fired through the café’s open window. Demo ducked, and heard, “gotcha, sweetheart! Surrender and I will make sure your death is only mildly painful.”
Demo could hear the smug grin her words, and, oddly enough, felt one of her own tugging her lips. “Not today, ya boot!” She returned fire, forcing Soldier to take a step to her left.
And right onto the un-detonated sticky jump.
A wave of blood splattered against the café, and Demo could practically see Soldier scowling back in her reswapn room. She stepped back out into the daylight, victorious.
That didn’t mean it hadn’t been a close thing. It wasn’t always a good idea to peel for something like a lone Demo, but it would have paid of big time for BLU if it had worked. (And it almost had, if not for a few lucky traps.) Weeks of trading public jabs and private drinks, she began to wonder if having a rival on BLU was affecting her performance.
As she wondered—while simultaneously trying to rationalize away—if she was getting sloppy, a faint voice called, “now that you handled that, mind helping a girl out?”
Demo’s head snapped around. The only sign of life was a single baseball covered in blood, rolled to a stop at the valley’s mouth, an omen if she’d ever seen one. When she descended, she found a lot more blood than that: the remaining BLU Scout had a cleaver sticking out of their chest, but they apparently put up a good fight before they went. Noodle was crumpled in a mortal heap, and Peaches was alive but barely. A perfectly circular welt bloomed on her temple.
“Jesus lass,” Demo huffed. “Ach, let’s get you up. I was on my way to find Medic anyway.”
“You’re sweet,” Peaches said with the air of someone who’d been losing blood for a while now. As Demo pulled an arm over her shoulders, Peaches woozily patted her face. “Sweet like Pumpkin Pie.” With her accent drizzling over the words, it came out like p’nkin pie.
“Don’t tell me that’s my new nickname.”
“Was bound to happen sooner or latter.” They walked in silence for a few staggering paces, a costly rate, but faster than waiting for respawn. The lull didn’t hold for long, and Peaches drowsily said, “you ‘n Cupcake having fun, huh?”
“The Roamer’s ‘Cupcake’?”
“Mmhmm. She’s saying it all the time, you know?”
“Pretty sure she’s calling the Medic that.”
“Well, Stew already has a name, so I work with what I got.” More long, staggering steps. More silence. “Be careful with that one, ‘kay Pumpkin?”
Demo shot her a sideways glance. Her head was lolling and her eyes were half-closed, and if he didn’t know how sharp she could be he might have assumed it was the concussion talking. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like.” Peaches gazed on ahead. “Just…be careful.”
Fixing her attention in the same direction, Demo firmed her jaw and said nothing.
Eight weeks. Eight weeks of meticulous training, jumping the same route again and again, shaving it off by the half-seconds. And finally, finally Demo had beaten her here.
They crashed mid-air and landed with an impact big enough to cause a crater. Demo had the serrated edge of her scrumpy bottle out within the second, jagged edges up against the Soldier’s throat.
Soldier looked down, then back up, only deepening the wounds under her chin. The grin was full of teeth, and slightly mad. “Took you long enough.”
There was no question of a fight. Time was already on Demo’s side and the lack of urgency made her realize she had never seen Soldier’s face this close before, not even between split tabs and thrown darts. Her jawline was strong and her hair was buzzed and her eyes were a bright electric blue—but what was most astounding was that smile. Demo had never seen it in full before, had never known that the helmet hid crow’s feet that crinkled with fury. Had never been able to take it all in, and in that moment couldn’t decide which part of this face was the most beautiful.
Her mind spasmed and her arm lurched in response and the bottle went up into the roof of Soldier’s mouth. Demo reeled back, trying to process what had just ran through her head and found herself scrambling away from what a second ago had seemed like such a successful kill. It was for the best anyway. The BLU Demo had arrived and aimed a volley intent to avenge, chasing away REDs from the fresh-flowing corpse. Demo didn’t need another incentive—she retreated far behind the front lines, heart still hammering.
She’d been avoiding the bar.
They’d never exchanged phone numbers (not that they could have ever called anyway, surrounded by teammates and trapped on base until the season was over) but if they had, she was sure she’d be avoiding Soldier’s calls too. It was all too familiar, the sinking essence of déjà vu that wrapped her ankles in quicksand and threatened to pull her under.
She should have never left base that night. She should have learned her lesson the first time.
“Who shat in her cereal?”
Mac said it in a way that was neither an aside nor an invitation to a fight; in short, showing they didn’t care either way if Demo was listening. Tit for tat, Demo met their indifference with her own, slamming closed her locker and making the bombs inside jangle. After that, to continue the flimsy charade of normalcy, she should have marched off to solitude, to find some corner to sulk as one did after a long day of matches. But she didn’t. She was still looking at her locker, the dial turned to the last number of her combination, reflection looking blankly back.
By the time her hand pried itself from the cold steel and she turned around, the rest of her teammates were long dispersed.
“I need a drink.” She thought for a moment. “More like ten drinks,” she amended.
There was shite beer in the fridge, but it would have to do. She twisted off the top and sat down hard on the wooden chairs RED made intentionally uncomfortable to discourage kitchen relaxation.
“World’s shite,” she told Gummy.
The Pocket, a newspaper propped on his legs and his regulation helmet hanging from the chair’s back, raised an eyebrow at her. He was probably the most tolerable person on base for the sheer fact he never talked at her.
“I’m in love with someone I shouldn’t be,” Demo said, three drinks later. Another one. And another. “She plays for BLU.”
Gummy looked up again. “Mm,” he acknowledged, and turned his page.
“And I knew, I knew I was getting tangled up in it again, but I…It’s like that for everything. Taking in what I know is bad for me.”
Like the drink for one thing. She could feel it heavy inside her, both in her gut and in her head, so cumbersome she had to set it on the table just so it would stop spinning. Her head, not the table.
“Oh lordy.” She raised her eye beseechingly, presumably to look at God Almightily but only really getting an eyeful of Gummy. “Hopeless tart I am. What am I going to do?”
“To be fair, I think going after a BLU is bad for your health in an entirely different way.”
Demo nearly jumped out of her skin at the unfamiliar voice, hairs on the back of arms doing their darndest when she fell short of that. Gaping a little, she stared at Gummy.
“On the other hand,” Gummy turned the page, “heartsick also isn’t doing you any favors.” At this, he looked down at her, as though he was too polite to say case and point.
“…I guess so.” There was definitely a mouth moving and words coming out, so really there was no sort of mystery other than the fact she was a little baffled. “So what am I supposed to do then?”
Gummy sighed, folding up the paper and leaning two-elbowed on the table. “You like this girl, right?”
Girl was a little demeaning. Soldier was a woman, with a woman’s right hook and woman’s penchant for starting bar fights she couldn’t win. If anything, force of nature was more accurate, but Demo conceded with an, “…aye.”
“And she likes you back?”
Demo thought of blue eyes and a mad, mad smile. “…I think so.”
“Then there you go.” He rocked back in his seat.
“That doesn’t help you bastard, I’ve got reasons enough not to…” She waved her hand. “There’s baggage involved.”
“We’ve all got baggage. The point is, it’s other people that make this game worth playing. If you find someone who’s worth it, you take the gamble. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but you need to make an effort.” He snapped open his paper once more.
“I…” Jesus, was she even considering this? Hadn’t she been down this road before? “…I think she’s worth it.”
He looked up and nodded, but whatever magic had summoned forth the great flood of words had now dissipated, and that was all he did. Demo clambered to her feet, wiping off her mouth with her sleeve, a horrid suspicion rising with in her that she was about to do something very stupid. But more terrifying was the thought was if she did not pounce on this conviction now, she never would, and so rise she did.
Her sweater had a beer-stain down the front. She’d have to change, but that was all, no other distractions before she would need to cross her own personal Rubicon.
“Thank you,” she said as she clumsily pushed in her chair. There was a brief nod, but Demo still had one more question encased in hesitation. “Oi. Gummy. If you don’t mind me asking, you a lassie?”
Gummy shrugged, eyes fixed on the paper.
“Jesus! Why’ve you never said anything? Been calling you wrong this whole time.”
“Don’t really care either way.” Another shrug. “Better get moving, Demo.”
“Right. Right, aye.” And then Demo rushed to her room to see if she actually owned anything nice enough to make an apology in.
Soldier was there, leaned over at tankard, hardly moving despite the lights and sound putting the bar abuzz. That was good. Demo wasn’t sure what she would have done if she weren’t—lost her nerve, her certainty, slipped back to base in a melancholy despair. An American football game was on, and everyone was jostling for a look at one of the two televisions on display, but Demo only had eye(s) for one person.
“Ey,” she said, touching the Soldier’s sleeve. “Can I talk to you outside for a minute?”
Soldier blinked, her eyes uncovered, fogged by quite a few empty glasses in front of her. Up and down those glassy orbs went, taking in Demo in full. Even still, she didn’t look like she quite believed she was real.
They walked. The crowded bar got quieter behind them, and Demo realized she’d never seen much more of this town than the inside of it—the coast was quiet and rhythmic, waves bashing hard against the same shore they’d done fore a million years. Only now, there were concrete flood guards to contend with, rocks piled along roads to fight the ever encroaching sea. On the west end, there was a lighthouse. A real one, majestic enough to put the crappy little faux ones at Sunshine to shame.
“I want to be honest with you,” Demo said. “And it’s not fun to be honest, but it’s what I’ve got to do, so. I was involved with a BLU at one point.”
Soldier stared at her. Not only was her helmet missing but her jacket—the uniform she was never without—was tied around her waist. It fluttered in the breeze.
“She was nice and we hit it off but-” Bitter memories surfaced, and Demo pushed them down. “Managers for RED and BLU found out, and I was the one holding the bag. Would have lost my job, the whole thing, but instead they just demoted me down to sixes and I never saw the big leagues again.” Her face contorted grimly. It would have been a disgrace to call it a smile. “So. That’s the whole story. Since you’ve been asking.”
They’d reached the bottom of the lighthouse, a path wrapped around its base that lead trail-goers on a winding trip right up to the sea. That was where they’d stopped, moonlight bouncing off the waves and Soldier’s shoulders where her black tank top didn’t cover.
“That’s why you stopped talking to me,” Soldier said. Or maybe it was more of a rhetorical question. A few seconds passed. “You’re talking to me again.”
Demo flexed her hands. Then she reached one forward, drawing behind neck and bringing them together. The kiss was soft and fast and a little cold as the wind brought salt-spray to their mouths.
Demo drew back. “I won’t say I’ve got nothing left to lose, I do got something. But if you’re willing to risk it, then so am I.”
Cautiously, Soldier brought a thumb to her lips, dragging against where their faces had connected a moment ago. Then it changed trajectory, brushing against Demo’s, pressing down until the nail bit skin.
The kiss’s repeat was bitterer than the first, sea-fresh and piercing, but just as devoted.
