#my_inbox

Scout was already trying to fight over the sausages with Soldier and possibly Sniper as well, who appeared to realise how completely outmatched he was but was still trying his hardest not to get stabbed by a stray fork. Engineer was too busy stuffing eggs into his mouth to chastise them for their table manners and everyone else was either half-asleep or actively snoring into their cereal bowls.

Spy wrinkled his nose in distaste and thumped Demoman on the back as he passed by, who spluttered and immediately started coughing up the milk he’d inhaled. Spy poured himself a steaming mug of coffee and took his seat next to Heavy, who was staring murderously at his burnt toast.

“Unpleasant morning?” Spy asked without looking, and Heavy grunted.

“Soldier patrolled last night,” he said by way of explanation, “Was loud. Did not sleep well.”

Spy hummed as he buttered his own untoasted bread and decided against making a snarky remark on how he wouldn’t have known that, since his own room was soundproof. At least it explained why everyone looked dead on their feet, and quite possibly Medic’s absence, though Spy couldn’t know for sure until he asked; Medic was usually quite punctual, in spite of the fact that he liked to spend his nights working away on his experiments and got little to no sleep.

Spy had casually questioned him about his sleeping schedule once and Medic had simply shrugged and said that there were things to be done and breakthroughs to be had, which were statistically more likely to happen during the night. When Spy had raised an eyebrow and asked him to elaborate on his sources, Medic had laughed in his face.

So Spy left Heavy to glower in peace and assumed the good doctor would show up for lunch. He ate his bread with butter and jam, added a pinch of sugar in his coffee and treated himself to a vanilla brioche from his secret stash. He made a mental reminder to bring his sapper to Engineer’s workshop later as he washed his plate and nodded to his teammates on his way out, ignoring Scout struggling to get out of the headlock Soldier had him in.

Since there were no battles scheduled that day, everyone went about relaxing in their own way, which for Spy included barricading himself in his smoking room with a good book and a fine wine. The hours passed swiftly, and Spy eventually opened the windows to air out the room and made his way to lunch.

It was Pyro’s turn on the stove, who could surprisingly cook up a storm when they weren’t messing with the settings in order to see how high the fire could burn. Spy didn’t recognise whatever they’d put on the table, but it did look appetising enough and ended up tasting delicious, if a bit too spicy for his taste.

He did notice halfway through the meal that Medic still hadn’t shown up and stated as much to Heavy, who frowned at the empty chair. He speculated that Medic might be working on something and reluctantly agreed to bring a tray of leftovers to the infirmary afterwards—Medic didn’t tolerate interruptions very well, even if they were well-intentioned.

Spy had pushed aside his concerns and decided to trust that Heavy wouldn’t let Medic starve. Everyone knew how well they got along and how much Heavy fretted over his teammates’ wellbeing—a leftover habit from looking after his sisters all his life, Spy knew.

So he ate his lunch and then went into town to help Engineer shop for weekly supplies. He himself had been planning on getting a new shoe polish and perhaps a new set of wine glasses. His old ones had dwindled in number over the last months due to his unfortunate decision to lend them to Demoman for game night, which had resulted in their being used to create what Scout had dubbed ‘the world’s shittiest champagne tower’ and ultimately shattering on impact when Soldier had drunkenly dived into them to take a ‘champagne bath’.

They hadn’t even used a decent brand of champagne for it. Needless to say Spy wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

By the time they returned and busied themselves with unloading the van, Spy had nearly forgotten about Medic’s suspicious absence. Heavy was nowhere to be seen, so Spy assumed that he’d gotten Medic to eat and decided to camp out in the infirmary for some peace and quiet, since someone was blasting the radio at full volume from somewhere inside the base. He’d picked up his sapper, thanked Engineer for his service, and returned to his smoking room to finish the book he’d started.

And then dinner came and Medic was still nowhere to be found.

“Door to infirmary was open,” Heavy said in-between bites of steak when Spy questioned him on whether he’d seen the doctor at all, “But door to lab was closed. Assumed doctor was busy, left tray with food on the table.”

Heavy had turned away to compliment Pyro on the mashed potatoes, and then Sniper had joined the conversation, and of course Scout had been chattering away the entire time, so the topic of Medic was soon dropped. Spy ate in silence, brow furrowed, and didn’t even react when the others had to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on Soldier because he choked on a bone.

He offered to wash the dishes simply to take his mind off things, even if Engineer did stare at him like he’d grown a second head and asked him to repeat himself, and ignored the background noise of the team making up some new card game to play before bed. The rushing water brought him little comfort and the sharp scent of the dish soap stuck to his suit, which only further soured his mood. When he was done he tossed away the gloves and marched back to his room without so much as waving goodnight to everyone still hanging around in the living room.

Instead of going to sleep he adjusted his tie, strapped on his cloaking watch and slipped into Medic’s room.

The curtains were drawn, casting the room in partial shade, but the lamp on the far desk was on, shining dimly. The floor was clean and the bed was made, though the closet had been left half-open and the air was stale, indicating that no one had opened any windows in quite some time. Spy knew Medic tidied up regularly, but this went beyond that—the room looked almost unlived in, and when Spy touched the lamp on the desk he found it burning to the touch.

Spy tapped his fingers on the desk, weighing his options, and eventually reached over and turned it off. The only possible explanation for the lamp being on was that Medic had gone back to his lab in the middle of the night and hadn’t returned yet, and he’d forgotten to turn off the light in the middle of the rush. The thought made Spy tap his fingers harder the longer he waited.

Heavy wasn’t a very skilled liar and knew better than to lie to him of all people besides, so Spy had to assume that he’d indeed taken food to the infirmary and left it there when Medic hadn’t come out to greet him. But had he gone to check if the food had been touched afterwards? Had he knocked on the doors to the lab or listened for any noise that might indicate Medic was inside? Had he even thought to check for Medic in his room? On the balcony? In the gun range?

Spy came back to himself only to realise the room had gone pitch black. He checked his watch.

It was fifteen minutes past 3 am.

He didn’t even stop to close the door on his way out. The halls were silent, meaning everyone else was either asleep of holed up in their rooms, with the notable exception of Engineer whom Spy could hear welding something together as he passed his workshop. The doves startled awake when Spy barged into the infirmary and started crooning at him in displeasure, and he had no choice but to pause for a few minutes to calm them down—he hadn’t spent months earning their trust only to give them something to hold a grudge against now.

That and Medic wouldn’t approve of him upsetting his darling birds just because he was in a hurry.

The tray of food was still on the desk and completely untouched, as Spy had predicted, and the doors to the lab were not only closed, but locked from the inside. Good thing Spy was, among many other things, an expert at picking locks.

He had to shield his eyes from the fluorescent lights inside, but once his eyes got used to them he noticed that the room was more of a mess than usual. There were tools and papers scattered everywhere, drawers and cabinets left open, muddled jars of questionable contents and airtight containers that were usually carefully arranged on the shelves now in disarray. Spy stepped over a blueprint that had definitely been borrowed from Engineer and nearly slipped on a page that had likely been ripped from an old medical journal.

There was a flutter of wings next to his ear and a small weight landed on his shoulder. Spy huffed a private little laugh.

“Hello, Archimedes,” he said, reaching up to pet him before Archimedes could peck at his mask like he always did when Spy didn’t greet him right away. Archimedes crooned softly and leaned into his touch, then casually started grooming himself after Spy lowered his hand.

“Ah,” Spy said quietly as he rounded the operating table, “There he is.”

Medic was sitting next to one of the counters, gloves and coat tossed haphazardly at his feet, a stack of books by his left and a microscope to his right. His cheek was pressed against an open notebook, his glasses crooked, and he was snoring softly, fast asleep.

Spy came up to him and snapped his fingers next to his ear. When that garnered no reaction he grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him gently, then more forcefully, until Medic finally stirred. Spy watched him unstick his face from the paper and sluggishly push himself off the counter, then groan at the bright lights, pinching the bridge of his nose and further dislodging his glasses.

Spy, who had been quite prepared to deliver a scathing lecture, suddenly couldn’t muster up the vitriol.

“Busy night, doctor?” he said anyway, just to see how Medic would react.

Medic startled and squinted his way. Blinked a few times. Seemed to finally recognise that it was Spy standing in front of him, and also seemed baffled to see Archimedes staring back at him from his shoulder.

“Mhuh?” he said, eloquently.

Spy snorted, unable to stop himself. He reached out and rubbed his thumb over Medic’s cheekbone, trying very hard to ignore the way his heart fluttered when Medic, still drowsy, instinctively leaned into his touch.

“You have ink stains on your face,” Spy said.

“Mhm,” Medic replied, and instead of reaching up to wipe off said ink stains simply wrapped his hand around Spy’s wrist and leaned even further into his touch.

Spy sighed, but didn’t pull away. His questions could wait until the morning. “Come now, let’s get you to bed,” he said softly, “There will be time for your experiments another day.”

Medic grumbled something under his breath, already half-asleep again, but went willingly, letting Spy guide him around the clutter and leaning on him as they navigated the halls together. They left Archimedes with the other doves and made it to Medic’s room without incident, safe for them bumping into Engineer as he was leaving his workshop.

Engineer had nodded at Spy and Spy had nodded back, and that had been that, a silent agreement that this encounter had never happened.

Spy wiped the ink off Medic’s face with a wet handkerchief and carefully tucked him in, making sure to place his glasses safely on the nightstand. As he made to go something pulled him back down, and he saw Medic watching him through half-lidded eyes, his hand fisted into Spy’s suit jacket. Spy sighed, too tired to argue, shed his jacket and his shoes and his mask and elbowed Medic out of the way as he wiggled under the covers.

Medic pulled him in by the waist and murmured something into his hair, and Spy smiled against his skin when he made out the words.

He was no botanist and he may have lost his medical licence along the way, but he wasn’t stupid enough to ignore the morning sickness or the tight feeling in his chest, and especially not the unassuming little bundle of flowers he’d coughed up into the sink the day before.

They were small, smaller than his fingernails, round and fluffy and coloured a vibrant yellow. Medic wasn’t that well-versed in flower language apart from the basic variants of roses, but he’d caught Heavy reading a book on the subject in the living room once. He’d startled quite badly when he noticed Medic watching him, but then calmly explained that it was good practice for his English and asked Medic if he was interested in borrowing it.

Medic was quite fluent in English, in spite of his accent, and he knew that Heavy knew this, but he decided against embarrassing his friend and politely agreed to have a look at it. He’d forgotten to return it, but Heavy hadn’t asked him about it since and so he figured it would be alright if he held onto it a little longer.

Yellow acacia flowers. Secret love.

Medic had run the tests and checked his vitals, in spite of the fact that he already knew what it was. Hanahaki, a disease caused by unrequited love where the afflicted coughed up flowers over a few months—or, in rare cases, years—until the plants multiplied inside their lungs quicker than they could be expelled and suffocated them. A slow and agonising way to die.

Medic had known what to expect. He had, after all, been coughing up petals for weeks.

He hadn’t expected the whole flowers to come so soon, due to the nature of the respawn system, but he supposed it was inevitable either way. There was no cure for the disease and Medic couldn’t hope to achieve what centuries of research had failed to do in such a short time—because his time was short, there was no doubt about that. It was advancing too quickly.

Surgery wasn’t an option, and Medic had laughed bitterly when he realised that. He was a damn good surgeon and the Medigun would allow him to perform the surgery on himself, so logically the odds were stacked in his favour, especially since the thought of permanent death was terrifying. He would survive and return to health and no longer have to worry about dying.

Except the thought of no longer loving him was worse.

So Medic endured. It was easy enough to pretend he was fine around his teammates, who knew not to ask too many questions lest they lose an internal organ in their sleep. Heavy sometimes looked at him more closely than Medic would’ve liked, and he’d caught him talking in hushed whispers with Engineer before dinner on multiple occasions. Engineer would throw him a quick look, notice him staring, and then avoid him for the rest of the evening.

Normally Medic wouldn’t hesitate to insert himself into their business, especially since it was very obvious it concerned him, but lately he couldn’t be bothered; too many sleepless nights spent vomiting in the bathroom were taking their toll on him.

The yellow flowers didn’t last long, replaced instead by more beautiful but just as small flowers of a striking dark indigo colour. Medic had picked one out of the more recent bunch, washed off the blood and flipped through the book until he’d found the right page.

Heliotrope. Eternal love and devotion.

Of course.

Medic tossed the book on his nightstand and fell back against the pillow with a sigh, clenching his hand into a fist and crushing the delicate flower. When he opened his hand to brush off the petals, a sweet fragrance wafted into the room, much too potent to belong to one single bloom. That was surely the reason for his watering eyes.

His performance on the battlefield worsened as the disease progressed. He often found himself short of breath, which made him slower and more vulnerable and constantly turned his vision blurry at the edges. Nearly every time he died and went through respawn he was forced to run to the bathroom and throw up the day’s dose of flowers, which made him late to coordinated attacks and led to them losing matches.

The others were starting to catch on, and Medic was trying too hard not to vomit all over the dinner table every night to say anything in his defence.

Eventually, as it was bound to happen, he misstepped.

He’d dimmed the lights in the infirmary and turned the lamp on his desk away from him and still everything seemed too bright. He was supposed to focus on the team’s monthly medical check-up sheets, but every time he tried to write something down a tremor came over his hands and the letters on the page fused together into intelligible gibberish. In the dead silence of the soundproof infirmary, his own breathing grated on his ears.

By the time he reached the bottom of the first sheet he was exhausted, and he put the pen aside and dropped his head in his hands, focusing on taking one breath at a time. He was so frustrated—at his teammates, for not leaving him alone, at the universe, for doing this to him, at himself, for catching the disease in the first place—that he didn’t hear the doors opening or the footsteps approaching his desk.

A hand rested gently on his shoulder. Medic, against his better judgement, startled himself into looking up, and once the room stopped spinning and the vertigo passed his heart seemed to halt.

Spy looked down at him, the visible parts of his face schooled into careful neutrality. Medic met his eyes and his lungs immediately constricted painfully, and it took every ounce of willpower he had for him to swallow the flowers threatening to spill from his throat.

He expected Spy to simply raise an eyebrow and stare at him until Medic gave in and explained himself, or perhaps to subtly prod at him until he found what was wrong, or even to forego subtlety entirely and outright ask for an apology. Spy was too much of a gentleman and much too dignified to start yelling obscenities at Medic, even if Medic had technically wronged him for a good reason. He’d been avoiding him, yes, but he’d been avoiding everyone.

He did not expect Spy to wordlessly hold out his other hand and reveal a single, blood-stained indigo flower resting in the middle of his palm.

Heliotrope. Eternal love and devotion.

“You were not in your room,” Spy explained when Medic simply stared at the flower, “So I checked the bathroom. I found it on the floor next to the sink.”

Medic swallowed, his throat dry, and dared to look back up. Spy’s features were as neutral as ever, but there was a sheen over his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and Medic was so shocked to see it that the words he’d wanted to force out died on his tongue.

“Were you going to tell me?” Spy asked softly, in that tone of voice that meant he was either furious or wounded.

Medic couldn’t figure out which one it was, and in the absence of a response Spy tightened his grip on Medic’s shoulder.

“Well?” he insisted, “How long?”

Medic managed to get his voice working. “A few months,” he rasped, too busy watching Spy’s expression to cringe at the horrible sound. Spy closed his eyes and nodded slowly, the way he did whenever he was emotionally overwhelmed and trying to compose himself, but when he opened them again they still gleamed in the dim light of the room.

“Is it someone I know?” he asked, trying for light-hearted and missing the mark completely.

Medic blinked. “What?”

“Doctor,” Spy said, not quite forceful enough to hide the way his voice trembled, “I am trying very hard to be supportive in the face of learning that you are actively choosing to die for someone who surely doesn’t deserve you. Don’t make this harder on me.”

Something clicked.

“You don’t know,” Medic said, bordering on hysterical because he’d always assumed—

Spy scowled. Definitely furious. “And how on Earth would I know who the object of your affections is? You’ve never talked about…”

Spy trailed off. As much as he prided himself on his ingenuity, Medic had always known that he wouldn’t ever be the smartest person in the room so long as Spy was there with him. He was good at his job, better than any other spy Medic had ever met—his only weakness was that he tended to overlook himself whenever he was part of the equation.

Spy’s grip on Medic’s shoulder went slack, and the mask of neutrality cracked and shattered when he met Medic’s eyes and found there all the answers he needed. Medic watched his expression rapidly change from realisation to incredulity, to relief and then finally to unmistakeable, blinding anger.

“You utter imbecile,” Spy hissed, grabbed Medic by the front of his shirt and pulled him into a searing kiss.

Medic made a noise of surprise in the back of his throat and then immediately melted into the touch, bringing his hand up behind Spy’s head to deepen the kiss. The office chair creaked under the weight of two bodies as Spy unceremoniously climbed onto Medic’s lap, and Medic suddenly found all his previous thoughts scattered on the wind.

“You thought—” Spy gasped when they broke apart for air only to immediately kiss him again, “For months you—” This time it was Medic who pulled him back in, again and again, and eventually Spy had to rest a hand firmly on Medic’s chest to allow them both to catch their breath.

Medic instinctively began to rub circles into Spy’s waist, his chest painfully tight. His face must’ve been positively love-struck, because Spy huffed out a laugh that made his eyes crinkle at the corners and leaned down to brush his lips against his.

“I love you too,” he whispered, and something in the vicinity of Medic’s heart spasmed.

He turned away and began to cough, a horrid noise that only got worse the longer it went. He felt Spy hastily climb off his lap as the flowers started to come, first fluffy and yellow and then beautiful dark purple, and just when Medic was beginning to feel lightheaded and thought he might die from the blood loss after all the coughing suddenly stopped, leaving him gasping for air in a way he hadn’t been able to do in months.

A hand was gently patting him on the back. Medic leaned his entire weight into the body next to him and started to laugh, and when Spy pressed a kiss against his temple and teasingly asked him what was so funny he simply pointed to the floor.

Among the blood splatter and the veritable sea of scattered petals there lay a single, thin stem filled to the brim with miniscule pale flowers in full bloom. Spy leaned forward to have a closer look and immediately sneezed, and he muttered something about his allergies to the sound of Medic’s laughter.

They had talked, oh yes, but they had been new and fragile then, a bloom waiting for either the right rains to make it blossom or the right drought to make it wither. The topic of marriage had been a simple conversation starter, something to keep them awake through the night when sleep didn’t matter.

Medic had been married before. An arranged thing, something his parents had agreed to in his stead—she had been too tame, too traditional for him, and he too wild, too sharp, too different, too much for her. It had been a bitter and miserable affair, a laughable attempt at normalcy, and in the end the only thing they had ever agreed on was that they weren’t for each other.

Spy’s story was a different one. He had loved her, certainly—the proof was right in front of their eyes, loud and brash with a side of Bostonian fire—but they had never been in love, and she had never asked him for more than he could give despite everything it would have meant for her.

“I would’ve stayed,” Spy had told him in the quiet of the night, looking more vulnerable than Medic had ever seen him, “I would’ve given it all up and settled, spent all my remaining days in that house with her if she only said the word. I would’ve been comfortable.”

Medic had simply turned to face him and whispered, “But would you have been happy?”

Spy had fallen silent. Looking at his tortured profile in the moonlight slipping through the window, Medic knew it was as close to a confession as he would ever get. They hadn’t spoken about marriage since, even as the months turned into years and they learned everything there was to know about each other, even after they swore their teammates to secrecy and stopped hiding themselves behind closed doors and false pretences.

Medic had looked at him one New Year’s celebration, just as the clock hit midnight and their team erupted into cheers in the background, had watched Pyro’s fireworks dance off his eyes and highlight the curve of his soft smile and decided that he was the one. He was his only choice, his forever after, his today and all of his tomorrows.

The engagement ring came a month and a half later—he’d had it custom-made, of course, and spent a fortune on the design and a little under a fortune on the jeweller’s silence. Spy had told him once that he wasn’t too fond of golden accessories and found that silver tones better complimented his complexion, and so Medic had kept that in mind and gone in the opposite direction of tradition. He’d chosen a split-band, beautifully carved platinum ring inlaid with white moissante and topped with a one-of-a-kind, trillion-cut blue diamond.

When he first held it up to the light it shone like a rainbow in the water, so brilliant it left him blinking spots from his vision. It was perfect. He set it within a thin, royal blue velvet ring box, also custom-made so he could easily conceal it, and then went about trying to do the actual proposal.

Trying being the key word. He didn’t debate much over the words he would say—a simple ‘marry me’ would be more than enough for Spy, who would appreciate the gesture far more than the words themselves—or even the place—ideally somewhere private enough that they were unlikely to be interrupted. No, that was all fine. It wasn’t even that he was nervous.

It was the timing.

He couldn’t do it on the battlefield. The tides of a battle could turn at any moment and there were too many things to focus on, such as crushing the enemy and not dying. Medic himself had to keep an eye on all his teammates and Spy had to keep an eye on all their assailants, and even if they somehow got a moment to themselves in the middle of the carnage the atmosphere simply wasn’t right.

He couldn’t do it during dinner. Besides not being private in the slightest, the team ate all of their meals together and one of them was bound to do something inappropriate the moment Medic pulled out the ring box and ruin the whole thing. Spy would immediately catch on if he made a big deal out of them dining alone too, so that option went out the window early on.

He couldn’t do it in public, much as he’d like to treat Spy to a fancy meal at a fine restaurant and a walk in the park at sunset. The world, sadly, just wasn’t ready for that.

He couldn’t do it in the bedroom. No one would interrupt them, sure, and it was as intimate as it got, but Medic was more than familiar with Spy’s complicated history of setting apart the pleasures of the body from the feelings of the heart. They’d gone down that road before, and the last thing Medic wanted to do was to blur that line again now.

The time of day mattered too. Medic didn’t want to do it in plain daylight or in the middle of the night, even if proposing under the stars was tempting. Spy struggled with insomnia, and preferred sunsets over sunrises besides, so an early morning proposal didn’t feel quite right.

It was maddening.

It also didn’t help that their schedules had begun to conflict lately. Medic knew the reason for his own odd behaviour, late nights spent agonising over the right moment disguised as research projects, and had initially assumed that Spy was going through one of his distance phases. Medic tended to be very hands-on in every aspect of his life, and while Spy welcomed and often even encouraged that, he’d made it very clear that sometimes he simply needed his space. So Medic hadn’t questioned it much, willing to wait it out for a few days—it gave him more time to think and plan.

By the time a week had rolled by, he began to suspect that something else was up. Spy wasn’t exactly avoiding him, they spent roughly the same amount of time together, but there were—quirks in his behaviour that hadn’t been there previously. Medic, who was well-versed in his moods, picked up on them easily, but it was significantly more difficult for him to figure out Spy’s train of thought than it was for Spy to figure out his, no matter how close they were. Only one of them had been trained in espionage all their life.

When he returned to his room from another late afternoon spent in the lab—actually researching this time, more to take his mind off things than to achieve any scientific breakthrough—and found Spy’s suit jacket folded over the desk chair, but no actual sign of Spy, he decided that he’d waited long enough. If the right moment never came, so be it. Neither of them were getting any younger, despite his best efforts and the effects of the respawn system.

He took off his gloves and his coat and hung them in their proper place in the closet, stuffed the ring box in the folds of the front pocket of his pants and set off. It was almost dinnertime and it was Engineer’s turn to cook, so most of his teammates would be swarming the kitchen, which gave him the opportunity to search the base at his leisure.

Spy wasn’t in his own bedroom or his smoking room, or in the firing range, and Medic knew he wouldn’t be hanging around in the living room when he could be fashionably late to dinner. That left only one place that Medic knew he frequented.

The sky was alive with the colours of sunset, soft pinks and warm oranges and fiery reds. A light breeze was cruising over the desert, making the few scattered trees growing near their base shiver and the tumbleweeds dance on the nearest horizon, and the tors and mesas burned like a mirage under the light of the lowering sun.

Spy was leaning against the railing of the balcony, his back turned to the door, and he didn’t acknowledge Medic beyond the miniscule tensing and then relaxing of his shoulders. His tie was loose and the top button of his undershirt undone, which Medic found out when he snaked his arms around his waist and leaned down to press his mouth to his skin.

“Something on your mind, mein schatz?” he murmured, and Spy hummed. He turned his head, allowing them to touch foreheads.

“Many things, lately,” Spy said, too casual to be genuine, “Have you had any success?”

“Success?”

“With your experiments,” Spy said, and Medic caught a knowing glint in his half-lidded eyes, “The reason you have been spending most nights in the laboratory, non?”

Medic huffed out a laugh. His heart felt full. “No,” he said, unable to stop himself from smiling, “Not quite.”

Pop, came a noise, and Spy looked down. Medic held up the box to the light, and the platinum ring glimmered giddily under the rays of sunset, casting shimmering reflections over its soft velvet cushion. The blue diamond shone like a miniature star set into the band—the same colour as Spy’s eyes.

Spy’s head snapped back up, and there was shock there as he searched Medic’s expression for any trace of deceit. Medic knew he wouldn’t find any even if he tried to make it up, as he sometimes did in his more paranoid moments—and indeed Spy seemed to realise this was not some overly complicated prank, because a sheen came over his eyes, and he seemed torn on whether to cry or laugh.

Medic gave his waist a reassuring squeeze. “Marry me,” he said, two words that for them meant a thousand things.

Spy choked out a little laugh and then shook his head as if in disbelief, and for a split moment Medic thought—

But then it was his turn to look on in shock as Spy reached into his pocket and pulled out a velvet box, revealing an exquisite rose gold ring set with swirling gemstones of a dark and rich red sitting prettily on a white silk cushion.

“There was a manufacturing issue, so it only arrived last week,” Spy said, voice choked up with emotion. Medic thought of how tired and stressed Spy had looked up until the previous week. “I was debating on a time and place, but I—I didn’t think—”

Medic surged forward and pulled him into a deep kiss, and their respective boxes dug into their ribcages as their bodies met in the middle.

“Hey guys, Engie says—what the fuck—”

They broke apart with a gasp, and Scout yelped as Spy shoved him back into the hallway and slammed the door in his face with enough force to make the building shudder. “I’m being proposed to!” he yelled indignantly, and Medic felt his cheeks begin to hurt from all the smiling he was doing.

Spy swivelled back around, ring box still in his hand, and pulled Medic in by the collar of his shirt. “Ask me again,” he whispered against his lips. Medic could do nothing but laugh, and he kissed him one more time just to feel him smile.

“Marry me,” he said.