Chapter Text
Henry collected bugs.
All sorts, really- small ones, big ones, weird shaped ones, butterflies and moths and bees and everything in between. Idiot even had a roach or two, all pinned down on white cardstock and labeled with curling, neat cursive.
He remembers, once, Henry taking him to the park- he’d been no older than six, Henry twelve, in ratty sneakers and a hand-me-down-down-down-down t-shirt and a tiny mesh net slung over one shoulder, his other hand gripping Scout’s tight. He remembers them both crouching, a pudgy hand pressed to smiling lips to quiet his giggling- remembers the way they crept through the grass in the park, and how Henry had caught a butterfly with brilliant blue wings. He remembers Henry putting it in a jar full of acetone, remembers watching the thing frantically beat itself against the glass until it went still, and remembers, in perfect, crisp detail, the process Henry had walked him through- arranging the butterfly, then pinning it down along the major joints with tiny needles to keep it in place and telling him all the names for it as he goes.
Head. Pin. Thorax. Pin. Abdomen. Pin. The largest discall cells on each forewing and hindwing. Pin. Shiny silver dots littering the corpse like fallen stars, posing the body with artful skill, but Henry had never been good at getting the legs right- they remained hidden, shriveled and curled in and stiff, tucked away under the butterfly’s otherwise perfect frame.
Henry’s gone, now- went off to school and became a doctor, and what a fat lot of good that did him. He still got drafted, still went to war, still came back in a body bag just like the idiots who didn’t waste all that time and money studying stupid shit like bones and muscles and the way humans die. Scout still has a big box in his room, full to the brim with sheaves of white cardstock- bugs of all kinds pinned still in a mockery of their life-poses, like they could scuttle off the page at any moment.
Just like him.
It’s almost hysterically amusing, the comparison- his brother’s brightly colored bugs in neat little rows, and his torn and bloodied body pinned to a fucking shack wall by an arrow as thick around as his skinny wrist. The opposing sniper apparently was feeling a little nostalgic, or something- craving the dark ages and caveman times, and just his luck that he’d be in the sights when the Huntsman made a reappearance.
“I’m gonna kill you,” he hisses to no one. There’s no way the other sniper would ever be able to hear him- with the way the wind in Coldfront shrieks, he could spit those words straight into the man’s face from three feet away, and they’d still probably get lost in the nasty weather. But talking’s all he knows how to do- all he can do, right now, with the way pain ebbs and flows like the tides, reducing his body to hyperawareness or pins and needles in cycles- and so he fucking talks.
“I’m gonna find you an’ I’m gonna bash your skull in with my boot,” he wheezes, “Fuck the baseball bat, we’re gonna go at this mano a mano, you stupid bozo, an’ I am gonna delight in crunchin’ your big ugly nose with my bare hands- ”
He twitches, and the responding flare of agony is so great that he feels like the entire explosive contents of the Boston Pops 4th of July Spectacular goes off in his skull all at once.
The noise he makes-- inhuman. A thin whine that slips out through gritted teeth, barely audible over the howling wind and the wet slap of snow against his pitiful shelter; his vision blacks out for a moment, crowded with spots and swirls as he gasps and tries to keep himself as still as possible.
He’s pinned, just like one of Henry’s stupid bugs- the arrow a mockery of the neat silver needles his brother had used, buried through both forearms and into the wood of the shed behind him, much rougher than crisp white cardstock. He’s pinned and no amount of struggling will help him; he’s already lost feeling in both hands, fingers nearly the same bloodless white as the snow piling up around his knees, legs having crumpled under the strain of the bone-deep chill and the creeping torment ages ago. He’s pinned and he can’t reach his gun, a dark blotch in the snow inches from his feet- can’t reach the headset he sees, ten feet out of reach; he can barely even hear the sounds of battle anymore, not over the sound of the storm and his own harsh breathing and the frantic pace of his own heart.
“Gonna kill you,” he repeats, because otherwise he’s just gonna go bonkers, trying to gauge how far away he is from the rest- how the battle is going, how much he can depend on outside assistance. Otherwise he'll go batshit insane, focusing on the pain in his arms, in his thighs, in his back and spine and his head, beating out a harsh drumline with no particular rhythm.
“Gonna kill you an’ let Medic chop you up an’ feed your itty bitty pieces to Sniper’s stupid baby crocodile,” and if his voice cracks on something far too close to a sob, well, that’s his business and nobody else’s.
He could just… rip himself off the wall. He could. Yeah, even just twitching his fingers had caused him like, unbearable agony, but- if he did it quick, a one-two-three- go kind of deal, then he could reach his gun and just send himself right off to respawn, no harm no foul-
An alarm blares.
“No,” another crack, another almost-sob , thick and heavy in the back of his throat, “Nonono, no, NO- GUYS!! FUCK, DON’T YOU DARE LEAVE ME OUT HERE- MEDIC? ENGIE-? SNIPER -”
Nothing but howling wind and his own terror, choking him up and drowning him out.
“It can’t be five already,” he rasps, shaking his head, but that just makes him jostle his arms and his hands are numb but he can still feel, with crystal clear clarity, each point where the rough wood makes contact with frozen skin, fire-hot, “It- it-- the battle just started, it can’t already be over-”
The alarm means everybody go home. The alarm means you’re done for the day, and it’s usually his favorite thing in the world to hear…
But Respawn doesn’t work after-hours.
He’s going to die out here, just like that fucking bug in Henry’s jar- frantically trying to escape until the last minute, fluttering and beating himself against the walls of this stupid shed until he keels over. He’s going to die out here, for real- no take-backsies, no coming back. If he rips his arms off the arrow, he’ll bleed out. If he doesn’t move at all, he’ll freeze to death. The only way out involves other people actually giving enough of a shit to come look for him, and- hah. Fat chance of that happening. He usually disappears after a battle anyways- decompressing, and Engie had always said that was a bad habit, isolating himself like that, but he’d never expected it to bite him in the ass like this .
Respawn doesn’t work after hours, he’s going to die, and nobody’s even going to bother looking for him until he doesn’t show his face for battle on Monday.
He throws back his head and he screams.