Birds of a Feather

Helping a broken bird

Scout didn’t typically think much about birds. It’s not that he hated them or anything he just never really thought much about them. They were always just something that existed in the background. At most he enjoyed their singing on occasion, but that was pretty much the extant of it. He certainly never thought of having one as a pet. He was always more of a dog person. Not that it really mattered. Growing up his family couldn’t afford to have a pet. Heck, his Ma could barely afford to feed eight growing boys never mind trying to take care of any pet be they a dog or a bird. At any rate he just never thought much about birds.

Of course that all changed when he met the Medic. That man loved birds almost as much as he loved preforming experiments on whatever unlucky sucker that ended up on his surgery table. The man basically had a small army of doves at his command. With that said even once he met the Medic and his army of doves Scout still didn’t think much about birds. Of course that all changed when he ended up accidentally getting one of Medic’s doves trapped in his chest. That was one of the worst moments of Scout’s life. Having a bird have a mini panic attack in his rib cage was hell on earth. He could feel the bird’s wings brushing up against his organs, and he could feel the bird bashing himself against Scout's chest to try and escape. To say that it felt unpleasant would be massively understating just how painful it felt. It couldn’t have been much fun for the bird either being stuck in a dark place unable to get out, but honestly Scout’s sympathy for the bird was rather limited. If the bird hadn’t jumped into his chest during the ÜberCharge heart surgery, he wouldn’t have ended up in that position in the first place.

Thankfully, the second Scout figured out he had a freaking bird trapped in his body he had turned right around, and got Medic to get the bird out of him. Medic was able to get his beloved bird out of Scout without too many issues, and the bird went on with his life happy as ever. However, Scout walked away from the situation swearing that he never wanted to go near Medic’s freaking birds again. Suddenly birds went from something he never thought about to something that only brought up a rather unfortunate memory. These days just looking at Medic’s bird Archimedes caused Scout’s chest to ache just a little in memory of that moment.

After that day Scout only went to Medic’s infirmary if he absolutely had to, and he took to avoiding the man’s doves like the plague. If Medic ever notice that Scout sort of stayed clear of his infirmary the man never mentioned it. It was not like they interacted enough for Medic to really bring it up much anyway. Engineer definitely noticed, but that was only because Scout started going to him to use the dispenser that he had set up in his workshop for any injury that Scout had decided wasn’t serious enough to go near Medic’s freaking birds for.

“You know Medic would probably be willing to take care of those injuries,” Engineer would always say whenever he saw Scout use his dispenser.

Scout would always brush the comment off with some sort of excuse. Either by saying the Medic wasn’t in his infirmary at the moment, or the man was in a foul mood and Scout knew better then to mess with a ticking time bomb.

His favorite excuse was “Medic was doing some freaky experiment, and I wasn’t about to mess with that.”

Engineer never questioned him when he tossed that excuse out because nine times out of ten the Medic was doing some weird experiment. Honestly, that was another reason why Scout typically avoided the infirmary. He was grateful for all of the healing that Medic did on the battlefield, but that didn’t mean he was willing to have a bunch of animal organs shoved into his body. Why Heavy seemed perfectly willing to let Medic do so Scout would never know. When Medic wasn’t placing animal organs in people he was usually doing some sort of experiment that reminded Scout a bit too much of the mad scientists that he had seen in some horror movies. That stuff had always made Scout a little weary about dealing with Medic, or going to his infirmary.