#yes its 3am as i post this dont worry abt it

[thetriggeredhappy]

scout likes sniper but can't help but blush and go awkward when he sees it

me, who saw a very pretty girl with bitchin’ tattoos and temporarily forgot how to speak english for about five minutes today: ha check out this fuckin loser having’ crushes and stuff..... ha what a fuckin goobus

(no warnings)

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He really did legitimately hate the fact that he always made such an idiot out of himself in front of people he liked.

Like, he had literally no problem just hooking up with people. Absolutely no shame. See someone good-looking, walk up, ask them if they wanna bang, either get slapped or get in a car. He didn’t feel even a little bit bad about it, he was just being really honest about exactly what it was he wanted. And plenty of people respected that he wasn’t one to play stupid games.

The issue was that as soon as he got like, more than moderately invested before he could cut to the chase, he was absolutely fucked.

Miss Pauling was a great example. The situation surrounding him first meeting her was such a whirlwind and so weird that he didn’t really get a chance to ask her out, and so he’d just sorta been left to stew on it, and then he got cheesy. Started thinking about all kinds of romantic shit. And that was a complete fuckin’ mess for like, literally years until he found out she was seeing some girl and promptly stepped off because he was a hopeless romantic, not an animal.

And that had like, sucked, but at least he was functional. He only saw Miss P like, on the monthly maybe, and usually just over the phone or whatever and not in person. At least he could spend the vast majority of his time being exactly as much of a doofus as he usually was and not just a hoppy sappy mess.

But then. Oh, but fucking then.

He glanced in his periphery as subtly as he could, popping his gum to try and just for a second act natural, so frustrated with himself over how warm his face had gotten all of a sudden.

It was especially frustrating because like, it had kinda snuck up on him, all the gross heart-fluttery crap that always came along for the ride whenever he got a thing for someone. And he hadn’t really pieced it together for such a long time, but then one thing happened and everything cracked wide open all at once and now he couldn’t even just sit through the team meeting without—

Sniper moved to tug on his own hat idly, nudging his shades up his nose the millimeter or two they’d slid down since he last adjusted them maybe a minute and a half previously, and Scout had to force himself to stop looking at the guy for like ten seconds. And ten seconds was exactly how long he lasted before he was looking over again.

It sucked. Like, he’d gone years and years just kinda letting Sniper do his thing—the guy clearly just wanted to be left alone, didn’t want to be bothered with their shenanigans, so he really didn’t ever see Sniper around much. Barely knew the guy beyond like, some very basic stuff. And he kinda got the impression at first that Sniper was actually just way too cool for him to talk to, a hired assassin from fuckin’ Australia of all places, beyond skilled and into intimidating in his particular practice, maybe a little scary in the few interactions Scout caught him in during battle.

And he was like, more an idea of a person than an actual person, for those reasons. Scout didn’t really think much about what he had to actually be like.

Then one night Scout woke up around 3 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep and he decided to just go grab a snack from the kitchen to try and maybe squeeze a nap in before he was meant to be awake at 6:30, and he’d walked in and seen Sniper standing there.

Sniper was pretty professional in all interactions Scout ever had with him. Only ever showed up in the base proper in full uniform, and while he wasn’t like, Medic or Spy levels of crisp clean-cut, he still always at least looked put-together. But now Scout was confronted with the concept of what Sniper wore for pajamas, something he’d only ever thought about once or twice before, and was now suddenly witnessing.

Sweatpants, apparently, and a sweater. Green and grey, knitted. Socks. No hat or sunglasses, which was weird enough that it actually kind of took Scout a second to understand who he was looking at.

Sniper looked up at him when he walked in, and Scout knew he probably looked like hell, but Sniper didn’t look all that much better. He seemed pretty tired, and Scout watched as he visibly tried to sort himself out, standing up straight and squaring his shoulders a little, leaning less heavily on the counter.

“Uh, sup,” Scout said, and walked over to the fridge, deciding to just kinda play it cool and like he was totally anticipating that someone might be in the kitchen at 3 AM, and also that it wasn’t weird that he was in the kitchen at 3 AM.

“...‘llo,” Sniper mumbled, and glanced back down at what he’d been doing before Scout showed up.

Eating cereal, apparently, the bland wheat garbage that about half the team usually put up with, he and Pyro being the ones who tended to go for the more sugary brands. Scout occupied himself with trying to sift through the over-stuffed fridge for something he could feasibly eat, deciding not to stare.

But the silence was pretty painful. He didn’t like silence, it always felt almost itchy to stand there and not say anything when there was someone like five feet away, so he broke it after a few seconds. “Doesn’t it get hot in that?” he asked, not looking over at Sniper.

A pause long enough that Scout was half convinced Sniper was just going to ignore him, but he did end up speaking. “Gets cold at night. ‘Specially out there, it’s... warmer in the base,” Sniper murmured. “Used to it being warm, besides.”

“Fair,” Scout shrugged, pulled out a container, glanced at it, put it back. “Probably hotter in—“

“Australia, yeah,” Sniper agreed, in a tone that implied he’d heard that a hundred times before.

“It’s summer there right now, right?” Scout asked, pulling out a different container and scowling when he saw Engie’s name on it, begrudgingly putting it back.

“...Yeah.”

Scout finally found a leftover Chinese takeout box that he was at least reasonably sure was his own, and moved over to the microwave, dropping the leftovers on a plate and putting in some random amount of time, aware he’d just be stopping the microwave when noises started happening anyways. He glanced back over at Sniper. Sniper wasn’t looking at him. “That’s a cool sweater, though,” Scout finally said.

“Thanks,” Sniper said into his bowl. “It’s, er...”

There was a very long silence as Scout waited for Sniper to finish his sentence and he didn’t. He popped the microwave open to check on his leftovers. Not warm enough. He closed it again, turned back around. Kept waiting.

Apparently Sniper did decide to finish his sentence eventually. “It’s wool. From... back home,” he said, voice still quiet.

“Huh?” Scout asked, a little confused.

Sniper finished his bowl, put it on the counter next to him. Scratched at the back of his neck. Without the hat it was much more obvious how Sniper’s hair just kinda flipped up in the back, and how unruly the rest of his hair was as well, even deliberately brushed back out of the way. “Family’s sheep farmers,” he finally said.

Scout’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah?”

Sniper nodded. “We don’t... spin the wool, some other bloke does that, but we get to sell the yarn at least. Usually m’parents keep at least a little bit. Mum knits. Gives... gloves and the like to any kids in town.”

“She made that too?” Scout asked, glancing the sweater up and down again. “Jesus, how long did that take?”

Sniper shrugged. “Week, maybe two.”

“That’s pretty cool.” Scout scratched at his arm as a memory occurred to him. “Only sweaters I ever had were hand-me-downs from my brothers, itchy as all fuck. They never wanted to pass down the softer ones.”

Sniper nodded at that. “Makes sense.”

There was a long silence then, in which Scout finally noticed his food was starting to make popping noises and he pulled it out. Mostly hot, some cold bits in the middle, but he grabbed a pair of chopsticks from the drawer of assorted utensils and stirred it around so it was more even. It was just noodles, so it didn’t matter much.

“Late dinner,” Sniper said, almost managing to make it sound like a joke.

“Early breakfast,” Scout shot back, nodding at the cereal bowl and stirring his food around a bit more.

Sniper tilted his head in a vague sort of agreement, going quiet again. Scout started eating, and winced a little at how some noodles were weirdly dry and others were goopy, but hey, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Silence again, but at least Scout could keep himself occupied with eating instead of thinking about it.

“You know how to use chopsticks?” Sniper finally asked, surprising Scout a little bit. He glanced up.

“Yeah, duh, who doesn’t?” Scout scoffed.

Silence for a second. “I don’t,” Sniper said.

Scout looked up again, befuddled. “Man, are you serious? I learned that when I was like, five,” he prodded.

Sniper shrugged, looking away again. “Just never learnt. Never really had to, didn’t come up.”

“Fuckin’, learn how to use chopsticks, man. What’re you waiting for, a written invitation?” Scout joked.

“Eh. I’ll get to it,” Sniper shrugged again, and rubbed at his eye, and suddenly it hit Scout how much of a human being Sniper was. Standing there in a sweater his mom knit for him, eating cereal at three in the morning, admitting that he just never learned how to use chopsticks.

What the fuck, Sniper was just a regular dude who happened to be in their line of work.

What the fuck.

(He did look pretty good out of uniform, huh—?)

And that was it for him, a series of back-to-back realizations compounding until he realized how good-looking Sniper was, even rumbled at three in the morning under the shitty fluorescents of the kitchen—especially like that. And he felt his face go burning hot, and he dug into his noodles to try and cover it, and he almost choked on his food.

Absolute fucking mess.

And like—now Scout was noticing all kinds of tiny little things. Sniper always crossed his legs at the ankle, left-over right, and his arms right-over-left. He had a bruise on his thumb from jamming it on his rifle, and his shades were crooked a little tiny bit to the left, and his hair was all flippy-uppy in the back but there was this one lock of hair that was especially flippy-uppy. He didn’t put anything in his coffee like an absolute monster but did put just a little bit of sugar on his cereal, apparently. He kept nodding off during meetings but nobody else seemed to notice since he had the shades on and you had to be looking pretty closely and from roughly Scout’s angle at the table to see his eyes were closed, and he didn’t have any other tells besides his jaw being a little tight.

Twice so far he’d been asked by Medic if he had a fever, he was blushing so hard. At once point Demo had dunked on him a little bit about “zoning out” and “thinkin’ about someone special, probably”, and he’d only barely escaped by rolling his eyes and rolling with the joke instead of getting defensive. He’d gotten mysteriously more clumsy in front of the team at large, fumbling and tripping over his words and even stammering sometimes. He was such a goddamn sappy mess.

God. He was so fucked.