Miles has been keeping long hours during the Ishvalan Massacre, and it's beginning to tax his doctor's addictions as well as her patience. Coffee is about to get expensive at Briggs.
A/N: So we can has a Rug Roa category but no Miles or Buccaneer? Well, gotta make use of what we got. *Sics Ishvalan plotbunnies* I don't own 'em. Even the doctor's last name comes from Dailenna. While this one-shot ties in with "Red-Eyed Brother," it's not necessary to read one to understand the other. Just a little Briggs piece set early in the Ishvalan Civil War, because Miles torture is fun! ;)
Sherry Wendle was accustomed to double-shifts. She wouldn't be serving in the military, much less as Briggs's primary physician, if she wasn't prepared to give up her share of sleep and days off. But some days, she had to admit, not many, but some, she wished she'd stayed out west with her dad's family practice. It would have let her see more of her siblings, and if she had to fight with six brothers and sisters for the coffeepot, at least it wouldn't be at the end of her shift at four in the morning.
The doctor yanked off her headband and pushed the limp dark blonde spikes back. There was too much blood in her caffeine and nicotine system for her to deal with this right now, but it was the fifth time in as many days that she'd caught him "getting an early start on the general's paperwork" and consuming her precious store of liquid imported warmth and alertness.
"I ought to start charging you, captain." It wasn't that she didn't have reasons to appreciate the results of the young aide's sleeplessness - her medical equipment had never been cleaner or more efficiently organized, but he'd hidden her cigarettes and she hadn't been able to find them for two days. It just wasn't good for his health.
Miles had looked up at the sound of her voice, hand going automatically for the sunglasses on the table beside his stack, but Sherry just rolled her eyes. He must be tired if he hadn't heard her stumble over towards the coffee machine. Slowly returning her tired, half-teasing grin with a shy upturn of his lips, he put his shades back down and reached for his wallet instead, forking over a small coin. "A hundred cenz ought to cover one pot. I've started more."
Good. He was learning. She couldn't let him get away too easily with it, though. Sherry forced her expression into the best imitation of General Armstrong that she could pull on short shift. "Maybe it'll cover a cup. We're on shorter rations, if you hadn't noticed." The doctor knocked in front of his paperwork with money in hand before she went to hover in front of the percolating container of joy. Even the smell made her feel better. She had been about to make a crack about him being the last thing Briggs would ever be able to import from Ishval for a very long time, but the tangy scent had revived enough of her sense of diplomacy to halt her tongue. She was trying to get Captain Miles to sleep more, not give him more reasons to worry.
"You're in a lovely mood," he observed, arching a pale eyebrow. Sherry rubbed the sleep out of her eyes beneath her glasses and offered a slow blink in response.
"It is too damn late for rose-colored glasses. Too early. Both," the doctor amended. She had teased him for "prudishness" in attempting to hide his eyes from the lady who'd seen nearly everything else on everyone here, but Sherry had to admit that they were stare-worthy. The single red light on the coffeepot blended into crimson irises, making it seem as if Miles glowed from within instead of from the portable oil lamp.
Another victim of the captain's insomnia. "You slept at all?" she questioned him. Sherry Wendle was the doctor here, damn it. She was allowed to stare long and hard at a man's eyes (looking for broken blood vessels from lack of proper rest) and ask personal questions (inquiring after previous conditions) and demand anything that didn't go against Armstrong's command (insuring the army's continued health).
The only answer was a quick resettling of his shoulders as he turned back to the paperwork. Briggs was weeks in advance, now. The bigwigs in Central praised them for it, when they weren't busy trying to drum up support for Ishval.
"Captain Thomas Abdul Miles," she growled. He paused with the coffee cup halfway to his lips, intelligence report still in hand. She took the former from him and drained it. Sherry couldn't wait for the next batch anymore. "Bed. Now."
Miles set down the report very carefully, blinking at her like her younger brothers had when she'd caught them with a hand in the cookie jar and they hadn't quite realized they ought to feel guilty. Unlike her brothers, the captain matched her stare for stare after that slow, intentional shut and opening of his dark lids. "Unless you mean something entirely different from what I expect you do, Dr. Wendle, there's not much point." Damn the man and his rock-solid poker face. He might be a featherweight when it came to alcohol, but he could give the general herself a run for her money when it came to stoicism, uttering shamelessly flirtatious sentences as if they were the daily banalities of running Briggs the way he did...
Damn it, he was distracting her from the issue at hand. Which wasn't all bad if it distracted him, too, but just because he was burying the problem didn't mean it wasn't still there.
She glanced down and noticed a tattered note on much thinner paper than the official Briggs letterhead mixed in with the rest of his work. She couldn't read much of it from the other junk he'd piled atop it, but it had been signed "Mama." His medical records had listed him as an only child. His extended family on his mother's side had followed their patriarch back to their ancestral homeland. Miles's parents had been the last ones left outside the war zone, since Sherry herself probably had more of Ishval flowing through her bloodstream than the captain's father, short, dirty-blonde, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned as she was compared with the dark-eyed man who had started going gray long after his soldier son and smiling wife in the picture Captain Miles had hidden beneath his bunk.
Sherry kept snapshots from her family in various displays about the medical bay. She'd caught sight of Miles's single pictorial memento of home away from Briggs once before he moved it in one of his late-night cleaning raids.
His parents had reluctantly compromised between fears for their own safety and a desire for contact with his grandfather's people and settled just south of Lior, the last time Captain Miles had said anything. Not that it was safe to show red eyes much of anywhere these days…
"I knew you'd drunk too much of my coffee."
"Probably. I'll go walk it off and then head for my bunk," Miles promised her sheepishly.
"Like hell." Sherry grabbed his hand before he could do more than stand up from the table. "I know how long it takes for this to wear off; I've been drinking it long enough. There are better ways of getting it out of your system, Miles."
"I take it you have something in mind?" The red-eyed captain picked up his sunglasses and pocketed them before gathering up his papers and tucking them under the elbow of the arm she'd trapped, however temporarily. His other hand covered the rim of the empty mug, splaying large, callused fingertips that tapped against her index finger and thumb.
She couldn't prevent this, any more than she could prevent a bullet from Drachma in the line of duty. But if he was cut off from his roots, Sherry Wendle could make sure that General Armstrong's bright young aide didn't come completely unmoored.
"You don't have to be alone if you don't want to be." She kept her eyes on his as he stepped forward. She'd have a crick in her neck if he looked down at her like that all night long. It would still be worth it. "Even if you want to be, sometimes we need you with us."
"You're being awfully presumptive, Dr. Wendle. Are you certain that you ought to be speaking for General Armstrong and the rest of her bears?" Military recruitment poster straight back, chiding schoolmaster tone of voice… Miles let nothing personal through, even when he had to be as exhausted as she was.
"Not all my family members are in those pictures," she informed him, refusing to back off.
He quirked an eyebrow. "I have wondered if you were part rabbit." He would make that sound like less of a crack about her bounty of relatives and scarcity of height and more like a challenge - without ever openly implying anything against fraternization laws, of course.
"Briggs is your family, too, captain." That inscrutable mien cracked, and Miles's red eyes blinked and searched the floor. She'd hit too close to the mark.
"It's not the same thing, ma'am," he sighed. "I make myself useful to the general and the rest of the troops as I am able, but I don't trust my life purely to camaraderie."
"Screw Armstrong." Sherry hoped he wouldn't take that order literally. "I like you, Miles. And you wouldn't be up for another promotion if we didn't trust you, though sometimes I think you quit listening when you've been up too long. What part of 'bed' do you not understand?"
"Yours or mine?" She had to kiss him for that. Miles's response was somewhat less than stoic. The empty coffee mug got left on the table, and eventually, they had to stop and pick up the fallen papers.
"Mine. For observational purposes." She could skip the cigarette tonight. Her morning pot of coffee might not be fresh, but it would be safe from late-night raids by over-efficient quarter-Ishvalan general's aides. Besides, she had another little (well, not that little,) addiction to keep her warm and humming right along into the saner hours of the morning.
The coffee was long gone by the time they got up. "We'll definitely have to charge one hundred cenz per cup," Miles agreed, looking forlornly at the empty coffeemaker.
"At least." Sherry ran her hand over her face, trying to force herself awake enough to locate her lighter.
"Good. The new recruits come in today; you'll be able to scrape a little money off of them." Armstrong would glance at them wryly while delicately sipping the last of her brew, wouldn't she?
It wasn't like Sherry was stealing away her aide for anything more than continued observation of his sleeping patterns. Yes, it was going to be a long-term study, but it wasn't like they'd made that much noise in the ladies' locker room. How were they supposed to know that the general would have been just waking up and hitting the showers? (Quite literally, this morning. At least she'd left the curtain alone; all of them were content to publicly pretend Armstrong had no idea what had been causing the sounds in the other stall.) There were much better uses for insomnia than paperwork.