Cloner4000: Tag! You're not quite correct – that was exactly the point of the statement. Subversion!
*headbang* Somewhere while crafting "those two guys", I switched their hair colors from what I had originally planned. I made the mature sergeant blond while the joker was black-haired; somehow, those two switched. Huh. That's going to get fixed…
Also, I completely forgot about Worrick's verbal tic that I had meant to add to him, the "oh" that he was supposed to have at the beginning of almost every sentence. Too late now.
AND I forgot about Celes's previous abuse by Ralf's hands. Even though it doesn't change his attitude… oops. Ret-cons ahoy.
Back to Isara, and an extremely dramatically important event…
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It took Isara a moment to realize what had happened. Celes had been in the middle of saying something about the lack of Imperials in Gallian custody when suddenly he began tilting forward off of his chair on a trajectory that brutally intersected with the floor.
Halsey was quickest to react, dashing forward and shoving the chair forward towards the cot, launching its human contents into a softer landing zone. Isara, sitting on the edge of it, very nearly found herself with an armful of Celes.
Fortunately for her, the moment Halsey had begun to move, she'd begun to dodge away to the side, and by the time Imperial hit cloth, the Darcsen had spun upright.
A little cooperative pushing and prodding from the three of them later, Celes was sprawled out comfortably – at least she hoped – onto the bedding.
Worrick turned to Isara, confused. "Just what did you guys go through today?"
She thought. Between getting shot, undergoing surgery, getting shelled, crawling through a huge tunnel and getting captured – and in Celes's case undergoing blunt trauma via angry boot – she really couldn't come up with an answer. "A lot of things," she offered lamely after a long pause.
Halsey sighed, and exchanged a loaded glance with Worrick. "Follow us," he commanded.
As one, they picked him up.
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They were in a medical unit, also prefabricated, which had been completely empty – until they'd come in and laid Celes onto one of the beds.
An aged, balding doctor bustled in, hurriedly attempting to make himself look presentable; with the lack of combat action, and therefore injuries, he'd only had camp accidents to care for, which had obviously been short of late given the lack of hospital occupants.
"This man has been through the figurative meat grinder," Halsey informed the man with authority. "He may be a prisoner, but he saved the life of a Gallian militiawoman at his own risk. Treat him with all the respect you would one of us."
Isara's heart leapt. So they believed her after all.
The doctor sized up the unconscious man, fingering the remains of his grey hair. "An Imperial prisoner, eh?" he asked in a reedy voice. A practiced eye paused at the purple cheek and the cloth band above it, but slid away to take in his graying hair and face. "Heh. I'll, heh, take care of him."
Isara distrusted him immediately. Apparently, so did Halsey and Worrick, the latter unbuckling his pistol belt and dumping it on a nearby table in a not-so-subtle statement. The doctor swallowed nervously; she could have kissed the sergeant.
"Ah, I'm not going to touch the filthy man," he finally proclaimed. "As far as I can tell, he's got a, ahem, clean bill of health."
"Like hell he does," Halsey growled.
The doctor's eyes lit up belligerently. "You forget your place, corporal. Technically, I'm under the direct command of Colonel Nicholas, and don't you forget that fact. You can't order me around, and when I say that this man is perfectly fine, he's perfectly fine."
Halsey cocked a fist and took a step forward, rage in his eyes. "You –"
"Hit me, and I will have you court-martialed before you can say insubordination."
Isara bit her lip, but said nothing. Only a corporal herself, she could offer nothing if this man was unwilling.
Worrick gently put a hand on Halsey's shoulder, pulling him back. "Fine. Have it your way."
"I'll handle him then, you slacker."
Her statement took everyone off guard. The doctor recovered first though, looking at her for the first time with an unmistakable look of loathing. "A pig nursing another pig back to health. Fitting."
Temper flaring, she struggled to restrain it, encapsulating it in a bubble of cold ice. "A man who refuses his own profession is worse than a pig. He's dirt."
"Don't talk to your superiors that way, swine. You might just find yourself on the table, ready to be carved apart," he sneered.
Before Isara could rebut him – and most likely degrade the situation into a clash of insults – the two Gallians swept between them faster than a coursing river. "I think you have to leave now, sir," Halsey stated, cold with disdain.
The graying man nodded, haughtily raising his nose into the air. "I agree. Good evening, pig-lovers."
With that, he quickly strode away, out of the prefab structure. Isara's hot gaze could have sterilized his wake.
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Grunting with the effort, she rubbed a towel soaked in hot water against the toughened muscle of Celes's bruised back, wiping away dirt and grime that had snuck into his armor in the tunnel. On any other day, she might not have known what to do in the presence of a shirtless – much less pants-less – male at her mercy.
At least Halsey hadn't indulged in a bit of sadistic humor and had had the decency to leave Celes in his underclothes. Now, though, she had a more important subject than modesty in front of her.
Gently laying her palm onto a bruise, she opened a small ragnaid capsule that Worrick had dug out of the medical storage for her, shining blue light upon the wound. For a few long seconds, she held it there, before moving to the next major one.
Three capsules later, his back was still as black and blue as before, the white of the bandages around his ribs a stark contrast. However, she did not panic and keep applying ragnaid; the color was simply the excess blood that had bled internally from the burst vessels before she had fused shut and healed them. The color would not go away from further ragnaid application.
Secretly, she wondered just how impressed Celes would be when he woke up.
Soiled towels and empty ragnaid capsules piled onto a nearby table as she continued to work up and down his body. Turning his limp frame over, she worked on the other side.
For a soldier, she mused, he had very few scars. There were a few body features of note behind the bruises – some moles, some slight areas of varying coloration – but for the most part, he was unmarred. Perhaps Imperial armor had its merits in protection, after all.
There were ugly wounds on his ribs and arm were Ralf had kicked him – someone had obviously set and treated the fractures with ragnaid, as Celes had been in sufficient condition to treat her. However, by the look of things, they still should have hurt enough to send him into unconsciousness for the day. Instead, he'd gone through it without a word, not even bringing it up to treat her. She remembered a past experience of her falling out of a tree over a creek –
"Come on, Isara, jump!" Welkin shouted from his spot in the water. Treading easily, he made sure to add, "You should see some of the trout in here –"
"I don't care about the stupid trout! Do I have to do this?" she shouted back down from her perch on conveniently overhanging branch. She was ten at the time, Welkin sixteen. About to go university, he'd been convinced by Isara to spend the last day with her personally, at the price of letting him do whatever he wanted to.
If she had known it would involve water, she would have never started.
"Yes…" he answered slowly, hurt by her comment.
She sighed, unable to watch him hurt for long. "Oh, alright… I'll try," she lied. A look down, a mere yard down into the water, made her shiver with irrational fear. The sinister blue depths, the churning current, the lack of air, the inability to see how the stuff worked, made her refuse to even get near the stuff normally. She'd only gotten this far with her brother's constant string of encouragement.
A minute slipped by as she crouched, entranced by the water like a rabbit in the thrall of a stalking fox. "Come on, Isara! I'll catch you!" Another minute. "You can do it, Is!" Another. "If you don't come down, I won't write you at all while I'm at university!"
That did it. Eyes screwed shut, she let herself tumble from the limb. The ground replaced the sky, Welkin shouted at her, the ground flipped back up to its normal orientation – wait a minute, the ground?
She'd
unconsciously moved back to the shoreline while looking at the water,
and had jumped without a second thought. Unfortunately for her, that
meant that she was much higher than a yard above the ground – and
the ground was not nearly as forgiving as water.
Crunch. She felt the bones of her ankle give out in shards, her own shriek of pain blending with her brother's panicked one –
Shaking the old tale off, she realized she was aware of several things that made her flush red to the roots of her hair, and surely would have sent Welkin into a protective brotherly rage if he knew she had thought upon subjects. She wasn't sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that he wasn't aware of her predicament.
Chivalrous bastard. Why was she the one who had to clean up after his mess?
When the last bruise had been washed with both ragnaid and hot water and she had redressed his fractures, she allowed herself to walk into the adjacent room that the two Gallians had prepared for her own care. For a brief heartbeat, she hesitated at the threshold, looking back at her companion's sleeping form, but a growl from her stomach ushered her into the second half of the building.
It was amazing what a difference a warm meal, hot shower, and clean clothes could do a person.
A towel wrapped around her head, she walked back into the recovery room to find not just Celes, but all of her tools waiting for her on the bed. Hurriedly, she looked down at herself; her clothes were meant for men, no skirt in the camp for her to wear– there were few enough females in the regulars that many squads, platoons, or even companies didn't have a single one in their fighting ranks, and as such the military spared themselves the trouble of supplying them specifically at all. Not that she minded – in the end, pants were much more practical than a skirt for work anyhow.
There was the slight problem of not having anywhere to put her tools, though. She had had to customize on her own uniform to hold everything she needed, and now that was sitting in a pile of soiled linens along with her gloves – the things were filthy after her tunnel-crawl. Her decision to do that had stemmed from her obvious acceptance – surely she'd be around long enough to get the piece of clothing back from whatever soldiers were on laundry duty a mere day later.
With a sigh, she gathered them up and arranged them in a replica of how they would fit into her clothing on the surface of the table instead. Heaviest objects carefully arranged to maintain balance even when one of them was in use, fine tools that might require careful selection in front, unique tools that could be identified by touch on the sides and back.
Pleasant busywork to keep her mind off of worse things. That was the goal, at any rate.
It didn't work.
Wrench set split into to halves, alternating sizes on each side –
Rosie's shocked face as she toppled, a little of her own blood splattered onto the redhead's hand –
Screwdrivers in front, the better to select them –
A blind swing of the wrench, a solid connection. The later embarrassment when she saw exactly what she had done, but only for a little bit as she rationalized her action –
The bags of supplies in the back, as she'd have to pull them off to dig through them anyways –
Arguing with Celes about professions, almost wrenching the quack in the skull had he not been on his guard, struggling with him until Lieutenant Karst had ordered him to stand down with little more than a cough, an impressive show of loyalty –
A small hammer in the very center back –
Celes, this time in a much better mood, brushing aside her belligerent comments and needled statements that were inspired by her post-operation crankiness –
She gave up trying to work, and stacked the remaining tools roughly to the side, pulling a chair right beside the unconscious Imperial and setting herself down into it. Her gaze unconsciously rest upon his face, but before she could catch herself, it shifted to his cloth band which doubled so easily as an eyepatch.
His earlier story of a grenade damaging the orifice beyond repair still rung hollow to her. Curiously, she leaned and carefully looked to see if there were any signs of previous injury or scarring on his face.
Irritably, she realized just how close she was when his scent of medicine and ragnaid – and something else – engulfed her. She got her answer regardless, though: his face had most certainly never undergone serious harm. The handsomely youthful face that still managed to hold a tinge of maturity and promised more than mere surface thought ensured that –
Isara realized what ridiculously flowery terms she was assigning to Celes, almost like something out of one of Nadine's romance novels. Resolutely, she aligned her face with his, grabbed the cloth band –
And instantly stopped, stymied by a thought. Since when had Celes been drinking?
"Aw, ah shee haw it izzz, ya Imp-lovin' slut!" a rural voice drawled behind her. The scent of cheap moonshine, most definitely illegal to have and even more illegal to brew in camp, made her want to gag.
The only thing that stopped her from indulging in that was the cold metal of a pistol pressed against the back of her head.
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Cue dramatic music. Prepare for a battle…
I think I've been losing some quality recently. If at all possible, can you point out at least one error you think I've made in this story – anywhere, even in the past. I promise to go back and fix it – as long as you give me a meaningful review, that is. :3
That, or you can just give me the review. I don't mind. Now click that green button. DO IT. DO IT NOW.
