Grasping the glass with her pickups, Beatrice held her breath and smoothly lifted the shard out of the deck officer's cheek. She felt badly for missing it yesterday in all the chaos, but there hadn't been time.
Without regard fortypical MO superstition, she'd gone into the first shift yesterday thinking that it would be an easy day. Only five new cases of the virus had been diagnosed in the last three shifts; it appeared that the outbreak was finally over, and things might finally settle down. Just as morning rounds was concluding,the overhead comms sounded the klaxon and a code silver was called in the hangar. All of the medical officers aboard the Finalizer assembled in the rostral infirmary wherethe three senior MO IIIs, the three MO II triads, and the twenty-seven MO Is readied the blood and the bacta tanks, they primed the ORs and preprogramed the resuscitation and dialysis droids.
Ten soldiers had died where they stood in the hangar as the resistance pilot and the traitor escaped. Those unfortunate enough to have survived suffered from severe burns from the Tie fighter's laser or from crush injuries sustained when the observation deck collapsed. Beatrice and the two other MOs that comprised her triad had spent hours on theirfeet in the OR with suture, scalpel and salve, working through the first and second shifts.Fortunately, things had quieted and today was devoted to the type of meticulous work that there hadn't been time for yesterday.
The young officer under her hands would benefit greatly from a bacta tank, but there were only four tanks on the Finalizer and unfortunately, he wasn't high ranking enough or injured enough to merit the treatment. After setting the bloody glass shard in the metal collecting basin, she watched the lines on the screen above the young officer's head, noting his blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation, and urine output. She requested that the medical droid increase the rate of the IV fluid infusion. She did not like the numbers that she saw.
"Do you think there is going to be another round of transfers to the Spire?" Beatrice asked. Maybe they could get the officer transferred to a ship where he could be treated , the other MO in the operating room and a member of Beatrice's triad,finished dressing the burn on the officer's leg before replying.
"I'm not sure. IL-4, do you know how many beds are available on the Spire?" Adriana called over to the droid.
The droid was silent for a moment before reporting, "They are on divert." Adriana swore and Beatrice rolled her eyes.
"They aren't even at capacity," Beatrice commented bitterly.
"Nope." Adriana's face was covered underneath a surgical mask but the furrows between her golden eyes betrayed her exasperation as she sighed, "But it's the Spire so what can you do?"
Each ship of the line had a specific purpose. As the ship that blooded the newest recruits, the Finalizer was considered a fairly prestigious Absolution was the training base for the youngest recruits, so the MOs that served aboard specialized in pediatrics. However, a berth on the Spire was coveted above all else. The Spire was an old imperial relic that functioned primarily as a support vessel in larger conflicts. No one of particular importance was stationed on it, which was why all of the seminal papers came out of the Spire's infirmary. The high command didn't much care if those troopers bore all of the risks of research. Four of the last five First Order Chief Medical Officers came from the Spire, as hadthe ground-breaking Trooper Outcomes Under Clinician Hands study, which demonstrated that soldiers had improved morbidity and mortality when wards were staffed with humans augmented by droids. The Spire was resource-rich and disinclined to sharing.
"Do you think he's going to make it?" Beatrice asked, "His kidneys don't look good but I'm worried we're going to flood his lungs with all the fluid." She slid the curved suture needle into the boy's cheek and out the other side of the gash with a steady, slow rotation of her wrist.
"We did what we could," Adriana said as she adjusted the wet dressing that covered the boy's entire denuded thigh.
"It's too bad. He's so young." The knot eased off of the tip of her hemostat as she pulled the suture tight.
"Same age as a storm trooper. And they wouldn't have a prayer of getting transferred for a bacta tank."
"That's true." She snipped the long ends of the suture and dressed the wound. They did all they could. It was time to step away and leave the young officer to the caprices of luck. Beatrice ripped off her sterile paper gown and bloody gloves, wadded the trash into a ball and tossed it into the garbage on her way back out into the ward.
She was startled to see Bard waiting for her outside the OR doors wearing an uncertain expression that was unfamiliar to her. She knew his face better than she knew her own and the borders between herself and Bard were 'd mopped his brow as he sweated under the OR lights and fished in his pockets for scraps of paper scribbled with his notes when his hands were engaged in a sterile field, while he would adjust her glasses when she hadn't even realized they had fallen down her nose.
Exactly the same age, Beatrice and Bard had gone through General Academy together and both were deemed suited to medicine. In the last two years of their training, after rigorous assessments of their particular skill sets, they were assigned to the same triad along with Adriana, a west sector student, each picked specifically to complement the others. Adriana was the better surgeon, meticulous and able, while Beatrice liked to think. Her patients were usually the stable ones whose management was not obvious. She had an interest in how diseases moved, spreading out from the index patient in a web that would eventually entangle everyone on a Star liked to go fast and bounce between cubicles of rapidly evolving cases. Stillness was unnatural for him, so it was concerning to see him standing outside the OR with his hands in his pockets waiting for her.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Beatrice, General Hux wants to see you," he said in his low, loud voice; a gaggle of MO Is clustered around a chest film looked over at them in surprise.
"Why?"
"I don't know. He's over there in triage," Bard said, gesturing to the place behind the free standing wall that separated the infirmary proper from the waiting area. Adriana looked wary, as though whatever Beatrice had done to call General Hux down from the bridge was contagious and she wanted no part in it.
Beatrice was anxious. Their meeting about the vaccines wasweeks ago; there was no reason for him to be here now. It wasn't his asthma either. She'd seen the general in the hall a few days prior and he looked to be breathing more easily. He had been having an animated discussion with Captain Phasma and hadn't paused to cough once. On the day she requested the vaccines, his lungs had been wheezing like an organ; he had probably been hypoxic, but she didn't have a pulse oximeter and since he refused to go to the infirmary she would never know. Perhaps she was going to get a demerit for creating a false medical record or perhaps she wasn't even cognizant of what she'd doneand he was going to upbraid her about it in front of the whole infirmary.
General Hux looked out of place in the triage area, standing in parade posture with his hands clasped behind his back as he read the poster about the importance of prophylaxis during shore leave. The triage patients sitting in the plastic chairs against the wall were trying to be invisible and the waiting room was unusually still, save for the occasional snuffle. One trooper was even trying to put his helmet back on (having it off was a unform violation) even though his nose was bleeding profusely, the blood dripping to the tile below with a sick splattering sound.
"Come with me," he said as she came around the triage desk; he spun out the door without waiting for her reply or to see if she followed. She glanced back at Bard, who indicated that he would cover her patients until her return. She had to trot to catch up with him. It was easy to forget, given his narrow build, that he was quite tall, and he paced the hallway at brisk clip. She followed him through the hall, down the stairs and into the atrium that served the rostrum of the ship. He summoned the lift and glanced over his shoulder at her, the first time he had checked to make sure that she followed him. Thinking he was going to tell her what they were doing, Beatrice waited expectantly but he looked away the second they made eye contact. When the lift doors opened, she pressed herself against the wall behind him; he stood in the middle and even though the lift stopped several times on the way down, no one got on. He accepted this deference as his due.
When they reached the lowermost level, an area of the ship where she had never been, he took off again, finally stopping abruptly in a hallway devoid of anyone but droids. He badged into a cold storage room and the lights flicked on as the doors slammed shut behind them. Four large shipping containers, taller even than the general himself,lay open before them. Her breath frosted in front of her face. She still had no idea why he had summoned her in particular and why they stood in a cold storage room. But it was not her place to ask questions of the most senior officer aboard, so she stayed silent and awaited his explanation.
"Your vaccines arrived. I had the shipment concealed as a precaution." He walked to the nearest shipping container and peered at the label. Frowning, he repeated the same procedure with the other containers. She watched him uselessly. It was against her nature and her training to be idle, but she hadn't yet been issued an order.
"They were supposed to put a code on it. And there is no blasted ladder. No help for it, we'll have to check each one," he said. His tone was frustrated but to her shock, he sounded almost apologetic. He glanced around the room for any tool or hint as to how this was usually done and found no implement other than Beatrice.
"Here. I'll boost you up." At this point everything was so very upside down that Beatrice found herself placing her boot in the cupped hands of the general and hauling herself over the side of a shipping container where she found herself chest deep in cold, opaque packing beads. But having a job was all she needed to forget the strange situation and she searched the container methodically, trying to ignore the crushing cold of the packing material.
"It's all frozen meal kits, Sir," she said, inelegantly balancing on boxes and hoisting herself up onto the corner of the container. She shivered and blew onto her hands. Below her, he frowned.
"If they had labeled it with the code, as I suggested, we wouldn't have to do this," he said crossly. Beatrice perched on the edge of the container, realizing that there was no easy way down. The general seemed to have the same thought, and he looked up at her at a loss, his face completely open and without pretense. He said, "I think you will have to jump."
She half-fell, half climbed down the container, hitting her elbow painfully on the middle strut. He sort of caught her, but there was a scrabbling and a fumbling and when she came to set both feet on the ground their posture was wildly inappropriate. Beatrice realized that the better course of action would have been to fall to the ground and break her ankle. She took her arms from around his neck and backed quickly away. He straightened his uniform jacket and smoothed his mussed hair, color high.
"I am terribly sorry, Sir." She hung her head, staring at the reflection of the harsh ceiling lights on the black lacquered floor. Shewaited. Would he slap her? Demote her? Curse?
"You should call me Armitage," he said instead, quietly but firmly, "And I'll call you Beatrice." She was shocked to wordlessness. He had obviously made an effort to look at her personnel file to learn her name, which in every context outside of her triad was MO II B. North. MO for her title and rank, B like all the other children born the same year and North for the Alcean sector where she had been whelped. For anyone other than close colleagues to call her Beatrice was too familiar. And it was downright blasphemous for her to have his given name in her lowly mouth, if one could consider the Alcean devotion to order and bureaucracy religion. Didn't he know that? Surely, he had to know!
"Sir, I-" she began to protest.
"The doors are shut. In here it will just be Armitage and Beatrice." This was not presented to her as a suggestion; it was presented as an order.
"Sir, I don't know that this is appropriate," she said but without conviction, trying to sound the situation. Curiosity warred with caution.
"What would be inappropriate would be for me to give you a nickname. I could call you Bea. Then your human resources complaint would have teeth."
"That would be quite the scandal, Sir," she said and she couldn't stop herself from smiling nervously and touching her hair. Her mouth always betrayed her, and now, when she was on such uncertain ground, her anxiety got the better of her and she forgot to control her expression. This felt more like a dare than a trap, but she was very aware that in disobeying him he could punish her, and in doing what he asked she was not giving due deference to his rank, which was also a punishable offense.
"Sir?" He waited, eyebrows raised. She didn't detect any threat. He seemed to be goading her.
"Armitage," she said and when she wasn't immediately corrected, she met the dare, "Gage."
"How do you get 'Gage' from Armitage?" Her answer had pleased him. He tried actively to hide his smile, deepening the creases around his mouth and trying to sound imperious but failing utterly. Her status was now very clear: she was being treated as a person, not a peon. This felt like a conversation that she might have with Bard in the wane hours of a slownight shift, though the teasing here was more subtle. She decided to hazard a correction to test its pretended to consider him, tapping her finger to her lips and circling behind him; she was pleased to note that he blushed under her scrutiny. She was right. There was regard here too.
"Well," she began, stopping in front of him but closer than they were before, "You certainly aren't a 'Tag'."
"I should hope not."
"You could be an acronym? 'AH' in cold storage and 'GAH' in formal settings?" He ran his thumb across his eyebrow and bithis lip until he regained mastery of his expression, settling it into an exaggerated frown that wouldn't stay put.
"Gage then. It's better than Cornelius, I suppose."
"Poor Cornelius. I will tell him you asked after him."
"Give him my regards. Shall we search the next one then, Bea?"
"I think we should, Gage." It became a kind of game, this informal name-calling. It felt deliciously scandalous to call him by a pet name, like he was just an ordinary person. Having a nickname seemed to make it permissible for her to touch him, so she set her hand on his shoulder as he boosted her into the second crate.
"I found a ladder," he announced as she searched, his red hair coming into view over the edge as he climbed. He eased himself into the shipping container with her and grimaced at the shocking cold of the packing beads, "This is extraordinarily unpleasant." It was much shorter work with the two of them.
He got out first, which she initially found rude, but it became obvious that with his height it was easier for him to get up on the side. He reached his hand down and gripped her wrist, pulling her up towards himso that she didn't have to clamber up the side, then he grabbed her elbow as she levered herself up on the held the ladder as she descended and as she reached the last rung, he held out his didn't need to take it; she was balanced and steady. The gesture was oddly formal, imbued with meaning that she didn't fully understand. But she wanted to touch him again. His gloved fingers were long, and he held her with light pressure. He dropped her hand the second her feet reached the floor. They stood a momentinpregnant silence, the scaffolding of stupid nick names gone. Without speaking he moved the ladder and descended into the next container as though fleeing her. She followed after him and they began their search at opposite ends.
"I think I found it," he called, submerged to his shoulder in packing beads. She waded over to him and slid her hand down the sleeve of his jacket, skimming her fingers over his hand until she felt what he did. Thus far, all they had found were the frozen meal kits, packed in a kind of slippery cardboard, but here she felt the familiar foam box typically used to ship drugs. They found all of the kits to vaccinate the thousands of cooks and janitors, ensigns and pilots, officers and engineers aboard the Finalizer.
She handed them up to him and he brought them down the ladder. They loaded the kits on a dolly which Armitage wheeled out of the cold storage room into the hall. She felt like she should be the one pushing it, manual labor seemed beneath him, but wasn't certain if it would be proper for her to insist. Storm troopers and droids parted before him and Beatrice felt uncomfortably visible, trailing along behind him.
Once the vaccines were in the refrigerator of the medical bay, he pulled up a stool next to her console as they worked out the fastest way to immunize the entire crew. Perched on the low stool, he looked strange with his long legs around his ears. He had a tendency to spin from side to side as he thought, his knee knocking against her thigh.
Again, Beatrice was aware that everyone was staring at them. Ordinarily, the medical bay was loud, full of beeping, chattering, and shouted questions lobbed across the open workstation in the middle of the ward. The presence of the general had stunned everyone into silence and the only sounds were the clanking of console keys. Bard kept checking on her, peering around his console with a bewildered expression on his did not seem to notice. He did catch himself, twice, about to say her pet name but amended it both times to Medical Officer North with a kind of teasing deliberation.
Under so many eyes and with every word between them audible to the entire infirmary, Beatrice was flustered, so when Armitage suggested something that made no sense to her, she told him so.
"No. That won't work," she said bluntly and was instantly horrified at her mistake. The entire ward stilled. Armitage looked surprised, cocking his head to the side. No one spoke to him that way. He tsked, clicking his tongue against his teeth.
"I suppose you are right, but I would suggest watching your tone," he said. Bard met her eyes from across the room, looking almost comically shocked. Beatrice made a point to be more deferential.
Theklaxon rang through the wards, followed by Captain Phasma's smoothvoice intoning:"Death to the Republic or Death under the Republic"; the third shift was starting.
"Well. That should do it then. Do you have any questions?" Armitage said, raising up from the stool.
"No. Thank you for your help with this," she said, indicating the schedule they had worked out, written in Armitage's cramped handwriting.
He inclined his head formally, "Much obliged, Officer North." As he walked away from her, Beatrice noticed that there was a flush creeping up from his collar and that his ears were crimson. Grasping the glass with her pickups, Beatrice held her breath and smoothly lifted the shard out of the deck officer's cheek. She felt badly for missing it yesterday in all the chaos, but there hadn't been time.
Without regard fortypical MO superstition, she'd gone into the first shift yesterday thinking that it would be an easy day. Only five new cases of the virus had been diagnosed in the last three shifts; it appeared that the outbreak was finally over, and things might finally settle down. Just as morning rounds was concluding,the overhead comms sounded the klaxon and a code silver was called in the hangar. All of the medical officers aboard the Finalizer assembled in the rostral infirmary wherethe three senior MO IIIs, the three MO II triads, and the twenty-seven MO Is readied the blood and the bacta tanks, they primed the ORs and preprogramed the resuscitation and dialysis droids.
Ten soldiers had died where they stood in the hangar as the resistance pilot and the traitor escaped. Those unfortunate enough to have survived suffered from severe burns from the Tie fighter's laser or from crush injuries sustained when the observation deck collapsed. Beatrice and the two other MOs that comprised her triad had spent hours on theirfeet in the OR with suture, scalpel and salve, working through the first and second shifts.Fortunately, things had quieted and today was devoted to the type of meticulous work that there hadn't been time for yesterday.
The young officer under her hands would benefit greatly from a bacta tank, but there were only four tanks on the Finalizer and unfortunately, he wasn't high ranking enough or injured enough to merit the treatment. After setting the bloody glass shard in the metal collecting basin, she watched the lines on the screen above the young officer's head, noting his blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation, and urine output. She requested that the medical droid increase the rate of the IV fluid infusion. She did not like the numbers that she saw.
"Do you think there is going to be another round of transfers to the Spire?" Beatrice asked. Maybe they could get the officer transferred to a ship where he could be treated , the other MO in the operating room and a member of Beatrice's triad,finished dressing the burn on the officer's leg before replying.
"I'm not sure. IL-4, do you know how many beds are available on the Spire?" Adriana called over to the droid.
The droid was silent for a moment before reporting, "They are on divert." Adriana swore and Beatrice rolled her eyes.
"They aren't even at capacity," Beatrice commented bitterly.
"Nope." Adriana's face was covered underneath a surgical mask but the furrows between her golden eyes betrayed her exasperation as she sighed, "But it's the Spire so what can you do?"
Each ship of the line had a specific purpose. As the ship that blooded the newest recruits, the Finalizer was considered a fairly prestigious Absolution was the training base for the youngest recruits, so the MOs that served aboard specialized in pediatrics. However, a berth on the Spire was coveted above all else. The Spire was an old imperial relic that functioned primarily as a support vessel in larger conflicts. No one of particular importance was stationed on it, which was why all of the seminal papers came out of the Spire's infirmary. The high command didn't much care if those troopers bore all of the risks of research. Four of the last five First Order Chief Medical Officers came from the Spire, as hadthe ground-breaking Trooper Outcomes Under Clinician Hands study, which demonstrated that soldiers had improved morbidity and mortality when wards were staffed with humans augmented by droids. The Spire was resource-rich and disinclined to sharing.
"Do you think he's going to make it?" Beatrice asked, "His kidneys don't look good but I'm worried we're going to flood his lungs with all the fluid." She slid the curved suture needle into the boy's cheek and out the other side of the gash with a steady, slow rotation of her wrist.
"We did what we could," Adriana said as she adjusted the wet dressing that covered the boy's entire denuded thigh.
"It's too bad. He's so young." The knot eased off of the tip of her hemostat as she pulled the suture tight.
"Same age as a storm trooper. And they wouldn't have a prayer of getting transferred for a bacta tank."
"That's true." She snipped the long ends of the suture and dressed the wound. They did all they could. It was time to step away and leave the young officer to the caprices of luck. Beatrice ripped off her sterile paper gown and bloody gloves, wadded the trash into a ball and tossed it into the garbage on her way back out into the ward.
She was startled to see Bard waiting for her outside the OR doors wearing an uncertain expression that was unfamiliar to her. She knew his face better than she knew her own and the borders between herself and Bard were 'd mopped his brow as he sweated under the OR lights and fished in his pockets for scraps of paper scribbled with his notes when his hands were engaged in a sterile field, while he would adjust her glasses when she hadn't even realized they had fallen down her nose.
Exactly the same age, Beatrice and Bard had gone through General Academy together and both were deemed suited to medicine. In the last two years of their training, after rigorous assessments of their particular skill sets, they were assigned to the same triad along with Adriana, a west sector student, each picked specifically to complement the others. Adriana was the better surgeon, meticulous and able, while Beatrice liked to think. Her patients were usually the stable ones whose management was not obvious. She had an interest in how diseases moved, spreading out from the index patient in a web that would eventually entangle everyone on a Star liked to go fast and bounce between cubicles of rapidly evolving cases. Stillness was unnatural for him, so it was concerning to see him standing outside the OR with his hands in his pockets waiting for her.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Beatrice, General Hux wants to see you," he said in his low, loud voice; a gaggle of MO Is clustered around a chest film looked over at them in surprise.
"Why?"
"I don't know. He's over there in triage," Bard said, gesturing to the place behind the free standing wall that separated the infirmary proper from the waiting area. Adriana looked wary, as though whatever Beatrice had done to call General Hux down from the bridge was contagious and she wanted no part in it.
Beatrice was anxious. Their meeting about the vaccines wasweeks ago; there was no reason for him to be here now. It wasn't his asthma either. She'd seen the general in the hall a few days prior and he looked to be breathing more easily. He had been having an animated discussion with Captain Phasma and hadn't paused to cough once. On the day she requested the vaccines, his lungs had been wheezing like an organ; he had probably been hypoxic, but she didn't have a pulse oximeter and since he refused to go to the infirmary she would never know. Perhaps she was going to get a demerit for creating a false medical record or perhaps she wasn't even cognizant of what she'd doneand he was going to upbraid her about it in front of the whole infirmary.
General Hux looked out of place in the triage area, standing in parade posture with his hands clasped behind his back as he read the poster about the importance of prophylaxis during shore leave. The triage patients sitting in the plastic chairs against the wall were trying to be invisible and the waiting room was unusually still, save for the occasional snuffle. One trooper was even trying to put his helmet back on (having it off was a unform violation) even though his nose was bleeding profusely, the blood dripping to the tile below with a sick splattering sound.
"Come with me," he said as she came around the triage desk; he spun out the door without waiting for her reply or to see if she followed. She glanced back at Bard, who indicated that he would cover her patients until her return. She had to trot to catch up with him. It was easy to forget, given his narrow build, that he was quite tall, and he paced the hallway at brisk clip. She followed him through the hall, down the stairs and into the atrium that served the rostrum of the ship. He summoned the lift and glanced over his shoulder at her, the first time he had checked to make sure that she followed him. Thinking he was going to tell her what they were doing, Beatrice waited expectantly but he looked away the second they made eye contact. When the lift doors opened, she pressed herself against the wall behind him; he stood in the middle and even though the lift stopped several times on the way down, no one got on. He accepted this deference as his due.
When they reached the lowermost level, an area of the ship where she had never been, he took off again, finally stopping abruptly in a hallway devoid of anyone but droids. He badged into a cold storage room and the lights flicked on as the doors slammed shut behind them. Four large shipping containers, taller even than the general himself,lay open before them. Her breath frosted in front of her face. She still had no idea why he had summoned her in particular and why they stood in a cold storage room. But it was not her place to ask questions of the most senior officer aboard, so she stayed silent and awaited his explanation.
"Your vaccines arrived. I had the shipment concealed as a precaution." He walked to the nearest shipping container and peered at the label. Frowning, he repeated the same procedure with the other containers. She watched him uselessly. It was against her nature and her training to be idle, but she hadn't yet been issued an order.
"They were supposed to put a code on it. And there is no blasted ladder. No help for it, we'll have to check each one," he said. His tone was frustrated but to her shock, he sounded almost apologetic. He glanced around the room for any tool or hint as to how this was usually done and found no implement other than Beatrice.
"Here. I'll boost you up." At this point everything was so very upside down that Beatrice found herself placing her boot in the cupped hands of the general and hauling herself over the side of a shipping container where she found herself chest deep in cold, opaque packing beads. But having a job was all she needed to forget the strange situation and she searched the container methodically, trying to ignore the crushing cold of the packing material.
"It's all frozen meal kits, Sir," she said, inelegantly balancing on boxes and hoisting herself up onto the corner of the container. She shivered and blew onto her hands. Below her, he frowned.
"If they had labeled it with the code, as I suggested, we wouldn't have to do this," he said crossly. Beatrice perched on the edge of the container, realizing that there was no easy way down. The general seemed to have the same thought, and he looked up at her at a loss, his face completely open and without pretense. He said, "I think you will have to jump."
She half-fell, half climbed down the container, hitting her elbow painfully on the middle strut. He sort of caught her, but there was a scrabbling and a fumbling and when she came to set both feet on the ground their posture was wildly inappropriate. Beatrice realized that the better course of action would have been to fall to the ground and break her ankle. She took her arms from around his neck and backed quickly away. He straightened his uniform jacket and smoothed his mussed hair, color high.
"I am terribly sorry, Sir." She hung her head, staring at the reflection of the harsh ceiling lights on the black lacquered floor. Shewaited. Would he slap her? Demote her? Curse?
"You should call me Armitage," he said instead, quietly but firmly, "And I'll call you Beatrice." She was shocked to wordlessness. He had obviously made an effort to look at her personnel file to learn her name, which in every context outside of her triad was MO II B. North. MO for her title and rank, B like all the other children born the same year and North for the Alcean sector where she had been whelped. For anyone other than close colleagues to call her Beatrice was too familiar. And it was downright blasphemous for her to have his given name in her lowly mouth, if one could consider the Alcean devotion to order and bureaucracy religion. Didn't he know that? Surely, he had to know!
"Sir, I-" she began to protest.
"The doors are shut. In here it will just be Armitage and Beatrice." This was not presented to her as a suggestion; it was presented as an order.
"Sir, I don't know that this is appropriate," she said but without conviction, trying to sound the situation. Curiosity warred with caution.
"What would be inappropriate would be for me to give you a nickname. I could call you Bea. Then your human resources complaint would have teeth."
"That would be quite the scandal, Sir," she said and she couldn't stop herself from smiling nervously and touching her hair. Her mouth always betrayed her, and now, when she was on such uncertain ground, her anxiety got the better of her and she forgot to control her expression. This felt more like a dare than a trap, but she was very aware that in disobeying him he could punish her, and in doing what he asked she was not giving due deference to his rank, which was also a punishable offense.
"Sir?" He waited, eyebrows raised. She didn't detect any threat. He seemed to be goading her.
"Armitage," she said and when she wasn't immediately corrected, she met the dare, "Gage."
"How do you get 'Gage' from Armitage?" Her answer had pleased him. He tried actively to hide his smile, deepening the creases around his mouth and trying to sound imperious but failing utterly. Her status was now very clear: she was being treated as a person, not a peon. This felt like a conversation that she might have with Bard in the wane hours of a slownight shift, though the teasing here was more subtle. She decided to hazard a correction to test its pretended to consider him, tapping her finger to her lips and circling behind him; she was pleased to note that he blushed under her scrutiny. She was right. There was regard here too.
"Well," she began, stopping in front of him but closer than they were before, "You certainly aren't a 'Tag'."
"I should hope not."
"You could be an acronym? 'AH' in cold storage and 'GAH' in formal settings?" He ran his thumb across his eyebrow and bithis lip until he regained mastery of his expression, settling it into an exaggerated frown that wouldn't stay put.
"Gage then. It's better than Cornelius, I suppose."
"Poor Cornelius. I will tell him you asked after him."
"Give him my regards. Shall we search the next one then, Bea?"
"I think we should, Gage." It became a kind of game, this informal name-calling. It felt deliciously scandalous to call him by a pet name, like he was just an ordinary person. Having a nickname seemed to make it permissible for her to touch him, so she set her hand on his shoulder as he boosted her into the second crate.
"I found a ladder," he announced as she searched, his red hair coming into view over the edge as he climbed. He eased himself into the shipping container with her and grimaced at the shocking cold of the packing beads, "This is extraordinarily unpleasant." It was much shorter work with the two of them.
He got out first, which she initially found rude, but it became obvious that with his height it was easier for him to get up on the side. He reached his hand down and gripped her wrist, pulling her up towards himso that she didn't have to clamber up the side, then he grabbed her elbow as she levered herself up on the held the ladder as she descended and as she reached the last rung, he held out his didn't need to take it; she was balanced and steady. The gesture was oddly formal, imbued with meaning that she didn't fully understand. But she wanted to touch him again. His gloved fingers were long, and he held her with light pressure. He dropped her hand the second her feet reached the floor. They stood a momentinpregnant silence, the scaffolding of stupid nick names gone. Without speaking he moved the ladder and descended into the next container as though fleeing her. She followed after him and they began their search at opposite ends.
"I think I found it," he called, submerged to his shoulder in packing beads. She waded over to him and slid her hand down the sleeve of his jacket, skimming her fingers over his hand until she felt what he did. Thus far, all they had found were the frozen meal kits, packed in a kind of slippery cardboard, but here she felt the familiar foam box typically used to ship drugs. They found all of the kits to vaccinate the thousands of cooks and janitors, ensigns and pilots, officers and engineers aboard the Finalizer.
She handed them up to him and he brought them down the ladder. They loaded the kits on a dolly which Armitage wheeled out of the cold storage room into the hall. She felt like she should be the one pushing it, manual labor seemed beneath him, but wasn't certain if it would be proper for her to insist. Storm troopers and droids parted before him and Beatrice felt uncomfortably visible, trailing along behind him.
Once the vaccines were in the refrigerator of the medical bay, he pulled up a stool next to her console as they worked out the fastest way to immunize the entire crew. Perched on the low stool, he looked strange with his long legs around his ears. He had a tendency to spin from side to side as he thought, his knee knocking against her thigh.
Again, Beatrice was aware that everyone was staring at them. Ordinarily, the medical bay was loud, full of beeping, chattering, and shouted questions lobbed across the open workstation in the middle of the ward. The presence of the general had stunned everyone into silence and the only sounds were the clanking of console keys. Bard kept checking on her, peering around his console with a bewildered expression on his did not seem to notice. He did catch himself, twice, about to say her pet name but amended it both times to Medical Officer North with a kind of teasing deliberation.
Under so many eyes and with every word between them audible to the entire infirmary, Beatrice was flustered, so when Armitage suggested something that made no sense to her, she told him so.
"No. That won't work," she said bluntly and was instantly horrified at her mistake. The entire ward stilled. Armitage looked surprised, cocking his head to the side. No one spoke to him that way. He tsked, clicking his tongue against his teeth.
"I suppose you are right, but I would suggest watching your tone," he said. Bard met her eyes from across the room, looking almost comically shocked. Beatrice made a point to be more deferential.
Theklaxon rang through the wards, followed by Captain Phasma's smoothvoice intoning:"Death to the Republic or Death under the Republic"; the third shift was starting.
"Well. That should do it then. Do you have any questions?" Armitage said, raising up from the stool.
"No. Thank you for your help with this," she said, indicating the schedule they had worked out, written in Armitage's cramped handwriting.
He inclined his head formally, "Much obliged, Officer North." As he walked away from her, Beatrice noticed that there was a flush creeping up from his collar and that his ears were crimson.