ph_logs | Then they'll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground (Mingle)

Then they'll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground (Mingle)

CHARACTERS: Hawkeye and the Veteran’s Poker Club
DATE: March
LOCATION: Hawkeye’s clinic
SITUATION: Poker game (for veterans)
WARNINGS: Presumably discussion of conflict and ptsd

You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands

A notice goes up on the board, and Hawkeye sets up the clinic for the occasion. Obviously he’s not moving all his medical supplies out- at the back of his mind is always the possibility that something could happen that demands he put his doctor hat on again. Not choppers, but something.

But he sets up a table and chairs in the middle of the main room, with a stack of cards and some ‘chips’ (acorns, he went out and gathered some acorns, which he’s painted different colours). There’s a flask of his homemade gin, some finger food from the Oak and Iron, and he got a box of cigars for the occasion. Feels just like the conferences from home, only without sandwiches that move and Frank. So, y’know, infinitely better.

Prior to starting, while Hawkeye’s setting up, he’ll engage in some small talk with anyone who shows up early- which, they’ll all be military, it will probably be all of them.
“Ever played poker?”

Or

“Can I get you a drink?”

Or

“Can you grab that tray of implements for me?”

At the sick bed of Cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer

When everyone who’s arriving arrives, Hawk sets himself at the table, one of his surgical lights over top of the table to set the mood.

“Alright- this is poker, it’s a little game we like to play back on earth, because we like losing money. I’m gonna teach you five card draw, just to get us started. I’m going to deal each of you five cards. What you’re looking for is to have the highest hand at the end of the round, then you take the pot. Easy. Hands are ranked by how hard they are to do- if you get numbered cards in order and they’re all the same suit, that’s a straight flush. Then we go four of a kind, which is just that- four of the same number. Full house is if you have three of the same number and a pair of a different numbers in the same hand. Flush is if you have all your cards in the same suit. Then straight, which is by number order but not the same suit, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, and then if you have absolutely nothing we score it by your highest card.”

Hawkeye clears his throat, takes a sip of gin.

“I'll deal to start with, we all bet based on our hands and how confident we are that we’ll have the highest ranking hand, then we discard any cards we want and redraw back up to five. Then we place our final bets, and reveal our hands. You get lost at any point, just ask. Questions?”

And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair

Shittalking, chewing the fat, commiseration, and general socializing with Hawkeye during games goes under this header. Tls for your characters welcome in the comments.

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Hawkeye realises his mistake just as soon as Ari tenses up like that. 'We' take our apprentices from that age. We. It's the same feeling as he sometimes gets talking to John Jay and his 'good guys' and 'winning', this sinking feeling like you're arguing paint colour with the colourblind. He shouldn't have reacted like that and he knows it, but twelve- the eighteen year olds he operated on were babies, are babies, twelve is even more firmly still a kid.

But he has the benefit of knowing about her and her father, the flight from the tower, and if her world supported her in that then... what does he say, the same as what he says to the kids he sees sneaking in under age? Not like the army cares. They just want bodies for cannon fodder.

He raises a hand gently to get Mulcahy to let him handle it.

"Nobody's kicking you out, Lieutenant," they want to be taken seriously, they all do, "alright? You're not the one who started recruiting twelve year olds, and if I'm mad I'm not mad at you. If you want to discuss it, we'll discuss it, so long as you know I'm gonna have my opinions on it. Alright?"

She was so careful about asking for context in an alien situation, even through his anger, he can at least do the same for her.

Tayrey hadn't recruited any, that much is true. It was hardly needed, there was never any trouble finding enough candidates for spacer apprenticeship. She'd been training little Kayda Levannen, though, before her life had been torn to shreds by an evil djinn, and while she felt fiercely protective of the girl, it wasn't because she thought Levannen was wrong to sign a spacer contract. Or incapable. You stop being a child the day you sign, that's what Captain Kavarai told them all.

She doesn't relax, but she does straighten up, no longer ready to bolt from the room at a second's notice, no longer fearing attack.

'I hear you,' she says. 'Liberty's my highest value, and I'd be a real hypocrite if I said that meant only letting people have their say if I agreed. I'll keep in mind you're not deciding our policy - if you'll keep in mind that I signed contract myself at thirteen standard years and I consider it a sound decision.'

"Sure, I'll keep it in mind."

So long as he keeps imagining running a jeep over a vague figure who's responsible that looks suspiciously like MacArthur, he'll have plenty of room to keep it in mind. Excess, even.

"You want to talk it out here or do you want to step outside for some air?"

Look he's down to talk it over but it'll be a bit of a bummer for everyone else.

After a glance around the room, Tayrey makes a quick decision. 'We'll step out,' she says. To her knowledge, half the people in there are from Earth. Gaeta's the only spacer, but he's out-of-sector too, she can't count on him taking her side. (She knows, too, that it wouldn't be fair to expect him to even if he agrees. She's the one who made the careless error, spoke too freely.)

The air outside is fresh without being too cold. Tayrey walks a short distance from the door, stands with her back to the outer wall. 'I forgot,' she admits. 'It felt enough like home that I forgot we're that different. That Earthers can react badly to what's normal for my people.'

Hawkeye joins her, a little distant but still within arm's reach. Breathing room. He's glad she took the out- here they can have a nice quiet conversation like adults without the rest of the peanut gallery. And he's brought his gin out with him, because he'll need it. Hawk takes a sip before answering.

"Look- I'm not gonna claim to understand, and I'm almost certainly not going to like the reasons behind it when you tell me. But show me someone who says where they're from is without fault or malpractice and I'll show you the hairy backside of a lying jackass, myself especially. I don't have a high horse to stand on. I've got an ornery Shetland pony who's trying to bite my leg off.

So I'm sorry to be the one who reminded you. I'll try not to let it happen again. And the important thing is, we don't have to agree for me to still count you as a friend, yeah? Hell- if that's another overstep and we have to space duel with sticks to settle a blood feud now that we've disagreed, you have my apologies there, too."

If Tayrey kept the situation from escalating, Hawkeye's the one who defuses it now, because she knows he wouldn't be so casual about it if there was really a problem between them. She relaxes, finally.

'We don't have to agree for us to count as friends, and we don't have to be the same for it, either.' It is an error for her to treat them like Tradeliners, because it leads to disappointment when they aren't, and that's not their fault. She learned that from Crichton, came to appreciate him for who he was and stop trying to slot him into a more familiar role in her mind.

'I'm also-' and here she turns quite solemn, 'not going to duel you. Not meaning to offend if it's your custom, I'll respect anything freely agreed between others, but I sure don't want either of us ending up dead over some pointless argument of principle, and we'd need four witnesses and a negotiated contract and I just- I'm not going to do it.' She stops short of saying how ridiculous she thinks it is, just in case, because it's true that she's meant to respect other people's contractual agreements no matter how stupid or dangerous they are. But that one? It definitely makes it difficult to hold that line.

'If I'm going to explain, I need to know how far back to go. Do you know much about neuroplasticity?'

"It was a joke, Lieutenant, I can barely fight a cold," but if there's a tone of irritation in her voice about the practice of it, then... well, something to ask about later.

But at the word, Hawkeye's face lights up a little, genuinely-

"Oh- I know that one, that's uh- that's new research in my time. I'm not an expert in anything neuro but this guy working out of Spain- uhh- I know it's to do with the ability of the brain to adapt to novel circumstances, right? He was looking into- into victims of brain damage, how their motor skills change and how they adapt to missing or damaged portions of their brain. Is that what you mean?"

'Yes, like that, exactly.' She nods eagerly. 'It's possible for anyone, to some extent, but brains are most adaptable in younger people. They can change dramatically, whether that's to compensate for an injury or...' no, that part will take further explanation.

'Let me explain about space travel. Our hard limit, so far as we know, is the speed of light, but even at speeds close to it, it takes a long time to get anywhere. The slow ships used to put colonists in stasis and travel for decades, and... well, sublight travel has all sorts of problems, but in the old days it was the best people had. Then Stanley Lorentzen and his team discovered L-space. It's another set of dimensions. Shift your ship into L-space, travel a while, and when you come out you've gone much further in ordinary space than you would have without the shortcut.

Problem is, human brains weren't designed to perceive L-space. Different geometries, sounds and colors - even smells that the human mind has to interpret through best-guess perception. Trust me, it gets weird. And for most people? That's completely incapacitating. Severe space sickness. Test people at twenty standard years, hardly any can handle it. So our regular spacers who start older, they take a pill, sleep through that part of the flight - but a Tradeline officer has to be L-space capable. So we start young. Most twelve-year-old candidates adjust quickly. Their brains can adapt. That's what made spacer culture develop the way it did. Sure, some planetsiders don't like it, but it's how we do things, and like I said, nobody's ever forced. Voluntary contract, always.'

Hawkeye's prediction is correct. He still doesn't like it. He can understand the logic to some extent, but... it's the same tune the army sings. Young soldiers because they're more physically fit, less prone to injury. A bullet hits everyone the same.

But he nods. This was the deal, more or less, that he'd listen.

"What happens if you change your mind?" he asks, quietly, trying to make it not sound like an interrogation.

'As an apprentice? You're on rolling contract, you can leave the ship at the next stop. No penalty if it's early, a charge for your training if you've had years of it, but captains can waive that at their discretion.' And they do, if a traumatised youngster needs to get out without having a debt hanging over them, but she decides that those aren't the details she needs to go into.

Instead, she takes a lighter approach. 'Two reasons for that. First is that your first year is tough. I wanted to quit a few times. Because I'd messed up and knew it, or something was hard or frightening. If I said that, Savitskaya always said no trouble Tayrey, you can leave at the next stop. Except by the time it came around, I'd gotten past whatever my problem was, and didn't want to leave! Second reason is practicality. We're in deep space. The next stop is just that, the next stop. No practical way out before then.' Tayrey shrugs. 'Once you pass for lieutenant you sign a five-year contract, and that's binding, but nobody gets that far unless they're serious about it.'

It all sounds fine, if you don't think about it too hard. If Ari had quit, she could have contacted her father, been sent family money to book her passage home. Embarrassing for her, but no worse. For someone without her resources, the prospect of being stranded as a teenager on some outer world or frontier station might make staying aboard the Tradeline ship sound much more appealing.

It does sound fine. But Hawkeye considers the idea of being left in unknown territory, and at twelve, and very quickly changes his mind on the idea. Hell, he had his parents and sister move him into his college dorm and he still wept like a baby when they drove off. Took him a bit to hit his class clown-ing stride again just from being around new people. Twelve...

...

"Did I tell you that I was around that age when I helped with my first patient?"

'You were helping your father?' Tayrey doesn't sound surprised. She'd attended her first Company event at the tender age of five, after all, and while that might have been only to show off what a clever and well-mannered child Director Kittredge's genetically engineered daughter had been, she'd always had the sense that Company business was family business, and age was no barrier.

Still, Tayrey also remembers the first time she saw someone wounded shipside, and that it was nothing at all like listening to her relatives talk about quarterly profits or buyout negotiations. She's not going to be dismissive about it.

'What was it like?'

"Terrifying."

He can still remember the disturbance that night, making his way down the dark hallway to the living room, seeing his father crouched over someone and a woman weeping-

"We uh- the town where I'm from is pretty small. Mostly farmers. Which can be a dangerous job sometimes- one of our neighbours had an accident with a sharp tool one night and-"

'Hey- hey, it's alright, c'mere- Hawk, it's alright. Mr Wallace will be fine, but I need you to do something for me.'

"-his wife dragged him to our house. Of course, all of dad's actual equipment was at the clinic, he didn't bring his work home, and our neighbour was in a bad way, wouldn't have made the drive there if he hadn't had pressure on the wound, but it's not like we had a nurse on hand. So he asked me to sit in the back with him, keep pressure on it."

The first thing he noticed was a change in temperature. The towel suddenly getting warm- a lot warmer, and a sticky feeling on his hands like he'd forgotten some candy in his pocket. Old pennies. A sharp, metallic smell. Warm as holding someone's hand. He knew what his dad did but it was the first time it really clicked for him that his dad stuck his hands inside another human person, someone warm and alive and bleeding. And then his face felt hot- tears, not blood, the same temperature.

"It uh- it was scary, we were worried he wasn't going to make it. But my dad kept talking to me the whole time- he never usually says much, so when he does talk I shut up. He uh- he was just calm about the whole thing."

'You're doing good. It's alright. Let me handle the worrying and you keep that pressure on for me. We're almost there, Hawk.'

"Ah, I dunno. I don't have a- a moral or anything, I think I'm just-"

He wouldn't touch another injury for near on a decade after that, not a real one. He'd study textbooks about the half-miracle his father performed that night, read diagnostic manuals, find meaning in the swipe of scalpels. But after that night, he had ten good years to grow up in, where the only blood he touched was his own. Hawkeye can't even imagine what would've happened if he'd had to do that again, and again, and again, at that age.

"I think I just miss my dad."

Edited 2024-03-30 09:16 (UTC)

Tayrey listens, and it's as if she can feel it second-hand, that fear. Keep pressure on it. It makes her think of Clover Becket, of how much she'd have given for a calm doctor at her side on the day of that attack, but she shakes off the memory. Hawkeye needs her to be present, to hear him.

'Of course you miss him,' she says, and she closes the distance between them, reaches out and puts her hands on his upper arms. A little squeeze, comfort and grounding, like one Tradeliner had done for another countless times.

'It doesn't need a moral, it's what happened. It was hard, it was terrifying, but you did exactly what was necessary, didn't you? And you didn't do it alone. That's what makes all the difference, and that's why you miss him now. Because it's harder, being alone. Doesn't matter how old you are or what you're trying to do. And that... it's one of the reasons you set up this game, yes? So people like us don't have to feel so alone, no matter where we came from.'

Tayrey isn't usually so openly sentimental, but she trusts him far enough to believe he won't turn it against her, not after the story he's just told.

Oh that twinges a little. Not like he wasn't just laying his heart on the table, but he hates people seeing through the anecdotes and advice to something squishier. He was overlaying Radar and his younger sister over Ari enough that it didn't occur to him that Ari might have insights of her own, might be able to cut through his bullshit.

"Something like that," he says noncommittally.

He clears his throat, takes another swallow of his gin.

"Just don't spread it around, I don't want people thinking they don't need to watch their acorns around me."

There's an art to it, knowing when to offer support and when to back off, and Tayrey feels like she still blunders her way through that side of things much of the time. Hawkeye's signalling clear enough, though. Her hands drop to her sides, and her manner shifts.

'Got it. Anyone asks, I'll say we had a proper row over recruitment and then shook hands and settled,' she says. It's only half a joke, because she values other people's privacy like her own. She'll never share anything personal that he tells her.

'I think,' she carries on, moving to the safety of generalisation, 'the first time you do something difficult is always going to be frightening. For me - I can't even pick. First L-space journey, solo flight test, first time I led an expedition, first-' She stops there, not wanting to talk about attacks on her ship or failed colonies or death rites, things you don't triumph over but just get through. 'It's not supposed to be easy,' she settles on. 'It's what you do with it that's the test of character. And we're all still here.'

She smiles, suddenly. 'That gin's pretty strong. Did I tell you about the celebration after I passed for lieutenant? How they tricked me? Insisted it would be exceptionally rude if I didn't match drinks with our captain. Except he's like-' she holds her hand up, about a foot above her head. 'I drank so much I wasn't worried about being suddenly in the company of people I was used to looking up to. Not that I appreciated it at the time. There's... another story without a moral.' Tayrey shrugs. It had seemed like a good idea when she had started telling it. Tradeliners had reasons for doing things, even their stupid initiation pranks.

Some of Hawkeye's usual ease returns with the mention of space flight, but all of it eases back with a laugh at the memory that Tayrey shares.

"I went back home for my twenty first birthday- that's the legal drinking age in my state back home. Dad said he was going to break open the good stuff for it, I must've spent a week practicing so I could act like I hadn't been drinking at college before then- so I sit down with them and my sister for my birthday dinner, and I do my rehearsed sip of this nice whiskey, and my mom says 'it's a good thing we're not paying for a degree in theatre', but my dad-" he laughs- "he says 'I wouldn't have wasted the good stuff on you if I thought you didn't know what you were doing'."

He shakes his head.

"What's l-space like, eh? I've only ever been on planes and choppers, and both of them feel weird enough."

If she hadn't met Earthers before, the notion of having a legal drinking age at all, let alone setting it at some ridiculous point like twenty-one standard years, would have been the only thing she could comment on. It would have left libertarian Tayrey in shock. As it is, she already knows about how they discriminate, and that part of the story only earns him a mild look of disapproval - which fades as soon as she hears that he didn't abide by such an unfair law anyway.

'The more I hear about your father, the more I like him,' Tayrey says brightly.

The question about L-space animates her further; she'll never turn down an opportunity to talk about her life back home. 'Flying in atmosphere is weird in its own way. I can do in a shuttle, or a hovercar, but spaceflight is smoother. But L-space? First time I went in was nauseating, and I almost fainted. Everything's overwhelming. You can look at your own arm and it'll seem like it's bent at an impossible angle, but you touch it and it's fine. Everything looks like it's melting, or stretching, and I couldn't recognise anything on the flight console except by the colored lights. Outside is - mostly black, like ordinary space, but all the stars and planets are - not the same, it's like they pulse with a different light. Hard to describe to someone who hasn't seen. And L-space has a sound, a hum. Sometimes it's discordant with the ship's engine. Honestly, if Savitskaya hadn't been there to steady me I might have given up right then! But it gets easier. Your brain adapts - we call that resolving, and your own body and things inside the ship start to look relatively normal. Outside is still way out-of-sector, but astrogators learn to interpret it, to recognise star systems and fly their course. There are still strange sounds and shapes and colors, but you get used to it. There's this one almost-yellow that I see a lot before outward transition - that's exiting L-space - and I'm pleased to see it now, means I'm flying true.'

"I like him too. He's like a father to me, y'know."

Which is a terrible joke but he's going to keep making it.

Still, he listens, enraptured by her descriptions of L-space. Maybe Ari really is just built different because Hawkeye's heinie would be off the ship at the next stop faster than you could say 'Euclidean geometry' seeing all of that.

"So you're kind of an expert on that kind of flying then, huh? That's what Astrogator means? It sounds uh- I'll skip the chance to experience it, but it sounds complicated, must be hard to do."

It is a terrible joke, but Ari seems to appreciate that sort. She chuckles when she hears it, anyway. It's nice to have things to laugh at anyway.

'Astrogators handle L-space flight, flight in ordinary space, maintaining charts and plotting courses. Those are my primary duties - I get to do a lot else besides, but astrogation's most important. It's hard at first, until you get used to it.' This is something of an understatement; no need to bring up how many would-be astrogators don't make it through training. Instead he gets a steady smile. 'Once you can do it, though? It comes natural. There's something intuitive to it. But I don't blame you for wanting to stand clear! Space sickness is rough.'

He won't have been to space, but she has to ask: 'You ever flown? In atmosphere, I mean.'

She really does seem to perk up, talking about her job. The system itself might make him rankle, but it sounds at least like Tayrey got the long straw in the whole deal. That much he can be glad for, for her.

"Me? Plenty. I took a plane to get to Korea, we usually take them back and forth between Seoul and Tokyo, and then we take choppers- helicopters I mean- to get anywhere around Korea in a hurry. They don't go up very high, but the cabin's open, so it feels like less of a tin can than planes do. Less cute girls in choppers though, unless you bring your own."

Another sip of his drink,

"Couple of times I had to get flown in for a field operation at the front. That, that wasn't fun. You feel that open cabin a lot more when bullets are flying past."

It's true, Tayrey loves her work - and being a Director's daughter whose genetic enhancements let her practically max out the aptitude tests did open some doors for her. Still, ask most Tradeline captains where they'd want to see their own children go, and it won't be somewhere high-risk like astrogation. There's a lot more competition for the apprenticeships in the finance department.

She'd never be satisfied with a desk job; she loves flying. His description of the chopper under fire makes her draw in breath sharply, audibly. 'I can imagine. Must have taken courage. Saying it's a hazard doesn't begin to cover it. I haven't flown like that - in space, anything opens and you're in real trouble. Patching a hole someone else made is bad enough. But you're saying you've got no women doing the flying in Korea? Or only no cute ones?' She grins. Cute isn't the image most Tradeliners are trying for, so maybe the same is true for Earther pilots. Either way, she's not taking it terribly seriously.

"Most of the time I was too terrified out of my wits to be scared about it," no courage here. But Ari makes the comment and Hawkeye suddenly gets the expression of someone who's just been told he's standing on a landmine.

"Oh uh-" a slight pause, "y'know I- I don't think I ever met a lady pilot before you, actually."

Hell hell hell hell- what does he say- blame the army? Blame the army, always a safe bet-

"I'm guessing the military thinks it's too dangerous for, uh, women, to be doing. Not that it is- I mean the whole thing is dangerous, not like it's less dangerous being in the air- what I mean is that's stupid and we should have had lady pilots back home too."

There, that oughta be sufficiently couched such that he won't get yelled at.

Tayrey's first reaction is faint surprise. Maybe it shouldn't be, given what she's heard about certain Earthers and the way they think of women, but still, it's unexpected. Her second reaction is a sudden stab of worry about just how unconvincing her Earther air force cover stories must have been, when she'd stepped through Sparkles' dimensional rifts.

It doesn't matter, she tells herself. It's all long ago and far away and she probably didn't break anyone's timeline.

'I figure flying in wartime is dangerous no matter who's doing it,' she tells Hawkeye mildly, but now that she's able to focus on him and not herself, she can see that she's unsettled him. 'More dangerous for an inexperienced pilot,' she adds, 'but experience wouldn't be a guarantee you'd fly clear, either.' She shrugs. 'It's not your fault; you didn't write the policy. I'd have words for whomever did!'

"Exactly- the whole thing was dangerous, for anyone. And no, I sure didn't. If I had it my way I'd write a much simpler policy: yankees go home. No fighting, no danger, no need for anyone to go up in choppers, no need to look after any wounded. I keep trying to tell the brass the logic, but they never seem to listen."

A gentle huff.

"Ah, anyway. You up to rejoining everyone else? Anyone brings the topic up again I'll say we settled it. Or I'll punch them, depends on how I'm feeling."

and wrap?

astrogator - 2024-05-02 13:40 (UTC) - Expand

Wrap!

notinflictthem - 2024-05-03 06:03 (UTC) - Expand

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Then they'll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground (Mingle)

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cw injury, gore

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and wrap?

Wrap!