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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"I know how that feels," he says, sympathetic. "I took a civilian position for about a year, and I'm pretty sure I spent half that time adjusting to the suit." He plucks at his shirt, pulling a slight face. "Guess it prepared me for wearing this, though."

He doesn't hate being in civvies again -- in truth, it feels kind of nice, after so many years of war -- but the shirt collars always feel weird. So do the sleeves. There's something about how civilian sleeves are cut that always makes them feel a tad too short.

"But I'm doing well. Dr. Pierce gave me an overview, so I know the best hands to look for. Fifty-two cards, four suits with thirteen cards each, two colors -- not that hard to break it down, right? Have you had a chance to play yet?"

Ordinarily she'd make some comment about how she'd never go back, career spacer for life - but maybe he'd thought that once too, she realises. Young Tradeliners tend to be very blasé about the prospect of dying in some fiery explosion - can't fill you with terror if you can joke about it, right? Surviving but being no good for the lines afterwards? That doesn't get talked about. And she's not going to start now when she's liable to say entirely the wrong thing.

'The upside is, you bring my tailor sketches and you can get whatever you want made. Prices are reasonable, too. So if you ever longed to try the most dramatic fashions from back home...' Tayrey smiles.

'The cards are simple! It'll be easy enough once I can look it over, pick apart the probabilities.' This is just common sense to her. 'We play a game called kalixtri shipside, so I'm used to the concept, even if not the specifics of this one. I'm getting a set of kalixtri cards made for next time, couple of people want to try it out.'

Gaeta chuckles. "Maybe I'll get a top hat and something with tails," he deadpans. "Swan around town like I'm going to the Caprican Opera."

Getting a more comfortable set of civvies doesn't actually sound like a bad idea. (Hell, maybe the tailor can fix the sleeves and shirt collars!) A comfortable suit, maybe; some custom-made pants that'll accomodate his leg better. He'll have to start saving up.

He plants a hand on the table, eyes alight, as Tayrey mentions the probabilities so casually. "Thank you," he says. "Gods, the amount of crap I got from the pilots just because they couldn't do basic math. We have Triad back home -- similar idea to this, but a more complex deck, so yeah, I bet it'll be easy to figure out these cards after a hand or two. What goes into playing kalixtri?"

Tayrey chuckles at the thought of Gaeta all dressed up. Maybe her mental picture isn't entirely accurate and owes more to the high fashion of upper-level Cardalek than it should, but that hardly matters. She imagines herself in one of the dresses she had to try hard not to trip up on as a child, Cardalek ribbons streaming out from her sleeves. It would be absurd, here. Probably anywhere, these days.

She blinks at his explanation. 'Hold there, you're saying your pilots can't calculate? Sure they weren't messing with you? I mean, flying comes under astrogation, I feel like I should be defending them, but it's not looking easy.' She shakes her head. 'Kalixtri has sixty cards. Square, four sets of twelve with twelve picture cards that don't match to a color set. It's about making patterns, knowing the value of different patterns - any half-decent player knows the probabilities as a starting point, so then it's all strategy and creativity. What's Triad like?'

"I'm exaggerating," he admits. "They all passed their exams, they can fly fine -- they wouldn't be in a Viper otherwise. They're just convinced it's 'unfair' and 'cheating' if you try to track the probabilities in a game that's entirely based on probability."

Absolutely ridiculous, as far as he's concerned. (And yes, he makes the air quotes around unfair and cheating.)

Gaeta smiles. "Once you have that deck made, I'd be interested in a round. Triad's more like -- "

And here he launches into an explanation that was never provided in canon, because all the actors were apparently doing improv during the Triad scenes and nobody knows the actual rules. Alas. But it sounds like it's in the comfortable middle ground between poker and kalixtri, when it comes to complexities.

" -- and the cards are shaped more like..." He sketches out an octagon with his fingers, then pauses, a bit rueful. "Is it stupid that I'm still not used to all the right angles here? There's so much else to fixate on that's different from home, but right angles, for some reason..." He sighs and shakes his head.

She shakes her head in disbelief over the pilots. 'Ordinarily I'd say that game rules can be set however people like, but practically you can't set rules that mean people have to try to turn their brains off!' She agrees. Totally ridiculous.

The explanation of Triad gets her rapt attention. She takes mental notes, already starting to puzzle it out, how a little knowledge of probability would make it simpler. Tayrey's fairly sure she'd be good at it, given time. Poker might not take her too long to get a feel for. Certainly not as long as kalixtri had. Triad sounds like a decent challenge.

'It's not stupid at all,' she's quick to reassure him when he mentions the angles. 'The big differences are obvious; it's the small ones that keep hitting you. Company Towers had plenty of right angles, but a lot of internal curves and arches that buildings here don't seem to, and they were Towers. Tall. That, and I'm not used to all this paper! We did everything on flexible plastic, and nothing got wasted, nothing was used once and thrown away.' She looks back at him, understanding in her eyes. 'Being happy to be here doesn't shift the culture shock.'

Then, thoughtfully: 'Here's an idea. You draw out a set of Triad cards and I'll get them made up along with mine. Correct angles and all. Call it payment for teaching me the game, and being patient while I make mistakes at it.'

"Yes. That's exactly it," he says, with a small but emphatic nod. "Or sometimes the big things are just -- too big. You can't wrap your head around them all at once, so your focus gets drawn to the small differences instead. So you can process it a little at a time."

Like the Colonies, he realizes with an inward wince. Processing those small pieces that he called his own -- the street I grew up on is gone. my childhood home is gone. my family is gone. -- in the slow build-up toward understanding my civilization is gone. No wonder he's fixating on the plethora of right angles. In some ways, as good as it might be here, he's also broken his final, fraying tethers to the Colonies.

But then Tayrey extends her offer, and it's like one of those tethers comes whipping back for him to grab hold. He lets out a breath, unexpectedly touched by the gesture; for a moment, despite the perpetual exhaustion and the gray hair at his temples, he actually looks like he's twenty-eight again.

"I'd like that," he says, a little softer. "A lot. You've got a deal, Lieutenant."

'Fair contract,' she confirms with a small smile. 'Send me the drawings as soon as they're ready.' She does want to learn how to play the game, but it's more than that. Tayrey believes in cultural preservation, in holding on to all the little things that mattered from home.

The big things are harder. 'Sometimes it's the small things you can change,' she reflects. 'Make more comfortable.' She seizes on a good example, an example that, unlike most of her others, isn't painful. 'I don't know if it was the same for you in training, but my first year my section lieutenant wouldn't tolerate anything left lying around. At all.' She omits to mention that she'd been thirteen and used to staff tidying up after her. 'All the time it was just - if there was a gravity failure right now, what's likely to go flying and hit you in the head? That was the standard. Everything secured. And I don't need to do that now. We're planetside, gravity's not going anywhere - but still, come visit me and you won't find clutter anywhere, because that's what got to be comfortable for me. Doesn't matter if it's not usual here.'

He chuckles. "Gods, I remember being like that my first month on a battlestar. We had to run yearly grav failure drills, but the only way the gravity'd really give out was if the entire life support system did, too. And you've got -- "

Unexpectedly, Gaeta falters. His mouth has gone dry, all of a sudden, and he has to swallow to recalibrate his thoughts.

"You've got way more important things to worry about if that happens," he finishes. "Anyway, uh -- not that I need to tell you. But when I was a nugget I was still convinced it could switch off at any moment, so I did the same thing. Everything stowed as soon as I got to my rack."

Edited 2024-04-06 02:37 (UTC)

For a moment she's not sure whether to interpret it as criticism, as if it's a worry you should have in your first month and not after. Then she realises that neither of them are wrong, it's just one of those differences. 'Your artificial gravity sounds a lot less temperamental than ours,' she comments. 'We have drills at least once between stops, and anyone who started slacking would soon hear about it. 'Course after I qualified I got to be the one running some of the inspections, so-' she shrugs.

'Our failures must be more common but less serious than yours,' Tayrey adds quietly, with a small, sympathetic nod. Yes, she does know that if main life support goes down, gravity's the least of your worries. 'A few standard years back I was on a damage control team that had to operate live in unexpected zero-G. Debris was a real hazard.' Although that had been from the aforementioned damage, not untidy people.

Before she can get too serious about that, though, she tilts her head and looks at him quizzically. 'But what's this about you being a... a nugget, Lieutenant?'

The dryness in his throat, and the ringing in his ears, takes a few extra seconds to go away. He breathes through it: cigar smoke, alcohol, the background medical tang of the clinic. Warmth.

You're here.

"Yeah," he says. "Reliable grav was one of the biggest early breakthroughs we made. Fortunately. But when it goes, it goes hard." He cracks a tiny smile. "I think I'd rather have that than suddenly falling upward and having to claw my way back to my duty station every three months, though."

(Even if floating through the CIC would've made moving around on one leg a hell of a lot easier.)

"Oh, that's just -- " The tiny smile blossoms into an equally tiny laugh. Gaeta waves a dismissive hand. "It's Fleet slang. A new recruit, someone inexperienced. A nugget. Doesn't sound like you were one of those for long if you were already running inspections back home."

She laughs at the thought. 'I'm only a half-year lieutenant,' she admits. It used to be unnecessary modesty, when she put it like that, because qualifying as young as she had was an impressive feat. After over a standard year of captivity, however, she was down to near average. Once that thought had bothered her immensely, but soon she had become so desperate to get home that lost seniority really was the least of her worries.

Tayrey's not going to dwell on it now, either. She explains herself. 'It was a small ship. Short on astrogators. I ran the department through second-shift from - well, from before I qualified, but that wasn't quite regulation.' Better than having the overworked Leah Savitskaya constantly on-call for weeks at a time. Tayrey had been happy to step up, honored to have such trust placed in her.

'But my first standard year as an apprentice? Sure. I'd come from planetside, no advice from spacer family to help me along. It was an adjustment. I sure was a nugget,' she says lightly. 'But I learned quickly. Qualified in three years.'

"Only half a year?" Gaeta says before he can stop himself. Admiring: "Damn."

He never would have guessed, from the way Tayrey carries herself. He knew she was younger than him -- he could tell, in the bright flashes where she grinned, that she was closer to her teens than the end of her twenties -- but still. Half a year!

After what sounds like a long period of training, granted. (He's not going to press on exactly how long, or when Tayrey started said training, but... he's going to quietly tuck that away in the back of his mind for pondering later. And having, if not as big and vocal a fit as Hawkeye, a few solid minutes of silent horror once he puts the pieces together.)

With full sincerity: "Congratulations." And then he adds, curious, "How long does an apprenticeship usually last? Three years at the Academy is a little short by Fleet standards, but not unheard of."

Only half a year. Tayrey remembers her distress the day she realised that even allowing for calendrical complications she must have spent longer as a prisoner than she had as a lieutenant, actively. It's a faded grief, these days, but it's the reason she won't be too precise about her timings. She doesn't want him to calculate it, spot the gap.

'Thanks,' she says with a smile. 'Wish I could have lasted longer than half a year, but there it is. Some people die in flight training before they ever get that far.' And she has a second chance, after this.

Which leads her nicely into talk about Tradeline training methods. Safer ground. 'We don't have academies; we do all our training shipside. Apprentices spend one third of their shift studying, and the other two thirds doing actual work, so that we know how the whole ship operates, more or less - and we feel like part of the crew from the very beginning. There's simulator training for the complicated parts. As for the timing?' Tayrey grins. 'You've got to pass the lieutenants' examinations, which are real tough. Three years is about the lower limit, although the record is just under. Mine was closer to three and a half. Candidates who start at the minimum age usually take five or six, older candidates a little less. If someone hadn't passed in eight it'd get to be a problem.'

She explains, 'All you need is your captain's recommendation to try the exams. One of my seniors wanted me held back a year, thought it was too soon, but my captain said if I wasn't capable I wouldn't pass, and he was willing to let me try.' There's a wistful admiration in her voice when she speaks of the captain she hasn't seen in a long time. 'What was your academy like?' she asks him.

Gaeta's mouth twists, apologetic and a little rueful. Tayrey quickly moves the subject along, though, and he's just as quick to follow.

"Sounds like you had a good captain," he says, a little quieter. "Fleet Academy is... it was a lot more like a traditional college than that. Four years of academics and physical training to prep you for serving on a battlestar, maybe about half of that on assignment to a ship for the hands-on practicum -- which mostly meant doing all the grunt work none of the officers wanted to do," he adds with a brief chuckle. "Not exactly part of the crew, like your apprenticeship; just some extra hands on deck.

"We sorted ourselves out pretty fast into who wanted to be in a Viper and who wanted to stay in the CIC, so our education got tailored to match. Everybody still had to get flight-certified to graduate, though, which was miserable, gods. I would've let my certification lapse forever if the attacks hadn't happened -- "

He says it so casually that he's not even aware he said it at first. The attacks. Like he's forgotten, for a moment, that Tayrey isn't from the Colonies.

" -- I knew I wanted to stay on the bridge about ten seconds into my first flight sim. Anyway." He shrugs, essaying a crooked smile. "At four years you graduate, you get your permanent assignment, it's on an actual battlestar if you've done well enough, and that's that."

Tayrey catches that. The attacks. She's known since their first meeting that he's had a rough time. Nobody arrives here unless they've died, or as good as - but with the way she's guarding her own traumatic secrets, she doesn't think it's right to pry into anyone else's. Her expression softens when he says it, in sympathy, but then he's talking about graduation again and it's easy to fall back into comparisons from home.

'You don't like flying? I miss it so much. I had to get good at it to be an astrogator. We've got three kinds of certification - shuttles and small craft, full-sized starships, and L-space. L-space is the one with the concerning casualty rate, so it's rare that anyone other than apprentice astrogators ever goes for it. Don't worry.' She smiles at him. 'If we ever get the chance to go upsystem from here, I'll do all the piloting.' It'd take technological miracles to get flying here, let alone break orbit, but there's no harm in speculation.

'It sounds like your Academy was real separate from the rest of your fleet. Tradeline apprentices do a lot of grunt work, especially on rotation - during my first year they stuck me in the laundry for a while! But it's to appreciate that every job on the ship matters and everyone is part of the same crew. Especially on a small ship like my Prosperity.'

She's quiet for a moment, lost in remembering. Everything about home has taken on the warm glow of nostalgia and longing, even parts of her training that had frustrated her at the time. Fueled by this, and the sense of solidarity and safety she feels right now, with these people in this clinic, she meets his gaze and asks, quietly: 'The attacks, you said?'

Gaeta chuckles. "Very appreciated," he says, amused. "Yeah, piloting is too myopic for me. It's harder to get my bearings when I'm tumbling around in a small craft, and I think I've got a little too much self-preservation to be any use in a firefight, anyway."

Which is... deeply ironic, considering how things turned out. But everybody has their limit where they say frak it and find the courage to override their self-preservation.

Briefly, he wonders if L-space is anything like an FTL jump. Gaeta's about to ask when Tayrey's question yanks him back a few steps in the conversation, and it dawns on him, at last, how easily he'd said those words to her. The attacks. The temperature in the room seems to dip a few degrees as he remembers all over again: he's the only one here from the Colonies. He'll always have to explain, to everyone he meets, this piece of himself that should be as evident as the color of his eyes.

"It's a long story," he says, quieter. "And it's not a very pleasant one. Um." He rubs a hand over his hair, then draws his shoulders back like he's relaying a sitrep. "The very short version is my entire system was decimated by an all-consuming nuclear event that wiped out the majority of the human race. Almost all the survivors only survived because we were in the air at the time."

She recognises that tone. The same one she used when she clinically recounted the details of the injuries that killed her, as if reading from a medical chart. The tone you use when professionalism is the only shield you have against an overwhelming barrage of pain.

She regrets asking. Oh, Lieutenant Tayrey had been under no illusion that the attacks would be anything shiny and good, but she had underestimated the scale of the damage by several orders of magnitude. The destruction of a star system in her own sector would be a breathtaking tragedy, but her people were scattered. A hundred worlds, dozens of systems, so many stations and outposts that their survival wouldn't be threatened for an instant. All in one system? If she takes a moment to react it's because it takes time to grasp it. The absolute horror of it.

Her own suffering had all been personal. Gaeta's goes so far beyond that. She doesn't speak, at first. She reaches across the table, wanting to touch his arm, hand on his sleeve in silent sympathy.

'I'm sorry,' she tells him. 'I'm sure that's what everyone says, and it's... insufficient. For what you've been through. I can barely imagine it. But I'm glad you survived, Lieutenant. It's real... it shows the determination of humanity, to come through that.'

She shakes her head. 'And here I am asking you about it when you were just planning on a drink and a card game. Look, if you want to talk about it, I want to listen, but if you don't, then shut up, Tayrey is also a fair response, yes?'

Gaeta exhales a small, mostly humorless laugh. He doesn't move his arm away from her touch. "I wouldn't be that rude about it," he says. "I just... don't know what to say about it, most of the time. There wasn't any point talking about it back home; literally everybody went through it, so what could you say?"

You'd talk about the little things. A restaurant down the street that you missed. The way your dad laughed. You'd pin a loved one's picture on the memorial wall; you'd express regret that you never got to meet the family of your boyfriend, or visit one of the Colonies you always swore you'd see someday. But if you let those little pieces add up to the whole -- our civilization is gone -- you'd never survive.

For the sake of doing his job, Gaeta needed to survive.

He manages a crooked smile. "But I appreciate it, Lieutenant. Really. It's, ah... it's good to know you'll listen if I do ever want to talk."

'I will,' she reaffirms. 'Sometimes you need someone on the outside to talk to, you know? Everyone went through it, but that doesn't mean everyone's experience was the same. Or that everyone's feelings were the same.' It's harder, feeling alone in a crowd, feeling unable to talk about your pain because there's nothing you can say that people don't already know.

Tayrey gives him a soft smile. 'It's not the same at all, I know, but it helps me to talk about home. About the things I miss, especially the things that are most different from here.' She still has hope of return, she never lost it, but she imagines the principle holds. To have other people know where you came from and what you value. To have them understand.

'So you can say whatever you want to me. If you ever want to.' She means it, even knowing that aspects of his homeworld might be way out-of-sector for her.

"Yeah." His smile doesn't grow, but it firms up by a measure. "And -- I want to hear about your home, too. Whenever you want." Gaeta nods toward the other veterans that've started trickling in. "Can't let them sit around and talk about Earth all day like they own the place, right?"

And speaking of the gathering crowd...

"I think the game's starting soon," he adds. A tiny, mischievous spark lights his eye. "Maybe I'll make up something ridiculous about the Colonies. Throw 'em all off."

Tayrey nods eagerly, because she'll be more than happy to tell him as much as he wants to know about the home that she misses so badly. For now, though, there's a game to be won!

She laughs lightly. 'Now you have to! Make it plausible enough that it'll fool them, but outlandish enough they'll keep thinking about it.' Although she hadn't ever made anything up completely, Tayrey had definitely amused herself by playing into Company stereotypes to shock her peers from spacer families. It had been too easy, she couldn't resist it.

Lightly musing, "So probably not that ninety percent of the population was actually a rare species of penguin. All right."

But who knows! Get enough gin in him, and he might give it a try.

Together, they head for the game.

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

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cw mention of nuclear destruction, genocide

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and wrap?

wrap! <3