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

[notinflictthem]

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.

Comments

[astrogator]

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.'

[not_a_traitor]

"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."

[astrogator]

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.

[not_a_traitor]

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."

[astrogator]

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?'

cw mention of nuclear destruction, genocide

[not_a_traitor]

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."

[astrogator]

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?'

[not_a_traitor]

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."

[astrogator]

'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.

[not_a_traitor]

"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."

and wrap?

[astrogator]

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.

wrap! <3

[not_a_traitor]

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.