ways_infirmary | (no subject)

(no subject)

"Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man
With my three wishes clutched in her hand..."

Simon finally hooked him up to a morpha -- morphine, whatever it's called here -- drip once the nerve block wore off and the supposedly unidentifiable opioid had left his system. Gaeta's half-drowsing, eyes closed in a vain attempt to sleep outright; the pain's still too great, though, and the exhaustion more prominent.

And if he sleeps, that means he can't do the only thing that's worked so far.

"The first that she be spared the pain
That comes from a dark and laughing rain..."

The words are a little roughened with hoarseness, a touch slurred by morpha -- but his voice still rings clear through the infirmary.

[ooc: for continuity's sake, all threads now take place before Boyd's and Simon's.]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

She almost bursts out laughing at the absurdity-- to her-- of sir, but a small matter seizes her attention.

(Lieutenant Gaeta, Felix Gaeta--)

You thought she was smiling before?

"Oh," she exclaims.

"You're Louis' Gaeta. Aren't you."

"My name is Ganymede," he answers, curious at the look on the man's face but glad that the turn of conversation seems to have taken the jolt of pain from his mind. "I lived on Olympus as the gods' cupbearer for nearly two thousand years by my count. And as Zeus' consort," he adds, not sounding particularly thrilled about that part of the job description.

"May I ask yours in return?"

Gaeta draws in an audible breath, sudden hope breaking across his face.

Eyes bright, he asks, "You've seen him? Is he here?"

"O-okay," he says quickly. "I won't, then. But I can ask anyone in your uniform? Is that okay?"

Oh.

It's...not a name he recognizes, but right now, Gaeta can't tell if that's due to the drugs or not. Zeus, though, that he recognizes without question -- and Olympus as well.

(Not to mention the stories of Zeus' reputation and fondness for mortals.)

"Lieutenant Felix Gaeta," he says. Deliberately, he holds back the sir this time.

He takes a laborious moment to breathe, trying to think that through.

"Yeah," he says at last. "Yeah, um. Anyone in duty blues should be okay. Or as long as they've got a..." He makes a vague gesture toward his upper arm. "A Fleet patch, there."

Andrew nods. "Got it."

"Thank you."

His attention drifts; Gaeta endures a small but intense fight to bring it back under control, swinging his gaze back up to Andrew, forcing himself to hold it there. The heart monitor stutters.

"How did you know?"

A beat.

"... know what?"

"That this was gonna happen. The other you," he thinks to add. "Um. Not Andrew Prime."

He swallows.

"He said he knew stuff."

It's a look River knows well.

From the inside especially, but not solely.

She waits, hands wrapped around her ankles and body still, until he speaks.

Then: "Hi," she says, quiet and serious.

Beat.

"I followed the track," she adds, in what might be explanation. "It's aural."

"... uh."

He's resisting the urge to facepalm at himself.

"Did he say it like ... 'I'm Andrew Wells, I know stuff'?"

Those stories, at least most of them, Ganymede can confirm for the Zeus he knows. Amorous does not even begin to cover it. "Felix is a name I know," he says lightly. "And you are military?"

"Yeah," she grins.

"I met him here, a little while ago. He's a sweetheart."

"Easy, man, easy." He's actually in a pretty good position to give the advice: he's been in the hospital enough and he knows the routine. "Don't want to make yourself sick."

He knows, he knows: no one wants to be told what to do, no one wants to need help, no one wants to... to be explaining the frakked-up laws of physics about the end of the universe to someone he thinks just shot him in the frakking leg. Especially when they're on so many painkillers. That much is obvious. Probably, he should just go. Leave Felix in peace, but if he said he didn't have at least a little morbid curiosity about the whole thing, he'd be lying. And he's a terrible frakking liar.

Three years. Three years is... it's a long time by anyone's standards. If the colonies hadn't been nuked, he probably would've been done with his pyramid career within three years. What would he be doing? Coaching, maybe, or doing gods know what. Something good, he'd like to think -- that's what he was primed to do, that was always his plan for life after pro ball -- but he never saw himself as the kind of guy who'd go around shooting peoples' legs off. But the colonies were nuked, and nothing that's happened since makes any frakking sense.

"Hey, Felix. If you don't mind me asking, which planet are you from? There aren't a whole lot of people at this place who've even heard of the colonies." He gives a wry little laugh. "Never thought it'd make me homesick."

"Captainly duty?" Her eyebrows rise and fall. "Yeah, I've had that nightmare before, but tell me how you really feel."

Frak of a time for sarcasm, she knows, and she's intruding, she gets it, but she hasn't had a chance to treat anyone like an idiot.

"Look, whatever they've got you on is obviously not good enough." Gaeta's all right; sometimes he's got a stick up his ass, but he's a good guy. He doesn't deserve anything near this. "What I can do is have the godsdamn decency to" -- bite back the questions -- "find you a doctor if you want."

His forehead wrinkles as he tries to remember.

"I think so. Yeah."

Gaeta gulps down one last mouthful of water. It sloshes a bit uncomfortably in his stomach, and for a terrified moment he wonders if Anders is right, and he's about to make himself ill.

(Ill from a bottle of water. Gods. As if he didn't feel helpless enough already.)

"Picon," he says. Blink and you'll miss it, but a flicker of sympathy lights his eyes at the mention of homesickness. "Grew up in River Junction, maybe twenty minutes outside Fleet HQ."

Gaeta blinks, hard. "Yeah," he agrees, a little wobbly. "He is."

You'd have to be deaf to miss the undercurrent: I want him here with me.

"But...you haven't seen him any time recently?"

"Yes, s -- yes," he says, in a hasty course correction away from another sir. "I serve in the Colonial Fleet."

...Served, maybe. His throat tenses again as the possibility occurs to him: even if he's just a bridge bunny, the injury might be severe enough to warrant a discharge.

You don't need two working legs to read a DRADIS screen, he tells himself, as firmly as he can, but the morpha washes away the thought before it can stick.

"...Oh."

He...can't quite parse what she's saying, but he gets the gist.

"I'm sorry," he says, not much louder. "I didn't mean to disturb you."

"It's morpha," he says. A humorless twitch of his lips. "Looks like they're worried I'm gonna OD, too, they're not going to give me anything stronger."

At least, he doesn't expect they will. They would have already if they were going to do it. Right?

Of course he did.

"I can explain it," he says slowly, "but ... it's kind of a lot to absorb."

"Please."

His voice has thickened with renewed tears.

"I want to know. Please just tell me."

"Okay," he says swiftly. "Okay."

He glances around for a chair, finds one against the wall, drags it closer, sits down.

"It's like ... well, for starters, you know how there are people here from all different worlds? And some of them are worlds that sound kind of impossible?"

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 9 of 16