doing something called the reverse gege where i take already established characters and i put them in positive and affirming situations so they feel happy and loved
It’s been a time since Kirschtaria’s arrival, during the raging chaos of that unknown war. Too short to truly forget, but long enough to find some semblance of normality in the midst of it all; to settle into a routine, and carve out a life for themselves. Some scars remain throughout the city, but that was the purpose of scars; to act as an eternal reminder.
The only silver-lining of the situation were the people; some strange, some curious, all trying. Perhaps it’s too early to call them all friends, but inviting one to tea certainly seems like the best place to start.
Soft music flits through the air, interrupted by the one-two beat of a knock at the door. The tea’s left to steep for the time being. “Good day, Miss Frostnova. You’re looking quite well.” Kirsch opens the door wider; an invitation. “I’ve already put the tea on. Do you have a preference between biscuits?”
kay so im not sure where in the world i am with this, esp, given the number of cuts and mergers its gone through, so im just going to say this is 145 and 146
In my dreams, dull thudding gunshot sounds. Strange, because, the sound was not the right shape. Then I realized I was awake, or that I’d woken myself up, and there were no gunshots at all. I was staring up at the grey fabric of a car…ceiling? The faint rumbly hum of an engine. And then someone was patting my head, and I was falling, and sitting next to an old creek that used to run in the woods behind my house when I was a kid.
“Wake up, Mikey. We’re here.”
Everything hurt. Should’ve listened to Mom about…vegetables, or something. Milk? A yacht sailed by on the stream.
“No, I got him. Take care of the laptop.”
A splash snaked up around the captain’s shoulders and she pointed it at the cloudy sky.
“Yeah, of course try to stall Yancy.”
Someone shook my shoulder.
“Come on, Thorton,” he said, and I looked up at Sean Darcy. The river was gone. I tried to look around for it, but my neck was sore and besides I couldn’t remember what I had been looking for anyway.
“Good morning,” he continued patiently. Smile wide, but eyes quickly scanning me, up and down. Blue stormy grey but if you had to put it in a crayon, maybe? I narrowed my own eyes at him while he reached around me and unbuckled a seatbelt. Suspiciously sturdy arms nudged me closer and closer to the edge of the seat.
“You’re supposed to be made of water,” I told him, and when I opened my eyes again, I was laying on the couch. The right side of my pants torn off above the knee. There was a pile of bunched up towels elevating my leg,
Sean Darcy sat a bloody washcloth back in a large, metallic bowl on the coffee table and looked back over his shoulder.
“Welcome back, Mikey,” he said evenly. “How’re you feelin’?”
“Good-” I started, and then pain remembered I existed and I couldn’t talk over the choking noises coming from my mouth. The pieces of gauze invading and burning the inside of my leg, sending spasms up and down. One hand went tearing at the damp bandage around my leg, missing, digging deep scratches around it instead and the other shoving away Sean’s attempts to push me back flat on the sofa.
“Sorry about this,” he said, and with a swift motion that sent a sharp twinge up my neck, snatched and pinned my hand on my chest. When the other one started at tearing away soaked strips of gauze, he laced his fingers awkwardly across it and yanked it away, bracing it against the sofa back.
Too much blood in my body. Pressing on everything, someone was kicking me in time with my heart beat. My fingers straining without my permission, his thumb making deep indents on my forearm as he struggled to keep hold.
“Goddamn-” I started when another gut-wrenching spasm caught me and it became mangled, mangled vowels.
It seemed like forever before the shaking started to subside, before I could force the feeling of a sledgehammer against my skeleton to the back of my head, began I could before to stand the feeling of pressure against the inside of my skin. My eyes were watering.
“Okay,” I said, fighting a little to keep a waver out of my tone. Fighting to breathe. “Okay, okay. I’m good.”
Also, working to ignore how close he was to me. A fact that seemed so much more present how that my leg wasn’t trying to murder me.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah,” I lied.
“Right.” He sounded unconvinced. “I’m gonna get you some Percocet.”
Then he dropped my arm on my stomach, and breezed out of the room.
I laid back down and watched the wicker ceiling fan spin lazily. And when that quickly sent me grabbing the edge of the sofa to stop the world from spinning around, I closed my eyes and worked on keeping the needling pain at bay.
The only noise of him coming back in was the sound of pills shaking as he tossed a plain bottle of them at me. Unfortunately, red and maroonish purple was beginning to crowd out the few unbruised patches of amber-brown skin on my arms, and everywhere the stairs had hit hurt. I was a little too slow in going to catch it.
It bonked my forehead, and a whole new type of pain ricocheted through my skull.
“Oww,” I said, with a purposeful glare that didn’t quite cut it.
Darcy knelt in front of the coffee table, busied himself with gauze and gloves and the silver bowl.
“Take one of those and for four hours you can hit your head on whatever ya want,” he said, moving things around.
“And don’t worry-” he added, finally looking up and smirking at me, “It’s from your medicine cabinet, not mine, so you should be okay. Think you can handle it?”
“I wasn’t worried until just now.”
He stopped sorting things into neat rows on the table, and shook his head. “Yeah, well, don’t be. This is a mission, remember?”
“This was a shitshow,” I said, and he snorted.
“Speakin’ of that, I gotta go talk to Westridge. Take one-” he flicked one finger up sternly- “and gimme fifteen.”
“Hey, wait,” I said, as he pushed a hand against the coffee table, “Little brown book next to the TV. Can you toss – bring it here? I have to do my logs.”
He glanced back at the TV stand, then at me. “Keeping classified info out in the open – that’s a dangerous game, Mikey.”
“It’s not a game, Darcy. Can you just hand it to me?”
He frowned. “Whatever you say,” he said, picking it up.
I took it, the twinge running down from a still not entirely okay shoulder making the motion sharp, harsh.
“Okay then,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “Maybe do take two.”
I had to fight not to snap at him. A dull ache crept up along the underside of my skin, and a headache was beginning to make the back of my eyes sting. Breathing just made sore spots on my ribs hurt.
And then there was the tiny bump on my head from the goddamn Percocet.
I held the book tighter, and willed the aggression and frustration into the cover.
“Agent Darcy,” I said, the rounded spine of the cover pressing into my palm, “I have been shot across the shoulder. I have been shot in the shin. I probably have a concussion and we don’t got a goddamn thing to show for it, so, please, pretty please, can you please give me a fucking break!”
He blinked. And I blinked, surprised at how quiet the room seemed now. My ears hurt. My ears hurt, and now they tingled with an unpleasant amount of heat.
“Look, I didn’t-”
He held up his hands again. “I’m gonna stop you there. This is a mission, and I shouldn’t have been pokin’ at you. Don’t bother apologizin’.”
“I…” I said, faintly feeling like I’d just lost an invisible argument. “I wasn’t going to?”
“Sure you weren’t,” he said, back to smirking. Then he stopped himself, winced, smiled more gently this time.
“I should probably go talk to Westridge. Sit tight for me, all right?”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “fine.”
Nom de dieu, great comeback.
Amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes.
“I’ll try not to bleed out while you and Westridge chat about the weather,” I said, sighing internally because that wasn’t any good either.
“Shouldn’t take us long,” he said. “The weather is still terrible. I’ll tell him you said hey.”
I couldn’t twist around to watch him go. A spasm forced me back down the moment I tried. So I talked at the ceiling instead.
“Save me some trouble and tell him I died,” I grumbled.
“Will do!” he said, and then the sound of his footsteps disappeared into the kitchen, leaving only the burbling of the fountain and the faint rush of wind outside.
Day 12, I wrote, having a harder time keep the pen on the paper and a slightly harder time ignoring what that might mean for my mission readiness.
No backup, Westridge said. None. And yet Sean Darcy is in the kitchen right now, talking to Westridge.
Plus the mission today was…bad. The missiles were gone. There, once. Gone now. If I took the camp before the airport then maybe… or maybe didn’t try that stupid Spanish gambit. They wouldn’t have felt like moving the other weapons.
Got some data, though. And Nasri’s laptop.
The Percocet was starting to kick in. I was losing words. The warm, fuzzy, a-dozen-puffy-blankets sensation looming.
Don’t know what we’re going to do about Shaheed. Two days. Walking is not good. It’s not as bad as it was but standing is…
Well Westridge is probably going to send me home. Hm. Now Sean being here makes sense. Come to get his mission back. How’d he know I was gonna get shot? Nope.
Stop it. You suck at hiding and I can see you reading, Darcy.
“For the unofficial record,” he said, leaning on the back of the sofa, “we got a report that the camp might be expecting extra backup. Westridge thought you’d do fine, Talin and I disagreed. You’re right about backup, though – I’m in as much trouble as you are.”
“Great,” I said, while he grinned.
“We went rogue to pull you outta prison – cheer up, Mikey. As far as the last mission you’ll ever get goes, you coulda done worse.”
“Great,” I said again.
“You take your pills?”
“Regretfully.”
I settled back down on the couch, chucked the log onto the ground.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, looking over the sofa as it landed.
“Regrettable,” I said.
“You’re a linguist, aren’t ya?” He circled around to grab several packs of gauze off the coffee table. “You got your derivational morphology wrong.”
“What do you know about linguistics?”
He laughed, a low, short sound mixing in with the water fountain. “I’m a Wikipedia editor,” he explained. “I know a little about a lot of things.”
“I knew it.”
He looked over at me, expectantly.
“Not that I was thinking about it,” I said, cottony comforter drug hell heat starting its attack on my skin.
“Well,” he continued, with a half-shrug, “as far as linguistics goes, I think ya mean something like regretful.”
“Can I mean both?”
“Not unless-” he started, then cut himself off. “This is a mission. I should be takin’ care of your leg.”
“Instead of…?”
He shot me a dirty look. “Instead of nothing.”
“Alright, then.”
I sunk down another degree into the sofa. Looked down at my foot to make sure I still had one. I wiggled my toes and instead of pain, I felt only the faint, tingly reminder of it. Meanwhile, he started ripping apart gauze packs, rolling latex gloves on, getting an assortment of plastic tweezer things ready.
Field medicine. I hated it. Almost more than Percocet.
“Regretsome,” I thought out loud.
“Not a word, Mike.”
“It is now. You know,” I added, and shifted over on my side a little, “everyone says Shakespeare invented thousands of words, but it isn’t true.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. They counted wrong. It has to do with…” I paused, the phrase I needed to describe the reason why disappearing into the foggy void of - actually, I felt great. “Data gathering and field work, I think.”
“Field work,” he echoed, giving me a small, distracted nod as he circled back around to inspect the bandages on my leg.
“Yeah, it’s, uh-” I’d had a point, I knew- “It’s why you have to do good field work. And not get shot. Or you’ll start inventing words.”
No, that wasn’t it. He made an mmhm noise, poked at the bandage and made a face.
I’ll be damned if I’m not being ignored.
“So,” I tried, pushing myself up on my elbows.
He waved a hand at me sharply without looking at me. “Take it easy, Mikey.”
“Fine,” I said, and went back to staring at the ceiling fan and getting dizzy.
One, two, three rotations. The breeze was nice. My skin felt like someone had injected space blankets into it. Miserably hot and itchy. Fortunately, my hands were busy clinging to the sofa so a wave of vertigo didn’t shove me off.
“Mike,” Sean Darcy said, interrupting the quiet.
The fan made another three quick rotations. It looked like one. But it was faster than I could count; it probably was three.
“Thorton, do I need to explain what I’m about to do?” he asked.
“No,” I said, after a second’s deliberation. Pack the wound full of gauze, let it heal from the inside out back home, in the good old US of A.
“Good. You ready?”
Home, off the mission. And never gonna get another one.
“Mikey,” he said, waving a blue-gloved hand in front of my face.
“Right, right. Sorry. It’s the Percocet.” I said, then remembered I was supposed to be counterignoring him.
“Just say no,” came the immediate deadpan response from his side of the sofa.
“Oh, ha ha,” I said, despite myself. God damn, my skin itched. “Let’s get this over with.”
"You're my favorite, Ruby," she told me, and you'd think all the chairs in my place were broken by how often she decided my lap was the better place to sit.
