| Morpha Haze |
| Summary: | Tisiphone communes with a wounded Stavrian in the improvised sickbay in the rec room, then stops by to talk with a morpha'd up Laskaris. |
| Date: | 11 Apr 2041 AE |
| Related Logs: | All Clankers logs |
| Players: |
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| Recreation Room - Deck 9 - Battlestar Cerberus |
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| Improv'ed sickbay, blah blah blah |
| Post Holocaust Day: #43 |
With Sickbay awash in bullet holes, people have been brought to the rec room to be seen to. Which is not an optimal setup by any means. Stavrian is lying on a portable cot with an extra blanket thrown over it to save his back. A sheet's draped over him from chest to feet, a small oxygen tank lying beside it and a cannula on his upper lip. IV stand, grabbed out of the wreckage and filtering something into a vein on his right arm. He's chalk-pale, which isn't easy to do with his normally dusky complexion.
Bulletholes and bloodsmears. Tisiphone isn't even sure how long it's been since Erebus tried to swallow the Cerberus whole, by the time she's stumbling into what used to be the Rec Room. She's covered in smears and spatters of dried blood, heaviest upon her good shoulder and hip, where wounded would slump as they're being carted along. Picking her way through the tangle of cots, searching faces one after the next until dragging steps stop her by Stavrian's. She starts to say something, breaks off to a single dry cough, tries again after stepping closer. She doesn't have a lot of oomph left to her voice. "Jesse."
Stavrian's eyes open halfway, little painful shivers of lashes. His eyes, heavy-lidded as they are, are still far too sharp for someone who looks like he does. Morpha stores must be taxed to hell and back. He licks his dry lips, lips ungluing as he moves them. "Tis…didn't even get the frakking cast off."
There's a tight sound that was probably meant as a laugh. "I- know, right?" Tisiphone sinks down to her haunches beside the cot, resting her fingers on the edge of it. It's rather like the night before, if you don't count the change in setting, circumstance, or bodily integrity. "You look like you tried to bleed out," she says. Matter-of-factly, as her eyes lift back to Stavrian's face. "Where were you?"
"Starboard…hangar." Stavrian has to stop for breath between the two words. There are some harsh tension lines in his face and his left hand keeps moving, twisting a fold of the sheet between his fingers. Veins shift on the back of his hand. Pain. "All those civilians. But I can't…did they say? Did they kill the civilians?"
"No. They're okay. I heard during cleanup." That's a word for it, all right. "Couple Marines were there. Held the Cylons off. Only place they /were/ held off, by the sounds of it." The words are devoid of inflection, rasped a little from previous shouting or smoke. Tisiphone sinks down from her crouch into a kneeling position, propping her casted elbow on the edge of the cot, smudged cheek resting against the plaster.
"It was…" Stavrian -seems- to have something to say, but it doesn't make it out before it's smothered by a tight sound of pain instead. His pulse beats rapid flutters at the side of his throat. "Where else did they go? CIC…"
"You'll flinch if I touch you, won't you?" It's asked almost rhetorically, as Tisiphone looks up from the fold of sheet being twisted and retwisted between Stavrian's fingers, her eyes creased at the edges with some fraying emotion. "Yeah. CIC's trashed. Marine berths. I think they tried to decompress it. Lieutenant Oberlin said it was standard operating procedure from the First War, all of it."
<Enter Laskaris's logfile.>
Tisiphone is sunk down into a kneel at the edge of Stavrian's cot, good fingers curled around the edge of it, casted elbow propped upon it. The chalk-pale medic's hooked up to an IV and is on oxygen.
"Won't," Stavrian mumbles. "S'okay." He doesn't even have much concept of how tightly his hand's crushing that bit of sheet, fingernails leaving crescent-shaped dents in the fleshy heel of his hand. "Lot of people dead? Are you okay?" His voice is barely audible. Lying in a staked-out corner of the rec room, which is a chaotic and very poor substitute for Sickbay. Tables shoved aside, shelves emptied of games and toys to store hastily shoved bottles, boxes of gauze, metallic instruments. Wastebaskets overflowing.
As it happens, Lasher's found himself in a cot not too far from Stavrian's. He's in much better shape than the PA, not like that's much of an accomplishment at this point. Still, he's getting a collection of scars of his own; there are fairly good sized bandages affixed firmly to his neck and the side of his torso, a little above the waist; another much lighter wound graces his left arm. He's been dozing since the doctors finished their initial cutwork on him; at that moment, though, he awakens with a start. Grunting, he pushes himself up a little.
The Ensign hesitates a moment before reaching forward to try and uncurl Stavrian's fingers and weave her own in as stop-gap between his fingernails and his palm. "It's a-" She looks up to his face for a moment, then up at the ceiling, clearing her throat. "Um." The single syllable wobbles precariously. "It's a slaughterhouse, Jesse. It's like I never left. I- I'm fine." The reassurance brings her voice back to flatness. "No morpha, yeah? You need me to find something?" She looks away from him to the rest of the room, rather hopelessly.
Stavrian's hand is trembling, whether from pain or weakness. It wasn't obvious before, but it's hard not to feel it now. "No, there's…there's morpha. Just not a lot." Certainly not enough, not for this. "Nothing we can do. Don't worry, Tis." Don't worry, he says. His eyes close, rolling under their lids and looking hazily in Laskaris' direction by the time they peel half open again.
Unlike the pair of Sagittarons Lasher hasn't seemed to notice yet, the Aerilon pilot has no aversion to morpha. He's got a bit of a loopy expression on his face right now, in fact, courtesy of the drug. Still woozy and clearly a little off kilter, he soon finds trying to sit up isn't the greatest idea. "Oh, frak me," he says with unnatural calm, though his voice is a little slurred. "How many times am I gonna find myself on my arse after a fight, eh? The lads'd be disappointed," he says to no one in particular.
Stavrian probably thought Tis was talking about morpha for all the moaning he can hear around. Who knows. Pain does weird things to your hearing.
"Don't worry," Tisiphone echoes, with the tiniest of bitter, disbelieving laughs. "Eris is laughing 'til she cries at all of us. We should never have come here. Gods-" Her fingers tighten as she looks up at the ceiling again, clearing her throat against a series of wet-sounding swallows. At the sound of Laskaris's voice she lowers her head, overbright eyes turned sidelong toward his cot. A tiny, airless snort. Sounds like morpha, all right.
Stavrian's eyes are far too bright for an opium fog. He's staying as still as he possibly can, exhaustion battling undampened pain for control of all his muscles. Tisiphone's outburst makes his eyes close again, tightly. "They stopped, Tis," he mumbles, apropos of seemingly nothing. "They…" He sucks in air betwen his teeth and clears his throat, forcing his eyes back open. Aerilon? Who is that. "Well lie on your side, then," his gravelly voice tells Laskaris. "Least it's not your ass."
"And how," Lasher continues a moment later, with an odd little chuckle following a second after that. "Motherless sons of whores," he spits a moment later, his tone darkening substantially, though it's still directed at no one. "Gods, just lemme find a Cylon with a live, breathin', fleshy throat. I'll tear it th' frak out if it's the last frakkin' thing I ever do." His taut form goes limp, but he finds himself rolling over as a voice addressing him punctures the morpha-fog in his mind. He frowns. "Stavrian?" Laskaris blinks a few times. "You look like shit." Slate-colored eyes find Tisiphone a moment later. "An' so do you. But that's nothin' a good wig wouldn't fix. Mostly." Ah, morpha.
"Sir." Said to Laskaris, presumably, though Tisiphone doesn't turn her head toward the man at all. "You sound well." There's no feistiness to it, at least, the syllables dutiful and flat. Ensign-throats probably taste like candy under the influence of morpha. Best not to press one's luck. She's looking at Stavrian again, from his hands to his face, up to his IV then back again. "Mother of the gods, Jesse. Not morpha for everyone else, I meant for you." Her fingers shift, tightening.
Stavrian's head rolls on his pillow, an uncoordinated side to side jerk. "No." It's like he's three years old and she just told him to eat his brussel sprouts. "Tired." His eyes roll slowly back to Laskaris. "Blood for theirs. They stopped…you know. He stopped them." This bizarre statement unfortunately gets no time to be clarified, as then his eyes are closed. Passed clean out, if only for a short time.
The sound of the word blood seems to deflate Laskaris a little. "Blood," he repeats listlessly, flopping back down onto his back. "So much frakkin' blood. Stairs're slick with it." He sighs. "Came from both ways. Up and down." The man's head tosses side to side for a second. "So much frakkin' blood…" he says again.
There she goes with her devilspeak again. Tisiphone murmurs something quietly in Sagittaran before carefully slipping her hand free from Stavrian's. A few strands of his hair are edged away from his face before she leans back on her heels, hand coming up to scrub at the base of her skull. "Where were you when it happened, Sir?" Again, it's said before she turns her head to look at Laskaris; after a long, quiet sigh that seems to leave her deflated, she finally turns to look his way.
Lasher doesn't answer right away, directing bleary eyes towards the bald ensign. "Tisiphone," he says raggedly, using the woman's name for the first time. For a second, it seems almost as if he's just now noticing she's here. Maybe the morpha fog is receding. "Happen t' have a smoke?" the blond, bloodied LT asks, his voice still a little slurred. There's a pause, and finally he answers. "Central stairway. Cylons came from up an' down. Almost caught us in a pincer, but we got through t' Deck 7 an' CIC." Another ragged sigh. "Was a frakkin' slaughterhouse." He doesn't specify which he's talking about, but he could very well mean both.
Tisiphone's mouth prims into a short, thin line for a moment before she sighs out through her nose and looks down. Rummaging for her cigarette pack. She's covered in smears and spatters of dried blood, one layer over the next, thickest at her good shoulder and hip — as if she's been dragging either injured or corpses about. She taps out two cigarettes, then digs out a scuffed, unmarked steel zippo and lights them both before handing one over. "They came in through Sickbay, too," she says, glancing back toward Stavrian's cot as she drags on her cigarette. "That's where I was. Went through the stairway on my way up to CIC. You're lucky to be alive, Sir."
"Sierra Hotel," Lasher mumbles softly as a weak arm reaches out for the proferred smoke. There's a pause as he takes a long drag, seeming to relish the sensation more than he usually does. "Yeah," he says finally. "Something along those lines occured to me, too." He shrugs, as best as he can manage. "You know that old saying… I'd rather be lucky than good."
"Last time we did anything that could fairly be called /talking/ was just like this. You realize that, Sir?" Tisiphone looks back from Stavrian's cot abruptly, attention returning to Laskaris. The words are light and uninflected, the sleety eyes numb. "Just after- the Anchorage. Everyone crammed into Sickbay. You wanted a smoke then, too." Another airless snort. She was uninjured that time, as well. Mopping up all the broken bits left behind.
"Hnh. Yeah, so it was. Hadn't thought about it. Time flies when you're fleeing certain death, what?" Laskaris seems mostly lucid by now, though his eyes are still noticably a little glassy from the drugs. "Seems like every time the Cylons find us, I end up on my back afterwards. Gettin' a little tiring, let me tell you." As for the smoking? There's a snorting chuckle from the man a beat later. "I've a bit of a habit, if you hadn't noticed." Another pause, as the blond man brings the cig up to his lips. "Anchorage didn't hold a candle to this shit, though."
"I'm sure you'll still be flying again before I will, Sir." Tisiphone watches Laskaris through her cigarette smoke for a second, before her eyes flick away to the ceiling. A slow drag, the smoke blown out before she looks back. "Today's- I was at Sickbay to get the cast off," she says. Which didn't happen, obviously — it's still there, spattered with blood. "Did you bring anything BUT smokes in your luggage, Sir? Sometimes I wonder."
At Tisiphone's last, Laskaris laughs loudly, though it degenerates into a hacking cough by the time he's done. Woo, gunshots. A pause, as he recovers. "Not quite," he replies, smiling thinly. "But… my sister did have to ship my booze out seperately. If that tells you anything," Lasher adds, deadpan. He trails off, his expression suddenly sobering momentarily; for a second, his eyes are a million miles away, until finally he turns his head back up to look at Tisiphone, and then her cast. "Tough luck," he says, not unsympathetically. "Understand you've got some other shit to do in the meantime, though." The film study, he means, most likely. "Sorry I… haven't been better about giving you somethin' to do. I know how it is, bein' on the shelf."
"It doesn't matter much at this point, Sir." Tisiphone's mouth twitches at the edges as she looks away again, studying her cigarette as she juggles it between her casted fingers. "Two or three more weeks, but at least it's rehab and sims." The punching-bags. Finally, /finally/ the punching-bags. "I've watched so much flight footage these last three weeks I know everyone's flying better than my own." She gives her cigarette a little flick-flick, dusting ashes down at the floor. As she watches them drift away she says, "I figured you were just happy to have me out of your hair, Sir."
"Bah." Laskaris dismisses her last comment succinctly. "Not that. I'm not…" He sighs, trailing off. "Not how I operate." There's another brief cough. "I might not go out of my way t' make friends, but I'm not your enemy, either, and I'm certainly not going to pack you off to study film and do drudge work to get you out of my frakkin' hair. Even when you do act the damn bloody fool." A harsh chuckle escapes the wounded man's lips. There's silence for a moment, as he looks up towards the bald ensign. "CAG thinks you've got potential. I don't disagree. Certainly not going to treat you — or see you treated — like some broken, useless tool."
Like some broken, useless tool. Tisiphone's mouth twists at one corner. "Potential to break myself at least, Sir," she says at length. It's her boot-tips' turn to be studied, now — she holds one foot out a little, edge of the heel against the floor, and twists it side to side. The leather is dull with dried, reddish-brown blood. "Is there anything I can get you from your bunk?" she asks, without looking up from her boot. "Another blanket? Your own smokes?" There might be the scantest hint of wry humour in that last question.
"No, I'm fine with bummin' off the passersby, thanks," Lasher replies, dry wit meeting dry wit. There's a dismissive wave a moment later. "I'll be fine. Shit, I'll be out of here in a couple days, most likely. Morpha shot aside, I'm not that bad off." He looks instinctively towards Stavrian, sleeping a few cots down.
Lasher looks that way, and Tisiphone immediately does, too, expression far more stricken than flat when she does. Her throat bobs once before she pointedly forces her eyes away, dragging harshly on her cigarette. "I'm sure I'll be around, Sir," she murmurs quietly, clearing her throat after she says it.
Lasher's still a little loopy from the morpha, but talking to Tisiphone and the general passage of time seem to have cleared his wits, for the most part. "Yeah," Laskaris murmurs after a short, awkward silence. He looks back up to Tisiphone. "Thanks. For the smoke." A pause. "And stoppin' in."
"Not a problem, Sir. Like I said, I- I'll be around." Tisiphone crouches to crush her cigarette out — for once she doesn't leave it on the ground, but drops the filter into her pocket to carry it out with her, her steps dragging a little against the floor as she goes.