sixthiterationlogs | of earthquakes and aftershocks

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of earthquakes and aftershocks

WHO: Kate Kelly
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: 10th September and a few days after
OPEN TO: Inn Residents, whoever else might be in the building: then, everyone!
WARNINGS: TBA
STATUS: Open

Earthquake

It's 5pm, or would be, if anyone paid much attention to things like clocks here. Sunset isn't for another two and a half hours or so, and the day's been hot. Not as humid as it has been. The Inn is mostly quiet, as it's hours after the midday dinner and the only people around either live at the Inn or have reason to be there. Supper will be made soon, as it's been a good day with the food supply.

Then, a minute later, the ground starts to shake.

Repairs and Aftermath

The Inn hasn't been as badly damaged as some other buildings. Foundations are still strong, walls haven't been cracked. But it's a big building, with lots of furniture and light fixtures, and it got shaken.

Having been turned into the unofficial community centre, it'll take some work and a few days to get everything straightened up again.

There's also the little matter of the water supply...

ooc: this is a party-style post, so set up your own OTAs or tag around and have fun! Setting is both for the day of the quake and a few days after to try and fix things up.

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Jess kept mixing, glancing up only the once, but a single glance was enough to say what he was thinking--that they were in agreement about the spring having too many unanswered questions to make it trustworthy.

Fortuitous coincidences were just traps that hadn't been sprung yet, in his opinion. And he didn't appear to be the only one who thought so.

"Hurt?" He thought that maybe she was referring to the fountain water and shook his head. "I was in one piece when they picked me up," and added, "It obviously didn't make much of a difference." Being in fit condition hadn't done him much good against these people; they'd whisked him away like the others all the same.

Unsurprisingly, Jess didn't give her the answer she wanted.

Raven wondered if she was the only person in the town who had had a life-changing injury. Not being able to feel half her leg, let alone support her own body, was one of the worst hands to be given in life. She might not often think pitifully of herself, always opting to think positively and even outrageously arrogant and ignorant to her actual current condition, but Raven suspected her trip in life had been the worst of anyone here.

She didn't advertise it, though. She liked being thought of as useful, and not someone worth pitying.

It made her more determined to give no one a reason to pity her as she did herself.

"I wonder if the water in the fountain is the same in the spring. Everything needs to have a source, right?"

Satisfied with the consistency of the leaves, Jess set aside the mortar for the time being and picked up the container of water and cloth. "All right, that's done. Come over to the sink so I can clean that cut out," he beckoned, standing up.

Jess was briskly efficient applying first aid, using his free hand to hold hers over the sink while he rinsed the cut out. Enemies in the field didn't wait for you to putter around applying bandages to your comrades; the High Garda had trained him to be quick, and when the wound was as clean as it was going to get, he took the damp cloth to the area around it.

"What do injuries have to do with the water in the fountain?" he asked as he swiped away dirt and grime. No one who looked at her hands would doubt Raven's chosen profession. She had grit layered into her skin as much as he had ink on his.

Or... he'd had ink on his. Past tense. He hadn't written a single word in a journal for ages.

Raven moved with him, and winced when he cleaned her wound with the same delicacy as Abby Griffin. That meant there was little delicacy in his touch involved.

She'd gone through worse. There was a slight echo of an ache in the base of her spine from the wound she'd acquired from John Murphy. A cut on her open palm was nothing in comparison.

Watching him work, she figures Abby would think his technique to be efficient. She wasn't going to lose her hand from any lack of care or thoroughness.

She shrugs her shoulder, not answering him immediately. She keeps her eyes down on her hand, moving her fingers and wincing at the fresh sting. "Just that … I had a pretty bad cut on my leg from the last moment I remembered. And I didn't have it when you pulled me out."

It's close to the truth.

"Stop fidgeting." Ask him and he'd say there wasn't a maternal bone in his body, but he could sure sound like a scolding mother sometimes.

Intent on cleaning the area around her wound--calling for Magnus a couple of days from now because Raven has an infected cut would be a poor way to celebrate their success--he gaze remained rooted on what he was doing until she brought up her leg. He paused, cloth hovering just over her skin.

Her leg. The limp. He remembered the unusual way she'd favored it the day he'd met, a quirk he'd gradually noticed less and less of as time went on.

Jess looked up. He controlled his expression well enough, but not his eyes--the questions jumbled to the surface in them. "That's the deal with your leg--you had an injury before you got here? And it was healed?"

She kept her hand still.

To admit she had lost most of the sensation in her leg would be to confess to weakness. And Raven Reyes wasn't weak.

She wished she hadn't brought it up at all, but she needed to know. Had anyone else come through the fountain and found that what had previously been broken had been fixed? Had it felt as normal as it should've, if all had gone exactly to plan and it'd healed as she had expected?

"I had a pretty bad cut," she repeated. It wasn't exactly the truth, given a bullet to the back and said bullet damaging nerves beyond anyone's original expectations was much more than a mere cut. "And it's gone. It shouldn't be gone."

This town was odd. The scar remained on her lower back, and there were other pigmentations on her skin that should've went away if the town was insistent on stealing her disability, but she could walk, and so the internal damage of her leg had been taken away instead.

"You think... the fountain had something to do with it?" His eyes narrowed, though it wasn't so much directed at her; his gaze was distant, focused internally on what Raven had revealed.

No wonder she was curious about the water.

"Why didn't you say anything before now?" He was hardly the type who could point fingers at someone for keeping secrets, but that had been a long time to sit on this kind of revelation. Would they have given her medical treatment just to dump her in an uninhabited canyon? Why?

Edited 2016-11-02 08:59 (UTC)

When Raven looked up, her brow was arched, and her expression wasn't one that was completely kind. She looked at him like he was an idiot. The answer to that question was one he should know himself.

"Let me trust a bunch of people I don't know," she said, a little sarcastically. Raven punctuated it with a roll of her eyes, and an accidental shift of her hand. She stilled it immediately in the hope of avoiding a motherly-like reprimand.

It was easier to shift the focus of her silence toward her distrust of people. It made sense to not speak up immediately. No one in this town was from home, and no one seemed to have a clue as to what was happening. The more she kept to herself, the safer she should be.

It also helped her remain locked in a world where she could ignore the fact she'd become permanently broken.

"Why would I say anything? Who knows what these people would think."

"It has nothing to do with trust," he countered rationally, resuming wiping along the outer edges of her hand. He wasn't angry--he wasn't quite sure what he was, truthfully. 'Surprised' might be the best word for it. "Maybe in the early days when you were sussing out whether the rest of us were playing with a full deck or not. That would have been interesting to know back when we were theorizing what these people want from us."

Pot, meet kettle. Jess realized how ironic it was for him to be advocating for full disclosure, with how many times he'd kept information need-to-know. He'd withheld truth of Thomas' execution from Glain and it had blown up in his face--quite literally, with her fist doing the exploding.

Still, he couldn't really blame Raven. He'd have done the same thing. Actually, he knew he would have done the same--keeping quiet about a potential injury would have protected her. He could see the crystal clear logic of her decision.

"I don't think it's insane, in case you're wondering. No more insane an idea than anything else that goes on here. But that might be proof they held us unconscious for some time before we woke up. Think about it. What if it wasn't the water itself that healed you, but our mysterious benefactors when they processed us?"

It didn't give Raven any peace to know someone might have tampered with her before she woke up inhaling water through her nose and mouth. Even though it was for the better, she was becoming tired of people strapping her down and taking from her.

She didn't owe anyone anything. From the people who had mended her leg to those who resided in the town. Raven knew the information could be valuable, but it was hers to use and find out, and she was never much of a team player when she didn't trust the skill sets of those around her.

Telling Jess was difficult enough. Though she trusted him as she had Clarke when she first met her, she still didn't want to tell him everything. He was hiding something, not quite similar to Clarke's interest in her then-boyfriend Finn, but he wasn't being completely open and honest with her, either.

Despite feeling tempted to inform him her nerves were no longer permanently damaged, she kept it to herself. Let him think it was a cut that might have required stitches that had her walking with a slight limp and wince.

"And why would they do that? We still don't know what they want from us. If they did this to my leg, then that changes things, don't you think?"

"It sure lends credence to the theory they wanted us healthy before cutting us loose in here." There was a slow, deliberate manner to the way he spoke; he was busy thinking now that Raven had thrown him a bone in the form of new information.

Reluctantly, he had to admit that it also added some weight to a possible connection between water and people thinking it was healing them. He was far from ready to give up on empirical thinking and jump on board with the idea they had some kind of Fountain of Youth on their hands, but between Raven and the fountain, and now the spring, the suspicious coincidences were piling up.

Whatever the case, treating Raven's leg definitely suggested the people behind this wanted her to be in fighting form. The million dollar question was--what for? It didn't make sense to him, no matter how many different ways he went over it in his head.

"So we could become unhealthy again?" Raven rolled her eyes.

Her leg was a more important factor than she was willing to give it credit for in the grand scheme of the town. By keeping the fact her leg had suffered permanent nerve damage a secret might be hurting their odds in figuring out what the people who owned this town wanted.

But Raven wasn't ready to acknowledge the fact she was a cripple. There was a weakness found in it, and Raven Reyes was never weak.

Being in this town helped her live in a denial she'd been aching for for three long months. She deserved to feel on top of the world and like her old self, didn't she? Without pain shooting up her hip and without hobbling and being given pitiful jobs where she had to sit, she felt like herself again. A raven who was no longer caged.

"Pfft," she shook her head. Quietly, "This is so fucked up."

"Every experiment needs a baseline." Jess said it without humor, a frown taking up residence between his brows.

Leaving aside the fact he was just now hearing about this, the news created more questions as it answered. Big or small, a cut would need time to heal. Days or even weeks, depending on the medical treatment. Exactly what else had these bastards done to them while they were unconscious?

Fucked up was right. And the rabbit hole seemed to just get deeper and darker the farther they fell.

Finished with the cloth, he set it aside. "And your leg--it hasn't affected you since? No stitches, no scar?" He couldn't recall seeing any sign of a stitched-up gash, recent or otherwise, on Raven's leg when she'd changed in front of the fireplace, but for the sake of her modesty he hadn't been looking that closely.

What would Jess say if he knew she was speaking of permanent nerve damage in her leg?

She was sure he'd call her stupid for letting him believe it was a cut, selfish for not informing them promptly of the fact her leg was healed properly, and desperate to examine it to see how well it was healed altogether. But Raven couldn't let herself even think of uttering the words. Despite how she liked Jess and how she'd grown to find him irritating in a way she thought Jasper Jordan to be, she didn't want to admit it to herself.

If she admitted it to him, it'd be real, and Raven didn't want it to become her reality again.

She shook her head. "No." Her hand shifted in his as she moved her other to touch her leg. She couldn't pull her pant leg up like this, with one hand in his and possibly needing to remain still. "Sometimes I forget that it was injured in the first place."

"Have to give them credit for patching you up before throwing you in the deep end without a pair of water wings."

It'd been apparent from the very first moment Jess had woken up gagging on water in a completely different part of the world that their faceless overlords could pull off mind-boggling feats. Helping heal a girl from the source of her limp just so she could run the risk of eating poisonous berries, or getting crushed in an earthquake, our burning away her stomach lining with tainted water are all examples.

Mind-boggling and insane.

Done with the sink, he let her hand slip from his grasp and gestured back to the table, letting her know it was all right to sit back down. "Wish I could say I could take care of this cut with the same flair. Sorry, you'll have to settle for a bandage. But the trade off is that you get to stay conscious the entire time."

For a brief, covert moment, Jess lifted his gaze and presented the back of her head with another look of thought, quietly considering. This town had its complexities, and so did people. So did this girl.

He wasn't so naïve to think the way she'd framed the injury was the whole truth of the story. There was something in the solemn way she spoke about it that teased at him, a thread just out of reach that had the feel of a half-truth. After all, people rarely offered up stories, whole and complete; Raven had just demonstrated that. Bits and pieces of them, yes. Their favorite bits. Polished pieces. The ugly, unvarnished truth was usually the last thing to come out.

"How did you get it?" he asked her as he slipped back into his seat and slid the mortar closer. "The wound to your leg, I mean."

She bit her tongue.

Getting her hand stitched up, or even just patted down with a clean, damp cloth, would never compare to being ripped right open and operated on without anaesthetic and while being conscious. It wasn't something Raven liked to boast about, not like that time when she'd saved Sinclair's ass on the Ark.

She walked back to the table, taking a seat as she looked at her hand. She winced when she folded her fingers into her palm, feeling the flesh stretch as she did so. But that didn't mean she'd stop herself from repeating the action a few moments later.

Not wanting to look at Jess, she kept herself busy looking at her hand before she stopped herself from curling it around the edge of the table. Looking up at him, she answered with little emotion, "I cut it on the metal of our drop ship. I was underneath it trying to fix something, didn't realise a panel was looser than anyone expected. A real deep cut that could've gotten infected, but I guess the stars were watching out for me that day."

A psycho had let loose on the entire camp, gun in hand, and had chosen to aim his bullets into the floor when she hadn't been quick enough to crawl away. It wasn't a story she wanted to tell. It showed too much vulnerability, and Raven wanted to erase it from her story.

That loose thread continued to dangle in front of him, inconsistences that begged to be pulled apart: her downcast gaze, her monotone reply like she were reading off a script of something that had happened to someone else instead of recounting an injury that had, if her phantom limp was anything to go by, seriously compromised her ability to walk and caused her a great deal of pain.

Jess was silent for a beat. Even if her response was peculiar, what could he say about it? Maybe she just didn't want to remember what had taken her out of commission, or the strange powers at work that had put her back in commission. He could hardly fault her for that.

"So this klutziness is a habit. Good to know," he remarked. He took some of the mushed plantain onto his fingers. "This might sting a bit."

Dabbing it over the cut, he made sure there was an even layer to act as a seal, then reached for the bandages, winding it over top and around her hand. Almost done.

"Let me know if it's too tight."

Raven inhaled sharply through her nose, felt her fingers flex a little in reaction to the sting, but she kept her hand as still as she could. Her body had tensed before had relaxed as she recalled being in worse pain than this.

She'd survived a bullet to the back and surgery without painkillers. She could survive him placing something cold and stingy on her open cut.

Still, she breathed deeply through her nose, forcing herself to relax. It was odd to be taken care of by someone who wasn't Finn, Clarke, Abby, or Jackson. They'd all been talkative in their own ways, their bedside manners differing. She'd preferred Finn's to Clarke's once, but now she'd grown to want to fend for herself, fearing Abby and how she'd lock her down in a bed and grill her until her leg was back in function in a desperate need to get away from her.

Jess was okay. That was all she'd let herself conclude.

Watching him work, she asked, "Where'd you learn to do this?"

"The High Garda," was the easy answer.

Carefully, he wound the rest of the cloth over her palm, snug enough to keep the gash covered, but still loose enough to let her keep her mobility.

Of course, he'd known his way around a bandage and antiseptic before he'd ended up in the ranks of the Garda. There had been one time when he was six, when he and Brendan had been roughhousing at the dinner table while Liam looked on; Brendan had been too fast for him and ended up stabbing him in the leg with a fork, leaving him with three perfectly round holes welling with blood. Their father had made him leave the table and clean it himself. A lesson to be quicker the next time.

His first war wound. It hadn't been his last, or his worst.

"Standard training. Carrying your own kit is a requirement in case someone in your unit's injured in the field. I'm not the person you want to ask if you need open heart surgery, but I can find my way around a cut." He tied off the bandage and looked at her expectantly. "How's that feel?"

"Like a half-assed bandage," she replied. She flexed her fingers, looked over her hand, and didn't pick at it. That was the best kind of compliment anyone who wasn't Abby or Clarke Griffin would ever receive.

It'd do. She didn't know how well it'd work against her ignoring any medical advice on how to take care of herself, but it was better than leaving her palm wide open for an infection to crawl inside.

Letting her hand remain still, she didn't push herself away from him and start for the stairs that'd lead her back toward her invention. Though Raven itched to use her fingers, she had something here to build. A picture of Jess, one that would appear slightly more accurate and rely less on observation and what she could glean from the things he said.

"If I ever need surgery, you're definitely not cutting me open. You find Abby Griffin and you pull her ass out of the fountain." She's the only person Raven trusted to cut anyone open, painkillers or not. "How many people have you done this to?"

Edited 2016-12-10 00:50 (UTC)

"That would make sense given it is a half-assed bandage," he said good-humoredly, his delivery purposely measured and dry. "Sit on that for a day or two, we'll see how it heals up."

There, that sounded doctorly, didn't it? He thought those of them here who actually were medically trained might appreciate his effort to offer the kind of reasonable advice he didn't put into practice in his own life.

A nod of his head to show there'd be no unauthorized use of scalpels on his part. "Abby Griffin, sure. I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm fishing for newcomers," he promised as he started to put the table back into order. "How many people have I patched up? You mean how many people were in my squad? I think we all left a little of ourselves behind in those training arenas. You should count yourself lucky--the last person I had to give medical attention to was bitten by a poisonous snake."

Mentioning Helva brought with it tumultuous memories, bobbing to the surface of his mind like debris cluttering the ocean after a shipwreck. Some of them--actually, most of them--Jess was reluctant to look at too closely, and he brushed them aside. It all felt so long ago.

Poisonous snake, acid fog. Both ended the same way, didn't they?

Raven's been fortunate enough not to run into any creatures on the ground that could easily end her stay on it. She'd kept her eyes peeled for it while on the ground, but with the Grounders trying to pick them off one by one, then the Mountain Men snatching them up in bulk, she'd forgotten that there was another enemy on the earth.

Mutilated deer seemed like good friends at this point.

She looked at Jess rather than her hand, it remaining still despite it stinging slightly. She ignored it. Raven excelled best when she ignored her physical pain, leaving her to think she was strong when she knew she was anything but.

Studying him for a moment, she didn't snipe at him. Her tone was lower than normal, curious. "How'd that go?"

"She was alive, last I heard." Alive and well is a different story, but he hopes that's the case. Helva hadn't deserved to get caught up in Wolfe's troubles. None of the squad had. "I can't take credit. Someone else had the anti-venom on hand."

He'd be misleading Raven to let her think he'd played doctor on a teammate and saved her life all by himself; he'd brought help, but in the end it had come at the cost of Tariq's life. When all is said and done, and the wins and losses of that day tallied, he'd had a greater role to play in getting teammates killed than saving them.

Once Jess had his supplies reordered and ready to be taken back upstairs, he flashed the girl a smile that let her know he was done playing doctor on her for the time being.

"Anyway, you're done. And no magic water needed."

Glancing down at her hand, Raven pressed the pads of her fingers against the softer portion of her palm as if to test it. His handiwork would be nothing like Clarke's, as she had hands that were made to fixing people's scrapes and bruises, but he'd done a job she thought would earn him some seal of approval from the resident medic.

Appearing content with her bandaged hand, Raven stood and no longer regarded it to be injured. There was work to do, and so little time to do it.

"Thanks," she said, with a slight nod of her head. "You didn't do as shit of a job as I expected." It was her way of complimenting him, despite knowing it wasn't exactly the best way to go about it. Standing a bit straighter, Raven set her mind back to work, and planned to do the exact same thing.

Voice louder, and that pompous attitude he might have grown to expect, she added kindly, "Which is good, because I need this hand to make magic happen."

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of earthquakes and aftershocks

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