[MINGLE] Worried/Sick 2: Snake Expedition & Recovery!

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: Anywhere; multiple locations
WHEN: Apx. 19-27 November
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE
WARNINGS: Serious illness and reactions to such, snakes, hallucinations

IMPORTANT NOTES: This is the second of two mingles. Please see the timing and general event details here.

Not putting any mod top-levels in this one — Just make sure you label your own top-level clearly as to whether it's Expedition or Recovery, and as always, whether it is OTA or not!

Please keep in mind the established plot details, but creative license is welcome and encouraged as long as it doesn't step on toes.

Comments

[lastofthekellys]

"Still in this topsy-turvy land I'm afraid," she says, kindly. She doesn't presume to sit on his bed, or lean over him, but she is standing closer than propriety would allow under other circumstances. It's late, and others are sleeping; it's late, and he is ill, and she has no wish for the man to tip himself out of bed when trying to reach for a glass of water.

"Here, water. I can get some herbal tea if that's kinder on your throat, but you need to drink up. Slowly though."

[ad_dicendum]

Her reply makes him smile; he appreciates the bright kindness with which she approaches so much of what she does here, be it cooking for the village, running the Inn, or apparently tending to the sick.

In some ways, it's a relief from the fevered visions in which he'd been barely able to tell sleep from wakefulness and present from past. With the newly-dawning clarity, he can remember what is important about being here, and the reasons he's had to learn to accept this place instead of his home and his people.

He takes the drink she offers gladly, and though the temptation is to swallow it all, he listens to her advice and sips, once, twice, then a third time, appreciating the coolness on his throat.

"The water is good, thank you." He's careful to keep his sips small as he drinks some more. His head still hurts, but it is not so bad as it had been before he'd taken the snake venom.

"How long has it been?"

[lastofthekellys]

Kate's worried. Far, far, far more worried than she's letting on. For all two of her brothers have died in violence, she's lost more sisters to illness of one form or another. Other family, too. Friends. Illness strikes at all, and no matter that no illness here has yet proved fatal, no matter yet that this is more like poisoning given the initial snake bite, she's had a previous lifetime of watching out for people to be lost to sweats and fevers.

And she needs Mr Gaius Gracchus alive. No one can organise the stores like he can, no one can keep those neat lists and all the things in his head. At least, not without also juggling half a dozen other needed duties. No, he's focused and he's competent, and he's been a solid, useful rock in the every changing population of their strange prison.

He's not out of danger, yet. At least, not by her reckoning.

Still.

He's improved. For the moment.

"Nearly three days. Given us all quite a stir, you have. Along with the others."

[ad_dicendum]

Gaius doesn't even remember most of his siblings. They'd been a big family when his father died, and he'd been the youngest. He doesn't remember those early deathbeds and funerals, when illness and injury had claimed their lives, but he does remember later, as he grew older, how very early he'd been introduced to the immediacy of death. None of them, though, had been as bad as the violent death of his eldest brother. He'd never recovered from it, and here, there had been times when he'd wondered if it might be better just to join him.

Except he never would join him, because his brother had been denied burial, and his restless spirit could not cross the Styx. And whatever rites his family performed, whatever justice Gaius sought for his death, that could never be undone.

It had been so long since he'd seen his brother's face that he almost wishes he could see the visions again, but he cannot, so he tries to shake off the lingering sense of temptation, and refocuses on Kate Kelly.

"I am feeling less unwell now," he says. "How are the others?"

[lastofthekellys]

"Mostly the same. None appear to be dying last I checked, for which I think we can give the Almighty His praise." Sincere in her religious devotion, as always. While she might sometimes be whimsical, or irreverent, she's never been anything but sincere.

"But I wouldn't be too quick to get out of bed if I were you," Kate warns him, as if to forestall any attempt of his to sit up, stand up, walk away and try to be useful. "You had a fever dream not long past. A bad one, from the sounds of it."

A dream this time, she's sure. Not a vision like he's had before.

Carefully, she adds, "You were callin' for your brother."

[ad_dicendum]

He's aware that she has a devout religious belief, once that is very different to his own but held perhaps more sincerely; he's doubted the gods, at times, when there seemed to be a curse brought down on his family by some ill fate. Gaius would thank Apollo and Asclepius for his recovery, though he's long ago run out of the sacrificial wine he'd been given. But her sentiment, to thank her Almighty.

"The doctors have done godly work," he agrees. He would have been sure that people would die, with an illness this severe running through the villages. It would have been so in Rome.

He nods, slowly, at her assessment, then wishes he hadn't and takes another few sips of water.

"It has been a long time since I dreamed about him."

[lastofthekellys]

They have indeed. And also, the Australian thinks, been somewhat lucky in the symptoms presented. There isn't much one can do if bitten by a brown snake. In her time. She's found herself adding in her time more frequently, instead of back home.

Kate's not sure what she thinks about that.

"We can help with fevers," is what she actually says, which is true enough.

Then she hesitates.

"Would it help t'speak of him, Mr Gracchus? You were soundin' right concerned."

[ad_dicendum]

He nods, but only briefly, because it still hurts to move his head, but he wants to acknowledge the correctness of her comment: they can help with fevers, and they have done so here, as well as or better than even the best physicians could have done in Rome.

"There is little concern could do for him; he is beyond concern. My brother was killed by the men who should have been the best in all of Rome, the patres who were supposed to lead the city with the wisdom of those who went before them."

For a moment, the populist orator he'd been shines through, anger and hatred turning the honorific patres into a curse, for that is all the Senate is worth to him now, fallen so far from the mighty aspirations of the great city of Rome that they would murder the people's champions to protect their own interests.