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kittydesadeTitle: We Don't Need No Education (Part 2 of 7)
Fandom: The Dresden Files
Characters: Donald Morgan, Anastasia Luccio, Rashid, Claire Bernier (OC), Svetlana Ivanova (OC), others
Word Count: 4,286/~24,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A week with the Warden trainees, medical seminar. Author's Notes in Part 1.
Part 1 || Part 2
Claire woke up to the sun shining through the narrow window at the top of the opposite bunk straight into her eyes, and the sound of someone swearing under his breath below her line of vision. Beneath her, she could hear the soft sound of Sveta's breathing, but the bunk across from her was empty. She wondered if Luccio had been to bed yet.
Landing softly on the balls of her feet made Morgan startle and look up though not, she noted, with a sword in his hand or any sort of weapon. Either he wasn't as hair-triggered as she'd half expected him to be or he'd heard her waking up. And either way it was probably for the best, since he was or had been rubbing his wrist with his good hand.
"Painful?" she asked, with an arched eyebrow and what would have been a cool look had she not yawned immediately after the question.
Morgan stopped rubbing and stood, narrowly missing the upper bunk with the top of his head. He was tall, almost a foot taller than she was, his hair pulled back in a ponytail that would have been straight and severe if he hadn't just gotten out of bed. Dark brown streaked with gray, suiting the worn look of his face. Claire realized that this was the first and most likely the last time, by the end of this week, that she would see him first thing in the morning. The sight and realization made the corner of her mouth twitch up a little.
"You look like ten miles of bad road," she added when he didn't say anything.
Morgan's lips thinned; evidently he didn't find that amusing. "I'm fine."
"Liar." But she said it quietly so as not to wake her friend, digging clothes out of her bag and folding them into a roll to take into the shower. "If you were you wouldn't be favoring that hand. I'll be out in five minutes," she glanced over her shoulder. "Don't go anywhere until I've had a chance to look at it."
Or Sveta could, if she woke up. Claire slipped into the tiny shower and started to scrub off. It wasn't a large shower, about room enough for her to move around, certainly not large enough for two. Which was not a thought she needed to be having, she realized.
Still, it was a shower, and she reveled in it. Indoor plumbing, she had decided, was always something to be reveled in. Better than a bucket and a sponge under cover, if you were lucky. She reveled in it, and washed quickly. Morgan, if he hadn't already, would want his shower, and Sveta, and there was much to do that day. Starting with fixing the idiot's bloody wrist. She bundled herself up in at least a t-shirt and underwear and went out with a towel up on her hair, meaning to set his wrist before jeans.
His shocked look was when she first realized that he was, in fact, old enough to still find bare shins shocking in the right setting, let alone a girl in a t-shirt and nothing else but her panties. And a t-shirt that had her hair dripping down it that, thankfully, was more deep burgundy than anything that would go transparent. They both ignored the sleepy giggle from the bottom bunk opposite Morgan's knees.
"Sit."
Morgan sat. Claire suspected shock more than a sense of obedience to a healer. This just might work.
She took his hand in both of hers, fingers over the bulk of his palm and thumbs smoothing out from the middle. "Does this hurt?" He shook his head, mute, looking down at first and then realizing that he could just see the tops of her thighs disappearing under the hem of her shirt and looked to one side. If it did hurt, not enough for it to distract him from a half-naked woman. "How about this?" she twisted his hand slowly to one side, then the other.
From the bunk behind her there was a hiss; Sveta was watching, too. It was enough to give Claire the cue to turn on her sight.
"It isn't well done to lie or try to hide things from your healers, Warden Morgan." Now that Claire was looking she could See where the lines of tension ran down from his hand, that Sveta had been picking up on the strain it took to hide them from that.
"I've no need to hide anything from either of you," he growled. They both ignored him.
Claire sighed, running her fingers along the inside of his wrist to try and feel where the tension was, where the heat from healing flesh was running. "You're such an idiot," she muttered. "The bone is knitting together, at least, where you've cracked it, but you're not giving the muscle a chance to heal, and it's tearing over and over again as you strain it."
He pulled his wrist out of her grasp and moved away. "It will heal."
"No it won't," Sveta told him, her eyes flicking back and forth between them and unfocusing for a moment as she grappled for control. "Not unless we fix it immediately, or ..."
"Or we strengthen it and you take as much care as you can..." Claire picked up where her friend left off, grabbing his good wrist again and using it to pull him around in front of her. "And since this is a light duty, bodyguarding, and no one has any notion that the camp will be attacked when we fought off their last attack so recently..."
"Do not try to tell me my business, Healer Bernier," Morgan growled, pulling his hand out of her grip even if he didn't step back. "I know what the latest intelligence on the war is, and I know that I will not relax my guard because you believe..."
"Don't try to tell us ours," Sveta said, exactly as Claire interrupted him. "Annoying, having someone tell you they know your business better than you, isn't it."
Morgan's eyes widened, glanced from one to the other young woman. Before he could reply Claire had grabbed his injured wrist in one hand and slammed her other hand over it, causing him to gasp with the sudden pain and she reached inward. It was hot. She had to turn the temperature down, made it cool. As a metaphor it was far from accurate, but the color overlay of red hot to cool blue in her mind served well enough. Remove the infection or aggravation that was causing the heat to rise in the body and you removed the heat as well. Less discomfort, less pain and annoyance for the patient. In this patient's case, less chance that he would re-injure himself out of sheer irritation as well.
Beside her Sveta shifted, one ankle turning under the other as she rose up on her knees. Claire wasn't sure what she was seeing, with her strange and unique way of seeing the world, but if she was only that small bit restless it couldn't be that bad.
"Are you done?" Morgan asked, when neither of them said anything and the flow of power had ceased. But his tone was more even and his voice was quieter. His face was less pinched and thin, either because he was no longer in so much pain or because he was acknowledging that they knew what they were doing, she wasn't sure.
Claire nodded. "You're free to go, Warden," she teased. He didn't smile back, but neither did he say anything as he creaked to his feet and headed out the door.
"Those of you who are young enough and in the right countries to have seen television like Casualty or ER may remember the ABCs..."
Claire was once again perched on the desk, swinging her legs from side to side and looking around at the crowd of young faces. Strange to think of them as young. Stranger, almost, to think of herself as older. At least she had Morgan and Luccio and a couple of others to make her feel like a young child again. Though that could be a mixed blessing, she thought, eyeing Morgan and that forbidding expression engraved on his face.
"A is for airway. If a person cannot breathe, they will not live. The human body and, most importantly, the brain cannot survive a lack of oxygen intact for more than three minutes. You can shorten that for battlefield conditions," she added, glancing at Morgan again before she realized that was the second time in a minute and any more would be indicative of something she did not want to indicate.
Hopping down from the desk, Claire paced as she talked to keep her mind on the subject at hand. "In a battle there are all sorts of things that can obstruct a person's airway. Dust and grit can collect in the nose and mouth with sufficient wind force, blood coming up from the lungs or down through the nose can pool, I'm sure most of you remember various musicians and celebrities choking to death on their own vomit..."
Someone among the group made a disgusted noise. There were scattered giggles.
Claire perched on the desk again. "Have you ever had a cold? One of those nasty, phlegmy colds where you don't feel terribly sick but your body seems to be producing more mucus than you think the human body really should be able to? Picture that building up in your head, and building up. You try to cough it out but you can't, and no amount of expectorant will help because it collects faster than you can be rid of it. You feel like you're choking on it sometimes. All you can taste is that slightly salty snot taste, and it's thick enough to coat every part of your mouth and throat it comes into contact with. You cough and cough and for just a moment you struggle to breathe."
No one in the audience was giggling now. No one looked outright terrified but there was a silence profound enough to hear them all shifting in their seats. A thick cold was something most to all of them would be familiar with, regardless of race, country, or cultural background. In one disgusting display she had drawn them all in and given them a frame of reference they could understand.
"Choking and airway obstructions are one of the easiest ways to die. The solution can be as simple as clearing the obstructing substance out of the person's mouth, but you may also need a healer nearby to perform an emergency procedure. And no, I will not teach you how to perform a tracheotomy with a pen."
She hadn't known that was what the young man had been going to ask, but he did lower his hand.
"B?" That was a young woman, Warden-Trainee Hitomi.
"B is for breathing. Which is not the same as airway, before you ask. Breathing also covers the chest area, and will tell you if you need to make sure the lungs are inflated, keep the lungs inflated, isolate the chest and determine if there is any internal bleeding or injury to the lungs, say from a blow that drives the ribs into a lung. Breathing also covers the diaphragm..." And she put one hand over hers to demonstrate. "Which, if it is not healthy and functioning properly, it is difficult to get the proper amount of oxygen to the blood, air to the lungs."
"Now..." Off of the bemused looks of the trainees in the room. "Do you know what the diaphragm does, how it operates?"
"It... helps the lungs to inflate?"
She didn't know the poor kid's name. It was, at least, a good extrapolation from what she had said. "The diaphragm lowers to allow full inflation of the lungs, and raises again to compress the lungs and allow us to expel carbon dioxide, bad air." A couple of heads in the audience were nodding. Those were the ones, no doubt, who had received some sort of performance training. "Warden-Trainee Callahan, would you like to demonstrate those exercises I'm sure you learned? One or two of them?"
And while she was doing that, Claire would mentally shuffle her notes on circulation. If they were going to garner most of their information from television shows of dubious accuracy this would be an interesting week.
They reached the point where most of them had their hands on their midsections and were making a variety of interesting noises in an attempt possibly to watch their diaphragms move via their hands. "C!"
Heads came up like a series of meerkats perking to attention. One by one, those who had started to stand or move around went back to their seats.
"C is for circulation. All the oxygen in the world is not going to help the person you are trying to save if the blood can't be pumped to the parts of the body. Some of you are most likely already familiar with the locations of the major arteries on the body as points of attack; now you will learn what should and should not be done with tourniquets, pressure bandages, so on and so forth." There was enough of that to cover that they'd arranged a whole block of time later on to come back to those sorts of things and how to do them correctly. Too much potential for things to go accidentally very wrong. "There are a number of safety issues involved in working with blood, both mundane and magical, and those will be covered later in the week."
"After circulation, disability was considered as a forth protocol, and it is worth considering. However, in the middle of a battlefield it's not exactly feasible to stop and consider a severe spinal injury, apply backboard and immobilize the person before removing them from the scene of injury. We can teach you the proper ways to accommodate disability, but whether or not you have time and room to implement them..."
No one giggled, now. It was enough being reminded of how little time they would have to make decisions, how little room they would have to maneuver or accomplish anything while under fire.
"Trainee Wilson," Claire called out, leaving the rest of it to their imaginations. "Your comrade at arms is lying on his back, covered in blood and mud, apparently unable to rise. He is making coughing sounds. What do you do?"
Lunch break. The trainees seemed to be evenly divided between those who were silent and pushing their food around on their plates, lost in thought, and those who were chatting with animation and the passion of the idealist. Claire's eyebrows arched a little as she wondered if she should sit out of range of accidentally flying food.
"How did they do?" Sveta sat on the bench opposite, picking at a dish of fruit for the sake of company.
"Not... too badly," Claire mumbled around a strawberry, then grabbed for the water glass. Too much talking. She started to say something else but the words weren't quite there, so she reached for another piece of fruit instead.
"That bad, hmm?"
Claire chuckled a little, pushing her fruit around on her plate and poking holes in a melon slice. "Not that bad. They are a little eager, and they're very reliant on what they hear second-hand, what they learn from television. Not always the dramas, sometimes those documentaries they see, bloody tales from Casualty or something like that. But they seem like good kids." And when did she get to be old enough to call Warden-Trainees kids? She was going to have this thought a lot this week, wasn't she.
The other woman smiled a little more. "They are Warden Trainees. They would not be here if they did not possess the capacity for learning, quick thinking..."
"Of course. Not that I doubted that for an instant."
"Except you did." Sveta pointed out.
Claire leaned back in her chair a little and sighed. "They are desperate. For bodies, if nothing else. They need eager warriors who can fight, who can learn, yes, at least enough to keep from getting killed. But they are young. They are young enough to make me feel old." And she might have been complaining just a little.
"We are not that much older than them," Sveta told her, amused but still stern. And then she nodded in Morgan and Luccio's direction where they were getting lunch. Morgan, Claire noticed, was still hovering over Luccio despite the fact that they were in an ostensibly safe place.
Then she realized she was staring and shook her head a little. "Do you suppose this is how they feel? Attempting to cram these ... these hyperactive children with knowledge and send them out into the world, and wondering if they'll remember the proper application of a tourniquet when the time is right, or if..." There was an end to that sentence but Claire's mind was too fidgety to come up with it.
"Very likely." Sveta did not seem to be too worried about the prospect of a newly instated Warden botching a tourniquet, though. "And yet if we do not do it we leave them to their own devices, or put their fates in the hands of others who may be less suited to teach them. We give them the tools we can, and the rest..."
"Is up to fate. I know." Claire wrinkled her nose. She still didn't like it. "How are..."
Morgan was looming over them and neither of them had noticed. Sveta looked up, blinked, then focused her eyes. Claire only shivered a little as a chill crawled down her spine. It bothered her that she hadn't heard him come up, made her feel somewhat lesser or stupider than the Wardens and their students who had surrounded her.
As a result her tone was a bit sharper than it should have been. "Yes?"
"Thank you," he said, quiet and low tones that seemed to be his usual when he wasn't being either offended and pissed off or menacing.
Both women stared at him. Claire wasn't sure if he was thanking her for the wrist or for leading the workshop or for something else entirely that she wasn't understanding. Sveta seemed to be having trouble focusing again, and that left her to carry on the dialogue at least for the next few minutes.
"You're welcome," she smiled, even if it was thin and tired already. "For which..."
His face creased somehow, she wasn't sure what that meant. It was neither a smile nor a frown. "My wrist. It does ... feel better." Which hadn't been what he'd intended to say, she was sure. "Thank you."
"It's what we do," Claire told him, half-smiling, fingers twirling the fork over a piece of fruit. "You're welcome. And I hope you will take better care of yourself in the future."
He snorted, taking something in her manner for an invitation and pulling a chair out to sit down. His tall, lean-muscled frame looked overgrown in the small cafeteria chair. "Are you all right?" he asked, looking over at Sveta. Claire glanced over at her too, waiting for her to respond. It was easier if Sveta responded, herself.
"I am all right," Sveta nodded, back straightening, eyes focusing with slow determination. Claire could see her pulling herself together. She wondered if Morgan noticed, too. Probably he did. "I have a ... disability. That makes it hard to focus sometimes."
Morgan did frown then, wanting to ask but he didn't. Claire pushed her fruit around some more and then made herself start eating instead. This wasn't her awkward conversation. She would stick around for Sveta's sake if her friend needed help, but she didn't know the first thing about what the other woman was going through, let alone how she wanted to be treated or explain it to others. Her and Rashid were something of a special circumstance.
The conversation went on next to her in stilted murmurs. She glanced around the room instead, watching Warden Luccio answering some questions from some of the trainees at a smaller table to one side. There were not so many of them, she thought. Perhaps this wouldn't be such an ordeal.
"Healer Bernier."
"Claire," Sveta added, touching her arm. Her head jerked up, eyes wide and white-rimmed for a moment. She'd been distracted.
"Are you all right?"
Damn. Dammit. At least this had happened after the events of the morning. She wondered if he would continue to respect her as a trained Healer if he knew just how frantic or nervous she'd been.
"I'm all right, Warden Morgan," she smiled a little at him. "Just daydreaming."
The sounds of the northern woods were different from the sounds of Nigeria at night. Different insects, different birds. It still kept her awake, even after all this time traveling and living in different places.
Not that anyone else in the cabin was ready to go to sleep just yet. The light was still on, she and Sveta were dressed for bed but Morgan was still in the same clothes he had worn all day. If he was going to change, Claire supposed, he wouldn't do it until he had been relieved at his watch. Did he have pajamas? She tilted her head, watching him move around the room and imagining him in plaid flannel pajamas.
"What are you giggling at?" Sveta murmured, hanging over the edge of the bed a bit. Claire leaned down to look at her, smiled, and mouthed a few brief words.
Morgan's eyebrows shot up, but he didn't say anything. The sullen glower did all the talking for him. And made both girls giggle just a little bit more.
Luccio walked in just as Claire was lying back down to snicker at the ceiling. She glanced first at Morgan, then at the two girls. "Is everything all right?"
"Everything's fine..." "Everything's all right." In chorus, as Claire rolled over to smother her grin in her pillow. Behind and beneath her she heard Luccio chuckle in her new voice, still a little strange to hear.
Luccio murmured something in Italian, but she sounded amused. Morgan muttered something back that Claire couldn't hear or understand, but that she suspected involved the two very silly young girls with whom they had to share living space for a week.
"I should have asked before... is there anything you girls need...?"
Claire and Sveta exchanged another look, down to up, and shook their heads. "We packed adequate, thank you," Sveta murmured.
"This is not our first foray into the world," Claire added, though with more amusement than anger.
"Of course," Luccio murmured, holding up her hands to make peace. "Apologies. You are fully trained healers, and well experienced in your own fields and from your own lives, I should have remembered."
"It's perfectly natural," Svetlana nodded her head, with the same wise and quiet tones she used to comfort a sick or injured child. "We are, after all, as children to one as old as yourself..." And she couldn't hide the smile by the time Claire started giggling behind her hand.
"Did you just call me old?"
"Why no, grandmother, we would never dare dream of such a thing." Claire's eyes were wide, innocent, and she still had to cover her grin with her hand. Luccio waggled a finger at the both of them.
"Now, see here, young miss..."
All three women laughed. Morgan scowled, but this time Claire had the feeling he was only doing so for form's sake. Because he was reputed to be a stone-faced cold bastard without a sense of humor. Because he was expected to scowl, and so he did. He didn't mean it, she realized, watching his eyes relax and his gaze unfocus preparatory to going to bed. It was a bit of a relief to know she hadn't actually offended him.
"Not everything is as it seems," Luccio proclaimed, then made a face. "And I did not mean to sound so..."
"Pretentious?" Claire offered, still hanging off the edge of the top bunk.
"Something like that," Luccio admitted with a rueful smile. "But you should not believe our reputations simply because they are our reputations, old and hidebound and stubborn. Just as I should not be assuming your lack of experience requires constant oversight. We're more complex than that."
Claire lay back and thought about that while Sveta asked something else she didn't catch. Reputations were tricky things; she knew from experience how quickly they could be broken down, or simply changed. And there had been another part to that thought but when she rolled over again she came almost nose to nose with Morgan.
"Hello."
"Hello."
She blinked. He was very close. "Did you want something?" Her accent thickened, became a caricature of itself. He was very, very close. She realized something about herself as he reached past her right ear, that she did not usually get close to other men, and women only a little more often. Not this close, anyway.
The latch closed on the window behind her, making her jump. Checking the defenses. Her eyebrows shot up as her heartbeat calmed. "You could have asked," she told him, irritated.
"You should go to sleep," was all he said.
Luccio and Sveta were looking at her now, Sveta with her usual half-focused stare every few minutes or so. Morgan had already moved on to check the next window. "What?" Claire asked, too conscious of the heat that colored her cheeks.
Luccio gave her a look of understanding and settled into her bunk. "He's right, though, you should go to sleep. You both have a long week ahead of you."
Claire obeyed, if not meekly. Sveta gave her friend one last long stare and leaned back, and she heard the other woman shifting in the bunk beneath her. But after that brief moment she wasn't sure she was ready to go to sleep yet. And she wasn't sure what this confusion and twisting inside she was feeling. Maybe Sveta would know. She would have to remember to ask, tomorrow.
Fandom: The Dresden Files
Characters: Donald Morgan, Anastasia Luccio, Rashid, Claire Bernier (OC), Svetlana Ivanova (OC), others
Word Count: 4,286/~24,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A week with the Warden trainees, medical seminar. Author's Notes in Part 1.
Part 1 || Part 2
Claire woke up to the sun shining through the narrow window at the top of the opposite bunk straight into her eyes, and the sound of someone swearing under his breath below her line of vision. Beneath her, she could hear the soft sound of Sveta's breathing, but the bunk across from her was empty. She wondered if Luccio had been to bed yet.
Landing softly on the balls of her feet made Morgan startle and look up though not, she noted, with a sword in his hand or any sort of weapon. Either he wasn't as hair-triggered as she'd half expected him to be or he'd heard her waking up. And either way it was probably for the best, since he was or had been rubbing his wrist with his good hand.
"Painful?" she asked, with an arched eyebrow and what would have been a cool look had she not yawned immediately after the question.
Morgan stopped rubbing and stood, narrowly missing the upper bunk with the top of his head. He was tall, almost a foot taller than she was, his hair pulled back in a ponytail that would have been straight and severe if he hadn't just gotten out of bed. Dark brown streaked with gray, suiting the worn look of his face. Claire realized that this was the first and most likely the last time, by the end of this week, that she would see him first thing in the morning. The sight and realization made the corner of her mouth twitch up a little.
"You look like ten miles of bad road," she added when he didn't say anything.
Morgan's lips thinned; evidently he didn't find that amusing. "I'm fine."
"Liar." But she said it quietly so as not to wake her friend, digging clothes out of her bag and folding them into a roll to take into the shower. "If you were you wouldn't be favoring that hand. I'll be out in five minutes," she glanced over her shoulder. "Don't go anywhere until I've had a chance to look at it."
Or Sveta could, if she woke up. Claire slipped into the tiny shower and started to scrub off. It wasn't a large shower, about room enough for her to move around, certainly not large enough for two. Which was not a thought she needed to be having, she realized.
Still, it was a shower, and she reveled in it. Indoor plumbing, she had decided, was always something to be reveled in. Better than a bucket and a sponge under cover, if you were lucky. She reveled in it, and washed quickly. Morgan, if he hadn't already, would want his shower, and Sveta, and there was much to do that day. Starting with fixing the idiot's bloody wrist. She bundled herself up in at least a t-shirt and underwear and went out with a towel up on her hair, meaning to set his wrist before jeans.
His shocked look was when she first realized that he was, in fact, old enough to still find bare shins shocking in the right setting, let alone a girl in a t-shirt and nothing else but her panties. And a t-shirt that had her hair dripping down it that, thankfully, was more deep burgundy than anything that would go transparent. They both ignored the sleepy giggle from the bottom bunk opposite Morgan's knees.
"Sit."
Morgan sat. Claire suspected shock more than a sense of obedience to a healer. This just might work.
She took his hand in both of hers, fingers over the bulk of his palm and thumbs smoothing out from the middle. "Does this hurt?" He shook his head, mute, looking down at first and then realizing that he could just see the tops of her thighs disappearing under the hem of her shirt and looked to one side. If it did hurt, not enough for it to distract him from a half-naked woman. "How about this?" she twisted his hand slowly to one side, then the other.
From the bunk behind her there was a hiss; Sveta was watching, too. It was enough to give Claire the cue to turn on her sight.
"It isn't well done to lie or try to hide things from your healers, Warden Morgan." Now that Claire was looking she could See where the lines of tension ran down from his hand, that Sveta had been picking up on the strain it took to hide them from that.
"I've no need to hide anything from either of you," he growled. They both ignored him.
Claire sighed, running her fingers along the inside of his wrist to try and feel where the tension was, where the heat from healing flesh was running. "You're such an idiot," she muttered. "The bone is knitting together, at least, where you've cracked it, but you're not giving the muscle a chance to heal, and it's tearing over and over again as you strain it."
He pulled his wrist out of her grasp and moved away. "It will heal."
"No it won't," Sveta told him, her eyes flicking back and forth between them and unfocusing for a moment as she grappled for control. "Not unless we fix it immediately, or ..."
"Or we strengthen it and you take as much care as you can..." Claire picked up where her friend left off, grabbing his good wrist again and using it to pull him around in front of her. "And since this is a light duty, bodyguarding, and no one has any notion that the camp will be attacked when we fought off their last attack so recently..."
"Do not try to tell me my business, Healer Bernier," Morgan growled, pulling his hand out of her grip even if he didn't step back. "I know what the latest intelligence on the war is, and I know that I will not relax my guard because you believe..."
"Don't try to tell us ours," Sveta said, exactly as Claire interrupted him. "Annoying, having someone tell you they know your business better than you, isn't it."
Morgan's eyes widened, glanced from one to the other young woman. Before he could reply Claire had grabbed his injured wrist in one hand and slammed her other hand over it, causing him to gasp with the sudden pain and she reached inward. It was hot. She had to turn the temperature down, made it cool. As a metaphor it was far from accurate, but the color overlay of red hot to cool blue in her mind served well enough. Remove the infection or aggravation that was causing the heat to rise in the body and you removed the heat as well. Less discomfort, less pain and annoyance for the patient. In this patient's case, less chance that he would re-injure himself out of sheer irritation as well.
Beside her Sveta shifted, one ankle turning under the other as she rose up on her knees. Claire wasn't sure what she was seeing, with her strange and unique way of seeing the world, but if she was only that small bit restless it couldn't be that bad.
"Are you done?" Morgan asked, when neither of them said anything and the flow of power had ceased. But his tone was more even and his voice was quieter. His face was less pinched and thin, either because he was no longer in so much pain or because he was acknowledging that they knew what they were doing, she wasn't sure.
Claire nodded. "You're free to go, Warden," she teased. He didn't smile back, but neither did he say anything as he creaked to his feet and headed out the door.
"Those of you who are young enough and in the right countries to have seen television like Casualty or ER may remember the ABCs..."
Claire was once again perched on the desk, swinging her legs from side to side and looking around at the crowd of young faces. Strange to think of them as young. Stranger, almost, to think of herself as older. At least she had Morgan and Luccio and a couple of others to make her feel like a young child again. Though that could be a mixed blessing, she thought, eyeing Morgan and that forbidding expression engraved on his face.
"A is for airway. If a person cannot breathe, they will not live. The human body and, most importantly, the brain cannot survive a lack of oxygen intact for more than three minutes. You can shorten that for battlefield conditions," she added, glancing at Morgan again before she realized that was the second time in a minute and any more would be indicative of something she did not want to indicate.
Hopping down from the desk, Claire paced as she talked to keep her mind on the subject at hand. "In a battle there are all sorts of things that can obstruct a person's airway. Dust and grit can collect in the nose and mouth with sufficient wind force, blood coming up from the lungs or down through the nose can pool, I'm sure most of you remember various musicians and celebrities choking to death on their own vomit..."
Someone among the group made a disgusted noise. There were scattered giggles.
Claire perched on the desk again. "Have you ever had a cold? One of those nasty, phlegmy colds where you don't feel terribly sick but your body seems to be producing more mucus than you think the human body really should be able to? Picture that building up in your head, and building up. You try to cough it out but you can't, and no amount of expectorant will help because it collects faster than you can be rid of it. You feel like you're choking on it sometimes. All you can taste is that slightly salty snot taste, and it's thick enough to coat every part of your mouth and throat it comes into contact with. You cough and cough and for just a moment you struggle to breathe."
No one in the audience was giggling now. No one looked outright terrified but there was a silence profound enough to hear them all shifting in their seats. A thick cold was something most to all of them would be familiar with, regardless of race, country, or cultural background. In one disgusting display she had drawn them all in and given them a frame of reference they could understand.
"Choking and airway obstructions are one of the easiest ways to die. The solution can be as simple as clearing the obstructing substance out of the person's mouth, but you may also need a healer nearby to perform an emergency procedure. And no, I will not teach you how to perform a tracheotomy with a pen."
She hadn't known that was what the young man had been going to ask, but he did lower his hand.
"B?" That was a young woman, Warden-Trainee Hitomi.
"B is for breathing. Which is not the same as airway, before you ask. Breathing also covers the chest area, and will tell you if you need to make sure the lungs are inflated, keep the lungs inflated, isolate the chest and determine if there is any internal bleeding or injury to the lungs, say from a blow that drives the ribs into a lung. Breathing also covers the diaphragm..." And she put one hand over hers to demonstrate. "Which, if it is not healthy and functioning properly, it is difficult to get the proper amount of oxygen to the blood, air to the lungs."
"Now..." Off of the bemused looks of the trainees in the room. "Do you know what the diaphragm does, how it operates?"
"It... helps the lungs to inflate?"
She didn't know the poor kid's name. It was, at least, a good extrapolation from what she had said. "The diaphragm lowers to allow full inflation of the lungs, and raises again to compress the lungs and allow us to expel carbon dioxide, bad air." A couple of heads in the audience were nodding. Those were the ones, no doubt, who had received some sort of performance training. "Warden-Trainee Callahan, would you like to demonstrate those exercises I'm sure you learned? One or two of them?"
And while she was doing that, Claire would mentally shuffle her notes on circulation. If they were going to garner most of their information from television shows of dubious accuracy this would be an interesting week.
They reached the point where most of them had their hands on their midsections and were making a variety of interesting noises in an attempt possibly to watch their diaphragms move via their hands. "C!"
Heads came up like a series of meerkats perking to attention. One by one, those who had started to stand or move around went back to their seats.
"C is for circulation. All the oxygen in the world is not going to help the person you are trying to save if the blood can't be pumped to the parts of the body. Some of you are most likely already familiar with the locations of the major arteries on the body as points of attack; now you will learn what should and should not be done with tourniquets, pressure bandages, so on and so forth." There was enough of that to cover that they'd arranged a whole block of time later on to come back to those sorts of things and how to do them correctly. Too much potential for things to go accidentally very wrong. "There are a number of safety issues involved in working with blood, both mundane and magical, and those will be covered later in the week."
"After circulation, disability was considered as a forth protocol, and it is worth considering. However, in the middle of a battlefield it's not exactly feasible to stop and consider a severe spinal injury, apply backboard and immobilize the person before removing them from the scene of injury. We can teach you the proper ways to accommodate disability, but whether or not you have time and room to implement them..."
No one giggled, now. It was enough being reminded of how little time they would have to make decisions, how little room they would have to maneuver or accomplish anything while under fire.
"Trainee Wilson," Claire called out, leaving the rest of it to their imaginations. "Your comrade at arms is lying on his back, covered in blood and mud, apparently unable to rise. He is making coughing sounds. What do you do?"
Lunch break. The trainees seemed to be evenly divided between those who were silent and pushing their food around on their plates, lost in thought, and those who were chatting with animation and the passion of the idealist. Claire's eyebrows arched a little as she wondered if she should sit out of range of accidentally flying food.
"How did they do?" Sveta sat on the bench opposite, picking at a dish of fruit for the sake of company.
"Not... too badly," Claire mumbled around a strawberry, then grabbed for the water glass. Too much talking. She started to say something else but the words weren't quite there, so she reached for another piece of fruit instead.
"That bad, hmm?"
Claire chuckled a little, pushing her fruit around on her plate and poking holes in a melon slice. "Not that bad. They are a little eager, and they're very reliant on what they hear second-hand, what they learn from television. Not always the dramas, sometimes those documentaries they see, bloody tales from Casualty or something like that. But they seem like good kids." And when did she get to be old enough to call Warden-Trainees kids? She was going to have this thought a lot this week, wasn't she.
The other woman smiled a little more. "They are Warden Trainees. They would not be here if they did not possess the capacity for learning, quick thinking..."
"Of course. Not that I doubted that for an instant."
"Except you did." Sveta pointed out.
Claire leaned back in her chair a little and sighed. "They are desperate. For bodies, if nothing else. They need eager warriors who can fight, who can learn, yes, at least enough to keep from getting killed. But they are young. They are young enough to make me feel old." And she might have been complaining just a little.
"We are not that much older than them," Sveta told her, amused but still stern. And then she nodded in Morgan and Luccio's direction where they were getting lunch. Morgan, Claire noticed, was still hovering over Luccio despite the fact that they were in an ostensibly safe place.
Then she realized she was staring and shook her head a little. "Do you suppose this is how they feel? Attempting to cram these ... these hyperactive children with knowledge and send them out into the world, and wondering if they'll remember the proper application of a tourniquet when the time is right, or if..." There was an end to that sentence but Claire's mind was too fidgety to come up with it.
"Very likely." Sveta did not seem to be too worried about the prospect of a newly instated Warden botching a tourniquet, though. "And yet if we do not do it we leave them to their own devices, or put their fates in the hands of others who may be less suited to teach them. We give them the tools we can, and the rest..."
"Is up to fate. I know." Claire wrinkled her nose. She still didn't like it. "How are..."
Morgan was looming over them and neither of them had noticed. Sveta looked up, blinked, then focused her eyes. Claire only shivered a little as a chill crawled down her spine. It bothered her that she hadn't heard him come up, made her feel somewhat lesser or stupider than the Wardens and their students who had surrounded her.
As a result her tone was a bit sharper than it should have been. "Yes?"
"Thank you," he said, quiet and low tones that seemed to be his usual when he wasn't being either offended and pissed off or menacing.
Both women stared at him. Claire wasn't sure if he was thanking her for the wrist or for leading the workshop or for something else entirely that she wasn't understanding. Sveta seemed to be having trouble focusing again, and that left her to carry on the dialogue at least for the next few minutes.
"You're welcome," she smiled, even if it was thin and tired already. "For which..."
His face creased somehow, she wasn't sure what that meant. It was neither a smile nor a frown. "My wrist. It does ... feel better." Which hadn't been what he'd intended to say, she was sure. "Thank you."
"It's what we do," Claire told him, half-smiling, fingers twirling the fork over a piece of fruit. "You're welcome. And I hope you will take better care of yourself in the future."
He snorted, taking something in her manner for an invitation and pulling a chair out to sit down. His tall, lean-muscled frame looked overgrown in the small cafeteria chair. "Are you all right?" he asked, looking over at Sveta. Claire glanced over at her too, waiting for her to respond. It was easier if Sveta responded, herself.
"I am all right," Sveta nodded, back straightening, eyes focusing with slow determination. Claire could see her pulling herself together. She wondered if Morgan noticed, too. Probably he did. "I have a ... disability. That makes it hard to focus sometimes."
Morgan did frown then, wanting to ask but he didn't. Claire pushed her fruit around some more and then made herself start eating instead. This wasn't her awkward conversation. She would stick around for Sveta's sake if her friend needed help, but she didn't know the first thing about what the other woman was going through, let alone how she wanted to be treated or explain it to others. Her and Rashid were something of a special circumstance.
The conversation went on next to her in stilted murmurs. She glanced around the room instead, watching Warden Luccio answering some questions from some of the trainees at a smaller table to one side. There were not so many of them, she thought. Perhaps this wouldn't be such an ordeal.
"Healer Bernier."
"Claire," Sveta added, touching her arm. Her head jerked up, eyes wide and white-rimmed for a moment. She'd been distracted.
"Are you all right?"
Damn. Dammit. At least this had happened after the events of the morning. She wondered if he would continue to respect her as a trained Healer if he knew just how frantic or nervous she'd been.
"I'm all right, Warden Morgan," she smiled a little at him. "Just daydreaming."
The sounds of the northern woods were different from the sounds of Nigeria at night. Different insects, different birds. It still kept her awake, even after all this time traveling and living in different places.
Not that anyone else in the cabin was ready to go to sleep just yet. The light was still on, she and Sveta were dressed for bed but Morgan was still in the same clothes he had worn all day. If he was going to change, Claire supposed, he wouldn't do it until he had been relieved at his watch. Did he have pajamas? She tilted her head, watching him move around the room and imagining him in plaid flannel pajamas.
"What are you giggling at?" Sveta murmured, hanging over the edge of the bed a bit. Claire leaned down to look at her, smiled, and mouthed a few brief words.
Morgan's eyebrows shot up, but he didn't say anything. The sullen glower did all the talking for him. And made both girls giggle just a little bit more.
Luccio walked in just as Claire was lying back down to snicker at the ceiling. She glanced first at Morgan, then at the two girls. "Is everything all right?"
"Everything's fine..." "Everything's all right." In chorus, as Claire rolled over to smother her grin in her pillow. Behind and beneath her she heard Luccio chuckle in her new voice, still a little strange to hear.
Luccio murmured something in Italian, but she sounded amused. Morgan muttered something back that Claire couldn't hear or understand, but that she suspected involved the two very silly young girls with whom they had to share living space for a week.
"I should have asked before... is there anything you girls need...?"
Claire and Sveta exchanged another look, down to up, and shook their heads. "We packed adequate, thank you," Sveta murmured.
"This is not our first foray into the world," Claire added, though with more amusement than anger.
"Of course," Luccio murmured, holding up her hands to make peace. "Apologies. You are fully trained healers, and well experienced in your own fields and from your own lives, I should have remembered."
"It's perfectly natural," Svetlana nodded her head, with the same wise and quiet tones she used to comfort a sick or injured child. "We are, after all, as children to one as old as yourself..." And she couldn't hide the smile by the time Claire started giggling behind her hand.
"Did you just call me old?"
"Why no, grandmother, we would never dare dream of such a thing." Claire's eyes were wide, innocent, and she still had to cover her grin with her hand. Luccio waggled a finger at the both of them.
"Now, see here, young miss..."
All three women laughed. Morgan scowled, but this time Claire had the feeling he was only doing so for form's sake. Because he was reputed to be a stone-faced cold bastard without a sense of humor. Because he was expected to scowl, and so he did. He didn't mean it, she realized, watching his eyes relax and his gaze unfocus preparatory to going to bed. It was a bit of a relief to know she hadn't actually offended him.
"Not everything is as it seems," Luccio proclaimed, then made a face. "And I did not mean to sound so..."
"Pretentious?" Claire offered, still hanging off the edge of the top bunk.
"Something like that," Luccio admitted with a rueful smile. "But you should not believe our reputations simply because they are our reputations, old and hidebound and stubborn. Just as I should not be assuming your lack of experience requires constant oversight. We're more complex than that."
Claire lay back and thought about that while Sveta asked something else she didn't catch. Reputations were tricky things; she knew from experience how quickly they could be broken down, or simply changed. And there had been another part to that thought but when she rolled over again she came almost nose to nose with Morgan.
"Hello."
"Hello."
She blinked. He was very close. "Did you want something?" Her accent thickened, became a caricature of itself. He was very, very close. She realized something about herself as he reached past her right ear, that she did not usually get close to other men, and women only a little more often. Not this close, anyway.
The latch closed on the window behind her, making her jump. Checking the defenses. Her eyebrows shot up as her heartbeat calmed. "You could have asked," she told him, irritated.
"You should go to sleep," was all he said.
Luccio and Sveta were looking at her now, Sveta with her usual half-focused stare every few minutes or so. Morgan had already moved on to check the next window. "What?" Claire asked, too conscious of the heat that colored her cheeks.
Luccio gave her a look of understanding and settled into her bunk. "He's right, though, you should go to sleep. You both have a long week ahead of you."
Claire obeyed, if not meekly. Sveta gave her friend one last long stare and leaned back, and she heard the other woman shifting in the bunk beneath her. But after that brief moment she wasn't sure she was ready to go to sleep yet. And she wasn't sure what this confusion and twisting inside she was feeling. Maybe Sveta would know. She would have to remember to ask, tomorrow.