HEAR ME NOW
"V"
BASTION |
RAVELIN HQ
CYBERNETICS DIVISION
The call to station was enough to pull the junior tech from his intensive work, the ringing PA system chiming over the speaker haphazardly tucked into his broom closet of a laboratory.
"Doctor Qar and team please report to hangar two, immediately." That was his cue, he was team, the straggler, the plus one. The disheveled technician slapped the clamp around his wrist to free his arm, the rest of the recalibration would have to wait, and threw his lab coat over his shoulder, darting for the door after. Down the hall he went, bouncing over the stairs two at a time, until he rounded the corner and narrowly dodged the departing Lord Executor, who he greeted with a tight-lipped acknowledgment of her presence, and kept moving.
He found his team lead standing in the hall, frozen, eyes watered by the glistening streak of sorrow. Oh, it was
that kind of visit. It didn't bode well for the cyborg doctor's focus, that much Vladimir knew for sure, and as much as he wanted to give the man the time he needed to process, they had none to spare.
"Hey, doc, c'mon man, look at me." The insomniac planted his tired boots in front of Julian, waving his cybernetic hands between them,
"We're getting deployed, short notice, we gotta focus up." He blinked, struggling to chase the bloodshot red from his eyes and refocus his augmented vision,
"C'mon I need you focused, I'm scared as hell man."
What was processing? A luxury that would have been well received had it been granted to him - but this was not that kind of environment. There was never time for processing or ruminating, all efforts were set on pulling him kicking and screaming to the present. Frozen limbs actuated slowly as if his system had been reset from the factory right there where he stood. A sound followed - ‘what was that?’ A voice and then another came through as static, calling out to him from above and in front.
“I’m fine, I’m good…” he finally spoke, taking a breath he’d held until he could no longer see the flicker of her crimson glow. Julian lifted his hands, pulling agony from his cheeks with the heel of his augmented palms. A thousand days and counting to land on the same resolution. Solitude. Duty. Action.
“Ok, ok … yea, let’s go. Come on.” The voice replied just as quickly as he was pulled from one place to the next. The doctor nudged his anchored limbs, setting a course for his office as a hand palmed over the sensor quieting the flicker that would remain until there was distance again.
“They never tell us where the fuck we’re goin' till we get to hangar…” he broke his train of thought, shoving the picture frame face down on the desk while he looked for the only constant he had left. The knife.
“Listen kid, you’re gunna be fine.” He looked over his shoulder with a weak smile as he slipped the blade into the holster of his boot. Adrenaline had already kicked in, masquerading the surge of emotions with a new drive.
“It’s alright to be scared, just don’t let it eat at ya. Eyes up, it’s go time.”
Vladimir watched the doctor go through the motions, his brows pinching together over those tired eyes. He huffed, scattering his wildly-out-of-regs hair from his sight, and gave chase.
"Yeah, I knew it was comin', but that doesn't make it easier to grasp." He mumbled, ripping the magnifying band from his head and tossing it onto his much smaller desk in the doctor's office, the same scattered and haphazardly stacked with the paperwork he was neglecting. He dove behind it, pushing out a forceful breath to steady himself, and claimed his deployment bag from beneath. Just as he had been coached to, he was prepared, at least in that regard.
"Rather have clinic duty for sixteen hours again than sit in a steel tomb going who knows where."
He slung the pack over his shoulder and moved to hook his lab coat on the rack behind his meager space, forgoing it for the patched leather jacket hanging in the same place. This he draped across his right arm, and after doing as much, he finally looked back to Julian.
"They already got all our gear on the ship, is what they said. Who else is comin'?" He allowed his question to hang before rather quickly adding a hopeful:
"Hazel?"
This was the ritual of preparation he often took alone and in silence. It seemed now it came with an added bonus; a nervous Technician to settle into space.
“First jump is the hardest,” the doctor offered, trekking through Vladimir’s minefield of banter he found himself in.
“I reckon you heard this shit before, anyways. Just remember to breathe and always watch your feet.” The doctor glanced over at Vlad with a nod of reassurance. His attention turned back to his preparation, slipping his wrist under his desk at the scanner tucked between the steel.
“Authorization?” A digitized voice interrupted, following the doctor's own less than enthusiastic response.
“Doctor Julian Qar - AX-919.”
“Access granted.”
The doctor cleared his throat, wiping at his face before carefully plucking a small black kit from the freezer. He opened the container with almost laser focus, inspecting the four marked angels before clipping it to the empty housing on his belt.
“If you want, I could always get ya assigned back to clinical when we get a call.” He snorted, finishing off his ritual with the retrieval of his pack of smokes and the tattered leather duffel bag he kept behind his desk. The doctor took a moment of pause, sensing this physical manifestation of oil and water between them; it was a calm and tension-filled aura that blanketed the office and he wondered, for a moment, if he had ever felt fear over duty.
“You’ll be fine, trust me. Everything else we need is on the ship…including Dr. T’hess.”
The tech's bruised eyes widened, processing the answer to his question. She was coming too, that was great news! But… not so great when he remembered the swollen, cotton-stuffed nose peeking out of the lower edge of his field of view.
Lucien Dooku
's awakening from repair hadn't been very graceful. He was asking for it when he hadn't specified he was going to have to remove
more of the man's arm to connect a new
highly-specialized cybernetic to it, but at least the new toys had made up for it in the King's eyes… so he thought.
"Feth, okay, that's good. I haven't seen her for a minute, I've been worried." Vladimir lied through his teeth, flexing cybernetic fingers through his messy tangle of hair in some attempt to soothe the rolling waves to no avail.
"Yeah uh, I'll be okay, I think. Used to violence, just not used to war. Hopefully, we're going somewhere nice."
BASTION | RAVELIN HQ
HANGAR 002
"Fething chit…" the tech muttered to himself from the edge of the gathered medical staff, his eyes shifting from the officer on the podium briefing them to the neon green streak of hair hovering somewhere close by. Nirauan, he had heard, was trashed. It was a wasteland. Soldiers had been stranded there for a month, beset by undead corpses and ruin, not to mention the fallout from the massive bomb The Maw had dropped on the city of New Carannia. It wasn't a good picture, and he certainly didn't feel any better about it now than he had before. If anything, it only twisted his guts into a tighter knot. His eyes had moved to his boots, the man scowling, until a
tap-tap on his shoulder forced him out of his dread and a turn of his head put Hazel's wry grin in his gaze.
"You look rough," the woman teased him, shoving at his arm,
"c'mon, it's not that bad. We'll be cozy in a field hospital in no time, just wait." Vladimir could only nod, forcing a narrow smile at her remark, trying to hide his anxiety.
"I'm not worried about it," he lied,
"I just uh…"
"What happened to your face?" Her head cocked curiously, those purple lenses narrowing at him suspiciously.
"Oh uh, got into a fight," he lied again, he did it often, though this time embarrassment etched its red stain across his battered features,
"one of my patients got out of line."
"Which one?" though she already knew the answer, and it was obvious by the quivering restraint on her laughter.
"The uh… King of Serenno…" V muttered, tapping a metal finger against the pad of an equally alloyed thumb.
"So you knocked him out?" Hazel giggled evilly, earning a heavy sigh in response from the tired man,
"Shut up, the officer is still talking."
"Oh V, don't be such a sore loser," she rattled his arm with her own metal grasp around his bicep,
"I'm sure you took it like a champ. C'mon, you can sit with me on the transport."
Hazel's relaxed banter had followed an unsavory remark from the tense and yet seemingly calm medical lead,
"I'mma need y'all ta shut the fuck up and listen..." Julian snapped, groaning as he tucked his hands behind his back and turned the finger on his left out of habit. He shifted over slightly from the two, inching his way towards the front as the officer finally got the boisterous group of medics and rescue teams under control.
"This is your standard casualty evac mission. We will have medevac teams stationed in three locations in New Carannia. For those of you who are new, listen up. This information is important and we'll be runnin' through it quickly." Julian glanced around for a moment at the sea of new faces that stood at rest, eyes glued to the officer in charge of the briefing. This newer crew was still rowdy like the bunch from Carlac but their energy felt more precise like a razor's edge. He felt a sense of calm despite what was in store for them when they'd land again at the city center.
"We will be assessing and retrieving civilian and military personnel on the ground. Under no circumstances will you perform life-saving treatment on the field. We have intel that there are bands of marauders wreaking havoc throughout the city in addition to legions of undead soldiers still on the move. So remember, focus on assessment and retrieval, and get the hell out of there quickly. Doctor Qar will explain the tagging system and then we load up and head out." Julian exhaled softly, swapping his exterior presence to mask a lingering sickness in his gut. Every time these announcements came around it had shifted his demeanor, transforming him into a beacon of care, duty, and confidence. The doctor had situated in front of the podium, holding up four tags in his left hand as he commenced with his intel briefing.
"We'll be usin' these tags for quick visual guides on how to tend to patients when they board the ships."
"Slap a green tag on those who are wounded and can walk, Patients who need minimal care that can be delayed, get yellow, all critical patients red. Simple. Field medics this is important, you will be paired with diagnosticians, rescue responders, and security detail. Assess, retrieve, and get them to the ships. I'm gonna repeat what Aekoh has said, do not treat. Stop bleedin', open airways, and get the fuck outta there."
"I know for some'a you, this is the first time seein' these before." His hand lifted the black tags, causing Hazel to grimace on sight and grip Vlad's augmented limb just a little tighter. Seeing those deathly flags never got easier, no matter how many times they'd done this before.
"This is for those that are unresponsive with no respiration or pulse, clinically deceased. You need to move these bodies away from the livin' so the RTs can pick'em up and do what they gotta do." He granted them seconds to take in every bit that was thrown at them, glancing down towards his former assistant and his new charge.
"That is all, stay safe out there. Y'all are dismissed." He stated, giving a nod to the crew as they quickly dispersed onto their ships.
Vladimir pressed a cumbersome breath from his lips, soaking in the information he was presented and did what little he truly could to ensure it cemented into the grooves of his forethought and commanded his full attention. Green, yellow, red. Easy. He could remember that, right? Black tags were for bodies. Easy. Cold metal fingers brushed the length of his face, dragging from a sunken, tired eye to trail off his chin, and rather abruptly flatten against the width of his chest. He spared Hazel a glance and his lips quivered, unsure of what to say or which shape to make at her reaction to it all. Truthfully, he didn’t know much of anything about her time enlisted, and if she had told him during any one of the numerous times she’d sat in his chair, he was too strung out to remember.
“That’s not so bad,” he stated with a half-hearted shrug of the arm the woman clutched,
“easy to remember.”
Purple eyes flicked up to catch his, the light behind their twilight stars indecipherable.
“You say that now,” she stated in an uncharacteristically graven tone,
“but wait until we’re out there. It doesn’t… it doesn’t sound like we’re going to be sitting cozy in a field hospital at all… this is just evac and rescue ops.” His brow furrowed at her tone, taken aback by it entirely,
“You say that like it’s the worst possible mission to get.” The junior doctor gave his arm a pat, the metallic collision resulting in a soft
clang clang with her digits against his limb,
“You’ll see, V. Just uh… remember to breathe.”
She left him then and started up the ramp of their transport ship. It was all he could do to give chase, only to be recalled back by sharp words from Julian.
“It’s uh…” he inhaled deeply, turning his gaze up to the cyborg,
“it’s gonna be a long day, isn’t it?”
The specialist pinned his back against the curving wall behind him, inhaling deeply through battered lips in some struggle to rein his nerves back under control. Nobody had told him it was going to be like this, nobody had taken the ten seconds to pull him aside and say
'hey Vladimir, we're going to be airdropping into an active warzone on a flying deathtrap taking incoming fire from marauding forces instead of landing on the outskirts and making our way in systematically'. Nobody had told him that. Maybe it was for the better that they hadn't, as he was starting to doubt his resolve about the whole ordeal entirely. He was made for late nights in the lab, for slaving over the minute details and wires of his work, for connecting and linking the intensely complex and fickle wires of a machine into the equally, yet somehow slightly less interesting, complicated mechanisms of the human body. Despite the fact he had managed to doze off- thanks entirely to the fact the soldier sitting next to him had so generously allowed him to use her shoulder as a pillow- for the few hours it took them to arrive at the devastated world, he felt as though he was still dreaming, trapped inside of a nightmare that he knew was only going to get worse the further in he went.
It's what he had told Julian in the office earlier that same day, he was used to violence, scenes of graphic horror, and the terrorism of his former group. What he had never witnessed, however, was a theater of war in the flesh. He desperately tried to tear his eyes from the narrow porthole he stared from, but he simply couldn't look away. There was something instinctual within him, something that made him want to run toward the fire, to run toward the streams of laser fire spitting into the heavens. Human nature was to flock like crows to tragedy, and he was no different. Another turbulent rattle saw him startle and tighten the grip on the edge of his seat he had taken, at last freeing his hexed gaze from the window and sealing it tightly behind his eyelids.
'If anybody is listening...' he urged in his thoughts, though he suspected that line was entirely one-way and that the party on the other end had long since hung up.
"Sawbones, get your chit together, we need you sharp!" the sergeant on his left side shouted over the racket of the warzone below, and the daring breaches through the clouds that careened by their AV,
"You can handle a little pressure, can't ya?" Beneath his helmet, V scowled in the man's direction, his eyes gutting into vicious daggers. It was not the first time that
particular sergeant had hazed him, nor did he doubt it would be the last. Perhaps if he actually listened to Julian, he would have learned to take the high road ages ago, but he was notorious for his selective hearing.
"Dunno Barnes," Vladimir piped up, forcing his voice to steady in its projection,
"your voice sure is making it awful hard to concentrate, you sound just like your ma!" Kark the high road. His jab back earned a gruff chortle but was rewarded by silence, the kind that V was dying for in the middle of the commotion.
His hands shifted from the seat on either side of his knees to the straps pressing his heavy chestguard onto his body, and his digits curled around as though his life depended on it. This was more comfortable to him, the added pressure, but he only had so long to savor it until:
<"We'll be over the drop zone in one-hundred-eighty seconds. Standby."> never had V dreaded hearing a voice more in his life.
Overhead, the red light flicked to yellow with a digitized, singular tone beep, and with it echoed the grinding groan of the drop ramp deployment. The team tucked safely into the transport's belly stood up in unison, save for Vladimir, who struggled to get himself in synchronicity with the highly trained soldiers, and lagged but a half-second behind. He reached overhead, grasping onto the bar as the smoky air poured into the vessel from the parting doors. The hell beneath suddenly became much more real now that there was nothing but the visor over his eyes guarding him against it.
'C'mon Vlad, it's not so bad.' he tried to reassure himself and seemed to manage it partially, steeling his nerves as the line on his side of the ship inched closer to the open mouth of the craft.
'Certainly not going to have to worry about your fix later... and your nose isn't hurting as bad, now is it?' Turns out the perilous realization that you were about to dive willingly into an active warzone was enough to get your focus off a broken nose.
"Julian!" he called out across the way loudly enough to be heard over the howling wind churning about the cabin, "Some kind of pep talk would be appreciated!"
