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Mmmmm. The aches were still there, but with Jenni's soft curves molded against him, they were hardly worth dwelling on. She'd pinioned his left arm quite neatly, especially since the feeling of her lips on the worn skin there was as strong an incentive as possible for not moving. If someone came barging through the door intent on mayhem, Suicide would have to throw her off before he could reach for the knife buried under his discarded clothes. At the moment, though, he was hard-pressed to give a damn.

(That same knife had provoked a Look from Jenni when she found it hidden in the small of his back last night . . . good times indeed.)

"Morning to you too," he said, shifting his weight a little to get comfortable on the rumpled sheets. He gave a slight hiss between his teeth as Jenni's wandering hand found one of the old disembowelment scars (not a good time) but didn't tense. That itself was a sign of how relaxed he felt.

"Slept like the dead," he added after a long moment. His voice was hoarse and rough; his body simply wasn't used to getting eight hours any more, especially not after having been so thoroughly worn out beforehand. He pulled Jenni a little closer and ran his right hand over the curve of her hip. "Better than I have in a while, in fact." A thought struck him, and he couldn't help grinning a bit himself as he stroked a thumb over Jenni's hipbone. "In fact, I think I might actually be sane this morning. So technically, you can say you've been on the clock this whole time . . . which means you're about due to come off shift and have some downtime yourself."

While she was at it, Jenni flicked on the bedside lamp before—retreating? No no. Making some tactical readjustments. Lying half across a chest the size of the former squire's wouldn't stay comfortable for long. She settled down on her right side instead, head pillowed on his bicep while her left arm rested across his middle. She couldn't see very much from this angle, but given the choice between looking and cuddling, she took cuddling. Enthusiastic was a good word for the night's activities. Now, the path of least resistance had a special appeal.

"Mm, not as such," she replied, her voice hazy from sleep. "I mean, I can't stay here all day . . . as tempting as that is." Speaking of which, there was no chance that her hands, or at least the free one, would stay still for long, not with so much bare skin available for slow, casual exploration. She didn't understand how people could be as uptight as most of them were about touching in everyday life. The tactile sense was her favorite, bar none. She couldn't get enough.

"G'morning, by the way," she added, feeling a proper salutation was in order. "Sleep all right? I know I was worn out." She grinned—even if he couldn't see her face properly, he could probably feel it against his arm and hear it in her voice. As with the start of the evening, there had been trial and error, and there was room for improvement, but all Powers, learning was fun.

As usual, Suicide's awakening was accompanied by pain. He vaguely registered the shrilling of an alarm, but that took a distant second to the litany of other standard complaints--mainly joints that didn't want to move and prior injuries taking the opportunity to remind him of them. The phantom pain of old arrow wounds spread a dull ache across his shoulders.

On the other hand, Jenni was reaching across him, one arm extended and her chest brushing his as she reached to slap at the alarm. Now that was a good way to wake up.

Now other aches were making themselves known--aches of the much more preferable kind, the result of a willing and enthusiastic woman who had let him make good on every promise he'd been mentally making since that day in FicPsych. Was he too old for this kind of fooling around? Probably. Did he still feel like Herakles on earth? Definitely. Was he all right with the night being over? Not even a bit.

"Piss and blood," he muttered, raising his head from the rumpled pillow and shooting the alarm clock a death glare. Jenni had tried to retreat back to her side of the bed, but he rather preferred her where she was, and made his opinion known by running a hand down her back and grinning up at her. "You don't have to get up, do you? The patients aren't gettin' any crazier."

((sigh Smooth indeed. Sometimes I feel guilty for perpetrating this sleazy mofo. Then I remember how much fun this is and stop it. XD))

Jenni wasn't that worried about it. True, she was a woman who liked a certain level of order, and she generally maintained it for the purpose of letting her visitors know that she had everything under control and it was safe to relax. It was a habit she'd acted on without thinking. But of course, that was silly of her.

If he'd deliberately considered the best place for that kiss, he couldn't have done better, as her involuntary response proved. He had her full attention. She tossed aside the shirt dangling from her fingers, deciding she'd much rather deal with his instead, and went to work with a smile.

"Point taken," she muttered. "We're just gonna make it worse."

Whether someone actually remembered to hit the lights or if the narrative itself induced a fade to black, they would not later recall. Given the circumstances, the latter was probably most likely.

. . .

Jenni had set an alarm at some point, though. In most cases she woke at first light, but in a place with no sun that didn't work, so artificial methods had to suffice. Was she a morning person? Well, as a woman who routinely had things to do and places to be, taking advantage of the day just made sense, but she was not offensively chipper about it by any means, especially when it was dragging her from a very good night. The noise wasn't as loud or annoying as a console's beep, but in her head she cursed it just as thoroughly as any agent would have done a console. She'd ended up on the inside of the bed somehow—not her usual—so she had to stretch across Suicide to slap the damn thing silent. The brush of warm skin on skin just about made up for it.

(( Smooth enough, as it happens. g ))

So this was it: the lair of the beast, the place that would've given Nume an aneurysm if he'd known Suicide was in it. It even had a dragon . . . albeit a plush brown one, which somehow didn't quite carry the level of menace Nume had predicted.

Jenni seemed a little embarrassed by the little bit of disorder-- a couple of discarded shirts and all that. Yes, she should never be allowed to come back to RC #2771a. Though Mithiriel was constantly on the lookout for disorder, both Suicide and Diocletian were used to living rough, and the socks under the console had recently discovered crop rotation and the three-field system. On the other hand, Jenni's room looked--well, civilized, for lack of a better word. These were the quarters of a woman who had traveled widely, found herself settling down (perhaps unexpectedly?), and done her best to make do in a limited space. The room fascinated him: so . . . normal. It said that if she'd been from his time, she would have been a respected citizen-woman who wouldn't have been caught dead with a foreign squire.

Nah, that wasn't right. Nobody who ended up with the PPC could qualify as respectable in any time, and he knew already that there were more unusual facets to Jenni than she was owning up to. So why was she fussing about a few pieces of clothing lying around? Who gave a damn about that?

He crossed the room quickly and wrapped his arms around Jenni again, trailing a kiss down the side of her neck. The sound she made was definitely not respectable, and was infinitely appreciated.

"Never mind the mess," he said. A few strands of hair had fallen down over her face, and he flicked them out of the way with his thumb. "I think we'll manage somehow. But if you're that worried about it, there's always--" his hands slid lower, enjoying the sensation of the fabric and smooth skin "--the floor."

[TM: . . . smooth, Su. facepalm I'm thinking a discretion cut soon?]

Hi again. I decided to come back after a long hiatus. Sorry that I've been silent, but real life does that. anyway, how has the board been?


Also, Drake and Naomi are ready to take up their duties again.

Jenni experienced a little thrill at how easily he plucked her up, like the effort was nothing. The voice of caution pointed out that he could probably do anything he wanted to her without breaking a sweat, and her only recourse would be a use of power, but she had no trouble shushing it. She felt supported and secure in his arms, and she was running the show for the moment. With him doing most of the work of keeping her in place, one hand was free to rake through the hair over his ear, combing it back from his face and adding a little flourish to this kiss.

The Narrative Laws supplied a passing agent shouting at them to "get a room!" This was summarily ignored.

And he forgave her balking and almost messing everything up, and took the trouble to say as much. How great was that? "I'm glad," she responded with warm smile to match her tone.

This close, she had to lean her head back to actually focus on his face. The awkwardness of this arrangement was becoming more apparent by the second. She shifted herself and slid back to the floor, then took him by the hand. "Come on. You can't be comfortable like that. We can do better."

She led the way—whatever thoughts she'd entertained about Headquarters, spending the rest of the night (such as it was) in the corridors was not on her agenda—and for a wonder it wasn't all that long before the double-doored entrance to Section 31 appeared. For an even greater wonder, whoever was supposed to be at the nurses' station had apparently nipped out for the moment, so they were able to slip into room C-14 without any embarrassing run-ins. No doubt the Ironic Overpower was storing up an extra helping of hilarious mishaps for later, but at the moment it wasn't worth worrying. Not this time, universe, not this time.

"Well, here we are," Jenni said once her door was safely closed and locked behind them.

The room was not large, but she'd arranged the furnishings such that it was effectively divided into a sleeping space at the far end and a working space they'd entered into. Each side had a rug, and she'd found spaces for a few useful plants (the non-sentient sort), which softened the harsh Generic Surface construction. The whole room held the complex herbaceous scent Suicide had noticed on her earlier, emanating in particular from a cupboard above her desk, but there was also a hint of the sweet smell that seemed ubiquitous in the presence of small children. The desk, sitting against the left wall, straddled the midline of the room, with a computer on the office side and a much-used hotplate and tea paraphernalia on the other. Also against the left-hand wall, nearest to them, there was a bookshelf that faced a two-seater couch on the right-hand wall—because what shrink's office would be complete without a couch?

The far end of the room showed signs of her hasty departure earlier. In the back right corner, a smallish wardrobe hung open, showing its slightly disheveled contents. Her white jacket hung over one of the doors. A child's bed sat in front of it against the right wall, with toys haphazardly dropped on top. Jenni's own bed against the back wall was festooned with a few discarded shirt options and a particularly bedraggled, brown, dragon-shaped plush toy.

She grinned apologetically. "Uh, sorry about the mess. Give me two ticks to pick up." She started with the fire-lizard plush, tossing him gently to Henry's bed.

(( Visual aid! ))

So much for doubts. Suicide got the idea, and while most of his thoughts that followed were generally incoherent, part of him definitely decided that the height difference was going to be a pain in the neck. His arms were already around Jenni; it was pretty simple to brace his back against the wall of the corridor and, shifting his hands on her hips, lift her up and rest her weight against one cocked leg. Now they were eye-to-eye.

"Much better," he murmured against her lips. "Problem solved."

Though he didn't say it, he meant both problems. The gray Generic Surface felt cold against his back, and most of Jenni's weight rested against his right leg, sending a few phantom pains flickering through the cybernetic limb. There was still the edge of awkwardness between them--the certain caution of two people who didn't quite know each other yet. But it was real, and there was one hell of a spark there, and Jenni . . . Jenni definitely knew what she was doing. In the middle of word worlds and fiction harpies and author wraiths and gods-damned Archir the Emerald, Suicide finally had his hands on something quantifiably, achingly real.

Hades' teeth, and there were religions that forbade this kind of business?

"Apology accepted," he added after a long moment. Ye gods, he did like green eyes.

Jenni nodded in sympathy. She personally had a terrible history of complications when it came to getting close, and—she blinked, checking herself. Son of a bitch, she'd just about let it get the better of her, too. Well, nice try, universe, but not this time. It owed her, damn it, and no way was she letting it off the hook now, not when things had been going so well. Not that she could really blame either herself or him for having concerns, but since hers did not apply, that made things very simple.

Intently, she looked Suicide in the eyes. "In that case, you had the right idea in the first place, and for both our sakes I apologize sincerely for allowing this 'thinking' to continue. Let's fix that." Eight inches upward was a bit of a stretch, but she got up on her toes and wrapped her arms around the back of his neck, taking the initiative for a deeper kiss and trusting that he'd get the idea. How did that joke go, "if I said you had a nice body, would you hold me against you?" Eh, something like that.

And if this wasn't distraction enough to get around Headquarters successfully, then by all the Powers, that was Headquarters' problem!

Suicide mentally cursed again as Jenni's words cut through his newfound good mood. For a moment, he contemplated distracting her from the question; he figured he had a 55% chance of managing it, with a remaining 45% chance of it going horribly wrong and pissing her off. With someone he actually liked as much as he did Jenni, those weren't odds he liked.

Damn the woman; between her role as a psych nurse and just being who she was, she was infernally hard to contemplate lying to. And she seemed genuinely concerned, though how much she knew about his thoughts he couldn't guess. Extrasensory abilities, she'd said. Had she read his mind?

Once again, Suicide did his best to stamp down his paranoia. That way lay . . . well, madness was hardly a novelty, but madness of the second-guessing, self-doubting kind that always seemed to attend politicians and priests.

Though he had to admit, the idea of him being cautious was pretty damned funny.

"Just thinking," he replied, shaking his head a little at her mention of doubts. "It's a bad habit, I know." When Jenni gave him a not-buying-that look, he struggled to elaborate. "Still getting used to the PPC again," he said finally, doing his best to keep a dry tone. He'd lost his taste for any form of drama a long time ago . . . Shit, and he'd gone and left his lampshade back in the RC, too. Damn thing was never there when he needed. "This business of getting close to someone--" He ran one hand up the long smooth curve of her back, admiring the sweep of it "--is a lot simpler when there's no thinking about universal laws and suchlike."

He offered her a wry grin. "Too much time reading the Words, I guess."

Mostly, Jenni was just confused, though not at all displeased at being kissed again, whistler or no whistler. She smiled even as she tilted her head in the universal gesture of not having a clue. "What . . . ?"

She didn't usually miss things when it came to reading people. True, her brain was flooded with happy chemicals at the moment, but that didn't usually stop her from putting two and two together. She had, in fact, noticed when he'd looked just for a moment like he was considering heading for the hills. He wasn't—what, nervous? That didn't seem to fit at all. . . . Shit. Maybe that head trauma was playing up, with the stress—good stress, surely, but still stress—she was putting on his system. Increased heart rate and blood pressure, hormone levels rising, brain sparking away . . . dammit, that would just figure.

Her expression turned doubtful, and she took a reluctant step back for a better view (though she left her hands where they'd automatically gone around his waist). "Look, uh . . . backpedaling is the last thing I want here, but it's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, right? So, actually, that's the last thing I want. Please tell me if something's wrong, or if you have doubts, or anything." This was definitely odd, coming from her to a giant warrior who had just soundly kissed her and seemed happy about it, but then, men could be odd about covering up what was really going on in their heads, physically or psychologically. She smiled and added, "You won't lose man points or anything. That would be pretty much impossible." She winked at him.

Some asshole with a snarky sense of humor had put "A Whole New World" on the bar's jukebox. What kind of jukebox even had "A Whole New World" on there, anyway? Suicide did his best to tune it out, which in the end, wasn't that hard. Jenni had casually passed a comment about why yes, she wasn't going to have a child possibly interfering with interesting nighttime activities (a good thing, Suicide supposed, since while not a merciful man he had no intention of accidentally turning Henry Robinson into Rorschach Jr.) and stood, one hand disentangling from his. The one simple motion, a smooth rise from the hips through the long line of the spine, had done wonderful things for his admittedly one-track imagination.

It also triggered some nasty thoughts. There were plenty of things Suicide disliked about his PPC duties, but only one he actively loathed--the way it made him question the reality of something. For a moment, paranoia clutched at his guts: between the universal laws and his myriad experiences with beautiful woman-shaped creatures who were not what they appeared, his survival instinct (yes, he had one, mangled as it was) gave a momentary shriek of panic. He squashed it, silently cursing the reaction, but he knew his body had tensed momentarily at the thought. Hopefully Jenni hadn't noticed.

Some great Scythian he was, doubting things simply because he had almost been killed numerous times by selfish would-be gods and goddesses who wanted to control the . . . best not to finish that thought. Simultaneously angry with himself and amused by the whole thing, he slid an arm around Jenni's waist, pulling her a little closer to him as they stepped out of the bar. She felt real: solid, well-shaped but not unearthly in the way that the fictional worlds often favored. That was good enough for him. No knife, either: that had to count for something.

Hang on a second, he said, stopping Jenni as they reached the first intersection in the halls. I just want to check something.

Suicide was eight inches taller than Jenni, and with both of them standing, he had to bend to kiss her again. Not that it was much of a hardship: she was just the same, the smell and the feel and the lips all too real, leaving him with the exhilarated feeling of being slightly drunk. A passing secretary whistled at them, but though Suicide's scruples had been satisfied, he didn't let Jenni go right away. This was a piece of narrative realism he could definitely spend some time lingering over.

Sorry about that, he said finally when they both came up for air. Not that he was actually unhappy with what he'd just done, but Jenni might have objections to being seen doing that kind of thing in the halls. Granted, she didn't look too unhappy right then. Definitely, he added, all in order.

Someone had triumphed akoniti, but he'd be damned if he knew who.

Well, so much for plan A, then. That was all right. Plan B had been a possibility in her mind from the start, despite her decision not to actively nudge things in any particular direction—which had lasted up until a couple of minutes ago, to her credit. Oh well. Anyone would allow that it was difficult to keep one's resolve in the face of someone plainly volunteering to be nudged.

She leaned into the kiss, lifting her hands up to brush the sides of his jaw and neck on the way to cupping the base of his skull with her right hand and stabilizing herself on his shoulder with the other. It was awkward, what with being on the edge of how far the bar stools could support, but worrying about that was secondary to soaking up the sensations of warm, firm muscle under his uniform shirt, his hand on her back, and the musky, masculine scent of him overlaid with the brew he'd swallowed, still on his breath, and an indistinct hint of soap.

Until Dorf banged on the counter. Startled, she almost lost her balance as they both let go, and she didn't quite succeed at holding back her own annoyed grumble.

To Suicide, however, she responded with a grin and a glint of her own. "Hon, I'll show you around the whole multiverse if you want. For now, though, I did take the precaution of letting the Nursery know they might have Henry overnight, if you don't mind walking through FicPsych to get to my room."

She stood up in preparation for leaving.

Jenni was in trouble in one respect: unless no clothes were involved at all, Suicide was not a believer in delayed gratification. He was right-handed, and Medical or not, the limb had been battered all to hell with the rest of him; what Jenni was doing felt damned good, and he aimed to reciprocate.

Yes, that expression was definitely mischievous. Ms. Robinson, it seemed, was trying to seduce him. Was he likely to get knifed if he-? Well, only one way to find out.

He leaned forward (just a little. Not much space between them by that point) and kissed her. He'd spent so much time in Suefics that some part of his mind half expected to taste strawberries, but the only taste that lingered on his tongue was the merest trace of the lime soda she had been drinking. The other senses, on the other hand? The hint of roughness where she'd absentmindedly bitten her own lip, the faint herby smell (tea, perhaps, or something from the infirmary), the sound of her heartbeat . . . was that his hand, creeping up the back of her shirt? Yes, it was.

As a first kiss, it was definitely not perfect, but it made the point very effective. It might have gotten even better, too--if Dorf the bartender hadn't broken the spell by rapping hard on the bar and giving them both a stern look. "Not in here, you're not," he said flatly. "I just polished the bartop."

Suicide stifled an irritated groan. He had automatically tensed when he let Jenni go, his brain remembering similar situations where he'd nearly gotten killed before, but she didn't seem to be rethinking the knife option. "So what do you think?" he said. He was a little breathless, but there was a glint in his eye. "Your continuum or mine?"

If her smile tended mischievous, it might have been because she was enjoying watching him melt in front of her like this. No, scratch that. It definitely did, and she definitely was. These were not precisely the clutches Nume had been referring to—he never would have sat still for this much touching to know them—but they definitely fell under the heading. And this was just what she could do with one of Suicide's hands.

She was focused on what she was doing with his right, so it took a second or two for the mental proximity alert to go off on his roving left. Her breath hitched slightly when she noticed. Oh ho, so she was really on her game tonight. And he wasn't lagging behind. Her smile went from mischievous to devious.

"I think that's the brain, actually, but who's counting?" She leaned in just a hair and lowered her voice. "Are you going to let me get on with this, or do we need to go somewhere else?" Unhurriedly, never slacking on kneading the knots away, she glanced down at her thigh and back up again. This was simply to say "I see you hesitating there and I dare you to make up your mind." As far as she was concerned, civility was overrated, but drawing out the time before plunging into the wilderness had its charms, too.

Suicide's pupils dilated as Jenni pressed into a knot below the ball of his thumb, working through the pain and smoothing the muscle into place. His whole arm tensed for a moment, reacting automatically to foreign pressure, but as Jenni worked her magic the hand relaxed and the fingers spread. The Greeks might've created Western civilization, but between the hands and the laugh, Suicide's urges were rapidly tending very uncivilized.

Nume had said wiles. Suicide mentally marked the kid down for another point. Then he subtracted that point, because Nume had made those wiles sound like a bad thing.

Jenni was closer than ever, the two of them sitting facing each other while she worked her magic on his one remaining original hand. The left hand, regrown skin over a steel and carbon-fiber skeleton, dropped onto his knee--no, onto her knee, and slid upwards almost independent of thought. The denim fabric of her jeans felt rough: the new skin hadn't quite gained the protective coating of scars and calluses that the old layer had had.

The hand stopped at midthigh--barely. It took him about that time to remember that, hello, that wasn't the way people did things any more. Or was it? He couldn't remember, not with her turning his muscles to jelly with the skill of a Bacchan whore. Jenni's smile seemed mischievous.

"The only thing that separates us from animals," he said. His grin had an edge to it. "That's what the scholars say, isn't it?"

It did get a laugh, because she'd been there (metaphorically speaking; she'd never actually been to ancient Greece) and knew it for fact. "Yeah, you make due with what you've got and hope for the best. That doesn't change in any time period. The only difference is what you have to work with. Which . . . " Inspired, she took his right hand palm-up and pressed her thumbs into the muscles. " . . . is often just these." A hand massage could technically be considered the use of wiles, she supposed, but what the hell, it was an enjoyable thing to do and almost universally pleasant for the receiving party.

"We take them for granted, but without them we'd be entirely other than what we are. Most people don't even think about the little muscles and tendons in here." She dug into the narrow spaces between the metacarpals, just to emphasize the point, being sensitive to any irregularities caused by previous injuries. Details and minutiae were something she was quite good at. "Then again, there's an awful lot of mysticism about the hands. Palm-reading, reflexology and such. Some of it isn't even total nonsense."

She was trying to . . . comfort him? A strange idea, not so much wrong or irritating as just plain weird. Suicide couldn't think of the years he spent as a squire without some emotion, but he'd never gotten so far as to quantify or understand it. Still, the gesture was kindly meant, and Suicide appreciated it.

This was an odd business all around. So much minutiae; gestures here were small, voices were lower, the tone and inflection of everything was much more important than volume or force. Some of his old skills--like the talking-in-circles bit--were useful, but Suicide felt vaguely like he was out of his depth. It was less like chopping down a tree and more like the delicate work of flaying a man's arm for a quiver. The smallest nick or misused word could ruin the work before it was half finished, and it made him uneasy in some ways.

On the other hand, the woman whose company he enjoyed had just called him big and tough. That he could definitely live with.

"Battle's a good place to learn medicine," he responded. Had he been in lots of battles? Why, yes, and he wasn't above peacocking for her just a bit on that score. Or wait, was a nurse less likely to be impressed by all the injuries he'd inflcited? Shit. Mental Dio, help! "At least, that's what my masters always said," he added, while his mental Diocletian told him to leave her alone and sort out his own messes for once. "We didn't have any of the . . . technically, they're modern, aren't they? Present-day?" He grimaced a little at the idea. Not only was he in a different dimension, but Earth was more than two thousand years past his time. "The modern advances everyone here has. We'd douse a man in sour wine to ward off the affluent evils and sacrifice a black dog to Hecate if someone thought his wound was cursed. But you have anesthetic now. We didn't even have a word for anesthetic." He shook his head. "Actually, we did. It meant 'wineskin and a big rock.'"

He wondered if that would make her laugh again. Some strange part of him--the one that remembered his mother's wagon and appreciated Jenni's hand on his--wanted to make her laugh. It felt odd.

Okay, so running her mouth about tight situations with ridiculous odds had been a stupid error. She should have known better; she knew enough about him to know better. Not something she would allow to happen again unless she decided she wanted to go opening old wounds—which, with her, was always a possibility if she decided the thing hadn't healed properly and needed purging. But definitely not right now.

Listening to him and watching his face change, she slipped her hand out from under his and put it on top, curling her fingers around his in a light grip. Her turn to be the stable, comforting presence again. She felt better for it.

She was also happy to let the conversation move on, and his tale of being shut out of Medical got a laugh. "No offense, but you'd have to take some serious retraining first. Believe me, I've practiced medicine in plenty of low-tech 'verses, and I cringe to think of the limitations." She really did. The times she could have saved somebody if she'd only had penicillin, or decent needles, or help that didn't swear by the panacean properties of extensive bloodletting . . . what a nightmare. Still, patients dying was just part of the job. She didn't like it, but she was able to view it objectively.

"Still," she went on contemplatively, "if what I saw of your work with a bandage is any indication, I'd say we could have used you then. Shards, the number of times I personally could have used a big, tough field surgeon stagger the mind. I've never been good with massive trauma. The odd broken bone, sure, but there comes a level of severity that takes more than just one woman with a bag."

She was rambling on again. How did this keep happening? She reached for her drink, which she'd forgotten temporarily, and drained about half of what was left.

"Not necessarily," Suicide said, his lips quirking a little at the corner. "But the nowhere-to-go-but-through-us strategy loses its appeal when it's not something you chose to do." Three hundred Peers, all fathers of sons. Molon labe. "And it's a lot more fun when you're on the other side of the line." Watching the Argives' phalanx crumple while the little bastards shat themselves in terror--that sure had been fun.

Jenni had left the now-dampened napkin on the bar top, and he swept it up into a pile with the mess he'd made of the coaster. The things someone said and did after a fight weren't accountable to them later: he'd seen Leonidas himself tremble at the knees, after all. A few tears were nothing, even after some time had passed.

"Medical must've been full, though," he said, whisking the unpleasant topic of last stands out of sight along with the torn and tear-stained paper. Talking in circles around something that could anger someone (and possibly get you whipped or threatened with pensioning by a pissed-off Peer) was a valuable skill for any veteran squire. "Not that I'd know. I keep meaning to spend more time there--damn hard to keep the field medic skills sharp when nobody will let you practice on them--but every time I try, someone locks the door and tells all the patients to be extra-quiet until I go away."

Jenni wasn't the bragging sort, and even if she had been, as a healer her perspective on war was exclusively grim, whether her side won or not. Not that it wasn't necessary, not that she wasn't grateful they won, but her work didn't end when the battle was over. For that reason, even a victorious fight wasn't something she could truly be happy about.

With a minimum of fuss, she accepted the napkin and composed herself. Crying was a hell of a way to behave on a date, and the less said about it the better. On the heels of that thought, it struck her Suicide wasn't shying away or telling her to buck up or anything even the slightest bit marginalizing. That was heartening, and helped her get it together again without feeling humiliated.

"That's true," she replied, nodding. "But we lost far more to the macroviruses than we did to the Sues. If not for that I doubt if we would have so much as batted an eye at them before taking them down—it's not like it's the first time Sues have tried to come at us directly, after all, and it's a bad strategy to put us in a position where we have nowhere to go but through them. Not that I know much about strategy," she added, half-smiling. "That's just a law of nature."

She held it together remarkably well, considering the yarn she was telling. Sure, a story of a victory ought to be good for the one telling it, but even victory could get bloody damned quickly. As she spoke, Suicide felt an old familiar chill touch the back of his neck: the idea of the Sues graffitting a tomb made him wish he had been there, if only to try doing something that Upstairs seriously frowned upon and was technically illegal everywhere except Mississippi.

He listened 'til the end, though. He always had time for stories about battles. Nume pulled through, did he? Good for him; maybe the kid actually had some stones on 'im, though Suicide wouldn't have guessed it by the way he threw a punch. Ilraen . . . the fuzzy centaur was still an unknown quantity, though Suicide made a mental note to not get on the wrong side of him. Derik he'd never met, but he got the impression that it wasn't a big issue at the moment.

Jenni's eyes were still watering. He silently handed her one of the bar napkins.

"Not really," he said, once she'd taken a moment to mop her eyes and calm down a little. "Those ghosts sound like they could do with being put to rest. Once a battle's over and done with, the best thing to do is to honor your dead, burn the corpses of anyone who dared to try and ... with you, and send a few heads back to their leaders to make sure they never try anything like it again." It occurred to him only after the fact that talking about severed heads might not be the best thing for Jenni to be hearing right then, but another part of him said '... it, catharsis is catharsis.'

"It sounds like it went as well as it possibly could have," he continued in a slightly quieter voice. "Unlike the other side, there's only so many PPC agents to go around." Three hundred versus ten thousand immortals? Quit thinking like that, Suicide, you can't blame every way you think on Thermopylae . . .

(( I'm back! This runs long, and I hope it's okay that I pushed through to the end of the tale without allowing chances for Su to respond. I figured he'd go along with just letting her get it over with. ))

"It probably is," she agreed cautiously, and started to say that she really hadn't done that much and didn't have anything to complain about, but her own thoughts gave her the lie. And he seemed to know it. She wondered when she had become so transparent. It wasn't the first time someone had suggested unburdening herself, but it usually took longer, and never before had anyone been quite so direct with an invitation to bitch and moan. She wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

She had to say something, though, so she picked a thought out of the tumult. It came with a return smile. "It's sweet of you to try to make things easier on me. I want to finish the story for you, though, and I think I'll satisfy both of us this way."

She took a deep breath to begin with. "So, the quarantine was lifted. We were able to get most of the canons home at last, and we got Immac and Parwill to Medical. I thought I would finally be able to take care of Derik beyond just keeping him from dying, but no. See, here's what I have to bitch about," she interjected with a lopsided grimace for Suicide's benefit. "Suzine didn't even give me five minutes to look in on him before I left, and then when I checked in a bit later I found out they'd lost him. A man who'd been in a catatonic state for a month suddenly decided to get up and take a walk—later I found out he'd been provoked by Leroux!Erik, and honestly I'm grateful that he was able to achieve what we couldn't for Derik—and they were too overwhelmed to deal with it. I could have killed Mirrad and Suzine when they told me, but there wasn't time. They needed anyone with any experience in Medical. And this, when we were just starting to pick up the pieces and we were all exhausted already, this is when the Sues invaded.

"For my part, like I said, I really didn't do more than anyone else. Dr. Fitzgerald declared that the doors would stay open so people could come to us in Medical, but his staff were too busy to take it further. I got the agents who could manage it to organize a defense, which Sedri led—I stayed with them because you can't get a possessed agent past a psychic—but fortunately we didn't need it. The Sues that did come our way were annihilated by Omicron. I don't know if he was one of Honesah's Daleks or something else, but anyway, he got the job done, and we were able to get back to the business of fixing people.

"I checked in on FicPsych, and found to my great relief that Derik had turned up again, minus Sue-induced good looks but plus a purpose in life after stumbling into a Reality Room. He fought his way back to the department and, of course, collapsed from the strain. Later he got up again after I'd dosed him with enough fellis juice to put down a gold dragon and helped defend the department." She shook her head at the man's insane tenacity, then looked at Suicide again, considering. "You'd like him, I think. He's a lot like you in some ways, and he could use a proper male friend. Remind me."

This was more a note to herself than to him, though, and she pressed on to avoid getting side-tracked.

"I had to go back to Medical, since more agents were coming in hurt from fighting the Sues. There were battles all over, but the big ones were in the cafeteria and the final stand at the Tomb of the Unknown PPC Agent. The only plan the agents had was to lure as many Sues as possible into the cafeteria and let Honesah's Daleks blast the hell out of them, and it worked as far as it went. I heard about it from Ilraen, after I found him and Nume standing around in the ward, looking forsaken."

At this point, her ability to cover her feelings ended. She cared about everyone she worked with, and she was personally invested in Derik, but those two were her friends, and she'd found them alive after a month of not knowing. Tearing up at the memory was inevitable. She wiped her eyes and kept talking through it, though.

"They'd seen fighting," she continued. "After being locked up for a month, they would have faced the Balrog Sue and been happy about it." She actually laughed. "If you can imagine the two of them charging down the corridors through a sea of Sues to get to the cafeteria, like some kind of screwed up knight and warhorse . . . well, that's not how Ilraen described it, but he can't hide anything from me. It can't have been anything but awkward, and I'm sure he never wants to do anything of the sort again. Nume was a damn mess. He'd got himself thrown from Ilraen's back and concussed, and he'd been off Bleepka for ten days by Ilraen's count. Poor guys." She shook her head, but she had a smile for relief that they were alive and relatively well after the ordeal.

"I don't really know anyone who was involved in the Battle of the Tomb, except Lux, and she's too flighty to give a good account. That broke the Sues, though. They'd painted it urple and wilver, I heard"—her lip curled at the insult—"and that incited everyone to a huge effort. The rest was just mopping up, and it was finally over." A puzzled frown crossed her face. "Lux did tell me the agents can-canned to 'Man of La Mancha' afterward. Trust Lux to be in the middle of something like that."

Shaking her head, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then looked up at Suicide again with her eyes still slightly wet. All the same, she looked satisfied at coming to the end. "Any questions?"

"War's war," Suicide said, "and it's rare it doesn't get to you." His own expression conveyed, equally clearly, that he didn't believe she hadn't been affected and furthermore, that the curative properties of a good Sobranie were highly underrated by the medical community. (It was a very eloquent expression, involving the deployment of both eyebrows.)

"And nothing wrong with getting ahead." A grin edged its way back onto his face. "My RC's console had a terribly regrettable accident, so I don't have anywhere to be for a while." He gave her hand the slightest squeeze, but his expression was tending mischievous. "Still, if it's going to be problematic, try a different tack. We've broken through the hard part with the sadness and flashbacks. Now it's time for you to indulge in the other great pastime of people who've lived through a lot of shit--bitching about it and one-upping anyone who says they've lived through worse. That's therapeutic, right?"

(( Continued from the original thread on the main Board. ))

The smoking comment got a raised eyebrow that very clearly translated to "over my dead body," but she was distracted from saying so by him turning the tables on her.

"I'm not shaky," she said quickly. This was a lie. Perhaps not so much on the outside, but inside there were definite butterflies, and not just from the hand and the intense look he was giving her. "Heck, I never did any real fighting, unless the assault on Medical counts, but that was more getting other people moving again. But that's getting ahead."