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 Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 8:00 pm
Shards. W'ten sort of had him there.
Unwilling to admit defeat (it could hardly even be called defeat, really), K'em simply silenced for a moment and reexamined his options. He was, in fact, hobbling and he did accept W'ten's help in the middle of the storm, though who could blame him? It got them out of the rain much faster. Faroth complained less and Cordel wasn't screaming at them for some horrible, irreversible injury so really, K'em was going to chalk that one up as a success.
The brunette was given no more time to consider, however, because Cordel had fallen for W'ten's bribe and had pulled himself out of the comforting embrace. A hug was ten times better than any bandage he could- Ow. Oh, that hurt. K'em hissed at the healer, wondering if he was making the wrap hurt that much on purpose. It was very hard to strike back at his roommate when every other thought was punctuated by a flash of pain every time Cordel tightened the wrap.
"Fine. I neglected to consider the events that resulted us here in the first place," K'em admitted, albeit it rather crossly. Not only did W'ten completely kill all his fun with Cordel, this spar was not going in his favor, either. "If you are implying that I was using you for something other than what was intended, you are wrong. I did not, however, want to find myself here, but since I have, I am just going to have to sit here and bare it like you do, won't I?" And the scowl was gone, the ever-charming grin back in its place.
"I heard W'ten coughing earlier, Cordel. He's going to deny it, but I swear I heard him cough when he thought I was asleep."
So, yeah, he was just tossing W'ten under the bus. But that's what best friends were for, right? To suffer alongside you?
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Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 8:20 pm
W'ten didn't have to say anything on the nature of appropriate contact, as Cordel was clearly feeling the pressure and backing off. If he had been that convinced that his actions were professional he wouldn't have backed off. Or perhaps he had finally seen reason and decided to patch up K'em instead of flirt with him. Either way, the brownrider had won this little discussion and that made him feel quite a bit better about himself. Even against two opponents who were overly emotional, logic had prevailed. And they criticized him for his cool mind.
He remained silent until Cordel was finished with K'em, silently noting that his roommate still made a fuss even when it was a Healer tending his wounds. Perhaps he was just trying to garner extra sympathy. Either way, he chocked up another point for himself. Clearly he was not as bad at dressing injuries as K'em and Cordel liked to make him out to be. When the attention was turned on him, the eyebrow that had returned to its rightful place shot up once again. "It would be more beneficial for both of us if you would keep your questions pertaining to the physical realm rather than the fantastical one. I have not been coughing, I have no aches, pains, or fevers, and I do not feel unwell in the slightest. As for the nature of my metaphorical heart, I have no answer, as you are being facetious."
K'em's admission and following statements were logical, and so W'ten decided that he could begin to forgive him. Until, of course, he made the fatal error of trying to keep the brownrider there for longer than necessary. "I believe you are delusional, K'em. How could you be focused on me when you could not stop moving and talking long enough for me to finish a single mental math problem? If you are, however, going to insist upon trying to convince Cordel that I am ill then you will find that turnabout is fair play." W'ten was sure that Cordel would love to hear how much K'em had strained his injured ankle and how he'd gone between for a short distance to save time while W'ten had had Kaieth fly straight the whole way home.
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Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 9:02 pm
Cordel glared at K’em when the Brownrider hissed, just daring him to say anything about his techniques. Sharding ‘riders thought they knew everything. Admittedly, the man was more used to looking after dragons… he tried to be more careful, but it was still different, tending a human, especially one as obnoxious as K’em. Most of the conversation/apologies went over his head as he continued his work on W’ten, basically trying to make sure the man was not, in fact, sick. Actually, he couldn’t really remember W’ten ever being sick, but there was always a first time, right?
“Coughing?” he asked suspiciously, looking from W’ten back to K’em and then back to the taller man again. Shards, this was just getting confusing. He wished that he could just get the straight story, pure and simple, without a thousand different ‘whethertos and whyfores’ that W’ten was so fond of. “You seem to be alright,” he said grudgingly, not willing to let the man out of his realm of influence so quickly. “But I’d like you to stay overnight just in case and, shaffit, K’em stop making that face behind my back.”
Wasn’t there anything that K’em wouldn’t turn into an innuendo? Was nothing sacred? No… probably not. “And let me remind you, W’ten, it is your duty as a human bei… fine, as a dragonrider to tell me what happened. If I’m to heal K’em over there properly, then I need to know as many facts as possible about his injury and what happened.” Cordel didn’t really have glarebeams. He just had resentfulbeams, which didn’t work nearly as well, especially on a man who saw such things as illogical.
Well, hopefully he could see the logic in coming clean. Even if it did devolve into a long rambling speech.
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Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 9:15 pm
It was times like these K'em wished he could do mental math like W'ten, figuring out the odds would be incredibly helpful in this situation.
K'em was just going to have to bank on the hope that W'ten was a Good Person deep down somewhere in that rock of a heart. "Fine, fine. W'ten wasn't really coughing, Cordel. I made that up. I'm sure he's fine. And he didn't take his jacket off until we were out of the rain, either." The brownrider grinned at the healer and shrugged. "So he can go back. Honest. He's just here because...he had to drag me here." The grin got a little sheepish and K'em shrugged. Hopefully, W'ten was back on his side again, because in the end, he shared a room with that man, and the last time W'ten decided to exact revenge upon him brought very late nights and way too little sleep.
The wingsecond shifted uncomfortably and looked around. Well, if he was going to be responsible and Doing The Right Thing, he might as well go all out, right? "...aaaand I might have gone between even though my ankle was messed up, but I was wearing the boot and W'ten wrapped it, so it's not that big of a deal. So now that we're all square, why don't we just go down to the kitchen for dinner. Or breakfast. Or something, shards, what time is it, anyways?"
There. He'd owned up and saved W'ten's skin (hopefully), so at least K'em could rest easy tonight. Sort of.
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Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 9:37 pm
One night with the Healers? That didn't sound too bad. It would give him time to do his mental math problems – hopefully in peace – and perhaps catch up on a little sleep. He had been unable to do so while they waited for the storm to subside and he was starting to feel the effect of being wet and cold. While he liked to think of himself as repelling all health-related issues by sheer force of will, even W'ten got tired and had to rest. It was one of the things he disliked the most about being human.
As Cordel turned his attention to the little argument he was having with K'em, the brownrider carefully weighed out his options. He could rat K'em out. It would be fair play since his friend had been insistent on getting him to stay longer than necessary. However, the movement K'em was free of Cordel's clutches he might try to get his revenge. Already his brain was working over time trying to calculate the probabilities of K'em's actions, knowing full well that he would do something so illogical that W'ten wouldn't even be able to predict it. On the other hand, if he kept silent Cordel might make him stay here for days, hovering around him like a mother hen and waiting for him to so much as sneeze the wrong way. It was almost impossible to decide which was worse.
K'em, however, made the decision for him by coming clean. W'ten's face lost a good deal of its stoniness when the brownrider not only confessed to lying about the coughing, but continued on to pretty much successfully bail him out. He even went so far as to further condemn himself to Cordel's wrath. The brownrider was suitably impressed, so much so that he decided to throw K'em a, albeit small, bone. "The likelihood of him being wet enough to cause respiratory illness by sudden exposure to cold is less than 2.66 percent. The distance Faroth and Kaieth flew after the storm should have been sufficient to dry him off." There. Hopefully that would be somewhat beneficial.
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Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 10:34 pm
Now there was a surprise. Cordel couldn’t remember the last time K’em had actually taken responsibility for anything that wasn’t sex-related. Well, color him suitably impressed for the next few minutes, at least until the Brownrider admitted to going between. With an injured ankle. Cordel covered his face with a groan, wondering what sort of crime against humanity he had committed that entitled him to this sort of punishment. “K’em… were you even listening in your weyrling classes when they told you not to go between if you’re sick or injured or were you too busy thinking about breasts on that day?”
Not that it really changed things anyway. Cordel still felt that he had sufficient grounds to keep the pair here for the night, what with going through a tropical storm. There was no telling what sorts of diseases were out there in this tropical weather. “That at least explains why your ankle looks so bad then, K’em. You probably just exacerbated your injury with that move.”
“And it’s not just respiratory illnesses I’m worried about W’ten, although I fully appreciate hearing about the odds. Thoughtful touch, that. Even just a one percent chance is too much with the overcrowding here.” This wasn’t exactly a good moment for Cordel. On one hand, he really did care about his friends and how they saw him, but he had a duty to perform and that duty was not, ‘look after everyone else and then let your close friends do whatever they want’. Everyone had to be treated the same. “Look, it’s only one night of observation, just to make sure neither of you are carrying something that might be transmitted to other people in the Weyr. You heard how fast the flu spread, right? It started, as near as I can tell, from just two people and, within a week, it had spread to nearly the whole Weyr. As a Healer, I can’t let that happen.”
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Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 6:12 pm
K'em couldn't help but fell completely disappointed with the result. Oh sure, he knew Cordel was going to keep him, he'd practically signed his metaphorical heart away when he confessed to all his misdemeanors. But W'ten was supposed to get off. This was completely ridiculous. And the worst part was the Healer actually had the grounds to keep them there and here, his word meant more than K'em's did.
"...fine."
The brownrider said nothing else, finally backed into a corner. All his tricks had been used and he had no more logic to spare. Truth be told, the wingsecond was pretty exhausted after the day's events. All he wanted to do was curl up on the cot and go to sleep. Admittedly, that's all he was trying to gain by avoiding Cordel, but a whole lot of good that did him. He'd have been better off agreeing in the first place. Who knew what Cordel was going to deal out now?
Not exactly willing to find out, K'em flopped over on the cot. After gingerly propping his leg up, he flung a hand over his eyes (rather dramatically, we might add), and closed his eyes. Maybe if he pretended to fall asleep, Cordel would just leave him alone...
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Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 8:59 pm
Thoughtful touch? Had W'ten not been… well, not been W'ten he would have rolled his eyes at that. He did odds like that in his sleep, and the only thing that could stop his brain from working through mathematical formulas was a healthy dose of felis juice. Even then it only seemed to just slow the whole process down. Regardless, he hadn't included it to be thoughtful, he had included it because he deemed in necessary. Necessity before thoughtfulness. That has always been his belief. Cordel should know that.
Still, the Healer did have a point, and he did not need to calculate the odds of how fast a virus could spread under conditions such as these to believe him. The Healer was making a surprisingly reasonable argument, not to mention one that was not contaminated by his usual surplus of emotions. It was a refreshing concept. K'em also seemed willing to accept Cordel's words, and so W'ten did not feel the need to either. When faced with a better put together, rational argument, one had to back down. It was, as he said often enough, only logical.
The brownrider gave K'em one last look, taking note of his position with a quiet snort. It seemed like he had had enough of Cordel, and if his roommate was done then he had nothing more to say. With a final nod to the Healer, he hung his jacket on the post of his bed and settled down. Perhaps now he could get some math problems done. Where was he? Oh yes. If two events were only semi-mutually exclusive on the basis of one being only partially reliant on the other, this effected the calculations of probability in the following ways…
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Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2009 9:28 pm
Clearly, W’ten still had yet to master the human notion of ‘sarcasm’. The man was anything but thoughtful… actually, no, that wasn’t quite true. He was always full of thoughts, math problems that made other men scream like little girls, and imaginary numbers that existed only in some sort of strange alternate universe. The Brownrider was just thoughtless about others. That was the right word.
And now K’em was just acting like a two-year old who had been sent to bed without dinner. Not that Cordel would ever encourage such a punishment, since he doubted the benefits of letting a hungry child starve, but the ‘two year old’ part still aptly described the young Brownrider’s emotional level. And his maturity level too. Now Cordel had a week or two of the silent treatment to look forward to, which wasn’t exactly a punishment. After all, it would give him more time to get his work done. Well, some at least.
Good. He glanced from one Brownrider to the other, just to make sure that they weren’t planning to bolt the moment he was out of the room. He did have some actual work to get done, after all; he was a Healer, not a baby-sitter, although one could argue that this was what K’em truly needed. Luckily, it looked as though his logic had worked for W’ten and K’em was too busy flinging a hissy fit to care. Carefully, he sidled out of the room to make some tea for them. He returned with a small tray with cups and a nice pot of hyssop and peppermint tea; something for the pain and something to fight off the flu. Plus a mild sedative, just in case someone needed it. Even if K’em was acting like a two-year old…
Even two-year olds needed care. The Healer disappeared again momentarily to get himself some klah, the forms he needed to fill out, and a chair to sit on. If any man so much as coughed, he wanted to be aware of it. It was protocol to keep someone around to watch cases of possible new diseases anyway.
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