Welcome to Gaia! ::

Even in a field hospital, where they so often provided chiefly palliative care, the long drone of an EKG falling flat was nothing you could completely ignore. Laney had been nearby, changing bedsheets on some of the empty cots -- good work for someone like her, one of the nurses with no professional medical training -- when she heard the sudden break in rhythm of a heart that had been unplugged from its monitors or had given up the ghost. She looked up instinctively -- a few other faces did too. Tucking the used bedsheets into the basket balanced against her hip, Laney made her way over to the curtained-off source of the sound to check on it.

She found a body, as she'd expected -- and already unplugged from its machines. And beside it, someone considerably more living: a familiar burst of vibrant red hair, woodland-wise eyes.

And a bucket.

Slade, he went by now, not that it was possible for her to vocalize it in a greeting. With her free hand, the one that wasn't toting a laundry basket, she gestured at the -- well, it was hard not to think of it as a chum bucket -- and raised both eyebrows in question.

Laney let out a small, audible sound -- a closed-mouthed hunh of 'well, what do you know' at the bucket. If Slade didn't know and Laney didn't know, she guessed she'd have to take it on faith that it was some sort of medical wisdom -- like she did with everything else. She set her hamper on a folding chair, then held up a finger to indicate a moment's wait: long enough to check the time on her crappy swatch watch and scribble it on the corpse's makeshift medical chart at the foot of the bed.

While toting around dead bodies didn't exactly light up her day, like most hospital work, she was used to it by now. That wasn't precisely why she was a little put off by the task. Instead, it was the constant frustration of not being able to communicate at all while her hands were occupied. Carrying a pair of legs meant that even her rudimentary little gestures were all but closed off to her. She took her little notepad out of her back pocket long enough to scribble the words How do you know they don't already? and then, in all-caps, the word JAMBALAYA underlined three times. She gave Slade a second to read what she'd written before she tucked the pad away into the seat of her ratty old jeans again.

Laney pointed at Slade, then clapped the fingers of one hand together repeatedly in a yapping motion and raised her brows in question again. Will you make conversation? She situated herself between the corpse's feet and lifted one with each arm, waiting to make sure they walked in the same direction at the same time.

Laney, by virtue of her circumstances, had been spared ever actually eating the much-vaunted jambalaya there in camp. Her life was powdered protein drinks and Metamucil, anything that could mix with water to go straight to the back of her throat with no intervention. "Mmmm!" she answered cheekily to Slade's suggestion that they eat their bacon-scented friends, shaking her head in wry amusement.

It wasn't likely, of course. The Negaverse wasn't usually kind enough to send back bodies to be made use of.

She listened, greatly interested, while he nattered on through their work. He tended, in general, to have a knack for filling up conversational space: the presence of other people came easily to him in that regard. It was companionable. It wasn't surprising to hear someone like him express a longing for his everyday life, of course -- after leaving the Negaverse, he'd spent something like a year rebuilding one, losing himself in it fully. There were lots of them here that missed it.

Not Laney, though.

I didn't have a normal life, she wanted to say. There's nothing to miss.

There had been no job to go to, no book clubs, no bank account . . . the only friends she'd really had were either dead or living here at the Oasis with her. She missed going to the movies or the theater, she guessed -- but other than that, nothing that was gone could ever come back. Gooey doughnuts and l
late night KFC runs were not in her future, no matter what else it held. Laney Sutton was nothing, and no one had liked her, least of all her own family.

But this was not what Slade wanted to hear. It wasn't what anyone wanted to hear -- and she felt a responsibility for his happiness more than most, she supposed. This was what he'd become after giving up his life with the Negaverse -- and the life he'd lived as a civilian before that. This was all he'd ended up with in return. So she just nodded her agreement that sure, there was some theoretical Laney out there that had a full, vibrant life she missed living, and shrugged. It wasn't like he was ever going to find out whether or not she still knew how to be a regular person after the war. They all knew they were losing.

She set the body down gently, only a little guilty for the way she wiped her hands off on the sides of her pants afterward. It was an ugly job, dealing with the dead, and not one that was psychologically easy on anyone. Laney pointed at herself, clasped her hands together in a simple plea gesture, tapped her finger beneath one eye, pointed again at Slade, and then . . . with a grimace of uncertainty as to how to communicate the last word, drew a big circle in the air and pointed up at the sky.

Laney let out a frustrated sigh and reached for her little pad and pencil, prepared to scribble it out if the gestures didn't translate well enough.

Laney made a phbhbhbhbt! sound of dismissal, accompanied by a wave of the hand, at the notion that Sheik's planet was somehow unfit for mixed company. Her own Wonder, once an elegant temple and a place of rest, now sported a haphazard array of large electrical appliances all plugged cables-dangling into the well: a magical laundromat for all the camp's bloody clothes. They all made do, and it was no fault of Slade's if his world found its best use as a mass grave.

Dead people weren't frightening anymore. They weren't anything. They were just dead. Five years of time and exposure had dulled the power of that concept to stir fear and revulsion in her heart.

There were other horrors so much more deserving.

Without much concern, Laney reached out and took Slade's hand.