ASKLEPIAN !
“That’s twenty. Lift your arms. Higher, over your head. Good.” A complaint was uttered, then, about the discomfort—even in this weather, ice water trickling down into one’s gear, down their sides, wasn’t the nicest feeling. Barre had heard this particular gripe so frequently that they were starting to forget to respond.
“Yeah. Well.” The medic blinked, glassy eyes fixed on where chunks of ice sloshed in the dirty little cooler—or, the Arm-Immersion Cooling Station, if you read the tape-label on the side (
with an addendum jotted below: Do Not Drink.). Mashed gnat bodies rode the waves, plastered to the melting ice. Their deaths must have been glorious. Barre didn’t look at the guard; eye contact was too much to ask on a day like today.
“It beats heatstroke. Grab a water and sit.” When Barre had heard that today's guards were being denied entry back indoors where they had all the
good stuff like air conditioning and cold tile floors that you can lay on if you're slick enough to not get caught, they had nearly thrown a fit. Or rather, they'd
daydreamed about throwing a fit, this thrilling little fantasy that'd lasted all of ten seconds, but ultimately Barre had done what they had always done best: nodded meekly and kept it moving. They could hardly recall the exact excuse given, though if they had to guess it might've been something to do with keeping stress off the HVAC by limiting daytime access to emergencies-only until the weather cooled off.
Barre’s grand responsibility, then, was to limit the emergencies. Strictly amongst personnel, of course; if the Gifted in the camp needed relief from the heat, no they didn’t. Not until someone in uniform said otherwise, and all the uniforms had to say today had amounted to,
Christ alive it’s fucking hot, and
eugh, my pits are gonna chafe if I dunk my sleeves, I’ll just have a water— Oh, wait. Shit.
“Uh.” Barre swallowed thickly, snapping back into the moment and tipping their face toward the cluster of off-rotation guards that’d been corralled in here to cool off. Had someone said that just now, or had it been earlier and already resolved? Their hands twitched nervously, thin fingers hooking one other. A hot gust of wind reached in meanly past the mouth of the tent, knocking a discarded web of six-pack rings from the table that Barre haunted onto the dusty ground. They watched the litter fall without bothering to reach for it. It was just a reminder that the tent was running low on bottled water.
After another moment of staring, Barre didn’t speak up to see who had opted out of wetting their arms. Worst-case scenario, coolers identical to the one on the table stacked neatly in the back carried ice packs and sheets. Worse-than-worst, if being stripped to near nudity and wrapped up in an ice cold bed sheet didn’t work, some lucky winner would get to go back indoors for a chilled IV and the scolding of a lifetime, probably. No doubt somebody out there, no matter how fanatical, would rather risk the heatstroke than spend another hour or so breathing down the sunburnt necks of languishing Gifted.
Which–yeah, fine, whatever. Barre wasn’t going to start headhunting heat-casualty risks, no matter how badly the urge nagged them. There were bigger fish being fried.
“One bottle each.” Had someone else already said that? Someone else had definitely said that,
just now, and Barre, thoughtless, had parroted it. Barre scratched behind their ear. Air. They probably needed air. A solid gulp of that musty furnace-wind straight from the source would totally fix them. Zombie-like, Barre lurched up from their spot by the table, the Arm-Immersion Cooling Station (
go on and say it five times fast), and shoved their way out of the tent. They had to squint against the harsh sunlight. Not a cloud in the sky, and Barre would like to think that it was the big and endless plane of nauseating blue stretching high above that was making their head spin but, really, it could’ve been anything. The unforgiving heat. The medication. The empty stomach. That droning and ceaseless cicada-song. Oh, to be a dead gnat drowned in an endless freeze.
Fresh air wasn’t helping, but the change of scenery was a welcome distraction. There was movement back in the tent, medical staff or the off-duty guards or both, but Barre was too fixated to retreat back to their post just yet. The strange static-prickle that had since replaced what their body understood to be pain fizzed gently up their leg, the dregs of a shattered femur that Asklepian had helped with—a week ago?
Maybe. It was written somewhere. All of these things had to be. Barre shifted their weight, leaning into that sensation in the hopes that it might grow some teeth, give them something
real to focus on. No dice. The prickle intensified and they wobbled haphazardly, but Barre was quick enough not to fall over, re-planting their feet and crossing their arms.
Burning. Why did they smell burning?
Oh. Because,
there, someone was burning something.Or rather, someone was
burning, full stop. Barre went still, deer-in-headlights still, zeroing in on auburn hair and blackened earth. An uncontrolled fire in dry conditions like this could spell catastrophe for their guards. And, yes, absolute hell and torment, etcetera, for the Gifted trapped in the blaze but what else is new for these captives? That wasn’t the point and it never would be. The
point was, somebody needed to do something, or a slapdash heat-relief-station wouldn’t be enough to fix the sorry state of Area 06. Somebody had to—
Oop. There it was. Even from this distance, squinting through the unforgiving glare, Barre could tell that the fire-starter had gotten a painful warning from some fed-up guard watching from the ramparts. Maybe later, after Barre had had a shower and the chance to properly cool down and decompress, they’d feel guilty about the surge of relief that hit them at about the same time that
Wildfire had been zapped. But that shame would have to come
later. Right now, Barre was rooted to their spot by the foreboding tent (far nicer, of course, than the ramshackle cover that the prisoners had to make do with, and close enough to the base, proper, that it was easy to divert off-rotation guards from their usual course indoors, since indoors was currently not an option), keeping an eye on the smoking char as if they still anticipated a disaster.
No disaster came, just more people. Each was subject to yet more
staring because it would cost Barre too much energy to turn around and shamble back into the tent, and maybe they were starting to like it out here. It sucked, sure, but the occasional stale wind was, uh…it was something. And anyway, though they had vowed not to go chasing down individual risks, a
certain heatstroke-prone-
somebody was out to play, evidently drawn by the spectacle of the would-be fire. Barre’s twitching hands curled into fists for one rapid squeeze. They ought to make sure there was enough water for
Blitz to have a bottle. Hell, they ought to just bring one to her now. But then, maybe she was headed indoors after this, and had no need for a store-brand bottled offering. Even so, wasn’t it the nice thing to do?
And on a day like today, wasn’t that nice thing to do
also the most medically prudent?
Barre cast a shifty glance to the other two, the fire hazard and the pale-haired one whose Gift they initially hoped, for her sake, was something that might buffer her from the amplified heat in her proximity to the oven-girl, before they recalled what it actually was. Or, what they were fairly sure it actually was. Neither
Wildfire nor
Lucendi’s aliases occurred to Barre at the moment, though those would be the only names they cared to know the two by, same with any Gifted. No doubt they had heard or seen them at least once before,
particularly Lucendi, but recollection was evasive in these conditions, and Barre had a mind like a sieve outside of their designated corners of expertise. They just knew, in this moment, that these were prisoners, and not worth the planned offering of bottled water, and maybe it would be smarter or nicer or
better to wait until
Blitz was done doing whatever she was doing near them and then no longer near them to go and offer a drink. Because, manners. Or something.
Not that it should’ve mattered. Nor should it have mattered that another prisoner was drawing near, meaning that Barre would have to wait for
all three to disperse before the coast was clear to play the waterboy (
so to speak). How frustrating. They shot
Balboa a dirty look for
no good reason at all, squashing a kneejerk hiccup of concern because what was she doing, just then, right before this? Working out, in this heat? What if she hurt herself? Had anybody checked? No; this face Barre recognized a little better, enough to know that their worry was both inappropriate
and unnecessary. This wasn’t anything new, for that one. There probably wasn’t anything to be so worked up about.
Not. That. It. Should. Have. Mattered. And it didn’t. Today was just hot and stupid and that was making it very hard for Barre to mind their business the way they ought to.
They forced in a full chest of air and pushed it out slowly.
Blitz’s ominous bat catching the light drew their eye, forced them to re-focus. Right. A gaggle of prisoners shouldn’t’ve, and
didn’t, matter. Team mattered. The
Initiative mattered. And so did being nice, in a sense, and Barre did a good job of justifying to themself why this was ultimately an act of kindness with no other factors to be considered as they hazily retreated into the tent, pulled one bottle from another soft plastic ring-net (
biodegradable, bragged the packaging, lest all that fuss about the ol’ climate crisis be for naught), and started off. Their unfocused eyes skipped over a distant shape, one they wrote off, for now, as someone crouched idly on the hot earth, not the watchful
golem that it was. They were too focused on the task at hand, which felt like burden enough as they drew in closer, trying very hard not to look directly at the prisoners, because
Blitz was all that required their attention, at the moment.
Until someone in uniform says otherwise. And then Barre was there, close enough to count the freckles and the sweat beaded over every one, but they waited patiently (to them, it seemed like patience; to an onlooker, they might resemble a carrion bird settling at the side of the road) for
Blitz to finish (or at least come to a natural pause in) whatever she had approached the other Gifted for, in the first place. In the meantime, they cast another look back to their safe, sweaty tent. There were plenty of staff to hold down the fort until their delivery was finished, surely.
