Chapter Text
Tanner was having a great morning if that was what you were going to ask.
“Fuck,” he cursed under his breath, trying to diffuse the cannon fuse. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Yes, that many “fuck”s were necessary—it represents the level of his panic fairly well, doesn’t it? As for how he ended up here, it’s embarrassing, really: his intrusive thoughts got the better of him, and he lit the fuse to see if he could put it out before it set the cannon off—
BOOM, went the cannon once the gunpowder was ignited, and it would have ruptured Tanner’s eardrums if he hadn’t been spending the past few months, almost a year, manning them on the airships. His eardrums were already permanently destroyed because of the constant BOOMing of cannons.
—but, clearly, he didn’t put the fuse out in time.
“I really hope that doesn’t hit anything,” Tanner muttered to himself, surrounded by only his shame as he watched the cannonball streak across the clear blue sky with an ear-piercing screech. “Or anyone. Gods, I hope no one hears it either.”
It disappeared as it fell, and a few seconds later, Tanner jumped from the faint yet distinct CRACK of ice.
He grimaced. He really hopes that no one was nearby.
Rain was in the middle of teaching Stella how to ice-skate, Kane sitting on the snowbank, watching, when there was a whistle: a muted and shrill noise that you could have mistaken for whatever avian species that lives in the tundra. It rose in pitch, and Stella turned her gaze to the sky, searching for the source; Kane and Rain followed suit.
Eventually, they spotted it: a small black dot with a faint, wispy white trail streaking across the sky. It grew bigger, and as it headed straight towards them, Stella’s squinted eyes widened in a mixture of disbelief and fear.
“Is that…” she started. She blinked, and oh, it definitely was.
“Get back!” Rain cried, shoving her onto the snowbank.
She fell, the cold biting her face and fingers as Kane grabbed her by the forearm and dragged her up and away from the lake’s edge. Her feet just barely scrambled onto the snow when she heard a CRACK and the quick, sharp breaking of ice. She heard Rain stammer something, then more cracking and a large splash.
When Stella flipped around, facing the ice again, there was a large fracture in the middle, fissures snaking out to all sides. Rain wasn’t standing at the edge.
“Rain!” she yelled. Then she had to yell out Kane’s name because, cautiousness be damned, his first thought was to jump into ice-cold water.
Stella, after hastily melting the frost off her boots, hurried over to the ice’s edge just as Kane broke through the water’s surface with Rain gasping wheezily for air.
“He’s swallowed water,” Kane said. “Get him to cough it out before he drowns.”
“Drowning on land?” Stella asked. She had pulled Rain out of the water onto the snowbank, rubbing circles on his back as he doubled over, coughing.
Kane nodded, promptly cursing, “fuck, that’s cold,” as he lifted himself onto the ice instead of elaborating further.
Rain stopped coughing by then, heaving every breath as his soaked frame racked in harsh shivers. “H—hear…” he stammered, his hands shaking as he tried raising them, “hear…r—ring aids.”
Stella held back a swear (Kane had never heard her curse before, and it was funnier to her to keep it that way) and lowered Rain’s hands. He had curled up on himself, still trembling with short, rapid breaths, by the time she removed his hearing aids. They smelled scorched, and Stella didn’t need Azura’s knowledge in mechanics to know they were damaged.
“Hypothermia will probably set in soon,” Kane said.
Stella hummed in agreement, wrapping Rain up in her scarf. The last time Rain got hypothermia, it took him the rest of the night to return to normal body temperature; for an Undead, at least.
That gave her a thought, and she looked back to Kane, the only other Undead in the area: soaked but not shuddering from the cold. A bad sign, Stella’s brain supplied.
“Okay,” she sighed. “We’ve got to get both of you to the infirmary.”
“Yeah,” Kane nodded. Then he blinked. “Wait. ‘both?’”
And the cold froze his brain, great.
“Yes,” she deadpanned. “Both.”
“And how are we going to explain the glowing veins bit?”
Good to know he's comfortable enough with the aftermath of his near-death experience to start treating it like an inconvenience now.
Stella waved him off as she helped Rain to his feet. “I think the Infirmary’s stopped questioning ‘abnormal’ incidents at this point in the war.”
Lyria was having a great morning-afternoon-time-adjacent-time; who wouldn’t, spending the better part of three hours trying to investigate a stray cannonball that flew all the way from where they kept the airships to the exact frozen lake Rain just so happened to be standing on.
That was sarcasm, if you couldn’t tell.
The cannonball’s impact shattered the ice’s surface, and Rain subsequently fell into freezing water; hypothermia set in scarily fast, and he was admitted into the Infirmary as quickly as Lady Nisha could bring him there. Natalie’s older-younger brother (Lyria needs Natalie to give her the rundown of her family’s age hierarchy again) was dragged there as well. Still, he seemed really nonchalant about his body temperature being below what would have otherwise meant certain death if he weren’t a Resurrected Undead or whatever.
And because cannonballs were under Elytra Corps’ jurisdiction (like the ground armies didn’t use them either), Lyria, as the Captain, had to investigate the incident, also because she was at the Infirmary, too, by coincidence. She managed to heave the cannonball out of the water with some help from Faye, and they traced it back to an airship at the dock. By the time they arrived, three hours had passed; that darn cannonball took over two hours to retrieve.
“Found it,” Faye called out, a few minutes into their search. “Fuse is gone, cannon still feels warm, and you can just about smell the gunpowder.”
“At least a three-hour time frame between the fuse being set off and now,” Lyria noted when she headed over. “Not that recent, but recent enough. We can narrow the suspect list down.”
Each airship had its own crew and squadron, consisting of around twenty-five personnel: fifteen for the actual airship crew and ten for the elytra squadron. There was also an unspoken rule of never messing on or below deck of another squadron’s airship, so the main culprit couldn’t have been part of another airship, unless it was for a prank or sorts, but that wouldn’t be until next month. As for the dockyards, they were less of a “come and go” area and more of a “sign-in and sign-out” one. They docked, built, and repaired the airships there, so unless you knew your way around like you did the back of your hand, just being there was a minor safety hazard; as such, they had people at the entrance to keep a record of the dockyard’s visitors.
“Not a lot of people who came in here today, Captain,” Prin, the one in charge of entries and exits, said, twirling his pen in a hand. “Haven’t heard from Ifera about anyone trying to sneak in either. Although they might just be asleep on the job again.”
Both Prin and Ifera were Elytra Corps members who had to withdraw from the force due to severe war injuries: Prin went partially blind, while Ifera became paralysed from the waist down.
(In hindsight, they might not be the best choice for security, in terms of being able to subdue people, but they're effective in intimidation: Prin’s scary in a “I may be blind, but I can still damn well snipeshot you regardless” way, and Ifera’s terrifying in a “I’ve got knives and I’m on wheels so just try to fuck with me” way.)
“Got any names for us?” Lyria asked.
Prin fumbled for his blindingly bright blue clipboard and handed it over. Faye peeked over Lyria’s shoulder as she scanned the names written in various styles of writing.
“Esme Harper, Kian Somers, Colette Lawson, Tanner Eaves, and Ever Vaughn,” she read out in a murmur, focusing on the times they entered and exited. Tanner and Vaughn signed out roughly near the time the cannon was set off.
“If it helps, somewhat, Captain,” Prin started, and Faye looked at him to offer her attention on Lyria’s behalf, “I remember Tanner leaving in quite a rush; pretty sure he would have forgotten to write his sign-out time if I hadn’t reminded him.”
With that tidbit, the difference in the neatness of Tanner’s entry and exit times stood out, and Lyria could already feel herself getting a migraine. (She was too young for those—thirty years too young.)
“Okay,” she huffed. “Step two: find Eaves.”
She sensed Faye’s confusion before the mechanic could ask. “Step one was heaving that fucking cannonball out of the lake, Walters.”
“…”
Lyrics could hear the judgment quite clearly, or maybe her subordinate was thinking that finding Tanner should be considered step three. Either way, Faye nodded. “Yes, of course it was, Captain.”
They said “goodbye” to Prin soon after Lyria returned his clipboard with a clear path in mind. Lyria may be the Elytra Corps’ new Captain since her sister’s death, but she was Tanner’s friend first—she knew him better than he knew himself, which was saying a lot.
“If we assume Eaves is the culprit, and he probably is, then he’s probably panicking, and he’s probably hiding, even up until now,” Lyria inferred as she led Faye to where she was sure Tanner was hiding—and if he isn’t, she’ll just drag Faye around Dreadfort until they find him. She’s known Tanner since she could successfully disassemble her parents’ beloved coffee maker; wherever Tanner is, Lyria will find him. Eventually.
This sucks, Rain thought, with about three quilts thrown over him because fuck him, treating a dead guy with hypothermia is significantly harder than treating a living guy turned blue from the cold.
And because fuck him again, Kane, deader than dead, recovered from jumping into freezing water within the first thirty minutes og being admitted into the Infirmary. Even Dr. Andersen seemed done with it all, Rain having seen the defeated look of redundancy in his eyes and heard him ramble incomprehensible mutterings on “the inane complexities of Undead healing processes” and “years of medical school just for the patient to heal themself.”
(Dr. Andersen’s generally disgruntled, but blasé, attitude to life in wartime is what Rain strives to achieve at some point when he isn’t in the fray.)
Anyway, back to Rain, still cold and suffering in an infirmary bed, while Kane occupies the bedside chair, shuffling his playing cards and perfectly fine.
“I hate you,” Rain stated with a shiver, glaring at the other Undead.
“I can leave if you want,” came Kane’s dry reply. “I don’t have to be here.”
Rain grumbled. “Don’t,” he muttered tiredly, tugging the quilts tighter around him. Stella left a while earlier to find and ask Lyria about her investigation into the stray cannonball, and he really didn’t want to be alone.
Kane either scoffed or sputtered out a laugh. Rain wasn’t too sure; three hours of sitting in bed awake, everything still numb, was exhausting his brain. He shut his eyes, just for a moment, he told himself.
The shuffling stopped, and Kane was scooting his chair closer to the bedside. “Well, because you asked so nicely.” (The second Rain gets out of this white, sterile fucking building, he will shove Kane into that damn lake they fell into earlier.) Rain blinked blearily as he was presented with a fanned-out deck of cards.
“I know we’re dead and all, Rain, but you have to stay awake until you return to normal body temperature, whatever that is.”
“Says who?”
He received the most deadpanned of deadpanned looks. “Just pick a card before you fall asleep sitting up.”
Begrudgingly, Rain reached out for a card. Two of Hearts, he memorised, and he slipped it back into the deck for Kane to re-shuffle. “I feel like a five-year-old,” he said blankly, Kane some three rounds of overhand shuffles in. “You’re entertaining me with magic tricks like I’m a five-year-old.”
“Again,” Kane reminded, “I can leave.”
“I swear, if you do, I will freeze you solid and drag you around everywhere so you can’t leave.”
His threat went over the other’s head, blatantly ignored, if Kane nodding along listlessly was anything. “You and Nat would get along: you’re both angsty cryomancers who’ve suffered from hypothermia and repeatedly threaten to turn people in life-size popsicles.”
Rain shook his head—he might well make an effort to stay awake himself if Kane’s helping him do so. “She scares me,” he admitted, point-blank. “I don’t know what you’ve been feeding her—”
“Cockroaches.”
“—but she’s really intimidating. Wait, what?”
Kane looked up. “What?”
They had a bit of a staring contest for a comedically long moment before the awkward silence grew too awkward, and Kane held out a singular card. “Two of Hearts.”
Correct, but Rain decided that if he was to be bedridden for the next few hours, then he would be a bedridden piece of shit.
“Nope,” he bit his tongue, holding back a snicker. He thought of another card.
Kane rolled his eyes and flicked a different card at him. “Ten of Spades, you liar.”
The Ten of Spades flew into his lap, and Rain looked at the other with both surprise and suspicion; the card he had switched to was, in fact, the one just flicked at him.
“Witchcraft,” he accused, returning it.
“Pot meet kettle,” Kane scoffed, descending into quiet laughter as he reshuffled the deck. “Know any card games?”
Rain thought back to all the yelling and temporarily broken friendships a simple game of UNO caused before Herobrine arrived. “Probably not. We’re done with the one magic trick?”
“I mean,” Kane shrugged, dealing out the cards in two piles on the bed, “unless you want me to keep entertaining you like a five-year-old.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“Good to know. I’ll teach you how to play War. It’s easy enough.”
Spoiler: it was not, in fact, “easy enough,” and Rain proceeded to fumble so badly that he’s confident that even if Kane purposely threw the game, he would still lose.
There are upsides to Felegin’s medical career, and there are downsides.
An upside: all those years of medical school feel used and not like a waste of his twenties.
A downside: he feels redundant in the face of his patients healing themselves, so those years of medical school may very well have been a complete waste, in the grand scheme of things.
Another upside: he’s helping people!
Another downside: it’s such a generic reason that Felegin just feels depressed.
“YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT, TANNER, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING—”
One of Felegin’s favourite upsides of the job is, if there are any, listening to all the consequential reprimands post-incident.
“DID YOU LOSE YOUR COMMON SENSE WHEN YOU LOST YOUR HEARING!?”
And this one might be his new favourite.
Helena jumps from both yells and looks up from her computer, almost spilling her tea in the process. “What in Winter’s name?”
Kara swivels over in her chair. “Is this related to this morning? Felegin, Lady Evrett’s charge is your patient, right?”
“High-profile,” Helena murmurs, already recomposed. She takes a dignified sip of her peppermint tea. “Wonder why the Grandmaster hasn’t come in for a visit. This morning, you say?”
Felegin nods, acknowledging the sight of three Elytra Corps members entering the Infirmary lobby as he recalls for the receptionist: approximately four hours ago, Rain Alala and a member from the Netherbane, Kane River, were admitted to the Infirmary due to hypothermia after an incident involving a cannonball, a frozen lake, and ice water. River recovered in the first thirty minutes (see what Felegin means about feeling redundant?), while Alala has yet to warm up to what the Infirmary estimated was normal body temperature for an Undead. Felegin had just finished an appointment with Lyria Zafrir and was assigned as Alala’s attending doctor, while Zafrir rolled up her sleeves (and promptly rolled them back down because they were just entering Spring) to investigate.
“He’ll be staying overnight then, huh?” Helena asks, and again, Felegin nods.
“Until he warms up, yes.” By then, Zafrir and her two subordinates found a nice spot steps away from the reception desk to stand and block the way; all three seemingly too absorbed in what was Zafrir’s voice rising in pitch, an extremely fearful Elytra scout, and a deadpan mechanic. But hey, their conversation was coherent enough and entertaining. And there are no others in the lobby, that too, Felegin supposes.
Tanner, he identifies, raises his hands in a tacky form of defence. “I acknowledge what my actions have led to, Captain—”
Zafrir nods, crossing her arms, and scarily enough, she looks just like her late older sister, just with dyed pink hair and only marginally shorter. “For your sake and the sake of your future career, I should hope so.”
“—but why are we at the Infirmary?” Tanner finally finishes.
“Because—” Zafrir starts, only to trail off as her previously enraged face shifts to one of addled confusion. “...that is a good question—Walters, why are we here?”
“You wanted Eaves to apologise in person, Captain,” Walters, the mechanic, supplies. She eerily acts and speaks like Helena, and both Felegin and Kara turn to the receptionist.
Helena side-eyes them both, rolling her eyes with a scoff. “Do I look like someone who would like to have children?” she asks rhetorically under her breath as Zafrir thanks Walters for the recollection. And she’s correct, Felegin cannot, in any way, see his colleague as a nurturing mother; however, as a wine aunt, definitely.
He wraps up that thought just as the trio approach the reception desk. Kara returns to her designated computer with another swivel, and Helena sips her tea a final time before addressing the group in front of her.
“The three of you visiting someone?” she asks in that customer-service voice of hers, as if she didn’t hear the earlier, quite audible, exchange.
They are, as overheard earlier, and Felegin leads them to the private ward where Alala was placed. It’s around the time for him to monitor his body temperature, so it works out.
Alala is still awake, which is good—although he’s visibly enervated; eyes half-lidded and blinking slowly but frequently. He probably would have dozed off long ago if it weren’t for River rambling nonsense in a seemingly blank stupor, animatedly as well, while the two Undeads played…cards? (Felegin also caught word of “stuffed that frog-gorf-thing in a jar and handed it over to Ciara to supervise him,” and now he has several questions that will probably remain unanswered.)
Felegin avoids staring stupefied at their game for too long. If it works, it works, and it’ll have to continue working because four whole hours have passed with no signs of improvement, but at least Alala’s condition hasn’t worsened. His patient complains in incoherent, tired mumbles (the reason why they put him in a private ward: for the other hospitalised patients’ sakes) at being informed of his prolonged stay, and Felegin ends the interaction with routine doctor talk.
He hears the apology as he walks out, and it’s said in a combined tone of fear and remorse. Some steps away from the door, he hears a yelp and a thud, followed by a pained groan.
Felegin sighs, and turns heel back towards the room.