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Tweak says, "Taters...Po-Ta-Toe!!!"

Alexander Hamilton (unimpeachable) wrote in spinningcompass,
@ 2022-03-07 20:26:00

Entry tags:

alexander hamilton, ~liberty becket

Who? Alexander & Liberty
Where? Medbay
When? Monday afternoon
What? A visitor outstaying her welcome ;)
Open? To medical people, but ask first

The weekend had been hell, there was no getting around that fact. The malaria, as they called it, was awful enough, but then on top of that he'd had to quickly adapt to all of the medical advancements and invasive treatments. The noise, the lights, the wires and tubes, consenting in desperation to a female doctor doing whatever she deemed necessary to get him stable. He had no doubt that Dr Cuddy was more than competent, but it was a culture shock on top of a frightening illness.

He'd been so pleased when he found he had visitors. Liberty, and Crawley, although he hadn't really been lucid enough so far to offer them more than the odd mumbled phrase of gratitude before falling asleep again. He was aware of Liberty's continued presence, though, to the extent that now when he woke to find the seat by him empty there was a slight disappointment. He'd missed her. He'd always see that she had been - a book would be left, or a note - but he'd missed her.

Sleep was strange. He felt like he was living years of his life at home, in the wrong order sometimes, bits would be repeated over and over, some he'd just get glimpses of, but he felt very strongly that these were real memories, not hallucinations. It was impossible to explain.

"...needs amendments...defend the constitution... treasury... Jefferson?"

A few seconds of silence, and the world shifted back to the station medbay, lights too bright, the steady beep that apparently meant his heart was still beating, the subtle tug of wires and tubes when he moved, and... he hadn't missed her this time.

"Hey. You're back," he observed, as casually as if she'd popped round for a coffee one afternoon.

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libertybecket
2022-03-12 06:54 pm UTC (link)

To Liberty, the very idea that you could be minding your own business and then be murdered was frightening, whether a lover or a neighbour was the culprit. There were disputes on Rica, and occasional fights, but unexpectedly taking someone's life went so far beyond that. It was a marvel to her that he wasn't more frightened, living in New York, but Liberty had been on the station long enough to learn that everyone had a slightly different version of normal.

'Then you were a very good lawyer, in this dream of yours,' she said to Alexander, looking a little more proud of him than was rightly merited by an account of something that his dream-self had done. 'Proved a man's innocence, and found the real culprit. I can't imagine how a murder could be resolved. The amount of mediation that would need. If it were real, he'd be paying back her family for the rest of his life.'

Even that didn't seen satisfactory, and Liberty pressed her lips together, thinking carefully. 'Hopefully Rica will never see anything like that. We disagree on a lot, but not the core values.' Ordinarily, Liberty would have drawn Alexander into a discussion of value-sets and social norms, but he was looking tired, and she hesitated.

'Do you want to rest?' she asked him, lowering her voice. 'I'll have to fight to stay again if they think I'm tiring you out.'

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unimpeachable
2022-03-12 07:25 pm UTC (link)

"Yes, I'd practically perfected it," he smiled, seeing in her expression that she was as invested in this (possibly imaginary) life as he was. What she said next caught him off guard though. Of course, if she hadn't known of any real life murders on Rica, she wouldn't have known what the punishment was, but the idea that you could... pay someone back for a murdered family member seemed outrageous to Alexander.

"Pay them back? No, he was hanged," he told her. Even women in his time knew that, it wasn't something he would have hidden from his own wife. If anything, it had reassured Eliza to know that the maniac wasn't on the loose, with a good memory of what her husband looked like and where he worked. "That's why it is so vitally important that the right man is sentenced. It's life or death."

He gave a resigned sigh at her question. "No," he answered honestly, because he never wanted to rest. "But my body disagrees with me." He really didn't want her to go, but it wasn't going to be exactly great fun for her just to sit there if he fell asleep again. "Why don't you talk instead. Tell me something I don't know yet. About your home, or your family... anything."

Usually he would have a more direct question for her, but it was beyond him at the moment. And frankly, he didn't mind if she just listed place names or read from an instruction manual, as long as she was there.

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libertybecket
2022-03-12 08:31 pm UTC (link)

'Hanged? With a rope?' Liberty's eyes widened in shock. One murder was bad enough, but following it with another? She shook her head. Alexander might have perfected his legal career in his dream, but the law that he'd dreamt up seemed very far from perfection.

'What an awful thing to imagine! I hope you weren't the one to kill him.' It was just a dream, she reminded herself. Alexander could murder hundreds in a dream and it wouldn't make him actually guilty of anything. He was talking about it so seriously, though, that it was hard not to be drawn in and do the same. She shook her head. 'I liked the other part of the dream better. Where you save the innocent people.'

What could she tell him about home that he didn't already know? Over the course of their discussions, she'd told him plenty about Rican politics, about how their meetings worked, and why the first generation had left Earth. What else? She thought for a moment, and then smiled. 'I never did tell you how I got the vote, did I? I'd been attending meetings since I was too young to know what was happening, but I got to be ten, and decided it wasn't right that everyone but me got to vote. I didn't count the babies, because you couldn't talk to them about it. So I asked, and you know what they said, don't you? No, Liberty, you're a child. But I'd been in meetings since forever and I knew that wasn't a good reason. I told them it was the same as people back on corrupt Earth saying someone had no vote just because they were female or had a bad government score or something.'

She spoke quickly, and paused only briefly for breath. 'And I got up in meeting and made my case, and I said that we had two kinds of votes. The first kind was whether something broke Charter, and I could recite the whole Charter back to front by then, I knew what broke it. The second was on resource allocation, and I said that claiming my mother could speak for me on that was faulty logic because I had my own set of interests, separate from hers, and by that time I worked on machine repairs that actually contributed to the colony and weren't just made for teaching me, and if I contributed why shouldn't I have my say? And-' she couldn't help a little grin here, at the memory, 'that's how I got my voting right.'

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unimpeachable
2022-03-12 10:47 pm UTC (link)

"Yes, with a rope," Alexander confirmed, not wanting to lie to her despite how much the information had surprised her. He didn't consider it particularly cruel or unusual given the hideous crimes he knew the man to have committed.

"Me? No, no, there is a state executioner," he tried to explain. It all probably sounded loopy out of context. She had as little idea what 18th Century New York was like as he had about life on Rica, really. "Sure. I liked that part better, too," he told her gently. Of course, no woman was going to relish the details of a public execution, was she? It was highly unlikely. They usually fainted, no matter how strong their constitution.

As Liberty started to speak, Alexander allowed himself to rest. He was listening to every word she said, but his eyes did close for a moment so she might have thought that he was sleeping. If she did, it didn't stop her from telling her story, and he was grateful for that. He was still frightened, anytime he woke to silence except for the machinery. If he could hear Liberty talking, everything was fine.

If he had been in better health, he might've poked her on the topic of "corrupt Earth" and the vote, but it was the sort of chat that was better saved for when they had a good, long, empty evening ahead of them over a bottle of wine. For now, he just smiled, a smile that grew as she went on.

"Ha. You're just incredible, Liberty," he told her without opening his eyes. "Will you stay awhile?" he asked softly.

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libertybecket
2022-03-13 10:58 am UTC (link)

If the thought of one man being hanged had disturbed Liberty, the notion that it was a regular enough occurrence that there could be someone employed for the express purpose of carrying out the killings seemed absolutely appalling. It was different for Alexander, she tried to tell herself. He came from a time of war – something else unknown on Rica, a colony young enough to stay ethically pristine – and he had probably seen so many awful things already that none of this bothered him. It wasn't his fault. Liberty knew that if she'd been from Cardea, not Rica, she'd have fought in Breakaway, because you had to, because Earth had killed Stanley Lorentzen as sure as if they'd put a bullet through him. She was just lucky, she'd been on the slow ship and slept the war away.

She couldn't judge Alexander – and even if she could have, now wasn't the time. He was too ill for a heated debate.

She told her story, and when he called her incredible she felt a tremendous sense of pride, even if it might have only been half-asleep mumblings. 'I'll stay,' she told him, mirroring his quiet tone. 'I'll stay just as long as I can.'

'Let me tell you another story,' she went on, and while the last had been told with the drama it deserved, this one was softer, her voice taking on an almost lyrical quality. 'I told you before that we only live on a small part of Rica. We have the landing site, and the town, and everyone who wants it has their own plot of land, all spread out, and there's more besides. But most of Rica is out there, out beyond the habitable zone, and even if we put all our resources into expanding, it'd take more than my lifetime to cover a fraction of it. Out there, you can walk and walk and it's nothing but orange dirt, as far as you can see. Orange dirt and the glow of the sun and the moons. I used to go out, after I got mad at someone, or at myself, and I'd think maybe I was the first person ever to walk on that bit of ground, and what that meant. How alone we were, and how we weren't, because there were people out there on other colonies, far beyond our reach, and if they looked up in full dark they could see the same stars too. I'd walk until my oxygen tank started beeping at me-' there was at least one tale of a narrow escape, but Liberty didn't think it was the right time, '-and then I'd turn and head back, and mostly then it seemed like all was right with the universe. So when we had to take a shuttle out, much further than anyone had ever been, looking for metal deposits, you know I had to be one of the people to go.'

Sometime between the beginning of the story at this point, Liberty's hand had crept up to hold Alexander's again, because he had asked her to stay, and that seemed to make it alright.

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unimpeachable
2022-03-13 06:43 pm UTC (link)

"Thank you," he whispered with a smile. He felt a great sense of relief washing over him, like he could actually relax in the knowledge that she was going to be right there. He knew that the medical staff would ask her to leave at some point, or she'd need to get a meal or some rest of her own, he didn't expect her to be there for him exclusively. But he would settle for 'as long as I can'.

The next story she told him was beautiful. He felt like her voice was fading in and out, but he could follow the visuals well enough. He could imagine vast landscape, many moons, orange dirt... and her voice...

He felt the little hand in his, and instinctively his fingers curled to hold onto her hand in turn. Previously, he'd been aware of her touch but not reacted in any way. Now, he wanted her to know that he felt it, and appreciated it, and accepted it.

"Mmhmm... am listenin'..." he told her sleepily. He wasn't sure that he would be for long, but for now, he was listening and taking it all in.

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