i need somewhere to post fic that's not a commentspamming ground

[anamuan]

(table # err, 5, i think, blatantly stolen from here.) I'm doing Merlin fandom, with a focus on Gwen and Morgana.

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086. Mud

[anamuan]

Gwen applies pressure, wraps it tight and ties it off. She gives the soldier a tag, written over with the seriousness and type of the injury, overall condition, and how quickly she'll need to see a doctor. She tells the soldier, who's sitting up, and lucid, and both of whose arms work fine, to tuck the tag into her clothes for the doctors at the other end, to tie the tag to herself if she has to, but not to lose it.

"If you were a little less with it, I'd have tied it around your wrist myself," Gwen says with what is almost, in another life, might have nearly been a smile. The soldier nods gravely, folds it into a pocket and loops the string through a button hole to secure it. She grunts in pain a little when the grunts lift her, and then she's gone back, and Gwen jumps up and runs to the next muddy hole with most of a person in it. Gwen didn't want to be here, but as long as she is, she's going to fucking make the most of it. She's got to. Her alternatives are watching people die.

She hasn't got any antiseptic wipes, is nearly out of water, but she's not going to bandage anything dirty. This one is a chest wound, on the side over the ribs, not too much deeper than a graze, but will need a healthy row of stitches, and difficult to bandage in the field so the soldier can get somewhere with actual soap and that won't be risking every needle to the sucking mud Gwen's currently kneeling in. She needs to stop the bleeding, but it's a good twelve hours to the nearest med-evac, so she needs to bandage it clean because twelve hours on top of however many they've been lying here is plenty of time for infection to set in.

"Where's your canteen?" she asks the soldier. His hand twitches towards a pocket in his kit, but his face is set, selfish and surly and Gwen knows he doesn't want to give it to her, didn't plan to give its location away. He's been in the field too long, clean water too hard to come by, and he doesn't want to share.

"I need to clean this before I wrap it up, or you will die," she tells him seriously. It's nearly true; the could die either way, and his chances of infection are much higher if she doesn't clean the wound. He might get an infection even if she cleans it, and he might not get an infection if she doesn't. He's a line soldier, though, and fuzzy with pain; she's the medic, and he's going to believe her, which is what she needs right then, so she doesn't even feel a twinge of guilt for saying it.

He scrabbles one-handed for the canteen and hands it over fast then, and she's careful not to use any more than necessary to clean the cut out as best as she can. Bullet graze that nearly wasn't a graze. She digs into her pack, does a quick mental supply check even as she pulls out a few precious butterfly clips and pulls the sides of his flesh together and secures them with the butterflies. Gwen gravely hands the canteen back to the soldier, making sure he can feel how heavy it still is. Once both her hands are free, she wraps the cut in gauze, and fills out his tag. She ties it to his wrist this time; he might not be in a position to give it to a medic by the time he gets to the other side.