Private Ardor's Sorrow: My Greatest Joy

[Cybelle Sal-Soren]

TAG: Brandyn Sal-Soren

The night was quiet.

Naboo was peaceful as it typically was, with the evening air full of crisp citrus and the echo of little crickets. There wasn't a cloud in the sky with stars glimmering overhead. It was the kind of peace that usually soothed her when nightmares crept in, resting in her childhood bedroom. She felt safe here. Content. Loved in the presence of parents who had wanted her, cared for her, when no one else in the galaxy seemed to notice an abandoned Hapani child. It should have been another night, like any other.

Only something woke her with a gasp.

For a moment, she didn't understand and could only feel the racing of her heart. Her breathing was short, and something inside her ached. Not the soft, familiar kicks and pulls of the child she carried but a sharp and foreign pain that wasn't her own. It burned through their bond like lightning flowing across still water. She shivered. Brandyn.

Her fingers gripped the sheets. The connection between them had always been gentle, even after his parents had passed away. Even when he had taken revenge for their death. This was suddenly raw and electric, and it flooded her with agony and fear. Cybelle tried to rationalize it with herself, trying to quell her panic. Of course, it couldn't be physical pain. It just couldn't be. But it was deep, wounding, and all too real. "Bran…", the whisper was full of plea, coupled with the whimper of a wounded kitten.

The next wave hit her before she could brace for it. Pain twisted through her abdomen, sharp and unfamiliar, stealing every bit of her breath away. She curled instinctively inward, holding her stomach with varying degrees of panic, worry, surfacing for their baby. For the man she loved more than the air she breathed. The Force around her trembled while it reacted to her distress…She tried to calm herself, to find her center, as Master Aegis had taught her time and time again. 'Breathe'. Find peace…But there was no peace.

Only the echo of his pain.

Tears blurred her vision as she tried to reach Brandyn through the ether, tried to find him in the dark. Nothing answered her but distance.

"Bran, please…"

The pain struck again, sharper now, lower, and more urgent. It faded after several moments…But then the cramping started again. Worse. Realization dawned on her slowly and terribly. 'No…Not now. Please, not now.', she thought to herself, pleading to nothing, while she forced herself upright. Her breathing hitched, and the room started swimming. Something didn't feel right…

Was it supposed to hurt this badly?

"It's all right…", she whispered, though, her sweet voice shook from the bravery she tried to fake. "It's all right…We're going to be all right…"

But she wasn't sure she believed it.

It was only a few moments later that Gianna Aegis burst into the room to find Cybelle barely conscious and crying softly about the baby, about Brandyn, delirious, but very obviously going into labor. She didn't respond to commands or instructions but kept trying to refuse them. As if it could somehow stop the process—As if she could wait for her husband.

He was supposed to be there.

He was supposed to be there.

"I need Brandyn…I need him. I can't…Go away—I need him…I…"

He was supposed to be there.

He wasn't there.

He was hurting, she couldn't help, and he wasn't there… "Bran…"

"I—"

 

[Brandyn Sal-Soren]

// Departing Atrisia System
// Republic Medical Frigate Carazan
// Med Bay 1

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The light was white.

Not the kind of white that comforted, but the kind that burned. The environment was sterile and unrelenting, washing everything in cold clarity. Monitors hummed. Oxygen hissed. A rhythmic tone clicked with each fragile heartbeat. The air reeked faintly of antiseptic and ozone. It was the sort of stillness that only came after violence had already spent itself.

Brandyn lay beneath the glare, motionless save for the shallow rise and fall of his chest. His once-handsome features were obscured beneath bandage and grafting mesh, a constellation of bruised metal and pinked flesh. The left side of his face had been stripped raw, the skin scorched away where energy and shrapnel had struck its passing blow.

The Ithorian surgeon, whose voice came in low, harmonic reverberations, moved with a calm precision that seemed almost reverent. Two surgical droids hovered beside him, silent extensions of himself.

“The impact was glancing,” one of them noted flatly.

“Had it struck full-on, half the cranial mass would be gone.”

“Eye integrity...destroyed. Dermal loss at forty-seven percent.”

Every instinct of the surgeons said that the man before him should be dead. And yet, he was not dead. Because he refused not to be.

Each time his heart faltered, the Force trembled through him, as if something, or someone, was calling him back from the dark. In the stillness of the medbay, a pulse beat that wasn’t entirely his own. A whisper. A breath. Bran...

His fingers twitched. Somewhere far away, stars shimmered against a Naboo sky. He saw her face, heard her cry his name...and then the sound fractured under a sudden surge of pain as the cauterizer flared, sealing what could not be saved. The agony was absolute, all-consuming. What remained of his vision when absolute white and the dark as consciousness threatened to wane. But he held onto it. He used the pain. Because pain meant there was still a thread between them.

"Keep him under," the Ithorian murmured, though the command was unnecessary. Brandyn's body was already slipping toward the edge again, his pulse stumbling.

A voice spoke, someone that was on the ship with him, sitting at his side, but he did not know who. "Stay with me, Sal-Soren. You're not finished yet."

His breathing hitched once, ragged. Beneath the hum of the machinery, a single tear traced down the uninjured side of his face, vanishing into the sterile sheets. His consciousness flickered, reaching, no stretching and searching for her warmth in the cold. He found only distance and the echo of her fear.

She's afraid, he thought dimly, for me. For our child.

His lips moved soundlessly. "Cybelle…" Then, nothing but the hiss of respirators, the cold white light, and the steady, mechanical rhythm that refused to stop.

He wasn't supposed to be alive. But he was. And that would have to be enough — for now.

| TAG: Cybelle Sal-Soren |

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