Private Graverobbers

[Eurydice]

Pale fingers draped over the metallic, cubiform body of a holocron. They didn't clench. They rested. Motionless, lifeless.

Eurydice's consciousness was scattered in fragments, strewn about the destruction she'd caused. How could a single functioning lung unleash a scream that powerful? A mystery best left to the Force, no doubt. The girl did not understand it well enough to explain why what had happened, happened.

Perhaps she'd never get the chance to find out.

The Jedi had come and gone. Eurydice's world was reduced to distantly muffled sound and darkness. She didn't even know that she was alive, if barely.

The near-corpse laid among broken beams and shattered glass, her lips streaked with dried lines of crimson, one hand on the holocron she'd tried to offer Diogo , and the other several feet away. The scent of charred flesh and fabric was still pungent.

The last thing she'd heard with relative clarity was the sound of encroaching footsteps. Now, they'd faded into the same muddied background noise as everything else.

At the very least, she didn't feel pain. If Ashla or Bogan or whoever was feeling kind, then soon she wouldn't feel anything at all.

Ives

 

[Ives]

The rap-tap-tap of a knock at one's door rose above the weeping of bent steel and sparking of torn wires. The rest remained shrouded in silence.

Ives pushed the plate of steel that used to be a cover for the maintenance access aside. The piece of metal creaked but barely budged. Something had let out a powerful shockwave before things went silent, which had bent the plate out of shape. Ives had to put his all into dislodging it, and it eventually relented, crashing to the floor with an unceremonious thud.

The scene within the hangar was a mess. Exposed wiring, dented plating, and debris strewn all over the place. Crates lay flipped on their sides, with their contents spilling out and scattered all across the hall. Marks and dents on the flooring, walls, and ceiling radiated outward from a central point, like someone had dropped a stone in a pond of water with explosive results.

Ives walked over to inspect the devastation, idly kicking aside debris, when he stumbled upon an arm. It had been cleanly removed from its owner whom Ives found a few paces further, laying in a shivering mess at the center of all the debris.

"Oh dear."

- - -

Something about a knife hitting the wood of a cutting board carried an inherently comforting ambience that always helped to steady Ives when he found his hands shaking. Whether it was nostalgic fondness or simply the routine of well-practiced movements, he wasn't sure. Nor did he particularly feel the need to discern when all that mattered was that it helped him wind down.

The girl was stable enough. Ives had done what he could with what few tools and supplies he carried. Alone and without assistance, it had been nerve-wracking to operate on someone again. Between the puncture wound and the trauma of a missing arm he doubted she'd pull through, but she had better odds now.

Ives dropped chopped greens into the pot and gave it a stir. It would have to cook a while undisturbed, and it was time he check on Eurydice again.

 

[Eurydice]

Eurydice stirred. She realized she was some place that wasn't the ground. She realized this before she realize that she was alive.

With the chill of death still threaded through her bones, the girl tried to reach for the stake embedded into her abdomen. The skin there felt so tight, so unpleasant, so sore. Her hand wouldn't move.

It felt…

It felt?

Feeling returned slowly. Or, perhaps, it had always been there and she was just beginning to recognize it.

Eurydice relearned how to open her eyes. It was like dragging sandpaper over delicate tissue, rough and gritty. For a long time, she stared at the muted tones of the world around her, but nothing was ready to come into focus.

Sound registered next. No more explosions, no more blaster fire. Just tapping. A gentle, muted rhythm. It didn't immediately frighten her, but maybe she'd learn to fear that, too.

Then, there was smell. A gentle, earthy scent drifting on stale air. That one roused her the most, and the world slowly blinked back into focus.

Her chest lifted sharply, and she tried to clear her throat on a wheezing exhale.

If this was the afterlife, then perhaps dying hadn't been so bad after all.

Ives

 

[Ives]

The patient turned out to be stable. Breathing fine, no bleeding, and pulse—well not exactly strong but noticeable and steady. She remained unconscious, resting on the best approximation of a hospital bed built from a cot and an improvised assortment of medical supplies.

Ives sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the room, by a small table with the remnants of his medical supplies strewn across it. Stocks of various rare and stolen supplies had nearly been emptied. Months of painstaking work gathering medicine and tools had gone into saving the lady's life today. It was a small measure of relief that his efforts hadn't been in vain, though he didn't take any pride in it.

Ives deflated into the chair, settling his head against the sloped backrest. He struggled keeping his eyes open. The patient wasn't going anywhere, and the food would take a while longer to cook. Maybe...Ives sank deeper into the chair.

Among the strange places he'd used for sleep, the cushioned wood here counted among the more comfortable. It wasn't ideal, but he could hardly bargain for better at the moment. If anything happened, he'd be closeby, and it wasn't like he was a heavy sleeper.

As he began to drift off, he idly mused that he would probably strike a grisly sight from the point of view of that lady. Still partially covered in blood that wasn't his, eyes dark and sunken, with disheveled hair and a sickly complexion. He lacked the time to—

A sharp exhale from his patient roused him from crossing over to the land of the dreaming. He pulled himself halfway upright in the chair, pinching the bridge of his nose then dragging his hand down to cover his mouth.

"Madame?" He asked, voice muffled by his hand.

Eurydice

 

[Eurydice]

Eurydice didn't notice him at first. Either she was still stunned, or Ives just blended in that well with their drab surroundings.

A part of her was still laid out on the hangar's cold tile. Quiet and motionless as life bled from her.

"Madame?"​

Muffled though it was, Ives' voice hit like a discordant note in that quiet symphony between life and death. Adrenaline pulsed through the girl, sudden and nauseating. Eurydice's eyes flared wide, the frightened white of her sclera catching the low lighting.

She tried to sit up, choked on the pain, then fell back onto the cot like a ragdoll.

"Wh-"

It was hard to speak around a tight throat and raw vocal cords. It hurt even to move her mouth, given how her lips had chapped and cracked.

At least, from her vantage point on the makeshift bed, she had an increasingly clear view of this stranger and his pallid, sullen, blood-stained features.

In some of the ancient Sith rituals she'd read about, sacrificing a corpse wasn't enough. Dark magic required a life to drain. In grim resignation, she idly wondered how she would feed the Force.

"Wh…what…d….you….?" she rasped.

Ives

 

[Ives]

"Ah..." Ives observed her fearful movements a moment, considering his options.

He retrieved a small satchel from the table. Crossing the room, he stopped beside and placed two fingers by her throat. Her carotid was pulsing rapidly. Ives grimaced.

He produced a couple of flowers from the satchel. The scent they emanated immediately permeated in the small space. It was pleasant and faintly reminiscent of jasmine.

He took one and set it aside, then placed a handful of them by Eurydice . The petals had a rich red colour in the center that turned into a deep blue near the edges.

"Breathe," he said, making a show of inhaling the flower's scent. "These help."

He moved away from her to get a cup and some boiling water. He set it down on the small table and to drop individual petals into the steaming cup.

"Millaflower, grows on Naboo," he slipped into a practiced tone of reassurance. "Your nervous system is wound up. If you don't calm it down your wounds may reopen, or you could sustain new injuries."

 

[Eurydice]

His steps might've been slow, but they were a blur of movement to Eurydice's exhausted, addled mind.

Suddenly, his fingers were at her throat. Two of them, pressed just beneath her right ear. The girl stiffened as her artery leaped against his touch.

The space between them was suddenly filled with the suggestion of something…floral? Eurydice wrinkled her nose, not in displeasure but surprise. That hadn't been expected.

Then again, none of this had. Not her survival, not her recovery, not the faintly pleasant scent of jasmine.

Breathe, he'd said, and Eurydice followed his instructions. Her lungs filled with stale air for what felt like the first time. Then again. And again.

Something in her sought to touch the tiny blossoms at her bedside, but she could not make her hand move. Odd, but that was set aside for now. Eurydice knew she was injured, but she had yet to realize the extent of it.

"Millaflower," she repeated in a low murmur. Her throat stumbled around the syllables, still raw and sore and choked in dust.

Quiet blue eyes watched the petals as they fell into the cup of steaming water. They were so bright, so pretty, so very contrasting to their otherwise drab surroundings.

Her gaze flicked to the man behind the cup. A young man, his features still boyish set in grim bone structure.

"Are you a…" she trailed carefully, as if she were still cautious of speaking. "….nurse?"

If he were an acolyte, he would've taken her back to the temple. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.

Eurydice swallowed down a lump in her throat. Calm, she reminded herself. She searched for anything familiar about her dimly lit surroundings, and found nothing.

There were only the petals, this stranger, and a cup of hot water between them.

"Where are we?"

Eurydice

 

[Ives]

"Am I a nurse?" Ives repeated the question to himself, in his own quiet and accented words.

He stirred the petals inside the cup. He'd trained as a nurse. Worked as one, too, though that now lay buried under a year's—no two years', by now, worth of scattered memories. The knowledge he'd attained back then remained readily accessible in his mind, even if everything else about that time seemed a foggy blur.

Ives tapped a spoon against the edge of the cup to reunite lingering droplets with the tea, then brought the cup over to the patient. Mercifully, Eurydice asked different question that spared him the complicated endeavor of explaining the last couple years of chaos which meant that he was and wasn't, technically, a nurse.

"These are maintenance tunnels. Not far from where I found you. It's safe here, if you're worried about that. Most don't know they're here, and the few who know aren't aware of the layouts."

He set the cup down on a relatively well-balanced stack of crates that functioned as a good-enough approximation of a nightstand.

"Slow, it's not very concentrated but it might still be overwhelming," he gestured to the tea.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

 

[Eurydice]

Unsurprisingly, Eurydice's mind began wandering towards the worst possible outcome. Or rather, because her mind had expanded, a series of different horrible outcomes. Perhaps he was one of those black market doctors intending to poach her functioning organs. Maybe he was a Sith Lord skilled in subterfuge and redirection, concealing his power until he sought fit to strike. Perhaps he was an undercover Jedi, who would dispose of her upon discovering that she had no great Sith secrets to tell. In every situation she could conceive, it all ended poorly for her.

The possibility that he was just a guy helping an injured person lingered somewhere in her head, like a forbidden thought because things were never that easy.

Ives tapped the spoon to the edge of the cup, and the resulting clink startled Eurydice from her doom spiral.

"Oh," she said softly to his explanation. It was as close to gratitude as she could come in her state. The maintenance tunnels, then. They weren't far from where she'd encountered those awful Jedi. Her eyes flicked to the floral tea, brow tensing as she tried to collect her thoughts.

The girl's memories were an awful blur of shadows and pain and the bright flare of a lightsaber. The grim countenance of her initial assailant flashed in her mind, even the look of finality he'd worn when her trembling hand pressed the knife's edge to his throat. Then…

"There was a girl," she croaked, recalling Eloise with her purple hair and stature. "Tall. I was holding a knife, she attacked me, and I…"

Eurydice trailed, brow sinking further. What had happened after that? "I screamed. Louder than I ever had."

She'd bellowed with everything she had, until her lungs were ready to pop and her world went black. Her throat still felt raw, and she finally decided to reach for the tea.

Her hand would not move. It felt...it didn't quite feel…

Panic surged through every nerve that still remained in her body. Eurydice threw off the blanket, then drew up the billowing fabric of one dark sleeve.

Empty.

Her head snapped up to Ives, her face supremely panicked. Her lips opened and closed incredulously, like a fish gasping for water.

Ives

 

[Ives]

With all the tact of a Rancor in an art gallery Ives returned the panic in her eyes with his own look of twisted dread.

"I..." he began, but his voice came out quiet and wavering.

Why'd he ask something so dumb? Rookie mistakes, after all this time?

He cleared his throat, took a moment to get back to that clinical headspace.

"You were a step away from death's door."

His gaze moved to where her arm should have been.

"There are options these days, cloned tissue or prosthesis, you have ways to..." he began to rattle off the standard lines he'd memorized during training, but they rang hollow. Nor did they anchor him in that detached mindset. He was jumping between thoughts, saying the first thing that came to mind.

Without that professional detachment of being on the job or a company script to recite he found himself at a loss for words. None of the many scripts he'd practiced reciting felt right at this time.

Sighing, he pulled a chair alongside the bed and sat down. He leaned forward, having to tilt his head up slightly to look at her.

"I'm not really good with bedside manner, but," he began. Any direction was better than silence, he decided.

"You were up there, bleeding out and missing an arm. I found you almost dead and did what I could to keep you alive. Turns out you're tougher than most and pulled through. I didn't have the tools to do anything about your arm. You'll need more rest and some medicine, but being awake at all is a good sign.

"No one else was there when I found you, and I can't really tell who or what you are, so I haven't contacted anyone yet. Are there people I should notify about picking you up?"

Eurydice

 

[Eurydice]

Much of what Ives said sounded like he was under water. Or maybe she was the one under water? Whoever it was, his voice sounded distant. Muffled. A little garbled, and though his words did register somewhere in the recesses of her mind, Eurydice couldn't hear much over the heartbeat throbbing in her ear.

Her arm. Her arm was gone. Severed by a lightsaber. Then why could she almost feel it?

There was something about the way this medic sighed that brought Eurydice back. Just a little, just enough to latch onto his words. A distraction to keep her from spiraling too far.

"I…"

A dry cough followed her wheeze. Eurydice reached for the cup, intending to wrap both sets of fingers around it. She startled for a moment, then adjusted its weight into her remaining hand.

So when he'd come across her, bleeding out, his first thought had been to drag her to safety? To treat her wounds? Surely this man could not be Sith. That alone gave her half a modicum of comfort.

He was mistaken about her being tougher than most. The girl had simply been lucky.

She tapped two nails against the cup. Next came a slow sip. Eurydice hummed absently as warmth suffused over her palate.

"N-no," she finally answered. "If we're not far from where it all happened, I can find my way back."

Did she want to go back? Of course not. But, she had nowhere else to go. Perhaps her absence wouldn't be missed - perhaps this was her chance to feign death and run.

"Are…"

The word died in her throat, and she glanced down to the amber surface of the tea. Faint ripples ran along its surface, reflecting back her nerves.

"Are they…gone? The people who attacked us?"

Ives

 

[Ives]

"I only found you up there," Ives nodded.

Implicitly, they were gone, but working odd shifts in the bowels of various facilities had him disconnected from the wider reality of what went on above. By all measures, there could be a war going on and he probably wouldn't notice until a bomb dropped right into this makeshift home.

The attack hadn't targeted the technical corridors. He'd slept through most of it, and even then it hadn't been the fighting that had lured him up. He'd woken up two hours early, and wandered up to the surface because of a nagging feeling that had left him restless.

"Oh," Ives said, reaching to rummage in the pockets of his discarded jacket. He produced a small black-red-pyramid, intricately decorated with gold.

"There was this. I had scooped up a couple before I found you. There were more but, uh, you were...yeah," he trailed off awkwardly.

"They looked valuable. Yours?"

Eurydice

 

[Eurydice]

A pressure in Eurydice’s chest eased, slight but noticeable enough. If she’d been found alone, that was a good sign. Good that the Jedi had left. Good that the Sith hadn’t seen her tremendous failure.

Would they have taken the time to heal her, or simply swept her body aside as another weak link? The galaxy wasn't kind to weak links, and even if there were those among the Sith who looked at her kindly, Eurydice could not afford to trust kindness.

Then, he produced a holocron. Eurydice perked up near-instantly, reaching for the small metal object. She ran her thumb over the smooth, ornate grooves etched into one plane.

“Yes,” she answered. “I mean…they belong to my benefactors. The Jedi tried to take them.”

She turned the holocron over, the pad of her thumb now pressing against the point of the pyramid. Had they been successful? She’d offered the first Jedi she’d encountered a holocron to leave. He driven a stake into her gut, and she didn’t know if he’d taken her offering in the end.

Eurydice lifted her head, focus now squarely on the young man before her. He’d chosen life over the value of artifacts. He clearly didn’t know what they were, which made her wonder if he’d have changed his decision if he’d known.

“Your name?”

Eurydice didn’t offer her own, perhaps out of caution, or perhaps she thought it unnecessary.

Ives