Hope Is Kindled
Theed wore its beauty carelessly that morning.
Sunlight poured over the city's ivory terraces and green hanging gardens, turning fountain spray to gold and setting the polished domes aglow beneath a clear Naboo sky. The broad streets near the military district were already alive with movement. Uniformed officers crossed plazas with clipped purpose. Medics in pale blue moved through the open thoroughfares between buildings. Civilian speeders whispered past overhead, and from somewhere deeper in the heart of the city came the soft, constant music of water running through carved stone channels.
The military medical center stood among it all with an elegance only Naboo could have given a place built for war's aftermath. Its pale walls and tall transparisteel panels reflected the morning light, graceful in shape even if its purpose was not. Guards flanked the main entrance in pressed uniforms, and inside the open doors there was the steady rhythm of a place that never truly rested. The wounded came here to be stitched together. The fortunate ones walked back out whole. Others learned what whole meant now.
A young lieutenant ascending the front steps slowed when he saw the figure approaching from across the plaza.
Elian Abrantes cut a stark line through the brightness of Theed.
He was dressed simply, practical rather than ceremonial, his coat arranged with enough care to suggest discipline but not enough to hide the truth entirely. The left side of him was wrong in a way the eye caught before the mind had fully named it. His arm was gone. Not hidden. Gone. The fabric at his side fell differently now, and the absence changed the balance of his frame, though not the force of it. He moved with the measured stiffness of someone still healing, each step controlled, deliberate, as if he had already decided that the world would not be permitted to see more weakness from him than it had taken.
There were some injuries that announced themselves cleanly. A scar. A limp. A bandage. This was not one of them. This was the kind that altered a silhouette forever.
Two medics near the entry exchanged a glance they did not mean to make obvious. One of the guards straightened slightly. A clerk just inside the lobby looked up from her terminal and then quickly looked back down, rearranging her expression into something properly neutral before he reached the doors.
No one said anything.
No one needed to.
The story was there in the shape of him, in the tension held across his shoulders, in the set of his jaw, and in the terrible absence where his left arm had once been before it had been blown off in some burst of violence brutal enough to follow him all the way to this peaceful city. Theed, with all its softness and symmetry, could not smooth that truth into something gentler. The healing process was shorty, it was the getting used to life with only one arm that was the issue. While there was a robotic arm made for him, he had chosen not to use it yet.
Stubborn yes, but not without his own reason.
He mounted the steps without hesitation.
If he felt the eyes on him, he gave no sign. If the beauty of Naboo mocked the wreckage left behind by battle, he offered it no acknowledgment. He simply kept going, silent and upright, one hand at his side and the other no longer there, as though forward was the only direction he had left.
By the time he crossed beneath the high arch of the entrance, the cool interior light caught the hard planes of his face and the faint strain beneath his composure. The lobby beyond was bright, immaculate, and hushed in the peculiar way medical buildings often were, as though even pain was expected to conduct itself with dignity inside those walls.
