Thanks so much for the support coming through! You guys are the best.
I suppose a slight content warning is in order here for a very bloody chapter. Take a deep breath with Sewlen and off we go.
So long as Sewlen Jerac breathed slowly and deeply she could keep her hands from shaking. She was no stranger to blood on her hands, but this was so much kriffing blood on her hands. She faced the tiny creature curled in the womb – a baby, barely halfway to term – bathed in blood. Sewlen had not bothered to monitor the foetal heart; it would be dead.
"T9, start cell salvage."
The assistant droid was far too basic to perform any surgery, but at the least could hold retractors and a suction. Stars, what Sewlen wouldn't give to be doing this on Coruscant, or anywhere but this Third World planet where she might actually stand a chance at-
Sewlen deliberately arrested that train of thought. She would save the Duchess. Never mind that she didn't have any blasted blood products on hand, or that technically speaking she'd never performed a hysterectomy.
"T9 – clamp, scissors, pack. Three or four packs, T9. Uh- make it six. Six packs. Alright, Duchess. You still awake? Here's the-"
She didn't want to say baby. A twenty-two-weeker was no baby. Even on Coruscant, with the best intensive care in the galaxy available to it, a twenty-two-weeker faced with a placental abruption of this magnitude would have little chance at survival.
"Korkaran," the Duchess whispered, as the infant was lowered to her chest.
Good. Still conscious. Never mind that her blood pressure was through the floor. The crystalloids and cell salvage were doing just barely enough. Now, if she could just get this haemorrhaging uterus out safely, she might actually…
She would, Sewlen corrected herself firmly, as she clamped the uterine arteries at each side. There. A little less blood. She would save a life today.
It was the strangest feeling, as that baby was placed on her chest. All the pain, all the fear… it seemed to evaporate, like the dew beneath the rising sun. Satine was enveloped by a sense of peace. Of connectedness. Of a great and powerful, brilliant life force. She had not felt this since…
Fresh tears welled up in Satine's weary eyes.
She had not felt this since she had last touched his father.
As best she could with cannulated hands, Satine fumbled open the buttons of her dress. She tugged at the towel wrapped around the infant – it was stained by such a brilliant blossom of blood – so that their skin might touch.
And Satine beheld the galaxy's greatest miracle.
For the skin that touched hers had warmth to it. The tiny chest rose and fell in small, rapid waves.
"Korkie, my baby," Satine whispered, and she closed her eyes to simply feel him. "I am so glad to have met you. Even if…"
She barely had the energy left to speak.
"If only for a short time."
Bo-Katan had imagined a hundred different scenarios during her transit to explain her sister's call but nothing could have possibly prepared her for what she found when she entered the room that had once been her father's esteemed study.
A karking operating theatre set up on the kriffing thousand krona desk. Her sister's bare legs and surgically-draped abdomen. Some doctor she'd never seen sewing up the skin. And Satine's face barely visible beneath an oxygen mask, seemingly asleep. Bo-Katan felt fear twist in her gut. Satine couldn't have been dead, surely, or the surgeon wouldn't bother stitching the wound – or maybe she would, Bo-Katan realised with a jolt, just to make the corpse look decent for the funeral. She could be dead. There was a bundle of blood-stained towels upon Satine's chest. She'd surely lost enough blood to be dead.
"What in the blasted name of-"
"Lady Kryze," the doctor greeted her, with a fleeting glance away from her work. "If you don't mind coming over to T9 and having your blood cross-matched-"
"Are you going to tell me what's happened?" Bo-Katan demanded, but strode quickly towards the droid and offered a finger in compliance. "If I hear that this is a case of botched surgery-"
"This is a case of blasted bad luck," the doctor announced shortly, pulling through another suture. "Besides, the Duchess Kryze forbade me involving anyone else in her care. Not that there is any doctor or any technology in this blasted city that your Clan decimated, Bo-Katan Kryze-"
"Compatible sample," T9 contributed, interrupting the tense dialogue.
The doctor gave a visible sigh of relief as she finally closed the wound.
"Thank the bleeding stars… I assume you're willing to donate?" she asked pointedly, of Bo-Katan. "Your sister is in shock, you know."
"I can see that," Bo-Katan growled.
She was in shock herself.
"You still haven't told me what-"
"Placental abruption," the doctor reported curtly, as she took Bo-Katan's arm in her firm grip and jabbed at her with a needle. "A big bleed in the womb. No clear reason for it. I had to take it out."
She turned away from Bo-Katan and set to work on connecting up T9's transfusion circuit, leaving Bo-Katan to nod vaguely and try to make some sense of the words. Placental abruption. The womb. Wait. The kriffing womb.
"Is that a baby?" Bo-Katan yelped, eyeing the bloody towels at her sister's chest with sudden shock.
"Well, I mean, I'm really sorry but…"
The doctor grimaced and brushed some hair from her face.
"Not even a full-term baby could have survived that. And this baby was only at twenty-two weeks. I'm sorry. I- There was nothing that could be done."
Bo-Katan nodded dumbly. Call Obi Wan. Why in karking hell hadn't she realised…
"My sister is such a hell-damned idiot," she managed, bringing her free hand to stem the flow of uncharacteristic tears from her burning eyes. "She acts like she's so bloody smart all the time but I swear… I swear I've never known such an idiot."
The doctor gave a non-committal shrug as she adjusted the oxygen mask on Satine's face and fiddled with the flow parameters.
"Good heart, though," she offered.
"Yes," Bo-Katan grumbled, through tears. "Very compassionate, very loving. All heart and no kriffing brain."
"I'm talking about the heart in her chest," the doctor corrected her, with a faint grin of disbelief, pointing at the monitor. "Her numbers are starting to pick up already. I think your blood's doing the trick."
The lines on T9's monitor meant nothing to Bo-Katan. But minutes later, when Satine's eyes fluttered open, and her hand weakly squeezed Bo-Katan's…
Bo-Katan laid her head on her sister's shoulder and wept, as the great pain in her gut and chest seemed to pour out of her. She could have cried for an age. But she was interrupted – by the stars this young doctor was rude, if not a total lifesaver.
"Is that-"
She scrambled to the bedside, gripping Bo-Katan's arm in shock as she came to bring her face level with the bundle of towels on Satine's chest.
"By all the stars in all the galaxies…" the doctor breathed. "The baby's kriffing breathing!"
Hooray Korkie! Our beautiful, miracle baby. I hope you enjoyed the beautiful moment when he laid for the first time on his mother's chest.
A note on the medicine in this chapter - it's essentially all made up. I had fun with what they might be capable of in the Star Wars galaxy. Direct person-to-person transfusion of whole blood is a cool trick, right? Not to mention T9, a surgical scrub nurse and pathology extraordinaire.
Next chapter: Sewlen Jerac has some questions about Korkie's parentage, and Satine has some questions for Bo-Katan about that call she asked her to make...
xx - S.