Obdurate Heart – XV

Do you not just love it when an author leaves you on a cliff-hanging chapter for like, a week? I'm sorry.

"However long the night, the dawn will break."

- African proverb

If Obi Wan had been pacing before, he was driving a dent in the ground now. It had been three hours of waiting outside of the medical facility and he hadn't so much as received one word about Maul's condition. His anxiety had sprouted arms and was now wringing his neck freely. Had he let his prisoner—a renowned criminal and his only responsibility—die? How negligent could he have been that he hadn't even noticed something was wrong with him? And what was wrong with him? The day prior he had shown signs of nothing but recovery, so what had changed between the short hours in which Obi Wan had last seen him? A thousand explanations raced through Obi Wan's mind. Was he sick? Had he suddenly contracted some rare disease? A food allergy, possibly? Someone could have even poisoned him, but who?

He leaned up against the wall, rubbing his forehead with a groan. He prayed that Maul had not died. As worried as he was, he didn't even have room to resent the fact that he was fretting over the well being of his enemy. As he saw the medical droid emerge from the corridor, he sprang back into attentiveness and rushed to meet it. "What is it, what's happened?" he demanded a tad impolitely.

The droid stalled and began systematically. "A portion of the lining used to seal off his intestinal wound has ruptured."

Obi Wan blinked. "How? Why?"

"These things will happen." The droid replied. "The area was weakened. The rupture could have been caused by something he ingested, over-activity on his part, or merely time and wear."

"And?" Obi Wan pressed, fearing the worst.

"The prisoner is resilient. Internal bleeding has been drained and the abrasion safeguarded from infection. His fever has been treated. It is recommended that he be limited to dire movement only and placed on a liquid diet."

"What state is he in now?" Obi Wan asked, relief flooding him all at once.

"An induced coma. He is expected to come out of it in a day or so." The droid motioned and led Obi Wan to the recovery room wherein the patient lay. "He will be safe to be moved back to his quarters in a few hours. We would like to monitor him just a while longer."

"Of course." Obi Wan nodded. As the droid ambled away, Obi Wan let out a breath. Maul was going to be alright, by the looks of it…

Obi Wan stretched out his legs and rested his chin on a palm from where he sat on his stool, staring at Maul's limp form on the white medical table. For the past hour, he had been monitoring the patient's vitals for himself. While he acknowledged that it seemed a tad paranoid to sit and stare at him as though disaster would occur the instant he drew his eyes away, he was not about to let just that happen again. When he first arrived, Maul had been looking rather worse for wear, his form statuesque and his breath slight. In the past few minutes, however, he seemed to be regaining more of himself. His breaths had deepened and evened out quite a bit. At last Obi Wan's nerves were put to rest—at least for the moment.

Suppressing a yawn, Obi Wan looked around the room and contemplated stepping out on his watch for a little to grab a cup of tea. It might help him keep his senses about a little longer. His eyes drew back to the figure, however, as a muscle twitched along Maul's outer calf. Obi Wan slowly blinked and watched curiously, following another twitch in an arm lying nearest him. "Maul?" Obi Wan spoke directly, but he received no response. Maul was clearly just suffering the affects of some wayward comatose dreaming. "At least one of us has the luxury of obliviousness…" he muttered, crossing his arms and fixing his legs idly about the rungs of the stool.

Maul continued a cycle of various twitches, a lengthy pause between each one. Obi Wan watched with disinterested boredom, eyes moving back up to Maul's face as he hissed some incoherent sound. He twitched again, muttering out a few growls and letting his head fall to the side away from Obi Wan. A nightmare, is it? Obi Wan thought absently. I'm sure it serves you right… He watched back and forth between fidgeting movements and little trails of vibration traveling up the chords of his throat, eying over briefly at the newly bandaged scar on his side. He wondered how long Maul had been in that dangerous state. Had he been bleeding out gradually or all at once? If it had been gradually, he cursed Maul for having the spite not to mention the pain he must have been feeling. He knew that Maul would gladly die if he could somehow convey it as spitting in the Jedi's face.

Maul flinched a bit in his sleep again a little more violently, and Obi Wan sighed, chewing on a lip as he watched. If Maul didn't stop he was liable to either move over onto his wound or fall off the table completely. Looking around the room with a grimace, Obi Wan reached out a hand and placed it onto Maul's brow, begrudgingly trying to calm whatever nerves were troubling him. Maul growled loudly as the touch befell him, but was in no state close enough to consciousness to prevent it. His bodily twitches began to slow nonetheless, his snarl disappearing and his growls turning into a soft mumbling. Obi Wan studied his relaxing spasms, thinking how Maul would protest if he knew that Obi Wan had any power at all to tamper with his emotions. It was somewhat amusing that he could quell such vicious bloodlust with a simple touch, he thought as he observed Maul. And what are you smiling about? He's probably dreaming of tearing you apart, you know. Said a voice in the back of his mind. Obi Wan blinked and quickly relaxed the muscles of his face. …Smiling? …Why, so he had been.