"I hate this," Luke whined as he tried not to think about what the medic was doing during another test. He laid on his stomach and looked at the wall straight ahead, not willing to even make a sideways glance at the other person in the room.
The medic was a man roughly Luke's size and about ten years older, just enough to actually seem like a figure of authority, and also reassurance.
"I know it's not pleasant but this is just protocol," he told the teenager. "It's what we're trained to do, it's nothing to be embarrassed about."
"That's easy for you to say," Luke sneered, "you're not the one going through it." He flopped his head against his pillow and moaned, "I want to go home."
"We're still a few days out from that," the medic replied. "Just keep breathing and take it easy."
Take it easy. Luke squeezed his eyes shut and waited for it all to be over. He wanted to cry, but he was already about to die from embarrassment from this whole experience without adding that to the mix. The medics and his father had stressed the importance of these round-the-clock exams and scans and probes. They really had no idea what it was they'd been dealing with, and while they knew, as he'd since been told about the whole situation, that they'd removed the entire alien embryo during the surgery, they wanted to make sure the creature that implanted it hadn't left any other unpleasant surprises in his body that could grow into something else. So every few hours they checked everything, everything, it was so humiliating. He was only half sure he wouldn't rather just be killed by an alien ripping through his organs and bones and making a grand exit through his chest. At least then he wouldn't have to go through this, wouldn't have to think about it, wouldn't have to dread counting the hours until it happened again.
Luke pressed his face into his pillow and tried to will everything away. He didn't want to do this anymore.
"Is it really over?" Luke asked a few days later. "All over?"
"Yes," one of the medics explained to both father and son simultaneously. "All our scans have come back clear, the blood analysis shows no abnormalities, there is no trace of anything in your body that shouldn't be present. We can discharge you."
"And you're sure there aren't anymore of those things?" Luke asked his father.
"Everything from the wreckage was either incinerated or destroyed in the trash compactor," Vader answered. "Every square inch of the ship has been searched and mouse droids have been used as decoys to draw out anything. There is nothing left. The ship is safe."
Luke slowly nodded.
"Are we home yet?" he asked in a small voice.
"We will land on Coruscant within the hour," Vader told him. "It's all over, Luke."
He nodded again. "Good...I'm...glad to hear it."
Luke sat on the floor of the steaming hot shower with a washcloth pressed against his nose and mouth, hoping between that and the running water he could muffle the screams and cries that wretched themselves out of him as the events of the past several days crashed down on him. When he'd first woken up after his surgery, a lot of details had been fuzzy about the alien attacking him, but as time passed, more details started to become transparisteel clear and the whole thing hit him like a stun bolt. It wasn't just the alien attack, although that had been terrifying enough to relive. It was the days that had followed of the nonstop exams, scans, probes, scopes, the medics, people he'd known his entire life, subjecting him to every medical procedure imaginable, so many things he'd never had done to him before and never once gave any thought to. His first conscious memory after the attack was waking up naked with everyone standing over him, that alone made him want to curl in a ball and die, but that had just been the beginning. The whole thing was dehumanizing, and while he knew it was just their job, and it had to be done, that did nothing to alleviate his feelings of disgust and mortification.
His eyes burned with hot tears that the rushing water did little to wash away, he pressed his hands against the sides of his face to hold the cloth firmly in place and felt the textured fabric move outward as he exhaled and then cling to his skin when he inhaled. Luke was only faintly aware that the rapid pace of his breathing seemed very similar to hyperventilating, then he felt himself getting extremely lightheaded, and felt himself toppling over.
He woke up on the shower floor he didn't know how much later, the water was still hot but the shower wasn't full of asphyxiating steam anymore. Luke picked up the washcloth, put some soap on it and scrubbed his face furiously, then moved down to his neck and scrubbed all the way around it until the skin was raw. It hurt but he didn't care, he kept scrubbing harder, harder, still felt that thing wrapped around his neck, felt its claws digging into his flesh, didn't want to be left with a single reminder of what happened, even if it meant scrubbing all his skin off. Even though there was no connection, he worked his way down to his arms and scrubbed them until they were bright pink and almost bleeding, and repeated the process with every inch of his body until he felt like one big welt and was crying again, this time from a combination of the pain and the fact in his head he knew this was crazy, but he felt incapable of stopping himself.
The water was bordering on cold when he finally found the strength to get to his feet and step out of it. He wrapped himself up in a towel and looked at himself in the mirror. He squeezed his eyes shut and realized he couldn't even stand to see his reflection. It wasn't merely the fact he had scrubbed his skin bright pink and he looked like he'd gotten burned on Tatooine, it was the fact he could hardly even stomach his own image anymore. Seeing his face, his stomach twisted into knots and he felt like he was going to be violently ill. He opened the medicine chest and found himself staring at a bottle of bacta spray. It wasn't the only object in the chest but it just stuck out to him like it had been lit up. The teenage boy found himself staring at the bottle for the longest time, as if it somehow held the answers to all his problems, even though in that same timeframe his mind felt like it was just one huge blank.
Luke looked at the bacta and found himself seriously thinking about drinking it, knowing that the medics had said nothing remained in his body that came from the alien, but still feeling an overwhelming desire to make sure his insides were just as sanitized as he'd scrubbed his outer body. He'd seen the results of all the scans, all the tests, he'd heard the medics' reports, but it was all immaterial to him, it meant nothing. He didn't care that they'd said they could find nothing, they could find no trace of anything, it didn't matter, none of it mattered. He felt absolutely contaminated by what had happened to him, and he saw no peace of mind in sight until he could sterilize himself completely and know for sure. He thought about it for the longest time, out of nowhere he found his hand actually reaching for the bottle. It was almost like the bottle was luring him in, daring him to drink it, calling to him like in the fantasy stories he'd read as a kid; how easy it would've been to twist off the sprayer and just swallow the contents, and all his problems would permanently go away. He would finally be sanitized, fully cleaned out, nothing from that alien would survive. At the last second however, just before his fingers closed around the cylindrical bottle, he drew back and closed the chest.