Like getting caught in the impact of a pressure bomb, tension envelopes Atton completely.
Air through his mouth, too cold and compressed to be natural. The metallic taste of stale blood on his tongue. A splitting headache, as if someone had taken a mining drill to the base of his skull and went to town. And liquid, suspending, constricting, bearing down all around him. These sensations seep sluggishly into his awareness, like feeling the cold sting of a duracrete floor pressed against his cheek after coming off a bender. He can see now albeit barely, smokey nothing giving way to blinding light, still too obscure and murky to make anything out, as though he's looking at reality through a gauze-like veil.
Must be drowning, he thinks and it's a resigned sort of observation, too foggy and lethargic to do anything about it, so all that's left is to give in. From everything he's heard the experience is supposed to make for an agonizing end, chalked up as one of the worst possible ways to go. But it doesn't feel as bad as all that, and resigned to his fate as he is, it's a welcome transition from the invariable sunken state he'd elapsed into. Living had gotten old and he was tired, tired of all the war, of all the deaths, all the running. Now he's weightless and none of that matters. Now he's inconsequential.
It'd been getting better there right at the end, sure - Dane had given him something tangible to consider sticking around for. Seeing her safely through their journey had been a nice incentive to work towards, and there was that tiny light he'd sometimes entertain holed up alone in the cockpit while the others slept, that after all this was over he might build a life near her or around her or, on nights when the light was exponentially brighter, with her.
But it was a dim flame to fan and probably best left snuffed out by Sion's unrelenting grip on his throat, the blistering rake of his blade across Atton's skin. His skull cracked against a stone pillar with his guts spilling out into his hands and the only thing he could think was that at least if Sion was here wailing on him, he was far away from Dane.
That was his whole purpose, really. At least the one he'd established for himself that night in the corner of a seedy Nar Shaddaa hole-in-the-wall. He was running away from all this, or trying to work up the courage to, and she'd found him there, slipped into the booth beside him and stolen his drink in typical Dane fashion. He'd come clean to her about who he used to be and she'd listened steelily. When he was finished she'd stirred the contents of her cup in silence, downed it (five jolts he'd counted in the slope of her throat), and told him to come back with her to the Hawk. That was the moment he knew he'd defend her life indefinitely, even if it would most likely come down to costing him his own.
Well Jaq, you always have to be right.
And then without warning he ascends, like someone has heard his grousing and grappled him from the depths against all will or desire to fling him back into a state of existence.
Atton's first gulps of real air come as pathetic sputtering heaves for breath, eyes bulging like a selkath on glitterstim. The open air is frigid on impact with his skin, still sopping wet with liquidized kolto, and he shivers uncontrollably. Rays of white light, too bright to make anything out obfuscate his vision, but he can feel mechanical appendages supporting his frame, maneuvering him to rest against some new surface with a surprising degree of strength.
"The hell is this?" Atton stutters through chattering teeth.
The droid's voice modulator hums a note of static before responding. An older unit then. That's real reassuring.
"Do not move patient. You have been submerged in a kolto tank for twelve standard hours. Relay your unsease to this unit on a scale from one to ten."
He finds little comfort in the droid's pre-programmed bedside manner. What's the number for 'I've been stuck in a kolto tank for twelve hours, what do you think bolts-for-brains'?
Instead he groans and tries to lift an arm to shield his eyes from the light, but it refuses to budge. Holy fuck, he feels weak.
The droid remains unperturbed. "That response is to be expected. You have been in a comatose state for three days, coming back to yourself will take some getting used to. This unit's designation is VD-92."
"I don't care.
He has no amount of strength for facets like dignity when the droid strips him of his briefs in exchange for a flimsy medical gown, barely comprehends the transition to a new, smaller room with beeping machines and and a rock hard bed, but his body is heavy and solid duracrete would make for as good a place as any to rest right about now. His head hurts like hell, the rest of him too, but his face in particular feels like it's been hastily reassembled after being stomped to jelly, throbbing and swaying like it doesn't belong on his body.
Mindful of his injuries, the droid meddles about with medicine and kolto patches while Atton stares up at the ceiling, or rather a blurry white mass he assumes is the ceiling - could be the back of his hand for all he can make out. He's poked with needles and stitches but the kolto leaves him in a numb, near trance induced state and he only notices that he's finally alone long after the medical unit has departed. It's quiet here, save for the moderated beeps of his heart rate.
He's still not entirely sure where here is but he can trifle with technicalities later. The siren call of his heavy lids is strong and he drifts off without much care if he wakes up again or not.
Atton does wake up again and unfortunately for him, the pain meds must have worked their way out of his system because every nerve in his body is on fire with the renewed heat of a thousand supernovas. It manifests as a grunt, then a groan and pretty soon he's gripping the mattress with slick and sweaty palms, glancing around for that blasted droid to come pump him full of drugs again already. What the hell was its designation anyway, CD...BV…?
The sensation is reaching beyond his threshold of pain when he hears the mechanical clank of the door slide open. He has to shift his head to look, expecting to see the medical droid skittering through with a dosage of symoxin. Instead in walks an Ithorian in a white doctor's getup clutching a datapad to her side.
"Hello Atton. I am Dr. Edo," she introduces herself in accented basic and crosses the room to stand at his bedside. Long, slender fingers run across the screen of her datapad with impressive speed, but her eyes stay focused on him, inspecting him. "Do you know where you are?"
Atton's sight is marginally better now, still blurry and narrow like he's wearing blinders, but if he shifts his head around he can take in his surroundings without issue. The room is stark white with the sterile aesthetic of a hospital, so he can hypothesize about the building without much effort. Windowless, sparse and reeking of antiseptic. The lights are bright, bright enough that he can feel the sharp rays digging behind the sockets of his eyes like a blade. Before he can ponder much more, the doctor strings together the rest for him.
"This is Citadel Station. You are currently in Medical Module 076, more specifically the Intensive Care Unit."
His brain is muggy, clouded and he lags behind the conversation for a few stunted seconds. "Telos?"
"Correct."
As if she can sense the waves of discomfort rolling off of him, Dr. Edo sets aside her datapad and takes several minutes to administer a new cocktail of painkillers into his arm. The alleviation is near instantaneous and the tension from his body subsides. All his muscles go lax as he sinks into the mattress with a relieved sigh. Bottle some of that stuff, pawn it off on Nar Shaddaa and you could be living like the king of that garbage scow in no time.
"You were brought here having sustained extensive physical trauma, mostly from a lightsaber. Your vitals were dire when you arrived, but the kolto tank has sped the healing process substantially. However, there are some residual complications we need to discuss." The doctor sits, datapad returned to her lap and this time her gaze flickers between the screen and his face as she relays information. Right down to business then. She has a matter-of-fact way of speaking, like no matter what she tells Atton, he'll nod his head and take it in stride without interjection.
"Most of your wounds will heal over time with only minor cosmetic damage. But your left eyeball sustained severe trauma, and we had to remove it. Enucleation, it's called."
"My eye?" He mumbles numbly, lips dry and cracking and suddenly his constricting tunnel vision and sensitivity to the tinny fluorescent lighting makes sense.
"There are options. We have a wide variety of prosthetic eyes, or you could opt for a patch instead. We can discuss it more as your treatment progresses. I'd like to keep you here for at least another 72 hours to monitor you further and begin rehabilitation."
He supposes in time (and when the pain meds subside) the loss will process to something tangible he can grieve over. But his current state of existence feels so suspended and surreal, like this is all some kind of sterile purgatory made just for him, that his mind does the emotional equivalent of shrugging it off.
"The people who brought me here. Where are they?" he presses.
The doctor's got a stoic face that would have her cleaning out any game of pazaak easy and if she's taken aback by how abruptly he moves on, she doesn't show it.
"Still on the station as far as I know. Admiral Cede sectioned off several apartments in the Residential Module. We will inform them of your improving condition." The doctor stood. "Until then, rest. If you need anything there's a buzzer to your left that will signal me or our medical unit Veedee."
He feels a strange obligation to offer some kind of stilted thank you - thanks for earning your paycheck doc, the hell does he want to thank her for - but all he gets out is a typical tongue in cheek remark. "Doctor Circuits is two fuses short of a haywire. Ever think of restaffing?"
"Our resources are limited, unfortunately, but you are still in one piece are you not?"
He grunts noncommittally and thinks she might have cracked something approaching a smile.
He spends the next couple of days drifting in and out of consciousness, obliging to roll over for kolto patches and new bandages when prompted but incapable of doing much else.
He's slowly growing to accommodate his new monocular vision, having undergone a procedure already to retrofit the empty socket with a solid lining so the left side of his face won't collapse. It all sounded very dramatic.
Now there's just a square white bandage covering the empty socket. He catches it in the reflection of his tray when the droid delivers his meals, after he's fumbled around with utensils reaching for forks and spoons that turn out to be a few inches more to the left than he initially perceives. It's a lot like someone is consistently fucking with him - moving around objects, blinding his peripheral, pushing things in his way just to frustrate him.
In these moments Sion's parting words to him playback through Atton's mind like a broken holorecord, I will remake you. So when I look upon you it shall be like a mirror . He's taken to avoiding his reflection now, shoves the tray at the droid as soon as he's done eating off of it.
He really hates hospitals.
It's something he's had to discover about himself, he's never spent any extended amount of time in one before. In the war they'd patch you up right there in the muddy trenches with a medpac and a slap on the back. And Nar Shaddaa never had anything appropriating a clinic, not one you were liable to come out with all your organs intact anyway. So he'd learned to cauterize and stitch his own wounds, had the raised white scars across his skin to show for it, but at least he'd managed to hang onto both his kidneys. The rattling in his chest every time he takes a breath tells him even if he did manage to bust out of here, his current set of injuries wouldn't exactly be a patch and go job.
Aside from the pain, there's also an unsettling degree of vulnerability. Every bout of wakefulness brings an exposed sort of anxiety like he's coming out of another hibernation in the kolto tank. Panicked and sweating and gripping listlessly around for the blade he always stuffs beneath his mattresses. Eventually he processes his surroundings and remembers the stern faced refusal from the good doctor when he'd asked for a hunting knife, or at the very least his blaster back.
She'd informed him that he was perfectly safe here, impervious from any outside danger, but it's not what's outside that sends him jolting awake in a frenzy every night.
The crew of the Hawk straggles in the next couple of days to deliver disjointed and vaguely awkward well-wishes. Mira punches his shoulder hard enough to evoke a movement of intervention from the droid, tells him never to pull something like that again or she'll "shove a torpedo up his ion engine". Bao-Dur hands him a long list of topline prosthetic eyes and while the gesture is admittedly a thoughtful one, Atton has no intention of ever touching it.
Dane is absent from his ensemble of visitors and what makes it even worse is that he can still feel her, distant and familiar oscillations of energy just beyond the confines of the clinic. But he doesn't blame her for staying away. The seconds between his near fatal defeat to Sion and the pitch blackness that followed are muddled and faded at best, but his last words to her have stayed with him. They had been the words of a dying man, a man choking out his confession with a mouth full of blood. He never thought he'd still be around to face the consequences of them.
Six days after his admittance into the med bay, he wakes up - like some part of him knows that Dane is there - to find her sitting on the edge of his bed staring down at him with hooded eyes. It feels like an eternity since they've last seen each other, and in that time he's forgotten just how beautiful he finds her. Even if she looks tired, frailer and reminiscent of back when they'd met on Peragus, like all that healing that she'd done in between had unraveled and she's hollow inside all over again.
"Hey." His voice is croaky and dry from disuse. He tries to sit up but every action is still laborious so he sinks back down into the mattress again, head swimming from the exertion. "You been avoiding me?"
Except for a frail smile she doesn't answer him, instead lifts up his pack of cigarras into view and gives it a light shake. "Brought you a get well soon present."
He barks a laugh at the irony of her offering given their current location, and his ribs immediately ache in protest. "You're a dirty thief."
"And you weren't in any state to argue. Or use them. Is he going to sound an alarm if I light one up?" Dane jerks a thumb to where Veedee is slumped dormant against the adjacent wall.
"Nah, it's on the fritz. Won't lift a finger unless you put me in another coma."
"Tempting."
She retrieves a cigarra from the pack and lights it deftly. Then to his surprise, leans forward and lodges the roll between his lips. By instinct, his hand seeks it out and goes through the motions automatically. It's about the best damn drag of his entire life and he's savoring the blow of gray plumes out his mouth when she plucks it from out between his fingers.
"Hey, I was smoking that."
"It's my last one, so we're going to have to split it," she chides.
" My last one, you mean."
Dane sticks the cigarra in the corner of her mouth, grins ruefully and in that moment she looks about the furthest possible thing from a Jedi.
"Are they treating you okay in here?" she asks.
"Ah yeah, service is great. You should see the scrub baths they give me."
"Last I smelled you, you needed a good scrubbing."
Not for the first time does the thought pass through Atton's head that he doesn't understand her at all. Distant and reserved one moment, amiable the next. They're days off a nonstop cesspool of destruction and chaos, and she's in here trading barbs back and forth with him like all of that was nothing more than a dream to blink away come the morning. Like he didn't just profess his love for her in a puddle of his own damn blood. Maybe she hadn't heard him? Maybe his declaration had been so garbled and incomprehensible that she just didn't understand him? Maybe it really all was one big messed up dream. Truth be told he hasn't exactly figured out if that's for the better, that maybe some small masochistic part of him wanted her to hear him.
He's lying there with his cheek pressed against his pillow, quietly watching her smoke when the strain of craning his neck to actually look at her square on starts to hurt. "Hey Dane, do you uh - mind sitting on the other side of me?"
"What, am I blocking your view?" She jeers, but then sobers immediately and ducks her head. "Oh because of- oh yeah, of course. Sorry, not used to it yet."
"You and me both, " he mumbles.
She gets up and drags her chair to the opposite side of the bed, and suddenly he's self conscious and more aware of his injury than ever. His blood tightens and when he speaks again, it comes from a guarded part of him that he's been repressing. "Don't think I'll ever be able to shoot again. Flying is also in question."
"You will." And the way she says it is so forthright and resolute that he almost believes her. It's the firm affirmation of a superior. The General.
Atton stares up at the ceiling. "Dane c'mon, I'm half blind now, the lack of depth perception alone-"
"Kreia was blind. Visas doesn't have eyes as we understand them, but she can see just fine."
"I can barely lift a stone across the room, you know that. How the hell am I supposed to use the force to see?"
She's just as stubborn as he is, and he knows she can do this forever. He's always liked that about her, that headache inducing tenacity. "Telekinesis isn't a measure of force potential. I'm shit at healing, that doesn't mean I can't use the force for other things. Atton, look at me."
He resists and when he does she reaches over and takes his chin in her hand, turning his face to her and exposing the still swollen purple side of his brow where an angry red burn dips into the hollow of his bandaged socket. He knows it looks a hundred times worse turned to the light like this and he silently cringes. She doesn't flinch.
"You fought a Sith Lord-"
"I lost," he interrupts flatly.
Her grip on his chin tightens. The cigarra fizzles in her other hand, forgotten. " You fought a Sith Lord and lived to tell about it. You stared evil in the eye in that temple on Dxun and told it to take a hike. You didn't trust Kreia from the getgo and I should have listened to you, should have given your instincts more credit. You're a powerful force user with intuition greater than most Jedi I've known; as your mentor, as your friend, I am so proud of you."
He takes several deep breaths and blinks to stem the surge but it's already too late. Tears begin to prick his one good eye, sliding from the corner and down his right temple. For the first time in twenty years, Atton Rand begins to cry in front of another person.
It's the culmination of decades worth of mistakes, wrongdoings and repressed emotions, of brushing death and losing a part of himself that he didn't know he could mourn, but this steadfast belief from another person had been the last drop in a cup that was already nearing overflow. His body doesn't rack with sobs, nor does he even make a sound save for short staccato intakes of breath, but it's the most genuine emotion he's displayed for someone in a long time.
And when he looks at Dane, her face is terrified. Twisted and shocked like he's done something repulsive. His cheeks flush with a tide blood and he lifts an arm to rub the tears away, combating a mix of anger and shame. The breadth of the silence that follows is the longest one of Atton's life. This is the worst possible scenario he could have envisioned.
"I should go." He can't catch her eye as she stands, can't do anything but gape listlessly after her like some kind of idiot. "It's late." Was it? He has no concept of time in this monochromatic cell of a room, just the dim and glow cycle of the fluorescent lighting.
When Dane reaches the door, she turns back to him and he wonders if he only imagines finding traces of remorse in her otherwise vacant expression.
"Get some sleep, Atton," she says like it's an order. And then she's gone.