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I.
No amount of drills on Kamino could have prepared them for the ground-shaking, ear-splitting reality of war. Everywhere CT-6116 looked, he saw red. Red mesas that drizzled sand and chunks of rock as munitions were spent; red blaster fire and its accompanying ozone smell, shots that sizzled flesh and crunched Geonosians' exoskeletal plates; red blood that dripped and seeped and sprayed every which way imaginable when armor failed.
It was only now, after ten relatively sheltered years living over the blue-green swirl of ocean water, that CT-6116 truly understood what he was meant for.
Every inch of him felt like a live wire in a desperate, adrenaline-fueled sort of way; in the only way that mattered when death was suddenly such an intimate concept. He took all that energy, all that gut wrenching terror and hyperfocus, and ran into the fray.
There were a lot of bodies. He hadn’t expected this to bother him as much as it did, as he twisted and dodged and fired his DC-15S; after all, he and every other medic had spent thousands of hours training on clone cadavers, forced to gain knowledge through the sacrifices of brothers who had failed to thrive in development tubes, or who had been “decommissioned” by their perfectionistic creators. Point being, CT-6116 had already seen more clone corpses than he could count; but this wasn’t a training simulation, this was carnage.
To his left, a trooper suddenly yelped from a blaster bolt to the shoulder. CT-6116 veered toward him, already trying to categorize the major structures that would be involved in a wound like that, when another blaster bolt fried the back of the trooper’s head. Just like that, gone. CT-6116 couldn’t even fire back on his behalf because the kriffing bug had already vanished into the fissures of an overhead butte.
Ten or so yards away, a trooper screamed for help as he dragged himself toward cover; both of his legs ended at the knees. CT-6116 looked away from the scene with a flush of shame, knowing that protocol demanded prioritization, even if it felt callous. Triage, he told himself sternly, his head pounding with all the noise and the heat. Not everyone can be saved.
Further ahead, in the thick of the chaos but backed by a low rock formation, a lone trooper was firing off a quick succession of shots despite an obvious wound to his thigh. Even from a distance, CT-6116 could see how much blood the soldier was losing. CT-6116 sprinted closer and waved for idiot to move back behind the rocks. “Get off that leg!” he snapped, offering supportive fire as he tried to bodily push the trooper toward cover.
“I can still fight!” the trooper yelled back, voice strained.
“You can’t do shit if you bleed out!”
The trooper growled something that was lost in the general noise but allowed himself to be shepherded back. Once they were under the relative safety of an overhanging section of rock, CT-6116 noticed he wasn’t the only one who had sought to provide aid here; the orange insignia of another field medic marked the shoulder of a clone who was crouched over an injured Jedi. The Force user, a barabel female with dirt-streaked scales, was gasping quick, shallow breaths. Her tail quivered with her distress, though she was doing a remarkable job of keeping her expression mostly calm. It was the first Jedi CT-6116 had ever seen up close.
Turning back to his own patient—his first patient, outside the stable, sterile confines of Kamino—CT-6116 ordered him to sit and wasted no time removing the trooper's thigh plate and cutting away his blacks to expose the wound. The laceration was decently long, but CT-6116 was more concerned about how deep it appeared. Blood seeped slowly but steadily down the trooper’s leg, yet a quick glance showed that he wasn’t pale, at least. CT-6116 dug through his backpack for some gelatin sponges. “Here,” he said, pressing the sponges to the wound with enough pressure to make the trooper grunt. “Keep this here, just like this, and try not to jostle them.” After running a quick scan to make sure vitals were holding steady, he added, “I’m going to give you an injectable antibiotic.”
“I need to get back out there,” the trooper insisted, glancing down at his leg, expression hidden by his bucket. “How long will this take?”
CT-6116 shook his head. “No. You’re out of this fight. As soon as it’s feasible, I’ll call for a pick-up to escort you to a medical tent.”
“I can’t abandon—”
“You’re not abandoning anyone!” CT-6116 snapped, refusing to admit he could understand the sentiment. But they all had their roles, and he had to honor his. “What’s your designation? I need to—"
“Shit…shit,” the other medic groaned, and CT-6116 looked over with concern. The Jedi’s gasping was beginning to sound wet, and there was a distinct gray cast to the underside of her mandibular ridges. The medic’s hands hovered anxiously over the barabel’s chest where her robes and tunic had been pushed aside.
A quick tap opened up a private channel with the other medic. “Status?” CT-6116 queried, looking back at his injured trooper as he pushed a broad spectrum. The gelatin sponges were starting the coagulation process, he was pleased to note.
“Um,” the medic started, hands beginning to shake.
CT-6116 gave the other medic a moment to get his head out of his ass, but it never happened. “Status!” he barked, and the other medic noticeably flinched.
“Um, she—blunt force trauma to the thorax,” the medic stated shakily. He ran a hand over the front of his helmet in a nervous tell. “Suspect—suspect pneumothorax. Or—or maybe just atelectasis. I can’t—Auscultation is kriffing impossible in this noise. And my pleural scanner is useless.”
“Decompression,” CT-6116 advised firmly.
“Um, m-maybe.”
CT-6116 turned toward the other medic in surprise. “Maybe?” he asked. “She’s hemodynamically compromised. Look at her, listen to her.”
The other medic nodded, and CT-6116 could hear him swallow loudly over the comm. “Right. You’re right.” He fumbled with his bag for a moment, then withdrew sterilizing wipes.
“No time for that!” CT-6116 told him, gesturing dismissively. The trooper with the leg wound seemed to realize something odd was going on despite not being able to hear the conversation, because he was glancing between the three of them rapidly, his helmeted gaze lingering the longest on the dyspneic Jedi. “This isn’t a perfect kriffing textbook scenario!” CT-6116 admonished. “She can be lucky enough to worry about infection later.”
The medic nodded and started searching through his bag once more. Meanwhile, the Jedi slowly blinked again and again and again, her third eyelids draconically rising and falling as she stared up the sky. Her expression was searching as she gasped, though her tail no longer quivered. CT-6116 felt his own patience spilling away just as quickly as this strange Jedi seemed to be reaching acceptance. “If you can’t do it, karking move!” he snapped, shouldering the medic out of the way and switching his comm back to an open channel. “Attend to my man. I got this.”
The other medic shuffled aside without a word, head low as he followed the order.
The Jedi’s chest was awash with darker reds and purples from contusions. CT-6116 glanced her over quickly, pausing when he noticed a strange flutter at the level of the left dorsal rib just distal to the sternal plate. He grabbed the largest bore catheter he had in his pack, mentally cursing just how lackluster his non-clone anatomy lessons had apparently been. “Barabel intercostal vessels lie…above the ribs,” he muttered to himself, trying for reassurance.
“Affirmative,” the other medic replied quietly, and CT-6116 refrained from snapping at the man again.
“Okay,” he muttered, nodding and taking a deep breath. He quickly drew up a couple mils of sterile saline, then twisted the syringe into the catheter. It required effort to get the needle past the Jedi’s scales, but the catheter finally slid home between her ribs. When he aspirated bubbles of air, the sense of relief was heady.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last long.
Blood dribbled almost delicately from the Jedi’s lips. Her next breath was a drawn-out wheeze, then the gasping resumed.
“Hang on, sir,” CT-6116 ordered, deftly twisting a stopcock in place. He pulled back on the syringe, drawing air from the barabel’s lungs as quickly as he safely could. The Jedi gasped another wet breath, and her whole body tensed for a brief, terrifying moment. “Hang on, you kriffing bastard! It’s not your time to die!”
The Jedi smiled, and CT-6116 thought that was the damndest thing. He drew out another syringe-full of air, this time with red-tinged bubbles, and tried to keep his own breathing even.
“S-see—” the Jedi wheezed.
“Don’t try to talk, sir. Just breathe. I need you to breathe,” CT-6116 implored.
But he could tell the Jedi was losing this fight, could see the way lucidity was leaving her eyes, the way her pallor was quickly dimming.
The words, when finally spoken, were a curious rasp: “S-see it?”
CT-6116’s fingers twitched as he turned the stopcock again. “Yeah,” he grumbled, having no idea what she might be hallucinating in her final moments but not about to say as much. “Now shut up and breathe, sir.”
The Jedi smiled again. “S’okay,” she managed, completely disregarding CT-6116’s orders.
He felt like throwing up, a little. And then he felt stupid for feeling that way. He wasn’t the one dying, after all. “Don’t give up!”
And suddenly, like the sky had all the answers, the Jedi’s gaze locked on something distant, something namelessly compelling. She gasped once more, her lips and chin covered in blood, then went still.
CT-6116 stared, perturbed. In the nearby distance, a concussive canon fired shot after hungry shot. He thought about starting chest compressions; then he realized he must be as incompetent as the other medic, if things had come to that.
“Fuck,” he whispered, still holding on to the hells-damned stopcock. His voice sounded too loud inside his bucket.
The other medic sat, mostly unmoving, staring at a distant armored corpse. He didn’t seem to be aware of his surroundings at this point, but he flinched every few seconds when shots sounded close. Overhead, shuttles took off at high speeds toward the planet’s dunes; the battle must be moving on, CT-6116 reflected somberly.
He glanced back at the barabel and couldn’t help but wonder if he had been worth his ten years. All the training and the sacrifice, all those cadavers with his face, and CT-6116 couldn’t even save his first Jedi.
“CT-5597,” someone said quietly.
Blinking back to reality, CT-6116 looked at the injured trooper. “Is that your designation?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound as stilted as he felt. The gelatin sponges had done their job; the trooper’s laceration glistened with dark red synthetic clots.
“Yeah, though … some of the brothers call me Jesse.”
“That right?” He paused a moment, thinking it over, then made the official request for a medical pick-up. He still had a job to do. “Stay here, a shuttle should be here shortly,” CT-6116 told him, hoisting his backpack up both shoulders. The other medic didn’t move; CT-6116 wondered what would happen to him after today, then decided it didn’t matter.
CT-5597—Jesse—moved like he was about to stand, the absolute moron. “What about you?”
“Get off that damn leg!” Why the kriff would nobody listen to him? “I have to go back out. There will be others who need help.” Before he could move away, Jesse gripped his vambrace firmly.
“Your designation?” Jesse clarified. “I’ll try to find you, after this mess.”
CT-6116 gave him a weird look, though he knew his helmet hid that. “CT-6116. Why?”
He thought he could hear a smile in Jesse’s voice when he answered. “Gotta formally thank the medic who saved my sorry ass.”
And that ... helped, in a strange way. Maybe CT-6116 hadn’t been able to do much, in the grand scheme of events on Geonosis, but he had this. He nodded crisply, kept his chin high, and determinedly refused to dwell on the dead Jedi at his feet. “Wait for support. Don’t walk unless you have to, or next time I'll tranq you.”
“Sir yes sir!” CT-5597 responded, and his salute was almost cheeky. "Next time."
Hoisting his blaster, CT-6116 dove back into the red.
II.
“Ow!” Fives hissed, glaring over his shoulder at Kix. “Could’ve warned me first.”
Kix rolled his eyes and continued proficiently debriding the edges of the blaster wound on Fives’ upper back with a handheld scalpel. “Blaster cauterized it to shit. Have to freshen the edges, or it’ll never heal right.”
Echo leaned against the doorway to the medical bay, arms crossed as he watched. “You’re lucky your armor took the worst of it, Fives.”
“Yeah, well, helps that those Seps can’t aim for shit,” Fives told him with a smirk. “Clankers should’ve aimed a little high—Ow! Kriff, Kix!”
Kix sucked on one of his canines dispassionately as he sliced off the last charred edge. He dabbed at the freshly welling blood with a sterile gauze square, then reached for some bacta. “Aren’t ARC troopers supposed to be tough?” he asked dryly.
“Aren’t medics supposed to be gentle?” Fives retorted.
Kix snorted and made an effort not to grin. It wasn’t a very good effort. “Now, who told you that?” He started packing the wound with a thin layer of bacta, ignoring the way Fives twitched and squirmed.
“Just seems like that’s the way it should be,” Fives grumbled. “Right, Echo?”
Echo looked dubious, and his glance toward Kix was almost wary as he said, “sure.”
Coward, Kix thought fondly. He double-checked that his suture was absorbable before beginning to close the fascial layer. It was a simple fix, all in all; a happy ending to what could’ve been a disaster.
After the fifth or sixth time the suture needle passed through muscle, Fives groaned loudly. “Remind me to hunt down the requisitions officer after this, Echo. It’s complete osik that we’re out of topical anesthesia.”
Before Echo could reply, Kix hummed pointedly. “We’re not out. There’s plenty in that cabinet over there,” he told them, starting on the subcutaneous layer.
There was a moment of stunned silence before Fives made an entirely undignified noise. “Then—why?” he demanded, looking back as indignantly as he could without risking a stray jab, eyes wide and alarmed.
“Because,” Kix answered softly, coolly, and he could see Echo straighten uneasily in his periphery, “I want this lesson to stick.” He paused, timing his next words with a slow, final slide of the suture needle: “If you take unnecessary risks, you answer to me. And you, my dear patient, took one hell of an unnecessary risk today.”
And with one last knot, Kix was finished. He stood, pleased with his work, and patted Fives firmly over the newly closed wound. “You know the drill,” he said, tone back to normal. “No getting it wet, no straining or heavy lifting.” He removed with gloves with two crisp snaps and smirked at Fives’ stunned expression. “See you in two days for a recheck.”
Echo’s startled laughter followed him out the door.
III.
“Better watch out,” Waxer drawled over a private comm. “Mother hen Kix is on the warpath.”
“Oh gods, who did what?” Jesse asked. “I haven’t seen him this bad since General Skywalker insisted that he could eat those Sacorrian slugs.”
“I thought we agreed we were never going to talk about that?” Boil chimed in.
“Not enough gastro protectants in the galaxy,” Jesse groaned. “I swore Kix was gonna have an apoplectic fit.”
“Again,” Boil insisted. “Not talking about it!”
“Anyway, I heard it’s Hardcase’s fault,” Waxer added.
“Hey!” Hardcase protested. “It definitely wasn’t. Technically.”
“Good of you to finally speak up,” Boil said.
“Well, it’s not like I’m the only one to blame, in any case.”
“Someone spill,” Jesse pleaded. “I need to know what not to do or say for the unforeseeable future.”
“Trouble in paradise lately?”
“Fuck you, Hardcase.”
“The rumor,” Waxer interrupted dryly, “is that Hardcase smuggled some of his homebrew aboard—”
“That karking rotgut?” Boil asked
“—and a few shinies in medical managed to get their hands on a bottle. You know, to ‘help with recovery’ or some osik.”
Jesse whistled, long and sharp. “That’s…”
“Clearly not my fault,” Hardcase insisted. “I didn’t give it to them.”
“One stupid vod managed to give himself actual alcohol poisoning,” Waxer added helpfully.
“Not my fault!”
“That’s the five-oh-first for you.”
“Appo was the one who found them,” Waxer said. “Took the empty bottle to Kix and everything.”
“Of course he did,” Boil muttered.
A series of muted beeps alerted them that a brother was trying to access their private channel. Waxer offered clearance with a simple, “Hey, Commander Wolffe—”
“Who the fuck is fucking responsible for the kriffing nightmare I’m having to suffer through right now?”
“Uh…”
Jesse laughed despite himself. “Come again?”
“Here I was,” Wolffe growled, “minding my own gods-damned business, when orders come down telling me to stand guard in medical. Some shabuir smuggled karkin’ tihaar on ship, and some other shabuir patients drank it all! Thought Kix was going to skin me alive as much as look at me when I showed up for duty.”
“At least you just have to stand there,” Waxer added helpfully.
“Yeah,” Boil added, “it’s Hardcase who—”
“That’s NOT the worst of it!” Wolffe snapped. “It’s called rotgut for a reason. Do you know what I’ve seen the last hour? What I’ve smelled? Fuck! Fucking unspeakable, Sith-spawned—”
“Ohh my.”
“—disgusting, sodding diarrhea!”
“Okay,” Hardcase started defensively, “it can’t be that bad.”
“When I find the di’kut responsible for this, I’m going to—oh.”
The other troopers collectively held their breath, waiting for the follow-through, when Kix’s muffled, furious voice managed to filter through the comm: “—find so much as another drop of that shit in my medical bay, Commander Wolffe, I’m going to personally waterboard whoever’s responsible with every ounce—”
The line went silent, and Boil started cackling almost immediately. “Damn, you’re fucked, Hardcase.”
Jesse groaned. “He’s not going to smile at me for a week, at least.”
“It’s not—they stole from my stash!”
“Try explaining that to Kix,” Waxer told him.
“For a week!”
IV.
The Vigilance was a quiet hum in the background, a familiar pulse in the otherwise quiet depths of space. The medbay lights were dimmed in a soft imitation of peace, offset only by little flashes of color when monitors updated vital readouts.
“Two dozen,” Marshall Commander Cody slurred from the only occupied bed. His eyes were unfocused, heavy. Cushions were carefully arranged around his leg, both propping it up and preventing casual movement. External fixators decorated one side of his calf like alien joints.
“Two dozen vod’e, and I sent them to their deaths.”
“Hush,” Kix told him quietly, adjusting the CRI keeping Cody from hurting too much. “Nobody could have predicted Vos’ actions.” A series of muted beeps announced the newest blood pressure reading, and he logged the results dutifully.
“Why me?” Cody murmured, fighting the weight of exhaustion and strong drugs. “Why was I…the only one to make it back?”
Kix sighed, letting the breath go with some of his tension. He couldn’t do anything about the sadness though, the despair he could practically feel emanating from the 212th’s Commander, the weight that clung to his own shoulders every day and night. “It’s war,” he said. “We do what we can. Sometimes—” He shook his head, pressing his lips together. “Sometimes survival is all we get.”
Every brother knew that that wasn’t always a blessing.
“S’my fault,” Cody whispered brokenly. He lifted his head, then laid back with an uncomfortable groan.
“I’ll get you something else for nausea.”
“Should’ve—should’ve taken more precautions. Couldn’t even—even finish the mission. S’my fault.” And quick as that, in a pattern Kix had witnessed countless times over his short lifetime, the dam broke, and Cody’s ragged, unrestrained sobs filled the medbay.
Kix wiped some of the tears away with his thumb, refusing to look aside. “That’s not true,” he responded firmly. “You’re an honorable soldier, and a damn good brother, and I’m telling you this as your attending medic—life hasn't been kind to you, to any of us, but things will feel better, one day.”
One day, if this war ever ended, if the Republic ever recognized clone citizenship, if they were ever afforded real rest and much-needed sessions with mind healers. Maybe then, Kix thought bitterly. Not for the first time, either.
He almost missed it, a flash of blonde hair by the door, but before he had even made the conscious decision to move Kix was already gripping the back of Captain Rex’s pauldron. “Where do you think you’re going, sir?” he hissed.
Rex’s bucket was nowhere to be seen, so his guilty expression was easy to read. “I shouldn’t be here for this.”
“Banthashit, you should be.”
Rex glanced across the room toward Cody, who was trying to collect himself, before he quickly looked away. “He wouldn’t want me to see.”
Kix could feel his own face heat with anger. He clenched both fists at his sides, lest he do something he’d regret. “With all due respect, sir, it’s that kind of osik isolationist behavior that led to this. He’s loaded up on a synthetic opioid to keep the pain at bay, and that stuff fucks with emotions no matter how tough you are. But that doesn’t,” and he couldn’t help it, he jabbed a finger against Rex’s chest plate, still careful to keep his voice down, “mean you should ignore it. Deliberate ignorance doesn’t help anything!”
Rex frown and opened his mouth, clearly prepared to respond, but Kix wasn’t done. “We’re always telling the rest of the world that just because we’re clones doesn’t make us expendable, doesn’t make us just one step away from clankers. We’re men.”
“Of course—“
“So quit acting like he’s not allowed to feel just as much as one!”
Rex flinched, and shame colored his cheeks. Clenching his jaw, he shifted awkwardly where he stood. “He’ll be embarrassed,” he muttered, but the excuse sounded weak.
“Who gives a kriff? You’re his closest friend, aren’t you?”
Rex nodded, stealing another look at Cody. “Yeah.”
“Good. Support him, sir. He’s going to need it. His leg’s not the only piece of him that’s taken a hit.”
Rex stared Kix down for a few seconds, clearly deliberating, before nodding again. “Right. You're right,” he admitted solemnly. “Thanks, Kix. I’m sorry I needed to hear that.” Squaring his shoulders, he headed toward Cody's bed and took a seat on the edge.
Kix watched from afar, only moving away to give a semblance of privacy once he was positive he could hear a murmur of conversation between the two. “Kriffing military machismo,” he scoffed under his breath. “I have to do everything around here. Unbelievable.”
+I
“Detecting another life sign!” Jesse reported into his comm. “It could be him.”
“Careful, Jesse,” Rex’s voice responded. “Some channels are reporting recent cave-ins. Wait for backup.”
“Sir,” he acknowledged professionally, before ending the line. If Kix really was trapped somewhere under Coruscanti rubble, Jesse didn’t think he could afford the time to be too careful. Kix had been at an on-ground medical facility when the invasion began in earnest. Communication quickly went to shit, thanks to all the battle interference and the Senate’s distinct lack of preparedness. The Separatists may have been beaten back, but the city was a mess of downed buildings and burning transports. Right now, search and rescue was critical, and nobody in the 501st had been able to reach Kix in nearly a full cycle...
No, no, he wasn’t going to think about that. It was fine. Everything was fine.
It was practically a chant, at this point in the war.
Taking a deep breath, Jesse double checked the scan, and yeah, definitely a large thermal reading from below. Part of him knew he should wait like the Captain said, but he'd never been very objective when it came to his ... well, when it came to Kix.
“Kriff this,” he muttered, then raised his voice to a shout: “Kix! Kix, can you hear me?”
For a long, drawn out moment, all Jesse heard in response was the crackling shift of rubble and the purr of repulsorlifts in the distance. Then—
“Jesse!”
It was faint, real faint. But that’s all Jesse needed. “Hang on, ner vod!” he encouraged, dropping to his knees and frantically clearing away chunks of debris as best he could. Wires, cables, and chunks of durasteel were tossed carelessly over his shoulder. It was tiring work, and more than once Jesse wondered if he’d ever get through. All around him, felled buildings rumbled, destabilizing and shifting, crunching and collapsing. Jesse could taste his fear like a visceral thing, and he sent more than one quick prayer to whomever or whatever might be listening that he’d find his brother in time. Finally, with a grunt of effort, he lifted a large concrete block and found himself peering into the black depths of a large air pocket. “Kix?”
“I’m here,” Kix rasped, the words followed by a few coughs.
“Of all the luck,” Jesse breathed gratefully. “I’m going to try to make my way down.”
“Careful. Not sure how steady the area is.”
“I will be,” Jesse promised, sliding first one leg, then the other, through the opening he had created. His armor protected him from the worst of the jagged rubble; he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make the descent without it. Thankfully, Kix wasn’t all that far below.
“Jesse,” Rex abruptly asked over his comm, “Did I just hear you shouting?
“I found him, sir! He’s alive!”
Rex sounded a combination of surprised and relieved. “I’m tracking your coordinates now. I’ll have the next available pick-up sent. Wait where you are.”
“Uhh,” Jesse drawled sheepishly, “yes sir.”
He swore he heard Rex cuss knowingly before the line went quiet.
“You’re going to get one helluva lecture,” Kix told him wryly, quieter than usual.
Jesse couldn’t help but grin. “Worth it.” He dropped the last couple of feet, barely managing not to stumble when the rubble shifted from the impact. He looked up, about to make a joke about damsels in distress, when the light from his helmet clicked on.
Kix was seated against a slab of durasteel, the same slab that appeared to be the only thing supporting this pocket of air. He was bare from the waist up, and the contents of his medpack were scattered within easy reach. But beyond all that, beyond the pale tinge to Kix’s skin and the way his eyes looked pinched from pain, Jesse was suddenly hyperaware of the very bloody, freshly sutured incision on his lower right abdomen.
“What,” Jesse enunciated sharply, “is that?” He pointed for good measure, in case Kix wasn’t aware of the reason for his distress already. The extra reason, anyway.
Kix attempted to smirk, but it looked more like a grimace. “Today’s been rough.”
“Yeah, no shit. But Kix,” Jesses pleaded, sounding more strained (and shrill) than he cared to admit when he noticed a pink, organic-looking lump lying next to one of the discarded hemostats. “What is that?”
“Ah. That,” Kix offered helpfully, making some vague gesture with one hand, “is my appendix. Was.”
Jesse felt all common sense leave him, just like that. Gone. “Your appendix?” he repeated incredulously.
“Mhm. S’stupid,” Kix pointed out. “Stupid that those—those Kaminoan bastards didn’t design them out of us. Ugh.” He exhaled slowly through his mouth, then swallowed thickly. “Kriff, that sucked. Do not recommend.”
Jesse removed his bucket and squatted beside Kix, almost afraid to touch. “What happened? What can I do to help?”
Kix shook his head, his movements slow and stiff. “Reported to Coruscant’s main medical center this afternoon because—because I was experiencing sharp, acute pangs. Lower right. Figured what it was; wanted to have the matter handled discreetly." He sighed, long and loud. "Medical droid pronounced appendicitis just as the first Sep ship entered atmo.” He laughed suddenly, wincing as he did. “Can you believe that? What shit luck. Appendicitis.”
Jesse finally worked up the nerve to peel back a glove and run a hand gently across Kix’s forehead. He felt warm, too warm. “And, what? You took cover as soon as the procedure was finished?” he asked, eyeing Kix’s backpack’s contents with a willful sort of plausible deniability.
Kix snorted. “Of course not.”
“Oh. Thank—”
“I did it myself,” Kix told him matter-of-factly. “Got—got trapped here shortly after the invasion. It was chaos.” He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly again. “Few hours in? I don’t know. Felt a lot of pain. A lot of pain. Knew I had to—to get it out. Didn’t know if I could wait for … potential rescue.”
“Oh, Kix,” Jesse breathed, pressing his forehead to his vod’s. “You crazy, terrifying, impossible bastard.”
Kix squeezed his hand, and for the first time Jesse realized just how much he was shaking, how red and sticky his fingers were. “Think that was the most difficult procedure I’ve ever pulled off.”
Jesse laughed, resolutely ignoring how his eyes grew damp. “I said terrifying, right? Absolutely horrifying?” He could feel Kix smile against his cheek, so he called the stupid humor a successful endeavor. “Do you have pain killers?” he asked, leaning back like the right drugs were just going to be sitting there.
“Had a little ketamine.”
“Enough?”
Kix grunted. “Dissociative. It’s not really … meant for pain. Couldn’t inject it until after I had finished, anyway,” he sighed. “Couldn’t afford to—to make a mistake.”
Jesse chewed on his lower lip, hesitating, before setting aside his helmet. He carefully maneuvered around the medical utensils and debris, easing himself closer, until he had Kix as sheltered within the confines of his arms as possible. It wasn’t much, given the situation, but Kix seemed to relax some nevertheless.
“I don’t even know if this is real,” Kix whispered honestly.
Jesse fumbled with his words for a moment before he was able to answer. He wasn't sure why the words stuck in his throat so much. “It’s real. I’m real. You’re real. This whole mess is real." He scowled as fiercely as he could. "We’re going to get you out of here, and then we’re going to request some serious leave time.”
Kix huffed a laugh despite the way it obviously pained him. “It’ll never get approved.”
“I know.”
“I’m so glad I have you, Jesse.”
“Me too.”