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Agony pulls her to her senses. It feels like she’s swallowed a lump of hot ash. She slides her hand slowly up to her chest, and her fingertips trace over rough square buttons.
Someone else’s hand lightly swipes her fingers away. “Ooh, no. Don’t touch those yet. I haven’t decided what they all do.” The man’s low mumble is unfamiliar.
Too familiar, though, is the raspy mechanical intake and expulsion of air she hears next. Her body convulses. Lord Vader is here. Her memories must be mistaken, then. That moment where she thought she saw cold murderous intention in his eyes... All a dream. Instead he’s waiting by her bedside as she recovers from her wounds.
“My… My lord…” she breathes, and then is so startled by the kiss of metal against her lips that she forgets the pain as nerves all up and down her spine light up, and her skin broils in overwhelmed heat.
She isn’t ready for this, she want squirm away and hide her face. He can’t be right here, can’t be—
Her eyes snap open and there’s nothing leaning over her, not a beetle-black helmet or any other figure, only a somewhat dim metal ceiling. If it was another dream, and it seemed to be, the lurching from one belief to the next is making her nauseous.
There is definitely something pressing against her mouth. A grille of cold metal digs into her lower lip.
Someone swoops into view quite suddenly, from where he was hunched over by her abdomen: an unmasked, brown-skinned man peering at her with eyes quickly flicking from point to point on her face. He clicks his tongue and then forces her mouth closed with a hand under her jaw. Metal hits her upper teeth.
I’ve seen you before, she thinks abruptly. This is the room where the occasional gurney is wheeled after she loses a patient. And this is the bony-cheeked morgue attendant with his thin goatee and curly hair squashed under the regulation cap.
“Mmmgh?” she groans.
“Inhale,” the man tells her hurriedly. “Haven’t fixed it up here yet, it’s weird, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to breathe with your mouth open, with the way it...” He sucks in his cheeks irritatedly. “Maybe you’re not supposed to? I don’t know.”
Wide-eyed, she tries to breathe in, realizing for herself that she can’t seem to draw in air through her nose. A slightly chilly puff of wind squeezes out of the mouthpiece into the back of her throat. It reminds her of a dental droid’s air compressor. And then she tries to push it out again, and it blows like a ghostly death rattle.
Oh.
She breathes in, out.
Oh. It’s not him. Not Vader.
She breathes in, out.
It’s me.
The morgue attendant leans closer, bends an ear to her mouth. “Sounds okay. Let me tweak the tubing.” And then he shifts aside the box of buttons on her chest and somehow gets his hand in, and she feels grotesque pressure just in front of her spine, above her stomach.
“GgggaaaahhHH!” she howls, as the burning in her chest spikes worse than ever. “Don’t, don’t, don’t t-touch there, it—“
“Ah, kriff,” the morgue attendant says. “You better stay alive. I’m going to reconfigure.”
“What did y-y-you do t-to m-m-m—“ she chatters through a choppy, ineffective inhalation, tears streaking out of the corners of her eyes.
“I am not fragging good with live ones,” the man says in dismay. “I’m out of my depth here.”
Then let me handle it, a bizarre corner of her mind wants to sharply retort. I’m a nurse! But there’s no way she can work in this much pain, with her consciousness fading bit by bit as each breath draws in less oxygen.
“Hurts,” she wheezes. “Oh. Oh please. Make it. Stop.”
The man looks her over in a guilty panic. “Well, if you’d rather be dead, ah… Wait, what was your name again?”
“Don’t kill me!”
He puts a hand on her forehead. “Then I think it’s going to hurt.”
It does.
He’s oddly gentle with her when it’s over. He tries to lightly pat her hair, he gives her water through a straw, then liquid rations. He looks shaky and wan, maybe a bit nauseous and overwhelmed. “I didn’t know it was like that,” he keeps saying. “I didn’t know it was like that when they screamed.”
When she was in training, she went through the same grueling learning curve. She’s seen patients in horrible condition, some melting before her eyes from radiation overdose, some with bones deeply mangled and splintered into their own flesh, some with newly hatched alien bugs spilling out of their orifices. You didn’t usually get freak shows like that, but it happened every now and again. It’s one of the reasons… her heart throbs with misery to think of it. It’s one of the reasons she saw past the scars and burns on Lord Vader’s features, saw the man who could still be handsome.
Now she’s one of the freak show, in a way she can’t properly wrap her mind around yet.
“Did he kill me?” she asks in a tiny voice, still recognizable as her own, although it sounds the way it would coming from under a helmet.
She doesn’t know if she can sob with anguish and is afraid to try, though uncertain if she’d prefer it either way.
So many things have been a shock to wake up to but she can’t gasp now that her lungs and throat are refitted with electronic support. Being forced to breathe regularly, no more or less than the mechanism allows, suggests she is calmer than she really is. It occurs to her that she might not be able to scream ever again. Her new acquaintance won’t have to worry about it bothering him.
The attendant is sitting on the edge of her gurney, holding her hand in his lap and stroking it like it’s a pet. “He tried to, tried to. They called me up to collect a body and I found you on the floor. Oh, you know it’s rare to have a stabbing these days. He’s always choking the officers.” And then he reaches over to the wall — it’s a small, cramped room — and opens a drawer. It’s filled with pale u-shaped bones; she quickly recognizes them.
“Hyoids…” And she has no doubt where they came from. She would gasp if she could, press her hand affectedly to her breast. She doesn’t feel like herself when she’s limp and exhausted, twinging with acrid jealousy. “You keep them. You cut them out...” And no one has caught him yet and subjected him to the shame that she was.
He shows her one, traces a finger down the cracks. “Different every time. These were made,” he emphatically sweeps his hand over it again, “by the Force. How does the Force decide precisely how to break a bone?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “It could be the bone’s natural weaknesses.”
“If you look here, it’s so delicate. There’s a couple of loops, a forked branch. There’s actually an ancient divination system based on the cracks in bones thrown in a fire.” He sets the bone down and gently closes the drawer, fingers trembling excitedly as he takes a moment to appreciate the pricelessness of the relics he’s collected. “Like a fire, the Sith Lords in their destruction leave cracks in everything. Showing the natural lines of weakness, like you said. It’s supposed to start in their own bodies, too. You, you saw Vader without his mask, didn’t you?” He attempts to ask the question casually. As if that flame of curiosity isn’t the likely reason why she’s still alive.
Or is she? Has she passed into a liminal world of ghosts and mad spirits? How can she be sure she’s alive with this — freak, she thinks uncharitably, this man as cracked in the head as his treasured bones, claiming to have brought her back from the brink of extinguishment?
She attempts a scornful laugh, hiccups instead. “Oh, I see, you’re just like everyone else. You don’t understand Lord Vader. He’s so much more than a killer.” Her eyes sting, and she has to pinch them tighter to hold it in. “Of course it’s all about death and decay with you, that’s what you know best.”
The morgue attendant winces and shifts, hiding the drawer of bones with his body.
At long last, she props herself up on her elbows, bites the ventilator, and heaves in another draft of air. “What about healing? That’s why Vader is so, so cold. I saw pain in his eyes, he didn’t want to do it, but he couldn’t believe he could be loved. It’s so s-s-sad-d.” She sputters, hacks, and spits, as the ventilator interrupts her speech without warning to fill her lungs. Every time they expand, it burns. She clutches at the control box on her chest. “I know how it feels. What he’s going through. And now I can—”
“Go looking for him?” The man grabs her by her shoulders. “Oh, no, no, please don’t keep up these silly ideas. He’s not a man, he’s a monster.”
Just like her superior would have said to her. Silly ideas, crazy stupid woman. Monster.
“Noooo!” she wails. The sound comes out so strangely, like the yowl of a hungry felid, that she clamps down her tongue and forgets to be quite as angry. So it’s true she can’t properly scream, the vocabulator takes her cry and copies the last bit of it, modulating the copies together, to sustain the sound.
“He is a being of darkness,” the man insists, squeezing her forearms. “And I’m not going to let you walk off with that suit! You know how hard I worked on it? There are real bits of his suit in it.”
She can’t gasp. Her cheeks puff out in astonishment instead. “Wh-where did you get those?” Her hands start patting up and down her body.
He guides her fingers to help her find a piece, fitted into her collarbone. “Trash compactor. I knew them the moment I saw them.”
“My treasures!” she whimpers.
He looks up swiftly, still half crouched beside her gurney, holding her. Embarrassed, exposed, feeling almost naked, she wants to shove him away. He doesn’t have a sneer of judgement on his lips, but a soft part, eyes wide with an almost eager curiosity, forehead creased with sympathy.
How insulting. How pathetic. How dare he presume to know her?
“They’re mine,” she hisses. “So I can walk out of here with them if I want to.”
“But you threw them away…”
White hot anger courses through her as she remembers. She shakes her head so vigorously that her hair, which she realizes has come untied, gets in her face, strands stuck in the new plating around her jaw by static. “My supervisor did! That karker! I’d sure like to—”
The morgue attendant brushes the stray hairs back behind her ear with one finger.
Her heart thumps a bit louder. What is she angry for, honestly? The treasures aren’t lost anymore. She should be elated. She caresses her collarbone. “Vader left them for me. Because I’d done such a good job patching him up in the medbay. I… suppose it was careless of me to lose them. He must have been insulted.”
“He really left them for you?” He believes her.
“Yes,” she says, full of warmth. Even though it hurts, her stomach is fluttering again. “My. I wonder what he’ll think of me now, all decked out in his gifts. Like jewels.” She nibbles the corner of her lip, where the metal ventilator ends. “But I have to give him time to feel sorry about earlier. I won’t go to him right away.”
“Wow,” the man mumbles. “I never imagined. But I guess gods do take brides sometimes.”
“He’ll be grateful to you,” she says quickly, wondering if she’ll see the attendant light up with rapture. “I’ll tell him about your work. If you could build a suit like this with so little reference, you could work on his, too.”
Instead of perking up, the morgue attendant swallows. “Hardly. The price for failure…”
Cracked bones.
She pats his cheek. “W-well, there’s no need for that, of course I’ll need someone to maintain mine.”
He huffs in relief. “Yes, I’d like to, I have some ideas, too. It’s still painful, isn’t it? I think I could work on that.”
“What’s your name?” she asks. “Oh, but you asked me first.” She clasps his hand. “Erika Daaé.”