#*malith

Sparse options of Intelligence-trained medtechs to fix a Cipher’s Intelligence-issue cybernetics this far from Dromund Kaas...

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Before becoming aware of any sound behind him, the ineffable sense of something /wrong/ strikes the zabrak medic, freezing his steps. 

Inside the electronics workshop, the lamp above his own desk illuminates unfamiliar clutter: medical supplies that would belong on the shelves along the wall of the room. Empty packaging, abandoned.

He’s had a long time to fall out of the habit of surreptitiously looking both ways when entering a room and, more careless than that: his eyes were on the holo-comm in his hand. His thoughts were miles off, somewhere in the trackless expanse of the Dune Sea. They’ve come back at a bolt, crashing into the awareness of threatening circumstances, and the adrenaline rapidly accelerating his pulse.

“I’ve heard good things about your work.” 

However conversational her approach, he is not reassured to hear the woman’s voice. Her accent is not local to sun-scalded Tatooine. It’s much nearer to his own. Not only in the fashion of the Imperial core worlds, but specifically familiar: 

Dromund Kaas. 

The Ministry of Intelligence. 

And—in spite of her effortless tone of authority working to smooth-over her shortness of breath—she sounds unsteady. Unnervingly near to desperation.

The ex-operative dares to pause before responding, acutely aware of his own motionless hands, and the effort to restrain any gesture that might imply a threat. 

When he does answer, he affects the same neutral caution his posture is meant to communicate: “—I try not to have a reputation.” 

He’s kept a close grasp of the portable comm, anxious fingers wrapped more firmly around the small disc than before. 

After the stranger activates the main lights overhead, his left hand hovers to shoulder height, assuring her of its emptiness by the display of slowly-splayed fingers. A careful glance in that direction tells him she has no objection to being seen, or to his turning to face her.

She’s taller than him, though not by much. Deep, gem-blue complexion. Featureless red eyes that emit an eerie glow. Blue hair in ringlets that remain exquisitely styled, despite the distinctly worse-for-wear condition of the rest of her. 

From a trail down her arm, a minute splash of blood hits the floor beneath the upraised blaster pistol. Pointed at him.

Not that the sight of a weapon is shocking to him—nor gruesome injuries.

A chiss stranger, though? Uncommon in his new life as entrepreneur and support crew to a group of freelance bounty hunters. A person capable of entering the temporary accommodations shared by him and his associates, without tripping any of the alarms he had personally installed? They’d never had the misfortune of such a visit. Someone is very good with security systems.

Advancing age has sharpened the woman’s features and barely started to mark soft lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. A very pretty face, he can tell—apart from the raw-edged scrapes where patches of her skin are scuffed or missing. 

Seeing her chilly smile, he registers the subtle detail that her lipstick hasn’t been entirely wiped off by whatever ordeal she must have endured. 

“You know that’s not something you can control.” The way she leans on the wall behind her, it’s clear the hand propped against the rough clay is necessary to maintain her willfully blasé posture. “—As one skilled professional to another.”

He says nothing. The layers of implication are clear to him: she’s aware of a history prior to his current career. And he’s right about her accent.

“You shouldn’t be too impressed I managed to find you, though; I’m here because you were the nearest option, and the /easiest/ to locate in a pinch.”

Not what he’d like to hear, but he can recognize the evidence speaking for itself, facing him from the trigger end of a blaster barrel. He hasn’t fallen nearly as far off the map as he intended. Not if someone with Imperial Intelligence contacts can simply walk in on him here, of all places.

Still, it could be worse than a lone agent, badly injured and merely /threatening/ violence. 

It will be worse, if he mismanages the current situation.

“I can stop you losing more blood,” the medic hazards a guess at the most obvious reason she might have come to him. He hesitates on the way to drawing his comm disc toward a pocket, seeing something in her gaze he interprets as a warning.

Rather than vocalize a demand, the woman peels herself away from the wall and delicately pries the device from him using thumb and finger of her free hand. 

“I’d be grateful if you would.” Tucking the communicator in a pouch at her belt, she switches her small blaster to her opposite hand. This way, as they walk toward the tilted chair to one side of his work area, she keeps the sidearm casually readied between them. “There is a complicating factor, you’ll notice.”

When she extricates herself expertly from her jacket (without holstering her weapon, somehow)—he does. The wound that had soaked her sleeve is deep, and wide enough that he sees a glistening line of incongruous silver framed in the mangled flesh. 

“Cybernetics,” he acknowledges, abruptly recognizing the impact required to damage combat-grade limb structures and, in the same realization, becoming aware of how many adrenals she may have shot herself with in order to be as lucid as she is. “You should sit down; please.”

She seems entertained by his manners, laughing low in her throat as she complies with the politely-phrased suggestion. 

“The dossiers said you were quite tractable, up until your— unauthorized departure. I won’t need to keep pointing this at you, will I?”

“No,” he answers, sounding curt for the first time.

Even the gesture of disarming looks so natural, he imagines she could reach that leg holster in her sleep. Speaking of which, she might be well on her way to passing out. 

If she were trying to improve his opinion of her before it happens she chose the wrong thing to say.

Given the option, he would rather operate with a gun to his head than acknowledge the reference to his undissolved Intelligence file. Records which begin before his oldest memories as a child. The visceral recall of the days when biting his tongue was a way of life is making his mouth go dry.

One of her dark, crisp eyebrows seems to take a mocking angle, making it clear she’s taking note of the subtle, acrimonious attitude and his silent struggle to contain it—without apologizing for himself. Rather than comment, she takes off her shirt.

---

He’d gotten what details he could out of her before the drugs began to wear off. She had summarized her own well-informed theories of how to address the critical damage, and provided him with a set of partially redacted schematics. After that—with brow furrowed and breaking a cold sweat, nails dug in her palms, and tolerating a violent tic of her clenching jaw—she kept her good eye open through stubborn force of will.

Masochistic, really—but. The things Imperial Intelligence wouldn’t hesitate to do once they had you asleep... He wasn’t surprised she would decline sedation.

Attempting to maintain topical anesthesia promised to pose some challenges, thanks to the integration of biological and synthetic nervous systems. The best method he could offer was to limit the scope of his work: one injury site at a time, numbing each area as best he could until moving to the next.

The work would go slowly, and it would take time. 

He was far from a master technician. He’d logged enough maintenance work on his own to become proficient in basic repairs, but his mentor, Mako, would normally supervise anything as complex as this. 

To the benefit of the augmented chiss woman, who needed of someone capable of working with an ocular implant, neurological interfacing had already been the primary focus of his mentorship. 

Hers was sophisticated equipment (so was Keran’s, which he’d been studying so diligently). As a former agent as well as an apprenticed tech, he knew enough to guess this might have once been a peak of Imperial engineering—which had gone a long time without being entirely updated. Here and there, a newer piece had been installed to supplant the old; the kind of large-scale replacements of hardware she was likely to require in the not-far-distant future.

Not what she’d be getting now from a transient, “bare bones” shop with no advance notice to source those kinds of parts. 

Before her biological systems began to endure too much strain, he would do what he could for her.

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Repairs alone meant /hours/ of a glaring operating lamp; pulling scrambled bits apart, making the necessary realignments to delicate structures and circuitry, directing her through several changes in her position in the chair, keeping an eye on any medical intervention required along the way, giving himself a sore neck and shoulders from the tension of leaning over to work on HER neck, and—every now and then—occasional breaks to consult diagrams, manuals, and change out his tools.

Exhausting as the job was as surgeon, it hadn’t been on his own account that he hastily called it done. He had responded to the high-pitched alerts from his equipment when her vitals began to broadcast firm warnings across the small monitor screen.

His experience providing first-aid and medical care far outstripped his practice as cybernetics tech, putting him on much firmer footing for the final biological interventions: closing incisions and dressing her wounds in kolto and bandages.

For one brief moment, seated forward in the chair again, she made a gesture as if she would pick up a bandage and get to work herself. He recognized the self-sufficiency instinct. While she found herself preemptively thwarted by the absolute fatigue of her body, he pretended not to look past his work layering gauze over her cybernetic eye, affixing a gel-coated patch against her cheek. Restoring her binocular vision hadn’t been a priority; in order to save her the (literal) headaches caused by loose connections and faulty feedback, it was easiest to disable it for now.

“So—you’ll help to wipe any data you can access? Anything the Ministry has about Keran and I since we left, for a start.”

“Mm.” Nodding her head would be a poor choice. Unsurprisingly, she’s not ready for words either, though she makes a credible effort to seem nonchalant.

“I’ve just gone through a lot of effort,” the med-tech points out, waiting for her attention to be sure she’s heard him.

She has a bleary-eyed expression on the half of her face that he can still see; watching him take a step back from the chair to evaluate the condition of his project— his patient, rather. 

Maybe she’s not sure why he expects her to care.

“You should know I don’t intend to tear it all apart again.” Best not to dwell on that imagery, but he hopes she understands it as intended: a rational reassurance. 

He moves on, leaving the mess of the operating area as something to deal with after he’s gone on a walk and had something to eat. A relaxing cup of tea to drink, maybe. 

“—Wherever you might think is safer for you to go, I advise you to stay. It’d be better for you to sleep immediately.”

There’s a long, lagging moment for her mind to catch up and process. Then she manages a dry laugh, while moving as little as possible. Her voice, which had been crisp and articulate, is coarse and indistinct now. “When I have proper access to resources—” Such wordiness requires a breathy pause, “I may even pay you, doctor.”

Faced away at the sanitizing station, gloves removed and hands finally clean, he rakes orange fingers up the back of his stiff red hair. “And won’t return to shoot me, I hope.”

“It shouldn’t come to that.” She sounds rather self-possessed, regardless of her condition, and he catches her smirking as he looks over his shoulder to gauge the credibility of her response. “—Not if your quick fix holds up.”

This isn’t an encounter to simply walk away from, he knows. 

Many consider their “inner workings” a closely-guarded secret. Whatever this woman’s allegiances, and whatever role she occupies, there’s no doubt in his mind that she’ll keep track of him from this point forward.