#concussed

Honestly, he’d bet money that there’s nothing of any value in the envelope—quite possibly, there’s nothing in it at all, and Lamb just wants to send him on a particularly stupid errand. 

Not that there’s any other kind of errand where Lamb is concerned. 

So River’s on the bus, for all of two minutes, and then he’s on the pavement, and it’s just his luck that a car drives past and splashes him with muddy rainwater as he’s waiting to cross the road. 

Just great, he thinks bitterly, stomping across the crosswalk. He can already see Lamb’s acquaintance waiting for him beneath the faded awning of what appears to be an Italian restaurant. The man looks vaguely amused, which does nothing to improve River’s mood. 

They don’t so much as exchange a word. The man hands him the envelope, which does at least look as if it’s got something in it, though maybe it’s just a takeout menu for this place. That done, the other man nods, then turns around and enters the restaurant behind him. 

For a second, River thinks about following. It’s near enough to lunchtime, and this would keep him out of the office for longer. 

Except that the glimpse of the restaurant he’d gotten through the open door hadn’t seemed terribly inviting or terribly on par with basic standards of cleanliness. He’d rather not end up with food poisoning, even if it would mean a day or two off work. 

And so he heads for the bus stop, instead. 

It seems that he’s only just missed his bus. He could walk and make it back to Slough House before the next one arrives, but there’s no point hastening the inevitable. He finds a space for himself inside the shelter and stares at the traffic passing by. 

A few more people join him, seeking cover from the rain as they wait. The bus shelter crowds up quickly, and River finds himself wishing he hadn’t bothered with it. 

He catches a glimpse of his bus approaching and begins pushing his way out of the crowd. And then someone grabs the hood of his jacket and tugs. 

“Hey!” he yelps, struggling to break free. “What the fuck?”

Whoever’s got a hold of him is strong, and River finds himself being pulled backwards against his will. And then, just like that, he’s released, but he doesn’t manage to take so much as a step before he’s being shoved forwards from behind. 

His head collides with the glass wall of the bus shelter hard enough to make him taste blood, but not hard enough to shatter the glass. For a second, he’s stunned, can’t do anything amidst the sounds of people gasping and shouting, and then the world more or less resumes its normal dimensions. 

The bus stop has cleared out, and only a few people remain—it seems he’s missed his bus again. Those still there are alternately avoiding looking at him and outright staring. 

“Are you alright?” one of them, an old woman, asks. 

“I’m fine,” River replies stiffly. He starts walking away, giving up on the bus in favor of the pavement. He hopes he’s not bleeding. Doesn’t feel like explaining to anyone, “Yeah, someone threw me into the wall of a bus shelter. No, I didn’t see who. No, I don’t know why.”

A quick pat-down of his pockets reveals the continued presence of his phone and wallet, as well as the envelope. Better be bloody worth it, he thinks, though he knows it won’t be. 

As he wanders down the pavement, heedless of the rain, River becomes more and more aware of the fact that his head fucking hurts. 

Which is not exactly a surprise. What had he expected, after getting slammed into a glass wall?

It’s annoying, though. But he reminds himself that it’s only a matter of time before he gets back to Slough House, where at least a bottle of paracetamol awaits him. He’ll be fine. 

He shakes his head slightly, like he can physically brush away the ache. 

This accomplishes the exact opposite thing, and his head spins. His vision doubles for a few seconds, and he stops dead still in the middle of the pavement. 

He’s treated to a few seconds of verbal abuse from his fellow pedestrians before he makes his feet start moving again. 

Fuck, that had been a stupid idea. 

He makes it the rest of the way back to Slough House without any further issue, unless you count the gradual increase in the intensity of his headache with every passing second spent amidst the clamor and lights of a busy London afternoon. 

He’ll just take a few painkillers, and it’ll be fine. 

Back in Slough House, he makes a pit stop at his desk for said painkillers, dry-swallows the maximum dose (which is another stupid idea, and just adds a pain in his throat to the pain in his head). That done, he makes his way to Lamb’s office as slowly as humanly possible. 

Lamb doesn’t so much as glance up from his task when River arrives. He stands on the threshold and waits, rocking back and forth on his heels, until Lamb has finished scratching between his toes with a novelty, Christmas-themed pen. 

“Took your time, didn’t you?” Lamb observes, tossing the pen into a dark corner. Its light-up red nose briefly illuminates a takeout container that might qualify as toxic waste before blinking out. 

River doesn’t answer, momentarily transfixed by the pen’s flight across the room. By the time he realizes Lamb is still saying something to him, it’s too late. 

He spends what feels like an eternity being verbally berated for nothing in particular—a Lamb specialty—before he can take no more. 

He pulls the envelope, slightly damp, out of his pocket, tosses it onto Lamb’s desk, and leaves. 

He makes it about halfway down the stairs before he has to stop and brace himself against the wall. His vision has started to double up again and there’s a nauseous feeling slowly creeping up the back of his throat. 

So he’s fucking concussed. Great. 

He makes it down the rest of the stairs with all the speed and grace of a senior citizen, and collapsing into his desk chair feels like some kind of salvation. 

For far too long, he just sits there, eyes closed, breathing slowly, and generally trying very hard not to either throw up or pass out. 

This works moderately well, at least, it does until there’s a horrible crash right outside his door, followed by an exasperated, though rather polite, “Fuck!”

River flinches, then groans. 

“Sorry, River!” Catherine calls out, and even this is far too loud. The following noise of her tidying up the shards of glass is somehow worse, but he can hardly do anything about it. 

He puts his head down onto his desk and tries to block out everything. 

This doesn’t really work, and the next thing he knows Catherine’s voice is a good deal closer than it had been before. 

“Are you alright?” she asks, and he nearly jumps out of his chair. He hadn’t realized she’d moved closer, that she’d stopped cleaning. He feels like he can still hear the shards of glass bouncing off of each other. 

He slowly turns to look at her. There’s sort of one-and-a-half of her, and the faces overlap, but he’s pretty sure she looks worried. 

“What’s happened?” she asks, and she sounds worried, too. 

“Nothing,” River says thickly, because he doesn’t want to explain. 

“River.”

To his horror, he feels tears pricking at his eyes and an uncomfortable sensation in his throat. It’s fucking stupid. He went out on a stupid errand for his stupid boss, and some fucking idiot slammed him into a fucking bus shelter, and now his head hurts so fucking much, and he just wants to not be here, for the painkillers to start working, and he wants to be at home and he wants it all to stop. 

“It’s fine,” he snaps, and the words echo through his head and make everything worse. 

“You’re not well,” Catherine replies, apparently undeterred. “Are you ill?”

He shakes his head a bit too violently and immediately casts doubts upon this answer by throwing up, narrowly missing his own shoes. 

Things get a bit fuzzier, then. The pain in his head gets even worse, pounding and consuming his thoughts, and things triple and blur, and the next thing he knows Lamb, of all people, is shining a flashlight into his eyes, which fucking hurts, is he trying to kill him?

“He’s concussed,” he hears Lamb say. River gets the sense this isn’t directed at him, but the question that follows definitely is. “What the fuck happened?”

“Got pushed…in a bus shelter,” is what River manages to say. He doesn’t think this is his best explanation, but he lacks the words to make it better. 

Lamb mutters something else, which River fails to understand, and then someone is pulling him to his feet. For a second his vision whites out, and when it returns, he finds himself being manhandled out of Slough House and into a car he vaguely recognizes as Louisa’s. 

“Where we going?” he manages to ask, not sure whether he’s addressing the driver—surely Louisa herself—or the person beside him, who he thinks might be Catherine. 

It’s Louisa that responds. “A&E.” Her voice is clipped and if River felt slightly less awful, he’d wonder about that. 

As it is, he just hums in acknowledgement and lets his eyes drift closed, trying to distract himself from the unpleasant feeling of movement. 

This doesn’t work terribly well, and he vaguely hears himself make a rather pathetic and completely involuntary noise as they go over some kind of bump. 

“It’ll be alright,” comes Catherine’s voice from beside him. “You’ll be alright, River.”

He believes her—what else can he do? He lets that thought, that he’ll be alright, wash over him, and it distracts him, just for a moment, from the pain.

She pushed Kanan back with a hand on his chest until the shed fully hid both of them. "We'll go back to the Ghost and wait for nightfall." Hera nodded toward the flat patch of sand between gray dunes where she'd landed the Ghost, out of the locals' sight, just in case of a situation like this one. "Then we can sneak back here and find someone to tell us what resources the people have to defend themselves with."

"Against that many stormtroopers?" Kanan pointed at the shed like Hera could see through it to the sun glinting off rows of parading stormtroopers' helmets. "There's no way. If we stick around here, we're just gonna get caught. Let's go back and tell your contact to update their information before they send us into another time-wasting trap."

Hera frowned. "If we can help someone, it's not--"

A roar, lots of shouting in Basic, and clattering stormtrooper armor made Hera poke her head out from behind the shed again. The orderly lines of stormtroopers had become a confused crowd scrambling away from somebody large and purple in their midst.

The person was almost as broad and tall as a Wookiee. He, Hera guessed, wore the goggles and orange and khaki uniforms of the mining company that kept this outpost alive, but his clawed hands and and feet were bare. That didn't stop him from punching, smashing, and flinging any stormtrooper he got ahold of.

"Kanan, look, this guy is amazing!"

Kanan peered over her shoulder. "An amazing distraction we do not need to get mixed up in. Let's go."

"Open fire on the Lasat," shouted a stormtrooper officer in the street.

Kanan flinched. "No," he groaned, so quietly she was pretty sure he hadn't meant her to hear. He backed up until the shed hid the stormtroopers from his sight.

In the street, blaster bolts started flying. The Lasat, apparently, was moving too fast and too close to the other stormtroopers to be an easy target. Hera and her single blaster wouldn't take down enough troopers to save the Lasat. The few locals peering out of windows and doorways along the street didn't look like they'd be much help either.

The Lasat grabbed a stormtrooper's ankle with his bare foot, flipped the trooper into the air behind him, and caught the trooper around the neck with a hand, leaving the trooper dangling at his back like an armored, living shield.

He snatched the trooper's blaster rifle and fired back, single handed, and the disordered mass of troopers. Another rifle was on his back, waiting to use when the power pack on the stormtrooper's ran out. Maybe he didn't need any help.

A stormtrooper's blaster bolt hit a metal power box beside the Lasat. It sparked, then flashed white. Hera ducked behind the shed as the bang reached her position. A chunk of metal the same color as the power box bounced over the packed sand, past the shed.

When Hera leaned around the corner of the shed again, the Lasat lay on the packed sand beside his battered stormtrooper shield. The Lasat patted the ground like he was looking for the blaster rifle which lay just beyond his reach. The stormtrooper wasn't moving at all.

Hera couldn't just watch him die. She drew her blaster from its holster. "I'll get their attention and run them toward the other end of the outpost. Kanan, bring that Lasat to the Ghost. I'll meet you there." Without waiting for an argument, she ran toward the stormtroopers, firing as she went.

Even if Kanan tackled Hera to the ground, the stormtroopers would arrest them. And if he let her get shot at for nothing, her silent treatment would be painful even before she started relaying messages through her overprotective astromech. Kanan could stay in this miserable little occupied mining outpost, or he could go pick Hera's new idol off the ground before a stormtrooper took a break from chasing her to shoot him.

Grumbling, Kanan ran from behind the shed, heading for the fallen Lasat. The Lasat was struggling to stand. Blood streamed down his head and stained his mining uniform as he lost his balance and collapsed onto the packed sand. Kanan wasn't looking forward to carrying someone that big.

By the time Kanan reached the Lasat's side, all the stormtroopers who could still run had followed Hera to the next street over. Blaster bolts flashed on the other side of the buildings that lined this street, in the opposite direction of the Ghost. The Lasat's ears flicked toward Kanan as he knelt to get a read on the Lasat's injuries.

The Lasat was bleeding from a gash on the back of his head. Blood matted the short fur on his scalp and neck. A matching smear of blood stained the wall behind him. The power box explosion must've thrown him into it.

In a voice rough with pain, the Lasat said something Kanan didn't understand. The last time Kanan heard words like those, Master Tapal had spoken them in the Jedi temple. Hearing those sounds from this injured Lasat made something twist up tight in Kanan's chest.

"I hope you know Basic too," Kanan said. "I've gotta move you somewhere safe, and I don't want you taking my head off for my trouble."

"I did good, right?" the Lasat slurred in accented but understandable Basic.

Kanan glanced over his shoulder at the stormtroopers slumped against walls, lying in the street, or crawling back toward their new garrison on the other end of the outpost. Between the Lasat's assault and Hera's timely intervention, there wasn't a single one left standing.

"Yeah, big guy, you did." Maybe Hera was onto something with this stranger. Kanan had a good feeling about him, too. "Now let's get you off the street before those stormtroopers come back."

Kanan had to use a narrow stream of Force to supplement his own muscles while he lifted the Lasat to a standing position. The Lasat growled, "Wait a tic." He fumbled behind him, between his shoulder blades. As soon as the Lasat's fingers touched the strange rifle on his back, the furry arm Kanan had looped over his own shoulders relaxed.