Scraping Together the Past, the Future and the In Between: Chapter IV: Anguish Aroused

It hurt like hell. Despite that, the man ran. His lungs were burning and he had severe difficulties to breathe. Despite that too, he ran. Gasping for air and forcing himself forward made his pain far worse, but still he kept going. After crossing a few blocks, he couldn't contain himself anymore. The man collapsed on his knees on the street coughing. His body was shaken with violent coughs that soon turned into convulsive vomiting. When finally being able to do so, the man trudged himself around the corner and sat on the steps of a doorway on a quiet alley. After the physical breakdown, the worst was still to come. Falling apart mentally, crouching on the doorstep, he buried his face in his hands and cried inconsolably. After his tears had dried out, there was nothing left but his pain, both physical and mental. He stayed still, his head covered in his slightly trembling hands. Every now and then an occasional passer-by glanced his way, and then hurried forwards on the alley.

Rila's thoughts were restless as she was trying to clean up the mess the fight had created in the medical station. She was enraged, scared and nervous. Unable to sort out her feelings and understand what had just happened, she kicked the head of a destroyed medical droid on the wall across the room in frustration. What in the space had just happened? How could something like this even have happened? What did all this mean to her? If only there was someone she could talk to now...

The man woke up from his agonized dizziness to the sensation of his clothes being wet and cold on his right side. His hands were bloody and he had smeared his face with them as well. He opened his jacket to check the condition of his injury. It looked as bad as it felt. The old wound had been ripped open in a nasty way by Rila's strike. The tissue around it was bruised, and a couple of ribs were probably crushed. A simple medpack or a kolto tank would not fix this. At the beginning of this day he had been a little freaked out and wounded. Now he was losing his mind completely and dying. Great. This was as disastrous as it was ridiculous. The very thing he had been running away from the last ten years had kept popping up constantly for the last couple of days. No matter how much his intention was to avoid having anything to do with the Force or other things related to it in any way, there it was again. And now he was getting himself killed because of it... Or was it after all because he was running from it? Whatever. These were totally irrelevant thoughts altogether. There was no way he was getting away this time.

The mysterious thing the dock supervisor wanted the man to bring in exchange to his escape ticket was something he could never deliver. It was all too obvious that it was Rila's Force abilities that were healing her patients at the medical station. These could neither be taken from her or be later sold forwards as they had planned to do. This all didn't matter though, as he would be bleeding to death in a couple of hours right here, in some quiet corner on Nar Shaddaa's streets all alone, and no one would care. He was again dwelling on his misery, on the lost past and the meaninglessness of his last years. Only this time his pained, bitter self-pity had even darker shades than usual due to the fatalism of the situation. For many times the man had stood on the ledge of the walkways of the Smuggler's Moon, thinking if he should jump down and end it all, to just simply let go of everything. Still, he had never done it. He may have had no real reasons to live, but did he have any more reasons to end his life, even if it was quite far from anything glorious? Maybe that was why he had not decided to take that last step from the ledge to the depths.

This time however, he would not have to choose if he wanted to continue his pathetic existence or not. His wounds would soon prove fatal if not properly treated, and there was no medical station nearby that he could visit. Of course there was Rila's station just a few blocks away, but there was no way he could ever go there. The woman was a Force-user, a Jedi maybe. Not to mention it was her he had just been fighting with, and it was her who had put him in the state he was currently in. He could absolutely not go to the station. Even if he did, she would surely not save him. ...But the Jedi are supposed to help everyone, and wouldn't that include him too? Though, he knew better from his own extensive experience. Jedi principles could sometimes be extremely ambiguous or downright hypocritical. Hell, he didn't even know if she was a Jedi. He knew nothing else about her but that she had been trained in the Force. There was a chance that she might know as much about him, along with the other not very flattering things the attempted robbery he had jus done represented or told about.

It was hard for the man to get his thoughts together. He could hardly endure the pain and keep breathing laboriously. Thinking was getting way too demanding a thing to do at the moment. Still, he could notice that he was already sitting in a pool of his own blood. The massive amount of lost blood and the drowsy feeling in his head were clear enough signs of the fact that he wouldn't have much time left. Although he had despised, maybe even hated his life, dying was worse. In his mind, death would not liberate him, it would only continue the emptiness his life had been for so long. The man had no desire to die. He couldn't die now, not like this. If he still tried, it didn't matter if it didn't work out. Not anymore. Leaning his hand on the wall and holding his wound with the other one, he pulled himself up. His sight went black for a moment and he nearly lost his consciousness doing this, but he could actually get up and he was even capable of taking couple of slow steps. As the man started limping towards the medical station, first drops of dirty, grey rain fell from the polluted skies of Nar Shaddaa. The blood on the stairs of one doorway was at first mixed with water and then completely washed away, as the rain started pouring down as a heavy, depressing and dark shower.

Arrival of patient had pulled Rila's thoughts away from this morning's incident at the station. The troubled gran had at first eyed the station suspiciously, but Rila's quick explanation of common robbery attempt and the pain in his leftmost eye had soon made the patient focus on getting himself healed instead of some secondary concerns. Removing the tiny pieces of exploded energy cell's casing from the patient's eye demanded also Rila's full attention, and at the moment she saw that as nothing but a good thing. Doing her work, she was at her element, and she didn't have to worry about anything else. Rila didn't forget to remind the three-eyed sentient not to use protective gear designed for humans and other similar beings while assembling potentially dangerous appliances, because these would place individuals of species with different physiology at great risk. Rila spoke her warnings as she collected yet another sharp shred of metal from the whining alien's eye, who probably had gotten the point all too well already.

Rila was still working on the gran's injury, when the station's door opened again. She could hear that it was raining outside when a soaking wet, hunched figure dragged itself in the doorway. Rila froze instantly as she recognized the man. He supported his weight on the doorframe, and blood diluted with rainwater dripped on the threshold from his drenched clothes. His face was very pale and smeared with dried blood, and the expression on it was shaped by shame and pain. The sight was quite different from what it had been earlier this day. The man lifted his head and said 'Hi.' in a thin voice.

Rila turned back to her patient, and commanded the gran in a tense tone. 'Leave, now. From the backdoor, go!' She didn't have to ask the gran twice. The station's questionable state, the man's appearance and Rila's words convinced him pretty efficiently to run out through the backdoor, and to do it fast.

The man stumbled in the room in wobbly steps and collapsed on the first seat he could find. Rila rushed to him. All she could say was undoubtedly dismayed 'You...'

The man's response was repeatedly interrupted by his heavy breathing and coughs. 'You... You... Know the Force...'

Rila tried to calm down both the man and herself, and to deal with the situation as she should. 'You are in a truly bad shape. Just sit still.' She spoke as she turned to the nearby shelves to get her equipment.

The man's words were hardly louder than a whisper, when he asked: '...Are you a Jedi?'

Rila got back to him, with a syringe in her hand and replied, now in a totally controlled, professional voice. 'Relax, this won't hurt.'

'Hey! Wait...' Was everything the man managed to say before his consciousness drowned in all-consuming swirling darkness, as Rila stuck the needle in his arm.

She had to save him. She couldn't let him die of a strike from her blade. She was supposed to be a healer, not killer. More than anything Rila wished that Master Zez --Kai Ell was still here. If only she could talk to him now. The man on the examination table was a disturbing case. While examining her new patient and treating his injury she had found things that certainly made her nervous. The two encounters she had had with him added to the picture. She really needed to talk to Master Zez-Kai Ell. Rila left the man sleeping on the table and moved to her desk. She opened a locked drawer and picked up a comlink device. She called for Master Zez-Kai Ell, but no one answered. She tried again and again, her mind filled with worry and grief for the Jedi Master. After something like a tenth time she gave up. He wouldn't answer, as he hadn't for too long a time. Rila was on her own in this.