A little while after Irajah left, there was a quick, efficient knock on [member="Connor Harrison"]'s door. The nurse he'd met at intake (the one who had implied certain things about his rear) came in a moment later with a cart. He grinned widely at Connor.
"Half way there I see! Aren't you a go getter? I'm Kyle Darksetter and we're going to get you all set up for your procedure."
He patted a gown on the top of the cart.
"There's a bag under the gown you can put all of your belongings in! I'll give you some privacy as you change!"
Was it possible to be that perky? Apparently, yes.
*****
Irajah finally leaned back against the couch, eyes closed. They flew open a heartbeat later and she frown, digging around behind her. It took a couple of tries to unsnap the lightsaber from the small of her back, but eventually she got it. Drawing it out, she balanced it in both palms, her face impassive as she studied it. This was the first time she'd seen one up close, and she took her time turning it over- always careful however with what was obviously the ignition button.
Eventually though, she wasn't really seeing it any more. Just turning it over and over in her hands, hazel eyes distant.
It had taken two days for her to bury her father. Some part of her had assumed she would be able to bury the dead- but that had been before she'd fully understood the scope of what had happened- and before she understood the severe limitations of strength and endurance she had never before had to contend with. She barely remembered those two days, spent covered in mud, face streaked with tears. A never ending purgatory of one shovel full of damp earth after another. Every time she had to stop, looking with dismay at how little progress she had made.
She'd found his body in the front garden. When her mother lived, the garden had been her domain- she would sit and paint out there for hours, preferring it to the studio inside their home. When she'd died, they had done their best to keep it up, and as the years passed, she thought her father found more and more peace in that place, carefully tending the flowers she had planted, spending hours choosing what new things to plant based on her preferences and the colours already so carefully balanced. She had done her best to compose him, numb with pain and fatigue.
It was too easy, at the time, to ignore the flowers crushed beneath him. Funny then, how clear they were in her mind's eye now.
She'd spent days going through their home afterward. But she couldn't sleep there. She'd return to the silence of the hospital every night, rather than brave the silence of that place. One was far more perverse than the other. She'd found their paintings, hers and her mother's, carefully filed in his office. She'd found baby clothes and old holoimages. She'd thumbed absently through some of his old medical texts- only recently had she realized that some clue to the virus waited on his bookshelf in the form of a blue binder with that strange logo on it. That it had been waiting there for as long as she could remember.
Irajah had given herself all sorts of reasons to look through the house. She would need supplies, if nothing else. But the entire time, in the back of her mind, she had really been searching for one thing.
Her father's lightsaber.
The only reason he had even told her that he'd been a Jedi was so he could teach her the technique that would ease her mother's suffering in her final months. He'd never spoken of it again after that, even growing angry the one time Irajah had tried to bring it up herself. He had not been a man prone to fits of anger, and she had let it go, surprised and hurt by the outburst. It seemed that, other than his admission and the transmission of the technique, there was no trace of anything in his life regarding his time as a Jedi.
She wondered bleakly, for a moment, how he would feel about it being the thing keeping her alive. Had he known, then, that she would use it herself? It was possible. But he had never hinted at it. Never told her. Even though he must have known, every day, the risk he posed to those around them.
To her.
Her face darkened and she stood up suddenly. Walking purposefully across the room, she unlocked the lowest drawer in her desk, settling the implement carefully inside before locking it again. Without a backward glance, she hurried out of her office. As if the swift, decisive motions could leave behind the subconscious awareness of the projection inherent in those thoughts. Somewhere deep, she of course knew that this anger was not completely for Simon Ven.
Because she was doing the exact same thing now. As she closed the office door behind her, the small, cycling holoprojector on the shelf flickered to a new image. The face of a young, blue skinned boy, gazing thoughtfully at a large box in the middle of a child's bedroom. Because as surely as her father had kept it from her, so was she keeping it from [member="Boo Chiyo"].
