Private Methadone

[Nyla Ven]

Location: Refugee Station, Somewhere in the Velusia System
Persons of Interest: Capris Halcyon
​

Nyla Ven stared at the floor while her fingers brushed her sternum.

She winced.

Every now and then, when she had a moment to herself, she could feel it again. The jolt arced down her arm and into her heart whenever it happened, exactly half of a perfect memory. The medical staff at the temple had told her the pain was psychosomatic. A perfectly understandable reaction, they had assured the young woman, but this Order has some of the finest healers in the Galaxy. Her heart was perfectly healthy.

In the most literal sense, at least.

"Jedi! Need you at Med Wing C!"

The voice - gruff, understandably tired, slightly impatient - mercifully broke Nyla out of what could have very easily turned into another spiral of self-loathing. It had come from a haggard looking neimoidian in medical scrubs, busily disinfecting his hands. Nyla felt a pang of guilt - had he been looking for her long? She sighed almost-silently, unfolding herself from the squatting crouch she'd been situated in, and offered the medic an apologetic smile. They walked.

"Anything unusual this time?"

"Human male, twenty-seven years old. Nasty to look at, but the injuries aren't anything we haven't seen before. Blaster burns, psychological shock. Poor bastard took a piece of starfighter shrapnel to the gut a few days ago, and we're pretty sure that's infected."

The padawan grimaced at that. None of that should have been normal. "Did he come in from the Corridor?"

The medic snorted. "Nah, folks who rushed him in say they're from Neshtab. He was a sales clerk, apparently, but you know how the Imps are. Anyway, we're running low on bacta in Wing C, so I need you to clean 'im up a bit and get the bits of starfighter out of him before we start surgery."

Nyla nodded. The Neimoidian gave her a rough pat on the shoulder before they parted ways, and she ducked into the medbay that was waiting for her.

Oh.

Poor bastard indeed.

The patient that the Jedi found waiting for her was a mess. And definitely infected, if the smell was anything to go by - probably septic, and no one had bothered cleaning the poor man in several days.

The padawan smiled, softly. She didn't think the man was cognizant enough to care, but, still, it felt right to try and show the man some compassion.

And then she got to work.

Much of the task was simple enough; she was no Master healer, but blaster burns and and blunt trauma were simple enough to repair with a bit of focus. She tried her best to be comforting, too, although she was quite sure she was a bit too terse to actually succeed in that regard. She was too focused; too focused on trying to heal him, and too focused on trying not to let every brush of her hand against his cot flood her with echoes of the last poor soul left there.

Clean an area, say a few gentle words, and then with a bit of pressure, the wound fades or clears entirely. Simple work.

Until she got to the real injuries.

"Metal in the lower intestines. Stomach. Right kidney. Liver." She turned, hopefully, to the scarce box of medical supplies that had been left for this bay. Painkillers?

"No painkillers."

Chit.

Nyla muttered an apology to the man laid out on the medical table, then poked her head out from behind the curtain separating one makeshift room from the rest of the impromptu trauma center.

"Anyone - I need help keeping a patient still. Now, if at all possible."

 

[Capris Halcyon]

LOCATION: Refugee Station, Velusia System
APPEARANCE: x
TAG: Nyla Ven ​

War was an intimately familiar concept. Nostalgic even.

Hailing from the recesses of the Outer Rim typically amounted to a rather bleak outlook on life. One warped by an umbrella of conflict. Inescapable almost. Like some child-hood friend you couldn’t quite shake. And in more ways than one, Capris felt that to be true.

Though now it started to feel less like she attracted it and more like it attracted her.

It was her first time out by the border, working a refugee station no less. Most of her tenure with the Jedi had been spent grounded to the temple as a result of some malfeasance or another. Like anyone with her level of blind doggedness, she had plenty trouble abiding by temple protocol. But her track record was seemingly given a bit of grace. Waved even.

Perhaps they were simply spread too thin these days to care.

The staff had only entrusted her with minor injuries. Which worked just fine for the time being. Not only was her medical expertise slim to begin with, but no sane person would trust a sixteen-year-old to perform surgery. Especially at the dire scale most people flooding their doors seemed to need. If anything, her presence here amounted to just another cog in the machine, with the sole purpose of thwarting any surprise attacks if one were to arise.

Burying the thought, she instead centered her focus on wrapping a sprained ankle. Her patient a young rhodian free of most injuries outside the occasional scrape or bruise. She clung to her mother’s shirt, teary eyed but overall putting up a brave front. It was an admittedly nice distraction from the spiraling trainwreck next door.

She’d felt it as soon as they whisked him in, puttering wisps of pain out into the force as he barely clinged to consciousness. She winced, but that was the extent of her surface level reaction. It wasn’t like she could do much about his state. Her precision with a lightsaber was no indicator of her lack thereof with a scalpel. Surely he was in more capable hands.

"Anyone - I need help keeping a patient still. Now, if at all possible."

Capris blinked up at the woman, Jedi, Jedi padawan. Not much older than herself from the look of it. With a small smile and reassuring pat to the girl’s knee, she straightened and removed herself from the family. “It’s possible.” she offered a voluntary nod to Nyla, then slipped behind the curtain.

What she saw only reinforced what she’d initially felt. Letting a quiet “Feth.” slip her lips as she assessed the damage. Severe damage to the abdomen, infected by both the look and smell of it.

“Can’t knock him out?”

She shot a glance towards the med box. Empty of all painkillers. That certainly warranted a grimace. “Well chit.” Understanding then what Nyla needed from her, Capris sobered. “I’ll hold him down while you work. Make it quick.”

 

[Nyla Ven]

Persons of Interest: Capris Halcyon
​

"Thank you. I will." Nyla offered a brief nod to the girl, but no more. There would be time to be friendly after they'd helped this man. Hopefully.

"Intestine, stomach, liver, kidney. That's the order, alright? We're going to do this as quick as possible." She thought she got a slight nod from the man, but maybe that was her imagination. Not that it mattered, except to her sense of decorum. He'd be conscious enough in a few seconds, either way.

With a small, soft smile and a quiet "I'm sorry" towards the patient, the padawan gently grasped the jagged shard of alusteel stuck in his intestine.

The smell of burning electronics. The screech of twin-ion engines soaring through atmosphere. Determination. Pride. Glory to the Empire.

Nyla scowled for a split second, but otherwise ignored the echo of the past that flitted through her memory, and pulled.

The screaming that followed was unpleasant, but it had been expected. The padawan's Senses recoiled at the sudden surge of pain and fear, and she fought the brief urge to turn her awareness wholly inward. She needed to be attuned to his pain and his suffering to do her job here.

The shard of metal clattered against a thin tray off to the side, and with an outward calmness that betrayed none of her discomfort with the task, Nyla Ven slid her hand into the wound and began gently knitting flesh back together. It was far from a perfect job, but it would hopefully keep him stable long enough for one of the station's actual professionals to see him.

The rest of the "operation" went largely the same - the padawan fished out grisly looking chunks of metal or ceramic plating or carbon fiber, offered an apology to the screaming man, and healed the wound as best she could. When, mercifully, the task had been completed, she gestured for her impromptu assistant to let the man go. The rest was cleanup and prep for the next crew to come in; disinfecting her hands and taking down notes for the surgeons.

"Abdominal sepsis. Intestinal perforation. Fecal peritonitis. Damage to lower intestine, stomach, right kidney, liver, and likely presence of micro-shrapnel in aforementioned areas."

Nyla sighed - a worried, anxious noise - and unceremoniously dropped the datapad she'd been tapping away at into a small tray at the end of the patient's cot.

"We should get out of the way. One of the trauma surgeons should be here in a few minutes. Someone set up a sourfry stand in Wing E, if you're hungry." She stepped halfway outside of the too-cramped room, pushing aside the separating curtain, then stopped, and smiled.

"Thank you again. My name's Nyla."

 

[Capris Halcyon]

LOCATION: Refugee Station, Velusia System
APPEARANCE: x
TAG: Nyla Ven ​

For someone with full-blown sepsis, he proved frustratingly difficult to keep in place.

With muscles flexed violently against her palm, the man fought her in a crazed attempt to free himself, squirming away from Nyla’s hands as if they were a harbinger of death. The kid meant to say something comforting. To provide a modicum of reassurance to what was sure to be utter hell- But she felt too hollow to cough something up. She was nothing but a restraint, a bystander to his suffering.

If anything made her hate being force-sensitive, it was this. Just how much she felt in response. As all three of them endured, it took every ounce of self-control not to recoil. To not deflect a fraction of his pain out of self-preservation. She bit her cheek.

Snow, biting-snow. No visibility. The roar of a starfighter. Distant at first, then fastly approaching, then ear-splitting. Only to be punctuated by immeasurable pain.

Initially she didn’t process when Nyla waved her down, signaling the end of it. It was only after the Senior Padawan broke into her documentation that Capris seemed to ground herself, withdrawing the lock-jawed hold she had on the man. She blinked away a dazed look, the taste of iron coating her lips.

Then she seemingly realized she’d been asked a question.

“Oh uh- Capris. And don’t mention it.” She regarded the girl, given this was her first real opportunity to.

"We should get out of the way. One of the trauma surgeons should be here in a few minutes. Someone set up a sourfry stand in Wing E, if you're hungry."

“Starving actually.” Capris loosened a soft grin in some attempt to lighten the atmosphere. “I think I’ve been running off ration bars so long I’ve lost nerve-endings in my taste buds.” Sourfry? Yeah, that sounded good right about now. It would serve as a distraction if anything.

Following Nyla out the curtain she blinked, “How long have you been practicing medicine for?”

 

[Nyla Ven]

Persons of Interest: Capris Halcyon
​

"Oh! No, I-" Nyla faltered, blushed a faint pink, and let slip a quiet, nervous laugh. "I'm not a doctor. I've had some paramedic training, but that wasn't that unusual at my Temple." She also didn't particularly enjoy the work, but she figured that wasn't particularly unusual either. Most people didn't enjoy sticking their hands into open wounds, after all.

"I'd say it's nice to meet you," The padawan began, stepping out and weaving her way past an oncoming trio of concerned looking Ithorians. "But I would've preferred happier circumstances." She checked behind herself every few seconds while she walked, more out of nervous habit than actual worry that her new acquaintance might get lost; the girl looked like she could handle herself.

Wing E was, put bluntly, a tent city. In total fairness, though, that could have been said of most of the station. Its residents were overwhelmingly refuge-seekers and volunteer workers; some had been present since the Maw's last attempt at core-ward expansion, but the latest wave had started to trickle in after Neshtab reached a boiling point. It was a ramshackle, barely-held-together kind of place, but even a shantytown could feel homey with the smell of food in the air. Nyla offered a friendly wave to a gangly, teenaged-looking Twi'lek managing a food stall in one of the handful of spots that wasn't being taken up by housing. Nyla rushed over to secure lunch, and once that was done, rushed back to hand the younger Padawan her food and look for an unoccupied place to sit. Luckily, benches, both makeshift and otherwise, were plentiful.

Nyla didn't sit so much as she perched, knees up to her chest, balancing by the balls of her feet on the edge of the duracrete seating slab. "So Capris," she started in-between bites of food, "if you don't mind my asking, are you with an Order?"

 

[Capris Halcyon]

TAGS: Nyla Ven
​

So she wasn’t a Jedi Healer? Man, they must be chronically short staffed. Shrugging off the hopeless feeling that seemed to only worsen the more she learned about this place, Capris instead turned her attention to exchanging formalities.

"I'd say it's nice to meet you...But I would've preferred happier circumstances.""

With an edge of humor, the girl once more shrugged her off. “Wishful thinking. I don’t blame you.” It seemed nearly all her connections nowadays were forged by necessity rather than happenstance. War was undoubtedly.. occupying.

Trailing the padawan to the colloquial “tent-city”, it wasn’t long before a hot-dish was securely in her hand, soon to be mouth, via a very swift Nyla. Her haste certainly didn’t go unappreciated as Capris sunk down to base of the slab, shouldering the weight of recent events with plenty of residual tension. Not that it mattered. At least as far as she convinced herself.

"If you don't mind my asking, are you with an Order?"

“NJO.” Capris managed between bites; her words only slightly muffled as she choked down a wedge of food. The interest she took in her lunch certainly outweighed any judgment towards Nyla's choice of posture. Hell, if anything it looked comfortable.“mhaven’t been there long, still pretty out of my depth.” It was a catch-all phrase for how she felt about the Order and her current objective. The girl swallowed, loosening a faint huff of amusement, “I mean as if that wasn’t obvious.” She toyed with her food, grinning faintly. “Think’ I might have a phobia of blood that’s gone unaddressed till now. Truly on a journey of self-discovery.”

With her mouth full once more she returned the question, “mHow bout’ you? You said something about “my temple” earlier?”

 

[Nyla Ven]

Persons of Interest: Capris Halcyon ​

"mHow bout' you? You said something about "my temple" earlier?"

Nyla hesitated for a moment, gently poking at the steaming bowl of sourfry with her fork while she considered what she was about to say. It felt awfully dramatic to drop this on someone she'd just met. But then again, they sat on a station full of walking, living war stories. If there was a place to get into it, it was here.

"I...am part of the New Jedi Order as well, but only since fairly recently." Her jaw clenched, the muscles in her neck tensing, and then she exhaled. "You know Jutrand? The seat of the 'Empire of the Dark Lords?'" The padawan let out a joyless chuckle, her voice dripping with exaggerated, pompous affect. "Well, it used to have a Jedi Enclave. It had been my home longer than I can remember - literally. I was brought there as an infant."

Nyla blinked a few times, stirred the contents of her bowl absent-mindedly, and tried to smile. It was almost convincing. "The New Jedi took me in after I escaped, and so here I am." She'd skipped a few chapters in her retelling, so to speak, but there were just some things you didn't share in polite company. It wasn't hard to fill in the blanks, anyway. For all their lunacy, the Sith were a predictable kind of cruel.

"The Order's been nothing but kind to me since I arrived. Though I have my gripes with the Alliance." She waved her fork dismissively through the air, as if banishing that last statement. Who didn't, after all?

 

[Capris Halcyon]

TAGS: Nyla Ven
​

Ah. Chit.

While Nyla hadn’t been all that forthcoming with details, her implications were enough. Enough that Capris very quickly came to regret springing the question. Not only had she managed to make her counterpart uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like she had a nuanced response on retainer. What did she say to that? Oh, sorry that sucks- yeah Sith are bastards.

“I uh- didn’t know there’d been an Enclave prior to the invasion. Feth-I’m sorry, that’s a shitty way to lose your home.”

Yeah, it wasn’t the most delicate response imaginable but at the very least it was genuine. After all she knew a thing or two about losing everything at the hands of Sith. It hit something of a personal note. Raw and painful. But just like Nyla she wasn’t one to readily discuss it.

Instead, the girl cleared her throat.

“The Alliance- yeah.” She almost seemed to chuckle, though it was evidently mirthless, “Starting to feel like their personal lap dogs.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I want to be out on the warfront, and I know that’d be impossible without backing, it’s just- “Ah there it was, another spirited tangent delivered with a side of uncertainty. “Idon’tknow- I feel like we're losing identity, like we're just an appendage.”