Or she could wait for confirmation. That would force Nestor to make the call to reach out to the Republic, if indirectly, and strengthen their effort at his expense. Hardly a difficult choice
...
Not long after Nestor had disappeared up the ramp of that small ship, however, things got... loud. Not to her ears, but to her mind. Knowing what she did about her ally, about what made his thoughts get louder, she could guess what was happening in there. Whatever control he had kept over himself had faded the moment he was alone.
Put in the terms of her vocation, Nestor was vulnerable.
A part of Lia wanted to take advantage. That was what she had been trained to do, after all. Yet another part of her wanted to wait it out, to give Nestor the space he needed to recover. There was no need to force him to show himself at his most vulnerable if he did not wish to.
The rest of her, however, wanted to help.
She was a Jedi Shadow. Jedi first, Shadow second. And Jedi helped people.
With a sigh, she ambled up the small ship's boarding ramp and palmed open the hatch release. No security systems barred her way, no countermeasures presented themselves, nothing. The hatch merely whispered open to admit her.
Like it had been waiting for her. Like he had been waiting for her.
In truth, Nestor did not look like he was capable of much waiting.
He stood hunched over a table that ran the length of the small lounge in the ship's barely lit crew compartment. At some point, Nestor had discarded his mask, though the tight fit had left an indentation running around his neck. His skin, already pale, had lost what little sun-kissed color it had possessed and was covered in a thin sheen of sweat. In short, he was in a bad way.
As if the nearly deafening barrage of gibberish were not enough of a hint.
"What did he do to you?" she asked softly, and the gibberish grew just a touch muted.
"Bugs. Still in place. Shoulder and chest. Feel like knives reaching to the bone. Pumping something into me. Can't purge it," he hissed out, eyes screwed shut. The gibberish grew inconsistent, then. Briefly, it transitioned to Basic for a word or two before returning to the harsh tones of his mother tongue. Still, it was quieter than it had been before she had entered. A good sign, that; It meant his mind was in a better place than it had been back at the base. "My mistake. Trauma kit. In the globe. Please."
Looking around, she found what he meant. Beside the hatch to the cockpit, a pair of decorative globes painted to resemble a simple map of Tion stood on wooden plinths bolted to the floor. They slid open easily, the one on the right revealing a selection of bottles, the one on the left a large red bag.
No doubt he had meant the one on the left.
By the time the bag had floated into her hand, Nestor's gibberish thoughts echoed more intensely in her mind, the words beginning to fray into as though in stereo. Turning around, she saw Nestor half-wearing his coat, with only his right arm free, but now leaning on the table even more heavily. Whatever was going on with him, it was even worse than it had been at the intelligence outpost.
The fraying thoughts consolidated again, and the coat slid free and down the remaining arm.
The pattern repeated itself for the red shirt underneath: the shirt was freed from the right side, sparking a stream of suddenly quite loud thoughts. His mind calmed itself, and then the garment slid free of the left.
That left an undershirt.
Nestor really did make a habit of being overdressed, didn't he?
"You are not shrugging out that," she observed.
"Little Jedi, your powers of observation are something to behold," he hissed. "Bandage shears are in the bag. Don't waste the scalpels. Or your lightsaber."
"Like that blue one you're toting about?"
"Salvage from the Endar Spire," he admitted through clenched teeth; Even from behind him, Lia could see the muscles in his jaw tense up and stand out. "Looted a lightsaber from dead Sith. Didn't sit right in the hand. The hybrid one does."
"Right." None of Nestor's words felt like lies. Rooting around in the bag, she found a box full of bandages which helpfully contained a pair of shears, the blades sitting at a slight angle. It was the work of a few seconds to part the shirt on her friend ally's back. The scraps of sweat-drenched white cloth fell away to reveal the expected sight of a torso that was muscled to look good rather than to do work.
On the left side, hidden amidst stretch marks, less than half a hand's width from the spine, sat a small diagonal scar. Part of Lia was tempted to reach out and touch it, to remind Nestor what he was trusting a Jedi Shadow with, but it only lasted a second. That kind of behavior would have been a grievous breach of trust when he was putting himself in such a vulnerable position. Jedi first, Shadow second.
Besides, it would make him more likely to trust her later, if it did come time to eliminate him.
And that was when she got a glimpse of… well, whatever the Hell that Sith had unleashed upon Nestor. "Oh."
"Not the sound of good news," Nestor hissed. "How bad?"
Lia could see three bugs on his shoulder alone. Their oval bodies were covered in a segmented carapace and sat flush with the skin. No, not quite flush; the skin was indented around the edge. Something was pushing them in. Or, far more likely, pulling them in.
"Bugs," she said. "Parasites, I'm guessing. Don't move; I'll get rid of them."
"Scalpels. Outside pouches," he said. "Also painkillers."
"I'm not going to cut them away, I'm just going to pull them off," she reassured him. They were only insects. How strong could whatever was holding them in place be? "Sit down somewhere, so I can actually see what I'm doing."
He obeyed, but not without grumbling, settling down facing the back of the chair. Lia sidled up behind him, giving the strange bugs on his shoulder an experimental tug. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it did not budge. Pushing and prodding further at it, the skin around the bug moved with it.
Like it had been glued in place.
Well, side to side was a bust. What about straight up? She got a good grip on it with the Force, and gave it a pull-
She crashed into the now-empty storage globe, thrown across the room with the Force, her back and left side screaming from the impact. It would leave a bruise, no doubt, but it was not enough to impede her as she leaped back to her feet.
For his part, Nestor had regained his footing, his breathing erratic and a hand to his shoulder, resting on one of the bugs. The one she had been working on. On his chest, three more bugs had sat just above his heart. In the low light of the ship, she could just barely make out his eyes, could sense something shift in them before a weighty sense of remorse radiated from his mind.
"Don't… don't do that," he managed to say. "These things're… rooted in. Deeply. You'd tear out half the muscle in my shoulder."
"Noted," she allowed, not allowing the ache in her side to affect her tone. "Want to try it again after some painkillers?"
"… Yeah," he said after a moment, taking his place on the chair again. "Try cutting, though."
"In the outside pouches, you said?" she asked.
"There's a selection," he said. "Red-capped. Strong stuff. Should work."
"Should?"
"Don't know what these bugs are pumping into me," he said. "Drug interactions are a bitch."
"I'm sure you can manage," she allowed, rooting through the trauma bag. She was tempted to make a quip about the Little Sith acting like a child, but that would have been deeply inappropriate. Before long, she had a single-use injector and jabbed it into Nestor's shoulder. With a soft click, it deposited its payload, eliciting a sigh of relief from Nestor and a drastic decrease in the volume of the gibberish flooding her mind.
And when Lia tried to remove the injector, it clung stubbornly in place. She gently tugged on it, but it refused to come out, the skin having healed around the injector in the few seconds since it had pierced it.
Oh.
Oh, this was bad.
Not saying anything, she retrieved a scalpel from its plastoid wrapper. It wasn't going to be a complicated procedure, but she prepared some gauze and antiseptic just in case. She pulled on the injector the skin was stretched taut, and gave the scalped a quick swing for which it had most certainly not been designed.
Fortunately, it carved through the skin with all the ease with which it had been designed, freeing the injector and its thankfully short needle. Reaching out with the Force, she brought a patch of gauze up to the wound, but that proved to be unnecessary.
Where once there was a patch of skin with an injector hanging off it, there was now a pale splotch of scar tissue. The result of natural healing accelerated to unnatural speeds.
Oh, this was so much worse.
"Something wrong?" Nestor managed to say. In response, she let the injector hover in front of him, the patch of skin still fused to the needle. The skin began to twitch on the needle's point but refused to move as Nestor used the Force to fiddle with it. "Oh."
"Whatever these bugs are, they're accelerating your healing," she explained. "But they are fixing, not restoring. You heal the same way you normally would, just a lot faster."
"Tear one out, I get a hole in my shoulder," he surmised. Indeed, it would probably render his entire left shoulder unusable if all three were removed so brutishly. As for the ones on his chest… hearts did not have a great track record of recovering from being torn open, assuming the ribs had not stopped whatever the bugs had done. "So what's stopping you?"
That… well…
Lia did not want to answer that out loud.
...
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