Aching—gnawing—heavy—sharp—shooting—cramping—slicing—hot—burning: the pain is rippling through every crevice and corner of my body.
It felt like a welded knife was twisting in my abdomen and coal was injected into my bloodstream. The agony I was subdued to was everlasting waves that crashed upon my untouched soul to unknowable depths, thrashing upon my once unscarred skin and staining its grip there.
The torture throbs in my gut, deep and warm but slicing at the same time. It felt like someone has their hands in me and was squeezing my insides first gently as a warning and then as tightly as they could for fun.
At first, the darkness of the room deceived me but when I fluttered my eyelids open—which were as heavy as one thousand rocks—I realised the bright lights were potent in their confusing and dazzling glare from above. For a second, all I could make out was nothing at all but the moving lumps surrounding the bed and the hands using shiny objects to slice open my crimson flesh. It shot up fast, erasing every thought from my head and paralysing my body to the hospital bed. I screamed beneath the blade, but I didn't recall that part; only the pain.
Plastic gloved hands held me down and masked faces peered down at me with shocked gazes through the hazy mist that clouded over my sight.
"She's regaining consciousness!" A male's voice shouted above the briny tremors of the heart monitor connected to me.
"Apply more anaesthetic."
The nurse above left and came back quickly with a plastic mask. Through hooded eyes, I could see the way she smiled with her own eyes—in a warm but understanding way—but I couldn't relax around such an unfamiliar face which the expression belonged to: I need a known face, preferably a lover's...
I need Kylo.
When she held the mask up to my mouth and over my nose, I attempted to struggle against it but I don't think I even moved. Every little flinch was like a nail bomb exploding in my innards. My vision became blotched with violent colours that moved and merged without pattern or design.
Everything suddenly turns fuzzy, my consciousness was floating through an empty space filled with a thick static.
Throughout the hospital room, my heartbeat pounded loudly, echoing in my ears, alongside my fading pleas for help to the masked woman above. The agony still crippled itself into my bones but it now ran distant. Her squinting eyes shined below and with a gloved hand, the nurse tugged down her mask and told me that everything was going to be okay. Feeling as if my soul was instead draining slowly from my body, my eyes began to flicker to the back of my head but continued jolting back to watch her smile—wondering if she was telling me lies...for I certainly didn't think I was going to be okay.
Contorting—floating—swirling: suddenly that smile and expression morphed before me. The hallucination started with a slight shimmer in the air around her; like everything surrounding her was being warped and twisted as the colours of her tanned face began to collide and soak into something much more pale.
Scars now littered the nurse's skin, deep and silvery. Instantaneously, the pain and scalpels in my guts are gone and I am the thrown below a familiar face and for a moment, I am lost in the brown eyes above.
His face is graceful among the wreck and when Kylo smiled in a small way, the freckles upon his face light up like constellations around his solar eyes. Falling into the burning look he beamed to me, I felt my body go limp—all fear and adrenaline draining away until there was nothing but a black void.
When the darkness finally wanes, I could see the lights above again from behind close lids. My body went heavy as if someone was sitting above my chest, pinning me down. But I could only lay still in my place and breathe—breathe slow and deep until it passed—and the heaviness left eventually, but the pain still lingered.
My eyelids dragged down as if a hundred coins were sitting above them but I finally pulled enough strength within to open them once more. For the first time in forever, I had woken to lights that weren't piercing white and almost blinding. The slits of illumination above were still somewhat bight, but this time they were almost a yellow tone, nothing I was used to.
The air had a perfumed scent and every surface was dustless. Curtains surround the right side of the room, the other side only a bare window, showing the edge of the galaxy. The floor was slate grey which matched the walls. Examining the polystyrene tiled ceiling, I could hear moans from an adjacent bed behind the curtain.
I think for a moment that Kylo was worthy enough to get his own private hospital room, but I hadn't yet earned that privilege nor will I ever as a man coughed and spluttered cursing words at his pain behind a thin, mesh curtain that was split between me and a stranger.
Whimpering beneath my breath and clenching my eyes closed only to reopen them once more, but this time without a hazy overlay, I lifted my arms up to find one wrapped in a thick and white cast and the other attached to a drip—the needle forced under my skin, silvery and jabbing into my muscle as I moved it.
My abdomen ached and my legs were impossibly numb. Someone could cut them off and I wouldn't feel a thing. I was exhausted. Looking down to them, I struggled to tell my brain to move my toes beneath the sheets and although I couldn't feel them doing so, they still moved hesitantly under the thin cloth.
Tearing the sheet lower with my arm that was caged in a cast, I assessed the damage. My heart dropped and tears flooded to my eyes. There is no blood anywhere but my abdomen was purple and lumpy where it should've been smooth. When I started gasping for air, the muscle felt like it had been torn to shreds. My stomach was smaller. A deep scar was stapled together horizontally from one hip bone and to the other.
I thought the pain from before was unbearable, but now this certain pain was so excruciating in my heart that the name should tear itself away from its reason and categorise it as a form of torture instead.
I gasped in the hospital room and scratched my cold and rigid fingers along the tender flesh, almost hoping that my child is still in there somewhere, but my skin was only soft beneath the violent violets.
In that moment of loss, all the stars outside the window collapsed. Where there was yellow light above, became only shadows of hands that reached out for my child.
The torture ricocheted up my spine and sunk its teeth into my pounding heart. The heart monitor beside me suddenly started alarming disturbance, but I couldn't hear its cries above my own.
Where was my child? Had The First Order already gotten their hands onto my child? I spluttered and almost choked on the wet tears that seep through my lips and into the bone-dry feeling in my mouth; which ached when I tried swallowing. My ribcage constricted into itself a little tighter, my breathing becoming more difficult as I craved solitude all while the man behind the curtain only cried louder over my own wails.
I'm so scared and misplaced that I only wished to set the clock on the wall backwards a few hours so I could say goodbye to Kylo before he left for duty. Drink in his smile, bask in his honey eyes and feel his hands all over my swelled up body. But now, I was a mess of crimson and purple, which I knew would take a while to heal—not wishing to be touched when he eventually walked into the room, hopefully with my child in his hands—but I knew Kylo Ren would never show the newborn as much warmth as he hesitantly did to me.
Only it isn't Kylo who walked first into the hospital room, pulling the certain back and greeting me with a closed smile. Though it wasn't the familiar face I wished to see, I still distantly recalled that face from the brief, cloudy moment where I had woken up during surgery.
A doctor with a clipboard in hand and wearing white scrubs, hummed and nodded his head as a greeting while he also casted his green eyes onto me. "Ah. You're finally awake," he said, then fiddling with the machines all hooked up to me.
The heart monitor finally stopped beeping. The silence swallowed me whole and left the pain in my place.
I shook my head, furrowed my brows—remembering the chaos that put me here, in this hospital room.
"How long ago was the attack?" I croaked, my lips felt dry and cracked.
The doctor furrowed his brows and tucked the clipboard underneath his armpit as he pulled out a stool from beneath the bed and sat on it.
"Attack?" He tilted his head.
When I did the same, his smile fell.
"Oh...the attack," he sighed, pulling the clipboard out and flicking his eyes over the words, "it's been three days."
Stuck in a suspended moment where my face washed blank with confusion, like my brain couldn't work fast enough to take in his words: every muscle of my body just froze, but my hands trembled, clenching tightly on the thin sheets around me. Three days.
I turned my neck and faced towards him, but too slowly to be normal. When I finally spoke, my voice trailed slowly, like the words are unwilling to take flight.
"Three days...are you sure?"
The brown-haired man nodded, his tan skin glowing underneath the yellow lights. My heart dropped.
"Positive. You've been unconscious since your arrival," he replied—his eyes were still bright...tauntingly. In those emerald greens, all I could remember was the way they shined as he wore the mask during surgery as he cut my womb open. I wondered if he'd feel remorse if I died on the table, or if the First Order had already made it clear to save the baby rather than me.
I swallowed a lump that formed in my throat. "Arrival?"
He smiled, all too ridged to be genuine.
"Upon your arrival to the Resistance's star-base."
The pain roared.
His words washed over me like a bucket of cold water and I felt nauseous to the pit of my bruised stomach. I felt the panic begin like dust piling into my veins. Tension grew in my contorted face and limbs, my mind replaying my last memories: the explosions. the Resistance attacking. Four finding me. The StormTroopers. A gunshot. Four falling to the ground. Me passing out—I thought I might pass out again but this had to be a dream. I had to be dreaming.
My breathing became more rapid, more shallow. Tears spilled down my cheeks in the tsunami that thrashed with realisation, I gasped words out before I lost all the air in my lungs completely...
"I'm in the Resistance's base?"
The doctor stretched forward and rolled his chair closer and places a hand on my shaking wrist, stroking the skin over and over, telling me with a hush that it would be alright and cooing at my endless tears. I wanted to hit him, but I didn't.
"You're okay, now," he soothed. "The Resistance is here to help you."
I shook my head and snatched my wrist away from his grip, only to jab my fingernails into the mattress—anything to stop the primal surge to flee or fight. But it was no use.
"Where's my child!?" I shrieked, my face turned a dull red and eyes utterly bloodshot. He closed his own for a second and looked away. I lurched my hands off the mattress and gripped onto him suddenly, my body quivering as I was no longer in control of my mind or body during this panic.
"Where's my child!?" I spit into his face once more. I twist the collar of his scrubs in my hands, knuckles turning white at my force. The doctor sorrowfully glances his eyes into my own, the emerald burning with empathy.
I watched the way his lips moved when he spoke, but the words were muffled behind the static beat of my heart. Though...I didn't need to hear the words he mouthed, for I could read the thin lips clearly.
"It didn't make it."
An invisible hand clasped over my neck, while my mouth fell slack as an equally, ghostly flood of adrenaline pierced into my heart, unloading it in an instant as if the grief had plunged a dagger into it.
I immediately unclenched my grip from his collar and looked away to something a few galaxies away over his shoulder. The misery forced my brain into submission, demanding a solution that I couldn't provide nor can the universe. I used to think that the labour pains were the worst because they were chaotic, random. But now that my heart was held captive by an incredible loss, I knew something much more cruel than torture itself.
I felt my ribs heaving as if bound by ropes, straining to inflate my lungs. My head was a swing-set of fears that glided through the air, out of control, each chair swaying my mind into blackness and meek.
"We tried everything we could...but it was too late."
Without a break in the pain, I couldn't formulate a thought. only felt an emptiness in my heart, a shear nothingness that somehow smothered me and threatened to consume my soul entirely. The misery washed over my body like harsh waves crashing onto soft sand. Each wave was icy cold and sent shivers down my spine as I drowned on the water which rose like the lump in my throat. I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch a hole into the window and let a black hole eat me up for that would be less painful.
In seconds, I was curled tight in the hospital bed, my only movement being the trembling of limbs and salty tears darkening the thin hospital gown that I wore. The doctor places a hand on my shoulder as an effort to bring comfort, but I only snap my head to him and scream profanities into his shocked face.
"Get your hand off me!" I bark, eyes red and angry in my immaculate loss. "Resistance scum!"
I dig my nails into the flesh of his hand and rip it off my shoulder, thrashing it against his chest.
Tersely, my eyes flicker to the window, which before I found beauty in but now it only seemed to wither with age as the glass began to feel as if they were colliding into my bones, the air twining thin between it.
The room had dwindled to a barely perceptible lightening of the stars' gloom, and I shiver in the claustrophobic space. A scream of anxiety leaps out of my mouth as I pull all the needles and cords out of my veins and fought against the doctor who tried to pin me down.
"Stop struggling!" He mimicked the last words I had heard from the StormTrooper who had shot Four, "The Resistance is only trying to help you."
I am struggling to breathe and I can't tell if that is because I know the windows cannot open or if it is the growing anxiety that builds. I flush hot and my skin almost burns beneath his touch. Grounding my teeth together, I see crimson.
Spitting into the doctor's face, I ignore the slight ripping sensation in my stitches as I lift my leg to my chest and kick it forcefully into his own. Stumbling back and falling into the curtain, which crumpled to the floor beneath his weight, the doctor crashed to the floor and groaned upon impact.
Kicking my feet off the side of the bed, I shriek and hunch over myself as the pain in my abdomen grows. Spots of blood begin to seep through the thin, paper dress, signalling I had torn open a stitch.
"Stop!" The doctor cries from the floor, face contorting into one in pain as he cradles his shoulder to his side.
I only ignore his words and rush by him. I glance at the man in the other hospital bed and find a rugged, elderly man who's eyes were as wide as saucers. Holding my hand to my bleeding scar, I snap my head in every direction and search for the exit upon endless rows of taken beds that were separated by curtains.
My hand was becoming sticky in crimson, but I payed it no attention behind my groans and hobbling feet that began to speckle with blood also. A door at the very end of rows almost illuminates before me.
I am drinking in the feedback of all my burning senses. Aside from my own noisy breath, all I can hear is the pattering of my bare feet against tile and the doctor, who was now further behind, trying to pull himself up.
The hatch wasn't controlled by a technical keypad, and for that I was incredibly grateful as I gripped my bloody hand onto the latch and opened it quickly. The door was heavy for my weak muscles that tightened in pain and I could only hold it open enough to squeeze by.
"Hey!" The doctor shouts from the end of the room as he only now stands. "Don't go out there!"
I cry out in pain as I throw myself through the gap and the door shuts loudly behind me. I flinched in the new light, as the shocked cries of people walking by in the hallway, made all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I watched anxiously as the hospital ward transformed into a lethal playground of Resistance members.
Here there is no openness, no space, nothing shines or has the smell of disinfectant. The lights are softer and everything around the space seems as if it had to be replaced a million times to complete the ships panelling, instead of being majorly manufactured like all of Finalizer was, with The First Order's fund.
I trudge by many nurses who are for the most part, crammed with patients on trolleys, who stay still and only wince in pain, whilst I am heaving beneath my own. Each of them lies on their back, strapped in and eyes toward the naked fluorescent tubes that flicker as though they are on their last bulbs. The nurses eye me wearily, some even sending daggers in their glare – They must know I am tied to The First Order.
One lady with silvering hair, notices my bleeding abdomen and tries to help me, but I only push her away with my sticky hand – Leaving a crimson print in her blue scrubs.
I wince as the blood swirls without mercy, penetrating to the thin fabric that stuck to the wound which should've been stitched skin but instead that flesh now lies open and raw, as two staples had been pulled from twenty.
My arm that laid in a thick cast, began to throb with every movement down the hallway. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I had to get away from the enemy.
The Resistance loathed members of The First Order, just as they also loathed them in return; And though, I didn't think of myself on any side of the war: The members of The Resistance didn't know that.
If someone realises I am the girl who had tried to give The First Order another Sith, I would be done for.
Then, the pain becomes unbearable as another staple pulls from the skin of my scar and I crash onto the floor and I let out a strangled scream, blood welling into my throat from the tongue I had just bitten in a vain attempt to keep quiet.
I sob on the floor, tears mixing with the blood to create a chaotic concoction. I press a pale hand to my stomach, trying to seal the wound shut. It feels so wrong that it was flat beneath my touch, a month earlier than it should've been.
Suddenly, a gentle hand is placed on my shoulder and when I shake it off of me, it only returns. Glancing to its owner, I meet those eyes of icy blue.
"Arion."
There she was, crouching to the floor beside me and holding me in her skinny, frail arms. She looked so different without the bland, grey uniform. She was dressed in brown, combat pants with a turtle-neck tucked tightly into it, it was so strange to see the natural curves of her body – But they fit her so well.
A tumble of blonde curls fell over her shoulder. No longer tied up and falling limply down her back beneath the headscarf. It gave her some warmth, complementing her pale face rather than making her look washed-out.
"I'm so sorry, Six." She whispers in my ear, laying her head on my shoulder.
I cry.
"This is all your fault."
I grip onto her for extra warmth, but dig my nails into her back as if I was stabbing her instead – Angry at all the chaos that she had caused.
"I did this to keep you and your child safe." Her voice wobbles, "I didn't know you would lose the baby."
The pain and grief grazes all over me like a heavy bleed, deep and burning all at the same time, whilst the hatred masquerades as an ointment – When truely, I know its purpose is no more than gasoline for the flames.
I pull myself out of her grip and look into her eyes with my own, wide. "You are the reason my baby died." My chin trembles, but my voice barely becomes anything over a whisper.
Tears pool in her eyes, she nods. "I'm so sorry."
I know the hatred only guarantees more enmity, more pain – But the hatred is all I can hold onto like a dark flame, burning cold in my chest as I will never be able to do anything about it. The hatred is only a mask for my emotional trauma.
"And you're the reason my friend is also dead." I spit, forcing myself to a standing position, to which she does too.
Anger boils in my system as if it is the vexing of my burning soul. Like the rushing of blood to my reddening cheeks, my veins feel as if they could explode any moment if I don't let it all out in an act of violence. I had never been a violent person, but as I breathed in and out, the air wouldn't enter my lungs. Starved for air, my heart raced at tremendous speeds, and my lungs shallowly rose and fell in time. I want to scream. I want to let Arion know just how much violence she had caused with the help of The Resistance, in an act of my own savagery.
With blonde hair glimmering beneath the lights, she cocks her head to the side and lets the tears flow. Knitting her eyebrows together, I cut her off as I reach my hand out, fingers clasping the air and tightening her airways.
With feet dangling, Arion is left gasping for air, her face turning bright red as I force choked her tightly. I didn't have the conscience to realise the power I was utilising in my hands as I reached out for her neck in the suspended tension. Many people cried out around us, but never came close to try and stop me.
I could sense Arion felt as if her lungs were slowly filling with rocks and water. She was levitating, rigid and paralysed. Only through her parted lips, did she draw tiny gasps, her eyes pleading for me to let her go as she clawed at her neck.
"You killed him!" I screamed, tears stripping away at my defences. "He was shot, and you basically pulled the trigger!"
She looks at me with wide, glossy eyes. "Four's... Alive." She wheezes, using the last bit of air before her lungs began to crumple.
Shocked. My eyes fly open wider and my body wants to let her go, but a dark part of me wants to stay put and choke her until I can see the life leak out of her knowing eyes.
Unclenching my hand, Arion drops to the floor and doubles over. She heaves in deep breathes as if she was punched in the gut. The wind seeming to be knocked right out of her.
Blood is beginning to drip down my leg as she gasps on the floor, her blue lips cold as the hot air shoots into her lungs.
"Four's alive?" I ask, licking my lips and searching her painful eyes for an answer.
She nods.
"How do you know this?" I demand.
Arion topples over onto her forearms, craning her neck back to me as a crowd began to form around us. She glances at the little pools of blood beneath my bare feet and then back into my eyes.
"Because he's here too." She answers, a slight sweat glistening on her forehead and golden hair sticking to it.
All anger that once raged in my body, fell as flat as my face did. Furrowing my brows and groaning as I crouch down to hook my hands under her elbows and pick her up to her feet, I look into her eyes, suddenly determined – Ignoring the nausea that prickled at the bottom of my throat due to the blood loss I was enduring.
"Take me to him, now." I bark. Shoving her in the shoulder to begin leading me. When I glance at the crowd of dozens around us, they all widen their eyes and begin walking on their usual paths once more.
Arion cranes her neck back to me, licking her blue lips and sighing. "You need to get your stitches fixed."
My eye twitches. I shove her once more.
"I said, take me to him, now!"
I was vaguely aware of a stinging in my punched ribs but I never stopped to regain my breath – Even though my lungs felt like they would soon burst as I followed her down the halls in slow footsteps. I eventually settled to stumbling along behind Arion as fast as I could, but she would only tell me to slow down.
Exhausted, I heave a breathe out. I feel as though I had used all the energy I had left, draining it as though I was leaking electricity, whilst I drained the air out of her chest.
Walking as if I had a gun pointed to the back of her head, Arion stops eventually in front of a hatch, turning to me with defeated eyes. "He's at the end of the ward."
"You're not coming with me?" I ask, knitting my eyebrows together. She shakes her head, the colour returning to her thin lips once more.
"I'll wait out here." She breathes, flinching when I raise a hand by her shoulder to reach for the latch.
I almost want to say sorry for what I had done, just because of that fearful swirl in the icy blue hues that she pointed up to me – But, both she and I knew, that I didn't need to apologise, for my reaction was granted.
"I'll come in to get you soon... You need to get your wound stitched up." She presses again, tearing her eyes back down to the pool of blood in the paper dress, that I had forgotten I was wearing.
Rolling my eyes, I open the heavy door and walk hesitantly through the ward that resembled the one I had just come from. Why The Resistance had saved Four after shooting him in the first place, was beyond me... But I was just grateful they didn't leave him there to die.
I pray Kylo had gotten out of Finalizer before it obliterated into tiny pieces – Five too. But somehow, that magnetic rope that tied me to Kylo tugged onto my heart and whispered to it that he was alright. That he was still alive, somewhere.
My swollen eyes meet the dismal view of this hospital ward, flickering to every curtain, until it found the last one. There are multitudes of intravenous drips and monitors that beep and buzz in the eerie air, all hooked up to the patients who lay quietly.
When I reach the final curtain which hung limply on the chrome railing that was hooked to the ceiling, looking like it's been washed a thousand times, I pull it open softly – Somewhat afraid of what lays behind it.
The hospital bed is bare. Sheets made and pillow soft without any dents. The wide window shines its stars into the ward – Four sits before it, the bed covering him slightly as I can only make out the back of his head.
"Four?" I utter, walking around the bed to be met with the sight of Four... Sitting in a wheelchair.
Four turns to face me, his eyes already welding with tears. I immediately knew it was confusion that flooded within his throbbing veins – He swallowed softly, blinking his eyes tightly and opening them once more, just to be certain that I am real and truely here.
"Six..." He croaks and when he breaks down, I run over to him and cradle his head into my chest above the metal wheelchair.
"Are you okay?" I whisper, but I knew he wasn't okay. I wasn't okay, either.
He can smell the metallic of the dried up blood in my dress, but he didn't care enough. When I finally let go of him, he huffs a broken breath.
"I-" He stutters. I place my hand upon his lap, resting my broken arm on the back of his chair.
His eyes meet mine and his face twitched in pain. Lips curling downwards, his voice was so fragile that I could see the metaphorical chips in his glass frame. "I can't walk, Six."
His shoulders fall limp by his sides and his lips become as rosy as his neck does too. With trembling hands reaching out to mine, I interlock my fingers with his own and let the tears burst forth like water from a dam, spilling down my face.
"W-What do you mean?"
He chokes on a sob.
"The blaster shot me in my lower spine." He cried, "I'm paralysed downwards from there."
"No..." I shake my head, "Four. I-I'm so sorry."
He tries to smile, but it is forced and full of pain. Glancing to my abdomen, he struggles on a heave of breath, tears dripping from his eyelashes and darkening his blue eyes. "I'm sorry too."
Streaming tears cleansed my reddening cheeks. Few droplets remained, forgetting their way as the path was swept from beneath them, consequently blurring my vision with waves of sadness from the cruel destiny that our lives had become.
We sit here and grieve our losses together for an incredible amount of time beneath the stalking starlights, and I don't believe the pain will ever ease for we had lost everything that our lives had amounted to.
I had lost my child after being brought up, since I was one also, learning to nurture and carry one until birth, then going on to becoming pregnant and cradling it for eight months only for it to be cut from my body dead.
And Four? He had lost everything. The soldier who wanted nothing more than to fight... Couldn't even stand on his own two feet. The First Order had wasted his potential from the very start... But now would they even bother to keep him around?
What if they force me to carry another child?
That is... If we ever get back to them in the first place.
As I hold him in my arms and we cry out into the void, I recall the childhood where all six of us, would play soldiers with wooden sticks as swords, fighting a heroic battle and dreaming dreams where everything ended with a happy ending – But from here, there is no happy ending in sight. Only a crippling, fearful conclusion, where we must always stay on guard and fight to survive for the return of the reward that was that unworthy conclusion.
No. This wasn't a happy ending. And The Resistance were not our savours.
I only had two savours and they were neither The Resistance nor The First Order.
My savour was somewhere out among those stars.
My savour was the reflection that peered back at me in the glass pane.
When Arion comes to take me away to heal my broken stitches, she tells me that we must hurry for someone is expecting me. When I ask her who, with crimson hands and a crimson paper dress, she replies with,
"The General of The Resistance."