╔═══════════ 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐈𝐗𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍
'𝐡𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞' ══════════╝
━━ -ˋˏ★ˎˊ- ━━
...D'QAR, ILEENIUM SYSTEM
𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐃 hexagonal cards in her hands, Lyra knew she was losing. It wasn't the half-smile on Reeve's terrible poker face either, it was the sole fact that she had lost every single one of the six games they had already played.
They were sitting on the floor of the med bay, bored out of their minds. But there wasn't much else to do when Lyra wasn't allowed to step foot through the doorway.
Reeve's fingers--stained with machine grease--gently fanned the cards down on the floor so Lyra could see them. A perfect hand, again.
Lyra threw her head back and let her own cards fall onto the floor in front of her, not caring that half of them were upside down. "I'm out. That's it. I suck at this, I think you've made your point."
Reeve snickered, neatly pulling the pile of stones back toward her. Lyra had only accumulated three little rocks the whole time, but it had been better than nothing. Reeve extended an arm and swept those into her pile, too.
"I win, again," Reeve sang, shaking her head and grinning like mad. Her dark curls were barely pulled back from her face, and they fell everywhere as she moved.
"I hate card games," Lyra sighed for at least the fifth time, leaning back onto the pillow behind her back. "They aren't even fun, it's pure luck."
Reeve tisked. "You hate them because you suck at them. You can't stand anything you aren't automatically good at."
"They're boring," Lyra sniffed.
"It's a shame you're shit at playing, your poker face could win tournaments," Reeve whistled as she put the cards back in their neat box.
"Funny you say that," Lyra mused. "Do you remember that mission Phoenix Squadron was assigned to Canto Bight?"
Reeve wrinkled her nose. "How could I forget? You were undercover for, what, four weeks? I didn't see you for a month."
"Five weeks," Lyra corrected. "Georgie was supposed to be sitting at a Sabacc table for a three hour long tournament, but he gets too excited when he has a winning hand--"
"Georgie is a card shark," Reeve interjected. "I know that man cheats. The last time I played with him, he cleaned me out of everything I own."
"Don't make that mistake again," Lyra grinned. "He's easily the best of all of us at gambling. He grew up in the lap of luxury, and he was playing cards with the high rollers for years. So to come up with a way to keep our cover and still win, we had to combine talents. I had an invisible earpiece in, and I played through the whole tournament with Georgie in my ear telling me exactly what move to make. It was the perfect system and probably the only time I've ever won a card game."
"Oh, you mean like when we went clubbing on Lianna?" Reeve laughed, and Lyra's cheeks began to burn at the memory. "I thought you were going to lose all your credits. As soon as they dealt you in you were done for. I've literally never seen you look more panicked."
"You were the one that told me I should play a round," Lyra reminded her. Her cheeks ached from smiling so much. It was easier like this, to pretend nothing had changed in the company of Reeve.
"Because I thought you would be good at it! Who knew that scheming doesn't translate to being good at cards?"
"There is no correlation."
"You tell yourself that, Commander Endellion," Reeve gave a two finger salute and stood up from her spot on the floor. She pressed her hands to the small of her back and stretched. "I don't understand why they need to keep monitoring you. You seem so much better."
Lyra leaned her head back. "They know I won't rest unless they confine me. Kalonia said if I set foot through the doorway she'll personally drag me back into a bacta tank. I swear I can still taste it in my mouth," Lyra shuddered. "Technically, you're not even supposed to be in here."
"Oh, I know that," Reeve said. "But I'll be gone before they even realize I was here."
The door to the room slid open, revealing not Kalonia but one of the other doctors. Micah Soleil stood in the open doorway, looking between Reeve and Lyra with amusement.
He greeted them with an easy smile. He tucked the stylus in his hand into the pocket of his scrubs. "Tailor, you're really not supposed to be in here."
Lyra smiled and tilted her head. "Come on, Mich. It'll be worse if you don't let her in here, then I'd have to leave and go find her."
Reeve nodded and balanced her forearm on Lyra's shoulder. "And we wouldn't want that, would we?"
"The no visitors rule is so you can catch up on your rest, Lyra. Kalonia sent me in here to make sure you were sitting down," he raised a blonde eyebrow at where she was standing. "And that no one had managed to get into the room."
"You don't have any security back here," Reeve huffed. "You should really look into that."
"It's first on our priority list. No kidding, actually, I've had to turn away your entire squadron today and it's only nine hundred hours. They're persistent and I'm a little scared Ellis is going to start messing with my computer systems."
Lyra's stomach churned at the mention of her squadron. Reeve had told her the story of what had happened with the hasty rescue, and she hated that they had all risked so much. Jess too, and most of all Poe, who had staked both his life and his position to disobey Leia and fly blindly into First Order occupied space. They shouldn't have taken all those risks.
"Tell you what," Reeve said, tapping the box of cards in her hand. "I'll leave, if you let me come back later."
"That's a terrible deal," Micah argued, setting his holopad down on the edge of the bed. "I'm thinking I'm not going to get much of a choice, am I?"
"Good guess, Mich!" Reeve said over her shoulder as she left.
Lyra sat back down on the edge of the bed. She was dressed in her regular, comfortable clothes again, sans her missing jacket that was probably buried in the sand on that desert planet never to be seen again. It would be hard to replace, and she wasn't looking forward to breaking a new one in. Seeing as she wasn't allowed to set foot out of the room, there would be none of that any time soon, anyway.
Micah pulled up her medical diagnostics on the holo screen and all of the elation and happiness that Reeve had brought with her deflated from the room.
"So this is the normal function of the nerves in your leg," Micah explained, pointing to the glowing blue map. It shifted, and all of the lines became noticeably disjointed. "And this is the damage that your nerves sustained from the electroshock. Then you have your broken rib, collapsed lung, a nasty hematoma on your head, fractured tibia, distal radius fracture in your wrist, and that's all just the short of it."
"How long is it going to take to heal?"
Micah gave a light laugh. "You're so impatient."
Lyra let her posture relax. She had never felt like she had to put on too much of a front with Micah. "You know I am. I hate sitting here."
"You've never been able to sit down without doing anything productive," Micah leaned on the edge of the bed, eyes focused on the screens above them. "But I'm not the first person who will tell you it's a miracle you're here, sitting up and breathing. If the timing had been any different, they never would have got you onto that medical frigate in time. You came back from the dead."
Lyra moved her hand to hover over her heart. It had stopped beating, completely soundless in her chest. And even though she had been given a second chance at life, she didn't want anything to change. She wanted to go back to her squadron, back to the way things were. The incessant pain in the side of her leg would not let her forget that nothing could go back to the way it was.
"But I'm living now, so that means healing," Lyra argued.
Micah just shook his head. "Healing is a slow process. The bacta tank helped, and with the time you spent resting it seems like most of the lighter fractures have almost fully healed. I have to say, you're already showing signs of an incredibly fast recovery, but there's a lot to heal from." He swiped through the holo screen. When he saw the look on her face, he stopped. "What is it?"
Not willing to delve into much of anything, Lyra said, "I don't like this."
"You'll be fine," Micah said amiably. "I'm sure you'll be a little better with another night of rest, and then we'll work out a plan for physical therapy. I talked with Kalonia and she thinks it's the best course of action for you."
Lyra frowned. If there was one thing she was convinced of, it was that the reason things hadn't worked out between them was that Micah was too nonchalant about everything. Almost emotionless, his detached reactions were a result of time as a practicing doctor. He meant well, but Lyra still had the itch to walk out of the godforsaken room right then and there.
"Can I ask you something?" Lyra began.
"Yes?" Micah said, but he didn't sound very sure of himself.
"The science of electroshock isn't something the Resistance knows a lot about, is it?"
Micah's cheery expression turned dark. "No. It's too unpredictable, too powerful for anything more than conjecture. We touched on it in school, but it's never been anything more than an alternative theory."
"Right," Lyra nodded thickly. "There's no possibility that it could erase memory in a controlled way, could it?"
Micah raised a concerned eyebrow. "None of our scans showed any damage to your brain tissue."
Even for the entire year she had dated Micah, he never learned much about her time before the Resistance. He had never been curious enough to care much further back into her past. And, Lyra knew too that he had been scared to ask too much. That maybe he would see her for what she really was, and their relationship would have ended even sooner than it did.
"No," Lyra shook her head. "This was different, they were trying to kill me. It was just something they said that made me wonder."
"It's definitely possible." Micah gave a thoughtful sigh. "Especially with how far they've gotten, isolated electrodes could alter the neurological pathways of the hippocampus. It would be a risk, and it would undoubtedly alter a person beyond recognition," Micah shuddered. "You'd have to ask Doctor Nguyen, one of her concentrations is neuroscience. But, it isn't really something for you to worry about. They obviously didn't use anything like that on you."
Lyra gave an empty smile. "Obviously."
She wished he had said it was impossible. Now all there was left to do was wonder and know that Malarus might not have been lying.
-ˋˏ★ˎˊ-
𝐋𝐘𝐑𝐀 waited until Micah had left to make a run for it.
After he made his final rounds for the night and Kalonia and Mai Nguyen had gone to sleep, there was no one left to stop her except for the new ensign they had left on the night shift. The kid didn't even look twice at Lyra when she crept out of the med bay.
Sticking to the shadows of the walls was never difficult, especially since only the night shift was up and the auxiliary lights were the only dim glow in the hallways. She breathed deeply, taking in the sight of the base with fresh eyes. The only thing she had seen since she got back was the walls of the med bay.
Back in her room, it felt smaller. Cramped and enclosed like a tiny box. Had the walls always been this low? Everything felt dark and cold. Lyra stretched out her shaking hand to turn on the lamp from across the room. But there was no familiarity that flowed through her. The lamp didn't switch on despite her strain. Angrily, she crossed the room and switched it on by hand.
Flooded in artificial light, surreality washed over her with the realization that she had been convinced she would never see this place again.
When the door to her quarters opened, Lyra didn't have to turn around to know who it was. Reeve Tailor was the only one who had biometric clearance to enter.
She walked in uninvited and sat on the edge of the bed. "I promised Micah that you wouldn't go running around base to find me."
Lyra sighed and ran a tired hand through her hair. Once brown, she knew it was now streaked with gray. There was a slit straight through her eyebrow where a cut was just starting to scar over and a hundred other reminders that Lyra Endellion was not invincible.
"I just needed a minute to breathe."
Reeve laid back and put her hands under her head. "I might have blown your cover when I went looking for you in the med bay. That new nurse thinks you're in the bathroom."
Lyra burst out laughing. "That was the best you could do."
"Give me some credit, I tried!" Reeve laughed, tossing one of the pillows at Lyra's head.
Lyra caught it and lowered it down to her lap, thinking. "What are they saying about me?"
"Do you want me to sugar coat it?"
"Of course not."
Lyra sank onto the bed next to her. The sheets smelled stale from sitting for so long without use.
"They're saying that you aren't human. That you're impossible to kill. Your squadron and the people that matter, on the other hand, are all saying that they're relieved that you're home safe. We know that you're human and that this very well could have been your last stand." When Lyra didn't say anything, Reeve put her hand on Lyra's where it sat loosely on the bed.
Lyra blinked, shaking her head once. All of her walls fell. "I gave up everything without thinking I would come back. I thought that the only way to face everything I've done was to atone for it, all at once. It did nothing good, it jeopardized everything, and now?"
"And now?" Reeve coaxed.
"I don't know who I am anymore, or what I am. I am this–" she gestured loosely in the air around them "–war, fighting." Her expression was blank and her eyes shone like glass. "It's all I've ever known. And I worry I am nothing without it."
"Lyra, I know you. There is nothing that can stand in your way for too long without you moving around it. But your past? This fight? That isn't who you are, and that isn't your worth. It's all the things in between, the reasons you fight."
Lyra sighed and leaned into her friend's warm chest, letting Reeve run a gentle hand through her tangled hair. "I thought I could do it all alone, and I can't."
"That's why I'm sitting right here and telling you that you aren't alone. I'm speaking for so many people when I say this, but mostly for myself. I don't know what I would do without you here."
Lyra swiped at her cheek. If there was one thing she had done in life that would make her fourteen year old self happier, it would be this friendship. "Thank you for coming to find me tonight."
"I'll always find you Lyra, I always have," Reeve said with a small laugh. "But if you don't go back to the medbay, Kalonia is gonna kill me and then you."
"I'll go back, I promise."
Reeve left and Lyra was again alone with the shadows of her room. She grabbed a softer shirt from her closet and tugged it on before she switched the lamp back off. Out the door and back in the hallway, the ghost inside her was slowly but surely making its way back to its usual spot. The hallway felt less altered and more stable again.
Then the whole thing was thrown off when she ran smack into another person coming around the corner.
"Whoa!"
"Whoa yourself," Lyra bristled at Poe. He was wearing a gray tee shirt and grease stained pants, and he looked like he had come straight from the hangar. "Do you usually walk with your eyes closed?"
"Aren't you supposed to be in the medbay?"
"They released me," Lyra told him, tilting up her chin. "I'm healed."
"You're limping," Poe told her pointedly.
"And I didn't need anyone else to remind me," she said through gritted teeth.
He just looked at her. "Did they actually release you?"
"Depends on who you ask."
He grinned a little. "I figured you would find a way around that, one way or another."
Some part of her was glad to see Poe. There was an inexplicable safety that came from being around him now. Another part was still so sorry at how everything had played out. He had watched her die and he had tried to save her until the very end. It was unfair to him to have been put in such a situation.
Lyra continued on back toward the med bay, walking slow enough that her limp wouldn't show. He followed, just like she knew he would.
"Do you remember what you said to me before I joined your squadron?" Lyra asked him.
He thought for a second. "Probably something not very nice."
She bit back a laugh. "We agreed to never speak to each other again when the mission was done."
Realization dawned on his face, and he winced. "We did, didn't we."
"The mission is over, Poe. Deal is fulfilled."
"Fulfilled, right." He pursed his lips. "Well, a deal's a deal, Endellion."
"So we're agreeing to never talk to each other again, from this point forward."
They came to a stop at the end of the hallway, just before they would be in view of the windows to the medbay. "Actually," he said. "Since our mission is suspended it's technically not over."
"Interesting," Lyra said. It was a fight to keep from smiling and to pretend it meant nothing that every argument they had ever had was suddenly replaced by this strange, mutual understanding of each other.
"Isn't it?" he agreed. "So I guess we have to deal with each other a little longer."
"So unfortunate."
"Very unfortunate."
They were only a foot apart now. Lyra had her arms crossed over her chest, and Poe was standing with one hand in his pocket. She only held his even gaze for a few seconds before she was looking over his shoulder in the direction of the medical wing. "You know you need to go back and rest, right?" He told her.
"Don't sound so worried," she sighed.
"I have a right to be worried," he told her, and that familiar concern flooded his brown eyes. "I watched you die, Lyra."
She looked away from him. It was still so much of a weight in her memory. The feeling of his hand on her cheek in the final seconds when things made sense and before darkness encroached and took everything away. Even before that, back on the desert planet when Terex had thrown the knife at Poe's hand. By now, the mark was only the red line of a healing scar on his hand, but there are some things that never quite scar over completely. The feeling of guilt was one of them.
"I know you did," Lyra finally nodded. "And I need you to promise me something."
Quicker than she thought possible, he said, "Anything."
"Stop blaming yourself. For what happened to me, but also for L'ulo. Everything was so far beyond your control. You weren't even the one that radioed to base for backup, that was on me."
"You can't blame yourself either," he told her quietly.
"You know it's not so easy to stop," she said.
"I know better than anyone," he told her with a heavy sigh. Then his expression lifted a little. "So yes, I do promise to try to stop shouldering all the burden, but only if you promise to do the same."
"Deal," she nodded. He held out his pinkie finger, and Lyra rolled her eyes. "Are you seriously going to make me pinkie promise? I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were still twelve."
He was offended. "It doesn't count unless you pinkie promise."
Lyra tilted her head, and relenting, she hooked her pinkie around his. "There. Happy?"
"Immensely," he grinned. "Now c'mon, I'll walk you there. I have to go that way anyway, BeeBee is still waiting for me in the hangar."
"You should have brought him with you, I miss him."
"He misses you too," Poe told her. "It's getting a little obnoxious."
Lyra laughed so loud she could feel the sharp press of her still-healing rib. "Don't say it like it's so surprising. I gave him a new paint job, I'm nearly his favorite."
"Second favorite," Poe corrected. "I'm his favorite."
"Second favorite," Lyra said, genuinely surprised. "That's pretty good."
He laughed at this, and Lyra felt the same content elation in her chest. Maybe some changes were good changes, too.
━━ -ˋˏ★ˎˊ- ━━
a/n aw we do love a slow burn where it goes from enemies to lovers to idiots to lovers *sigh*
n e ways yes Micah is Lyra's ex-bf BUT they have an amicable relationship. it's an interesting dynamic idk. more on that later 👀
there are a lot of scenes I cut from the original version of the story and I'm finding that the first act is going to be a few chapters shorter than it was (but not really shorter-shorter because the chapters are longer lol). but I really love the idea of Lyra being so bad at card games so I kept this one in with some changes :)
--nat <3