He watches her fading, watches it happen in her eyes. Can see it on another level—see it in the small tics of her features, see it in her hands. And his heart reaches, and his heart lurches. In a moment, he makes a decision, as the man, as the doctor. In the din, that reaches his ears as louder than it truly is, pounding, crawling against his skin. He closes the distance and scoops her into his arms, the crook of her legs over one limb, back leaning against another, bridal style. He can’t wait any longer, not here, not with her like this.
He can’t run, not with his leg, he hasn’t run in almost two decades, but he can walk, through the pain of it, through the noise. He begins carrying her back to the ship, one he can see in the distance. They’ll have to take the long way to avoid the crowd, to avoid a riot. He prepares for it, in breaths. Her pain matters more than anything else right now. Matters as the most important thing he can think of.
What he forgets to do is speak, until he wonders if it’s too late, until there’s almost a blush on his cheeks at the forgetfulness. He speaks in whispers, “I can’t treat you where we were, I’m taking you back to the ship. If you want to go back later, I can’t stop you—I can’t stop you. But, first, please—we can’t stay.”
As they go, with fingers on her arm, he reaches out with his senses, reaches for any hint of pain that he can heal, any hint of pain he can take from her, in veins made of light, add it to his own. Heal her bruises fully when they can sit, when they can brush the sands from their eyes. He can look into her eyes and know she’s home.
It’s her words that add to his concern, and he speaks his questions now, hoping she’ll answer, hoping she has a voice in her throat. “What do you mean—can you tell me, tell me everything?” He crosses the mouth of an alley, “Why is it not a luxury, Nareen? Can you tell me why?” She almost reminds him of Orion then, something to prove.
The feeling of his hands and the weight of them on her person intensifies, and she fights the gummy feeling in her own arms in order to throw them around his neck; the action is languid, lacks grace and she feels as if she is moving in water but Nareen pushes forward. Through a current of numbness she grabs on to this man as if for dear life, and watches as the scene that shrinks behind them. It feels wrong to go, to seek safety away from the epicenter of it all. And here is Atticus, all at once the piece of driftwood that takes her further out to sea, and the buoy tying her down, securing her to the now.
She feels like a child being ushered away from a game she’d never win. Feels the anger and frustration that coursed through her veins in her first years at the academy, forced into a strenuous cycle of drill after drill. Most of all she’s disappointed in herself, taken aback by the numb feeling that set itself in her bones and disappointed in the cowardice that sits as the root of her own disconnectedness. Nareen wants to apologize but this seems meaningless, wants to move but any fight has been siphoned from her tired body.
His words reach her ears and they float in her mind, syllables peaking in and out of the fog that she can’t seem to clear up. But Nareen understood, she registered enough to force her arms to move again, fighting through whatever it is that holds her in place and tightening her hold on him. It’s exhausting to try to move when your limbs feel like something close to lead, and it’s more than likely that she’s moved in centimeters and not the inches that would make a difference. She just hopes that he understands.
It was supposed to be something like a laugh she thinks, but it catches in her throat and she coughs. What can she say? Of all the times she and Orin spoke she never told all, he had such high hopes for her and she would never tarnish them with her own insecurities. She might’ve been that selfless Jedi he thought she could be after all. Nareen has been fighting with her own body, forcing her mind into this hyperaware state, forcing her thoughts to focus on now, on Atticus. She doesn’t have it in her to focus and bare her soul, so she switches between the two, losing focus on the physical and amplifying the focus on her thoughts.
“Keshi was a luxury, and then it wasn’t.” The words come slow, not to test them but because her throat is threatening to close up around them with each sound. Nareen has never voiced any thing close to resentment from home, and she doesn’t feel resentment, not when she knows her mother only did what she thought was best. But she’s torn, because she’s incomplete and it’ll take her years to craft the rest of herself so that she properly fits into this puzzle, and until then what is she? How can she help? “I don’t think I know who I am.” She wants it to be the numbness talking, wants to badly for the words to feel terrible on her tongue, but there they are, the revelation warm, somehow comforting. “I’m running to catch up to you all...”
