L'hôpital de la République

The Clone Wars medical AU no one knew they needed. by @commonplacecaz

[republich]

Boil’s break was meant to last twenty-five minutes, but it’s been forty-eight - which means there’s only one place he can be. 

These are grim times, Waxer finds himself remembering; when he’s reminded that he himself is tired to the point of automation, where he’s lost what he knows is a certain gift for making everyone - especially the kids - think that he’s okay, and that, by extension, they are too. It had taken him a long time to realize that Boil was the ramrod that kept all of them, the whole damn staff, ticking on that way. Too long, probably. It meant that no-one was there to take up the slack, usually, when the backbone bent double.

He lingers for a minute at the desk before he realizes the coffee he’s holding is cooling down, and that Boil will grouse if it’s not hot enough to burn; so he crosses the hallway, nudges Boil’s stiff elbow with his own, finally reaches over and, exasperated, pulls a hand out of a resisting armpit and wraps it into Boil’s palm.

“You still awake?”

Boil grunts, which manages to convey the exact familiar sentiment of Well I’m still fucking upright, aren’t I? which doesn’t need extraneous words.

“Yeah, alright,” Waxer yawns, and relaxes himself into the same hunched, badly comfortable stance, his hands in his pockets as Boil sticks his nose into the coffee, not breaking his stare through thick glass. “She’s doing okay, you know.”

Another grunt. I know.

“You don’t need to stay here all night.”

Boil finally turns a little at that, nailing him with a sideways, red-rimmed glare.

“Okay,” Waxer sighs. “You want company?”

Most times, Boil says no. Most times he seems to relish (sometimes smug, sometimes just relieved beyond words) the morning after, when it turns out he’s been the only one to stick it out through those touchy hours when they might lose a patient decades before they deserve; when he’s the one who stayed, who didn’t sleep, who cheated death. 

But sometimes - including this time, for which Waxer can only be thankful - he’s willing to allow someone to sit next to him, to admit that he can’t keep it up, or that he’s just too damn tired to last until daybreak without shifts. 

Given that Numa’s continuous infusion is now entering it’s third night, Waxer will bet on the last of these being the reason for why Boil’s joints seem to have frozen up, and why he grabs briefly at Waxer’s arm, glowering the entire way, as he’s shoved down onto the nearest worn bench.

“Better?” Waxer asks, not brooking opposition, and Boil, after a moment, mellows and nods. “Good. I should warn you, if you can’t summon up actual words at some point in the next hour, I’m sending you home.”

“As if,” Boil rasps, instantly. He even manages to look triumphant - for a moment. “I know your spiel by heart, Waxer,” he mumbles on, wiping briefly at his puffy eyes, “and I love you for it, but please - not tonight.”

Waxer looks through to the room, at Numa’s subdued, but steady vital signs.

“Sure, brother,” he says, too tired to think of any future burden of guilt, and settles in to wait.

[republich]

There are enough long-smoldering wars on the planet that Kix isn’t surprised at all to have finally ended up in an EMT squad where every one of them, including himself, is a veteran.

It’s not something they need to discuss all that often, and in the aggregate, it actually helps a fair bit to already have the necessary experience to figure out exactly how each of them moves, how they think, how to plug directly into each other’s routines. We are one well-oiled fucking war machine, Fives likes to crow, and he’s usually right. They’re fast, and they’re efficient, and there’s no shame between any of them that Kix is medically their superior, or that Jesse and Echo have had the time to take a few steps ahead of Fives in their training.

It seems important to acknowledge sometimes, though, that they’re also exactly the sort of people who know how to keep their breakdowns at bay until after the patient is safely delivered. It’s important that Kix carefully takes note, in their first six months of working together as a squad, of just how much alcohol each of them usually takes in at after-shift drinks before, and what, therefore, is abnormal. 

He has his own limits - usually ones which have to do with viscera. Jesse will run gurney duty, or just get up front in the ambulance and take over driving, if the injury or disease they’re treating has anything to do with their patient’s eyes. Fives, being the cheek he is, is pushing resolutely forward in his training program despite knowing he’s completely petrified of death, the entire hovering, inevitable spectre of it. 

And Echo - well, Kix had witnessed one of his nightmares about dismemberment once, by accident, and it hadn’t been pretty.

Kix knows himself well enough to know that he’d been a total asshole, and insubordinate with it, in the field. He’d been proud of it, though, at the time, because he justified it to himself at the time by confirming, again and again, that he was good at this, that his insistence was necessary, and that he’d fucking saved lives. Driving the bus isn’t all that different, he’s found - in fact, it might be even better, because that little space in the back is all his own. He makes the decisions on the ground, he gets his patient stable; and if he loses them before he gets them to Rex, and he’s left with Fives staring wordlessly back at him from the driver’s seat, well - you can’t win them all, and he knows that he’s fucking tried.

The trying he does now is different, though, because he knows just how far he shouldn’t push. Those things he knows about Echo, about Jesse and Fives and every patient, too, that he comes across who has the same telltale scars they do - he knows about them, and they know about him, and he doesn’t need to know why. 

Treat the symptoms, he thinks, and it becomes a mantra which overtakes his entire life. 

Stabilize.

Get them home.

“Call-out, boss,” Jesse says; he’s already half-into the back of the bus, and Fives is revving up the engine, as Kix rouses himself from his reverie in the hospital’s wide garage. “Teenager collapsed at a local Academy.”

“Copy.”

“You good?” Echo says to him, quietly, when they’re strapped into the back and on their way and Fives is gleefully screeching through a series of tire-bending turns, blasting their siren all the way.

“Yeah, I am,” Kix says, and knows he’ll be believed - and that’s enough.

[republich]

He hovers outside her room for a good half-hour before deciding to finally go in, and feels like an ass. A stupid ass. An ass who wants to go into the room, damnit, so why the hell is he being an ass and avoiding her like the plague?

She’s too pretty to have the plague, he thinks, nonsensically, and finally knocks briefly on the glass partition before sliding the door open, poking his head around its edge. She’s sitting up in bed, looking pale but far, far better than when he’d last seen her (though that wasn’t hard, honestly, given that the last time he’d seen her she’d had a metal spike in her chest and he’d been playing Jenga with her ribs), and below her thickly-bandaged torso she has a lapdesk across her blanketed legs, her bright eyes peering at him over the edge of her laptop.

“Dr. Skywalker,” she says tunefully, and immediately sets aside her work - there’s another young woman sitting at her side with a notebook and tablet of her own, who takes quick custody of the computer and looks far more suspicious of Anakin than he feels he deserves. “How kind of you to look in on me.”

“You remember me?” he says, feeling uncharacteristically sheepish as he steps inside and, belatedly, realizes he’s made no effort whatsoever to look presentable. That’s probably what her assistant is looking at - the remnants of breakfast on his sleeve, or something. “Well,” he says, mostly to cover up his embarrassment, “of course you do. I do pride myself on my spectacularly awful dating technique.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad as all that,” Padme Amidala says, winking with mischief as she settles back into her bedclothes and pushes her reading glasses messily up into her hair. (Gods, she’s so beautiful, Anakin finds himself thinking, and aw, crap. He’s in trouble.) “You should try making small talk with Coruscant Senators. I’ll appreciate disaster over boredom every time.”

“Uh-huh,” Anakin says, somewhat bowled over, and then remembers that oh, right, doctor, and makes his way over to the side of her bed, checking her vital readings briefly before he bends in closer to check what he can see of her (perfect, because he did them) stitches through the patchwork of bandages. “How’s your pain?”

“Considering I was impaled, not bad,” she sighs, settling more comfortably onto her back. “Perhaps you could send my compliments to my surgeon.”

“Accepted,” he grins, and then pauses, slightly petrified, as her eyes go wide. “Uh. Yeah,” he adds weakly. “Hi?”

“Okay, so I have to admit that this is now significantly weirder,” she says, though she looks like she’s struggling not to laugh. “Sabe,” she says suddenly, turning to the suspicious girl, “could you give us a minute?”

Sabe goes, with something that seems like bad grace; Anakin can’t help but feel, as the door slides shut behind her, that he has absolutely no idea what’s coming next, and that that’s actually kind of - fun?

“So you really are a hotshot surgeon, huh,” Padme says eventually, smiling through her dark circles. “I have to admit, given how our date went, I had my doubts about - well, pretty much everything you said.”

“Guilty as charged,” he laughs, and shrugs. “I can be an ass when I’m nervous.”

“I can’t imagine you nervous,” she says, somewhat wonderingly. “My nurses were telling me that they - that you had to remove part of my ribcage and then put it back. Nervous men don’t do that.”

“I was shit scared,” he said bluntly, and feels almost resigned at the way her eyes narrow with interest. “I knew you. I mean - I don’t usually know or care who they are.”

“Well,” she says, after a moment’s silence, “whatever it was that got you through it, I’m grateful.”

He coughs a little, gestures to the lapdesk sitting quietly where Sabe had been for the sake of something to talk about that isn’t him. “Are you writing about this for the Coruscant Times?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she says, suddenly reanimated. “I’m fascinated by the entire process of how City resources are allocated for small-scale disaster relief. And I understand there are quite a few undercurrents of stories rumbling here in the hospital, too.”

She pauses, grins, bites her lip, looks up at him like he’s already a willing conspirator, and oh, shit, he would absolutely do anything asked by those eyes. “Come back and talk to me sometime. I’d like to hear your side of the story about what goes on around here.”

“You got it,” he says hoarsely, and then somehow he’s back outside the room, and floating, and it feels completely fucking amazing.

Damn, he thinks helplessly. I guess I’d better start believing in second chances...

[republich]

Rex hasn’t been back on duty in the ER for all that long when Windu makes his monthly check on student rounds. He’s actually kind of glad for the distraction, seeing as he’s still experiencing some shortness of breath and fatigue - because there’s no better entertainment in his world than seeing his attached residents getting their asses handed to them on a very polite, chilly, utterly correct platter.

It always starts with the hiding. On this particular occasion, it’s Tup and Ahsoka who have taken refuge under the intake desk, frantically gesturing to Rex to Oh my gods just SHUT UP as he grins down at them. 

When Windu breezes in, he’s already got a flock of unfortunate students under his wings - they all look petrified, because why wouldn’t you, when the Dean of the College of Medicine and one of the most famed cardiologists of his generation is personally overseeing your rounds to make sure they’re satisfactory? - and it means Rex can turf out his own disgruntled protectees, sniggering all the while as Tup and Ahsoka sulkily join the back of the queue with their clipboards and badges. He has no real fear for them, knowing their skills - he can already see the rest of the class watching them with solemn, hero-worshiping attention as they talk a resolutely silent Windu through the first few beds - but damn, it is still hellishly funny.

“Hey, man,” he adds, finishing his notes on a new case and flipping shut the folder as he looks up at Windu’s personal assistant, who has his head buried in a smartphone schedule as per usual. “How’s it going?”

“As expected,” Ponds says calmly. Rex has to give it to the man - as far as assistantships go Ponds probably has the toughest job in the entire hospital complex, and he somehow manages to do it without a shred of the backstabbing or unpleasantness that Tarkin takes pride in. “These students will have to finish their presentations in the next seven minutes. He’s due at a fundraiser.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Rex says, grinning, as Tup manages, while in the middle of a very complicated speech about stents and shunts, to trip over his own feet. “I have a good batch this semester.”

“So I see,” Ponds says, one eyebrow slightly raised at the distant sight of Ahsoka’s flame-emblazoned chucks under the hem of her scrubs. “And yourself?”

Rex is kept from answering by the sudden appearance of Windu himself at his elbow - damn the man is stealthy - and the repetition of the question in a slightly different form. “Mr. Fett,” Windu intones, with the students clustered in a nervous huddle at his back. “I trust you are fully recovered?”

“Quite, sir. Thank you.”

“Perhaps we might find time later to discuss your experiences in the containment unit,” Windu continues, looking sideways at Ponds with a brief nod. He really is very scary close up. “I am most interested in how you came to terms with the various symptoms of Blue Shadow.”

“Oh,” Rex says, somewhat nonplussed. “Uh - ”

“I’m afraid you are fully booked for this evening, Doctor Windu,” Ponds says politely. “Drinks with Dr. Yoda and the Board.”

“Later in the week?”

“Provost meetings wall-to-wall.”

“Hm,” Windu says, frowning slightly. “Well. To be continued, Mr. Fett,” he continues, straightening his immaculate coat. “I congratulate you on your oversight.”

“Thanks again,” Rex calls - he has to raise his voice to make sure Windu, who is already halfway out the door, hears him at all. He could swear, he thinks, with a smile, that he’d seen Ponds roll his eyes.

“That’s it?” Tup complains, sighing as he props himself up on the desk. The poor kid looks like he’s run a mental marathon in five minutes. “I actually prepared for this.”

“Trust me, you’re good,” Rex said, and grabs both of them up in a surprise, squeaky sort of bear hug. “Well done.”

“I need a drink,” Ahsoka says, and wobbles off towards the lobby and its vending machines.

It pays, Rex has always found, to give Windu the respect he so manifestly deserves. A week later, for example, he finds himself in receipt of another little batch of med students - they all look so small, but he knows that he’ll be treating them all as the adults they are - and, along with them, personally delivered by Ponds, a sheaf of paperwork saying that the Dean has just finished negotiating the approval for construction of an entirely new teaching wing of the ER.

It’s going to be a hell of a lot of work, Rex knows, as he gets down to the day’s tasks of making sure none of his new batch faint at the sight of blood, needles, or any of the other frankly-horrific possibilities the ER can throw at them on any given day. But that’s what he loves, and what he’s good at - and if Windu thinks he’s worthy of it, he’ll take the compliment every time. 

[republich]

Cody’s always considered himself to have an admirable - and useful - amount of impulse control. It’s served him well at Kamino (where nearby warfront chaos had left him one of the few cool heads in a strange half-civilian world), and he’s always intended to carry it forward into the new challenge of Coruscant Central, too, seeing as it’s the perfect place to consolidate his career.

Dating (?) Kenobi, however, is making this whole familiar process of calm and collectedness... difficult.

The first time, admittedly, ends up being Cody’s fault. It’s not often, after all, that a hospital ends up being so quiet on a weeknight that there’s no one left but them in the locker room, and they’re both wearily pleased to see each other and realize that huh, there seems to be something else in life besides work, and that maybe they should - 

Dragging Obi-Wan into an empty shower stall right there and then seems, in retrospect, like a terrible idea. But in the moment, fuck - it really, really works, especially when Cody gets to see just how surprised and excited Obi-Wan’s eyes go when Cody presses him into the tiles, and how hard he has to work to keep quiet when they’re flushed and drenched and he’s got his arms clamped tight around Cody’s shoulders to keep from falling.

“Aw, man,” someone says from outside the curtain; it’s not a voice Cody knows, but the tone is recognizable from pretty much every university or hospital system he’s worked in, grudgingly peeved. “Give it a rest, will you?”

Obi-Wan just giggles, quietly and unstoppable, into the side of Cody’s neck, and that’s when Cody realizes they’re screwed.

He’d never quite realized, despite the fact that knowing his wards up and down is an integral part of his job, just how many secret hidey-holes there are in a hospital that are perfect for having sex in.

Kenobi’s office is a given, of course, though it’s rarely empty for the amount of time they both seem to want. Its carpet is just rough enough that it leaves spectacular burns on Obi-Wan’s back and knees, and it’s that, plus the fact that Skywalker apparently figured out to pick the lock on the door years back, that convinces them that they need to move on.

Unused ORs or scrubbing rooms are out for hygiene reasons, as are the labs - not for hygiene reasons, because they’re as clean as a whistle, but rather for fear of managing to break something either very expensive or very dangerous. The observation room in the sleep lab, on the other hand, when there are no or very few patients, proves to be the perfect place for Kenobi to crawl into Cody’s lap.

By far the space Cody now has the most newfound respect for, however, is the humble storage closet, of which there are many, and which have, without exception, fairly restricted card access keys. About a month in, he almost thinks to himself that he should draw himself a map, just to see how far along they are in some strange personal version of fuck-in-’em-all bingo.

Rationally, he kind of wishes he could stop. But Kenobi is a fucking tease, damn him, and manages to insinuate the filthiest things with the mildest of glances - and Cody, despite knowing that he’s pretty good himself at keeping up a facade until its safe to let it drop, can see just how well he’s being read.

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan says, then, on an ordinary day, as he hands over his stack of charts to where Cody is sitting, and smiles. “I’ll be on the second floor if you need me.”

“Got it,” Cody says.

He’s good at this. He spends five minutes filing the charts, nods to the floor nurse on duty, and then takes his normal mid-morning coffee break. They know he’ll be back in twenty minutes, so his departure doesn’t merit even the most cursory of notices.

Which is convenient, seeing as they’d probably flip a shit if they knew that within the first minute of those twenty, he’ll be safely ensconced behind a wall of file boxes with his shirt rapidly being pushed up to his shoulders and both of his hands down Kenobi’s pants, front and back. 

“We need to work out a better system,” Obi-Wan pants, stifling a groan into Cody’s neck. “I worried you weren’t coming.”

“You should stop that,” Cody grins, pulling back for the briefest of instances so he can get his scrubs over his head and off before pressing back in between Obi-Wan’s legs where he’s perched on the edge of a disused gurney. “Worrying, I mean. I’m not going to pass this up.”

Thinking rationally, again, it was inevitable that they’d eventually get caught. Rationally, he had only thought about it long enough to decide, irrationally, that he didn’t give a fuck, and that he only cared about trying to make as sure as possible that it wouldn’t be Tarkin or Palpatine who noticed their absences, or that they wouldn’t be the ones to open the door.

He’s kissing Kenobi deep and slow and relishing in the sensation of strong hands kneading into his lower back and the arch of Kenobi’s chest into his when the door does finally open, and he can’t deny that his reaction kind of sucks, though it’s a natural impulse - he takes a step back, comes to bewildered halt he knew he would when he realizes that he can’t really explain away being shirtless in a supply closet, and just looks warily at Obi-Wan, who, utterly disheveled, turns in hazy-eyed astonishment to look at - 

- Skywalker?

“Uh,” Anakin says, and then he squeaks something thoroughly unintelligible for a few seconds, and rapidly pulls the door closed again behind him.

Obi-Wan looks at him, his features settling back into his familiar smirk. “Well,” he says hoarsely. “That could have been worse.”

“A lot worse,” Cody agrees, and wants, suddenly, to laugh. “Will he rat us out?”

“I doubt it. Though I suspect I’ll be in for some thoroughly unpleasant teasing.”

“His face,” Cody says, and then he does laugh as he picks up his scrubs, shaking his head. “It was almost worth it. And he’ll probably appreciate getting in on the bet.”

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan says, reaching out to grab Cody’s wrist and pull him back in close, “the what?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard? There’s a pool on who you’re onto at the moment,” Cody shrugs, keeping his voice light, concentrating on the drag of Obi-Wan’s palm down his abs. “I have very long odds.”

“How unfair,” Obi-Wan murmurs, sounding distantly perplexed, rolling his neck gently into Cody’s hand in his hair. “Perhaps I’ll put down a bet myself and shorten them for you.”

Cody kind of hopes that they’ll talk about this - in safer surroundings, at home, when they’re alone and he’s feeling brave enough to ask just what the hell it is they think they’re doing with each other.

For now, though, he still has ten minutes - and he intends to use them.

[republich]

Tarkin was a Little Shit, and no one had yet come up with a failproof plan to get around him.

Or to, you know, dump his body where it would never be found. That would’ve been good too.

You knew it was bad when Cody - Cody, the immutable rock, the bureaucratic newcomer who didn’t let crazed patients or supply screwups or disasters ever phase him (not that you ever saw it on his face, anyway) - started muttering vile things into his coffee about how a certain someone knew where to shove their paperclips. You knew it was bad when Rex, who kind of liked to shout when he was upset because damn it, you need to learn from your mistakes, regressed into a state of white-lipped, mad-grinning silence.

“I know a guy,” Rex was heard to say to Cody, one day, when his scheduled meeting with Palpatine ended up having been moved to a week next Tuesday on an apparent whim.

“Yeah?” Cody said back, and oh man, they were scary when they were in sync. “As in - you know a guy?”

“I know a guy.”

Unfortunately for everyone, said hit failed to materialize (the price was too high, Rex was heard to mournfully say to Ahsoka, who was incandescent with anger at Tarkin’s latest little put-down of her appearance and her skills and pretty much everything about her, really, because he was a Little Shit). The next target of Tarkin’s continual round of petty insults was Dr. Kenobi, who inexplicably lost access for his patients to a critical new drug trial; after that, it was the Board at large, who discovered that essential funding decisions had somehow been rearranged behind their backs thanks to an obscure bylaw whose origin no-one seemed able to trace.

“Are we sure some of this isn’t criminal?” Kenobi said lightly, one evening, over dinner with Bail Organa; it was easy to see, if you knew the signs, just how angry he was, and how much sleep he was losing in fits and snatches over having had to tell his patients that no, he wasn’t going to be able to get them on this new trial.

Gentlemen, he always said. “Gentlemen,” he drawled, while edging past Waxer and Boil on the pediatric ward and looking severely down his long nose at the affrontery that was the sight of children polluting his environment. It was a good thing, actually, that he was uninterested in the actions of others on that particular occasion, because the gestures Waxer and Boil immediately sent at his prim, retreating back subsequently got them into a lot of trouble with Mr. Bril when he realized where Numa had picked them up.

Various people had tried, of course - they’d tried to weasel their way around Tarkin’s position of constant vigilance at the front of Palpatine’s office and get directly to the Dean himself, and sometimes they’d even succeeded - only to hit a brick wall. And then they usually got reassigned, anyway, and no-one had yet figured out whether Tarkin’s influence really ran that deep, or whether Palpatine was that much of a Shit too. 

(Anakin tended to complain that he had no idea what the hell any of them were talking about, because he’d never had issues. The suggestion that he, then, should be the one to take up the problem of there being a slithering snake of a man bringing down morale at every opportunity was, however, mostly forgotten. Skywalker had more important things to worry about.)

(The investigative journalist recuperating on the third floor, on the other hand...)

[republich]

dakt37 replied to your post “lizaleigh replied to your post “I am now (genuinely) taking votes from...”

....I was busy all weekend and totally missed the voting post, but it's just as well because I'm apparently the only nay. So just ignore me I guess. >v>;

dakt37 replied to your post “lizaleigh replied to your post “I am now (genuinely) taking votes from...”

Oh wait i just saw that other Anon. Other Anon and I will just shuffle off to a broom closet together I guess. XD

If it’s any consolation, I can definitely promise that they will be BFFs before anything else! *g*

qwertyuiop678 replied to your post “lizaleigh replied to your post “I am now (genuinely) taking votes from...”

KINDA LATE TO VOTE LMAO BUT FRANKLY WITH YOU AS THE AUTHOR I'M WILLING TO READ ALMOST ANY SHIP BC I TRUST YOUR WRITING

Youuuu. YOUUUUUU. <3

Also I should say - the voting is never closed! Feel free to send me any thoughts whenever. :-)

[republich]

lizaleigh replied to your post “I am now (genuinely) taking votes from you all, Dear Readers, as to...”

I'd enjoy it either way, but it's a pairing I like to see when Ahsoka's been aged up a little as she is in this AU!

too-saxy replied to your post “I am now (genuinely) taking votes from you all, Dear Readers, as to...”

A+ on board with that ship because you wrote them so beautifully and also a whole new layer of spice to add to the hospital yay

agarthanguide replied to your post “Rex is slow to wake up, but he figures he’s earned it. Fuck, but it...”

yeahhhhh do the thing. throw this onto a ship. sail that ship into the sunset.

@tuntematonkorppi said:  I'd love to read Rex and Ahsoka as a couple written by you! I really like them together and I really like your writing so I'm reeeaaally all for it!

@kenobrea said: my replies aren't working so yASS

Anonymous said:  no Rex and Ahsoka hookup please no. I prefer the more mentor/cool uncle/big brother type relationship

Anonymous said: I am all in favor of Rexsoka!

It looks like the Ayes have it for now (apologies, Anon #1)! I’ll see what I can do with them down the road. :-D

[republich]

I am now (genuinely) taking votes from you all, Dear Readers, as to whether you’d like Ahoksa and Rex to hook up. I’ve never written them as a ship before, but as far as the overall vague plot of this AU goes I’m happy to write them any way you’d like. *G*

[republich]

Rex is slow to wake up, but he figures he’s earned it.

Fuck, but it had hurt. Whatever the hell cure they’d come up with had left him feeling like most of his veins had been stripped out of him and laid bare to a merciless sun, shriveling and pulsing at once. He’d taken refuge, for the most part, in not being conscious. Comas, he had decided, were underrated.

But now he’s vaguely awake, or at least he’s squinting just hard enough that he can start to take in the bright light of what looks like a very sunny morning, and to see that Cody is once again by his side. His brother is drawing blood from the inside of Rex’s now deeply-scarred arm, his movement calm and assured, and he has that particular sort of quiet content about him that lets Rex know that everything is alright, and that he’s gonna live. It’s rare that Cody gets to do basic nursing, now, Rex knows, given his administrative workload, and it makes Rex smile to see the pleasure inherent in the methodical, practiced motions of his brother’s hands.

“Hey,” he croaks, and Cody takes a moment to gently withdraw the needle and press a band-aid in its place before he replies.

“Hi. How are you feeling?”

“Sore,” Rex rasps, and then grimaces a little as he shifts and re-familiarizes himself with the shape and size of his body, and just how damn itchy the blanket covering him is. “Did it work?”

“Well, you’re still here,” Cody says, with a sideways grin. “There are chances of long-term side-effects from the reeksa root essence, but we’ll cross those bridges when we come to them.”

“Where’s my medal?”

“Your what?”

“Well, unless my memory also got fried, I’m one of the first out-and-out survivors of Blue Shadow, bro. I was expecting a parade.”

“Yeah, sure,” Cody snorts, rolling his eyes. “I’ll find you some confetti.”

Rex tilts his head sideways, peering at an empty, neatly-made bed on the other side of the room. “Where’s Dr. Tano?”

“Oh, she’s been up and walking for a whole day. Quite a talker, that one,” Cody says, and man, it really is nice to hear Cody’s relief winning out over what Rex is sure must be a deep strain of frustrated grief that he’ll eventually let loose. “I can page her if you want to see for yourself.”

Ahsoka is bustling and prim when she comes in, but sags into a slight slouch as soon as she’s gotten herself perched on the edge of his bed, grinning through a sigh. “Hey, Rex. I feel like shit.”

“You don’t look it,” he grins, and pats her knee and knows he’s lying for both their benefits - she’s definitely tired and brittle around the edges, and she shouldn’t be back at work yet - but if he’s reading Cody’s half-exasperated, fond look at them both right he’s pretty sure she must have insisted that she could go straight back into the OR the second she managed to totter out of bed. “I hear you beat me to the cure.”

“Wasn’t hard,” she says, tossing her head and neatly-wrapped scarf - she’s smiling at him, though, and reaches out to grab his still-fever dry hand. “Thanks. You kept me angry enough to fight it.”

“Wasn’t hard,” he parrots back, for which she punches him in the shoulder - which hurts way more than he’ll admit, but he doesn’t care.

You did good work this week, Rex, he thinks, as she leans more heavily onto her hand, clutched in the bedclothes, and starts to natter away about all the surgeries she’d managed to miss during her unexpected absence. 

She’s worth it.

[republich]

They manage to walk in circles together for three hours, hand in hand, before Ahsoka collapses.

“I can’t,” she pants, baring her teeth - she’d been leaning on him more and more heavily for at least thirty minutes as they tried to keep their blood moving, chattering away all the while about how much she fucking hates this fucking virus and coming up with ever more-inventive plans about what she’d do to it if she met it in a dark alley, and it hasn’t been enough. She’s in a cold sweat and slipping closer to a temp of 93, well past hypothermia, as she clutches the stand of her IV drip; they’d bagged each other, forcing an oxygen-rich slurry into their arteries, but the whole point was that their cells couldn’t take it up - and now her pretty, pale face is turning blue at its edges, cobwebs of blood vessels creeping darkly across her skin.

“One more lap,” Rex says, trying to ignore the bustle outside - Cody has given all the orders he can, and there are nurses and doctors running to and fro, shouting, not able to do a damn thing - as he clutches her forearms, feeling his own head start to lighten. There’s no mirror in the containment unit, thank the gods, because he thinks he’d lose it if he saw the same insidious darkness in himself. “Come on. One more.”

“Can’t,” she says again, breathless, and then she sits heavily on the edge of her bed and just wheezes. “You keep going.”

“Nah,” he says, trying to grin, and settles clumsily next to her, readjusting his own IV. “It takes two to tango.”

“Ugh,” she says, and wobbles, and her cheek comes to rest on his shoulder. “No tango. I’ll take you ballroom dancing.”

“Deal,” he says, and chokes, and it takes a worryingly long time for his breathing pattern to normalize (not being able to breathe fucking hurts, and it makes waves of incredibly rational panic beat at his throat, closing it just when he needs it the most).

When he next becomes aware of anything much, there are black spots dancing in his vision, and he’s curled fully around Ahsoka as she shakes through her chills, his hands around her wrists. When he tries to say something, garbled and low, she doesn’t respond.

There’s a tap on the glass, and he forces himself upright, and holy fuck, so cold - 

“I need you to hold on for two more hours.” It’s Cody, Rex just about recognizes, and this is the worst of it, this is the worst thing of all - the fact that he recognizes his brother is out there and is watching him die, and he can’t muster up the energy to try and alleviate his grief. “We have an experimental treatment being flown in.”

A pause. “I need you to do this for me, Rex.”

No emphasis on any particular word, of course. Cody wouldn’t put that burden on him, and it’s a common enough phrase, one they use all the time to urge their patients through one more surgery, one more round of chemo, telling them to open their eyes and focus and tell them where it hurts.

It hurts everywhere, Rex thinks, and then he blinks, and wakes up on the floor. When he gets a hand under him and manages to turn over, he sees that it’s almost entirely blue. 

Fuck this, he thinks - or maybe he says it out loud - and when he staggers to his feet, totally oblivious of whatever might be going on outside, the only thing he’s able to do is check and make sure Ahsoka’s still alive - she is, just, piled over with blankets (did he put them over her? he must have done) and her thready pulse weakly beeping - before he falls again and crawls, unashamed and totally uncaring, into the little bathroom attached to the unit.

If he’s going to die he’s not going to fucking do it on camera for the CDC to gawp at, that’s for fucking sure.

The tile wall should be cold, but to his frozen skin it feels like a warm bath. He wedges into a corner, nudges his head upright, and waits.

It doesn’t take long - and it’s kind of a relief.

No tunnel, he notices idly. Liars.

Cody’s a fucking asshole. Cody is barely visible in a massive orange biohazard suit, his gloved hands thickened almost beyond use, but Rex can tell it’s him. Cody has a fucking enormous needle that looks very disconcerting indeed in Rex’s arm.

"Shit,” he gasps, and then he screams, because whatever the stuff is feels like lava coursing through his circulatory system, burning and frying in its wake. “What the fuck is that?”

“You were never great at chemistry, vod,” Cody says, tinny through his radio, and oh man, he sounds fucking great. Hearing anything at this point, as Rex twitches and whimpers through the corrosive agent’s effects, feels amazing. “Save your questions for when you regain full brain function.”

“Will I?” Rex asks, pathetically, blinking haze out of his eyes.

“We’ll see. That was syringe number one,” Cody says, holding up the remainder of his boxed kit, which is covered in all sorts of stickers which say that Rex is being treated with something Very Not Happy-Making. “There are ten. Ahsoka’s already had two, so you’ve got some catching up to do.”

“I hate you,” Rex says lovingly.

“I know.”

[republich]

“It might not be Blue Shadow.”

“Save your energy and keep track of your vitals, Dr. Tano,” Cody is saying, tinny and muffled through inches-thick plexiglass. There’s the slightest of warps in it where Cody’s face should be, so Rex can’t quite tell just how worried his brother is - but if he’s feeling half of the trepidation Rex has sitting in his gut like a rock, it’s more than enough.

“It might not be Blue Shadow,” Ahsoka says again, needling and frustrated in the loose scrubs she’d been passed through the airlock and which she’d wriggled into in a corner as Rex turned his back. “I remember the day it was officially declared eradicated, it can’t just spontaneously reappear of its own accord - ”

“Yeah, and we’re old enough to remember what it was like before that announcement,” Rex interrupts, as calmly as he’s able. His memory of it is admittedly foggy, since the scourge had been nearly hunted into extinction by the time he and Cody were training up; he remembers vividly, though, the pictures in his textbooks and presentations, of patients formerly in perfect health whose blood had turned sluggy and thick in their veins, deprived of oxygen by thick clusters of virus spotted through their lungs blood vessels until they stopped breathing. 

The contagion was a slippery little bastard, and one which made little sense. The first symptom, he knew, would be their core temperatures dropping until they felt like they were freezing, and heat blankets wouldn’t do much good; they’d struggle for air and try to cough their lungs back from shriveling, but it wouldn’t help.

Damn it, he thinks, looking at Ahsoka, at just how disbelieving and determined she is. She doesn’t deserve this.

“You let the police worry about what that lab was doing with the strain,” Cody says, from outside; their containment unit is in the basement and gloomy with it, every hallway around them empty and practically devoid of anything besides a weak, greenish light. “For now, you need to rest and be vigilant. We’re already in contact with the CDC and your samples have been fast-tracked. In the meantime, our request for a rapid synthesis of the vaccine for prophylactic purposes is being considered.”

“I love it when you speak Management,” Rex says, grinning half-heartedly as he leans against the barrier, wishing more than anything that he could reach through and tell Cody through his grip that he didn’t intend to die. “Tell those bureaucratic bastards to hurry up.”

“I will,” Cody says, and then his blurry face definitely softens. “You did a great job with containing it at the infection point. Tarkin shat a brick, but even Palpatine has admitted we’re in the clear. There’s a rotating list of attendings who will be on call whenever you need anything - and I mean anything.”

“I need to get out of here,” Ahsoka grumbles as she hops up onto one of the two beds and crosses her legs and arms, scowling. “I was supposed to assist on my first quadruple bypass today.”

It goes very quiet, for a while, after that. Left to his own devices, Rex tends to fidget or otherwise physically fill his empty moments - he wants to sit and curl or make sure he’s not tired enough to do pushups, but figures that the sweat he’d build up would feel uncomfortably like a symptom, so he ends up on his back in his bed, staring at the ceiling while Ahsoka flips idly through a magazine (they kit out these rooms in the strangest ways). She coughs, once, but at Rex’s sharp look she just rolls her eyes and insists she has an itch.

“This might be the most bored I’ve ever been,” she says, roundabout the four-hour mark; she’s holding her fingers up to the bright overhead light and examining them critically, as though she’s looking for evidence of the virus on her skin. “Twenty questions?”

“Sure,” Rex shrugs, and only pauses briefly to glance at his vitals before he shifts onto his side. “Why surgery?”

“To work with Anakin. Why the ER?”

“Fixing things. What’s so special about Anakin?”

“Please,” she snorts, though she takes it a little more seriously after a moment’s thought, biting on her lip. “I don’t know. I suppose I aspire to that sort of brilliance. Shouldn’t everyone?”

“Gods, no. Not at the price of being as much of an asshole as he is,” Rex laughs. He likes her like this, he realizes - he likes these sorts of conversations, and it feels like a while since he’s had one with a colleague, rather than a brother or bosom friend. “Okay, next question, then - do you actually like surgery, or are you just chasing perfection? Because I think I should warn you, kid, that a perfect record doesn’t exist in our profession. You’ll be a miserable doctor if you make a bodycount of zero into the be-all and end-all of your career...”

She’s not listening anymore, just looking hard at him, her eyes gone slightly wide at their corners.

“What?” he asks.

“You’re shivering,” she says, quietly, and when he rolls over and looks at his screen he sees that his temperature has dropped to 97.5.

“Oh,” he says, and feels the minute tremor start to spread from his chest to his neck, hairs standing up on his arms. “Fuck.”

[republich]

She’s not supposed to be in the ER, but Rex can’t deny that she’s fun to have around.

Ahsoka has that Thing about her, that quick, fiercely happy energy which makes her an asset to whatever team you’re pleased to put her on. It makes her imaginatively efficient in surgery - where Rex hears she’s giving Skywalker a gleeful run for his money when it comes to completing her required docket of early-career training - and in the ER, it means she completes her rounds in half the time she’s supposed to and gets spectacularly angry with anyone who fails to keep to her pace. Most days, it’s just funny. Occasionally, it’s exhausting, and when it’s a Tuesday morning and he has a hangover because of the previous night’s staff poker night, Rex considers it to be one of those times.

“Sit down, will you,” he complains as she stands next to his chair behind the intake desk, looking with her crossed arms and pointed frown like she’s going to start fucking tapping her foot next. “You’re giving me a headache just looking at you.”

“Is every day here this boring?” she asks, fairly rudely, as though the normal chaos of the accident victims who come in every morning thanks to rush hour is child’s play. “You’re always selling the ER as so exciting.”

“It sure is,” Rex says, grinning over his coffee. “But believe it or not, it’s also a place - much like other places - where everyone has a job to do, and they end up doing it. We’re under control. If Anakin wanted you to do these hours I’ll just sign off on them for you.”

“He didn’t,” she sniffs, and sits primly on the edge of the desk in her pristine white coat and brightly-patterned headscarf, looking hungrily around as though all she needs to make her day is a gushing wound needing attention. “I requested the shift.”

“Ah,” Rex says, and sniggers as she glares over at him. “Felt like you were losing your common touch?”

“Surgery’s great,” she protests, sounding way too defensive for it to be true as her expression softens. “I dunno. Anakin’s kind of - ”

“You don’t need to justify it to me. We are glad for the help,” Rex says with a smile, and then he perks up, briefly, at the sound of the outer public door of the ER opening. “Hello. Fresh meat.”

“Nice,” Ahsoka says, with relish.

And then they wait - because the inner door doesn’t open, which is kind of weird, because Rex is pretty sure he had seen a shadow - 

Ahsoka looks down at him, and seems to have his idea at the same time. “Someone passed out?”

“Let’s take a look,” Rex nods, and loops a stethoscope around his neck as he stands and tosses out his cup.

There is a man in the entryway, as it turns out, huddled in a heap on the carpet, and when Rex kneels and turns him over Ahsoka is right next to him, pressing glove-clad fingers into eyelids and the corners of his mouth. He looks like a lab technician of some sort, his short white coat familiar from the hospital’s own labs, but Rex doesn’t recognize the lab name printed on the badge - 

- and every vein in his face and neck is a deep, dark blue.

“Fucking hell,” Rex breathes.

“Crash cart, please!” Ahsoka is calling, clearly more preoccupied with the fact that the man isn’t breathing - but that is so, so not their most important worry right now.

“Scratch that!” Rex bellows, and puts up a sharp hand towards the attentive nurses who had been hurrying towards them; well-trained, they stop immediately and just hover, peering down at the victim, whose skin feels clammy and slippery to the touch.

“What are you doing?” Ahsoka demands.

Rex’s mind races.

“Call code black,” he orders, and that makes its mark: two or three of the nurses blanche, and one, a new boy, takes an uncertain step back. “Get Dr. Palpatine and Cody in the loop. We’ll need level 5 containment and procedures.”

“Got it,” one of them - Hardcase - nods, and the little crowd promptly turns, ushering curious patients and staff far enough away from the automatic door that it swishes closed again, leaving Ahsoka and Rex in their little no-man’s land.

Somewhere, distantly, a klaxon starts to wail.

“Okay,” Ahsoka says slowly. She’s gone pale, Rex can see, but isn’t panicking - not yet, anyway, and for now Rex will take that as a good sign. “What’s happening?”

“We’re going into lockdown,” Rex says grimly, as he shifts the unknown John Doe onto his back and interlaces his fingers to start CPR. “Get ready, kid. You and I are going to have a lot of fun being the first people in ten years to go down with Blue Shadow.”

[republich]

Dang - y’all are really into gut-wrenching Tahl angst, huh? Duly noted. *G*

Also wahey: 50+ followers! :-D

[republich]

Waxer and Boil have proven to be so effective in their rounds that by the time Obi-Wan makes it up to the third floor, most of his patients are already resting comfortably and cheered to no end by the sight of him, knowing that his visit means action rather than the interminable waiting that so often comes along with the slow drip of chemo or the anticipation of results. These are usually his best days, he finds himself thinking - those when he’s able to recognize just what fantastic people he works with, who make days which should be interminable fly by. 

(He’s pretty sure it must take a toll on them, but they are very good at not showing it. It’s only when Boil’s private jokes turn cruel, or when Waxer falls asleep in the canteen, that the cracks begin to show.)

But this is a good day - this is one where he finishes at three and no one is terminal, and so when he comes back to the center of the floor to drop off his paperwork it’s a disappointment to receive one more thick file from Boil over the counter.

“Did someone just come in?”

“Referral,” Waxer calls after him through a yawn as he checks the room number and turns away. “Says she knows you?”

It’s rare, these days, that he feels the world tilt on its axis. 

There’s always that one patient, he’d been told, time and time again. As a resident, he hadn’t believed it. Years of experience had taught him to believe it, instead, though he didn’t like to allow them to intrude upon his life like they tended to, leaving him needing support and amnesia and possibly a night in a bed not his own. They stay with you even if they never come back.

“Damn,” he sighs, and then straightens, and opens the door with a smile.

“Well, if it isn’t Dr. Kenobi,” she says, her head tilting in his direction, her fingers stilling on the lines of braille in the book on her lap. “I recognize that confident step.”

“Tahl,” he says, and comes across the room deliberately, putting her chart down on the table before sitting on the edge of the bed. “It’s good to see you.”

“Liar,” she scoffs, not unkindly, as she closes the book and puts it at her side. “Come here. It’s been far too long.”

He leans obediently into her touch, and her long fingers are quick to find his cheeks; the face she makes is not at all unexpected. “Good lord. What on earth is this monstrosity?”

“I believe it’s called a beard. Or at least, an attempt at it.”

“You sound old,” she murmurs, more sympathetically; the description could fit her, too, though he’s not about to say it. She looks thinner than when he last remembers her - less full of life, though clearly just as intelligent. “I suspect you’ve been working too hard, young man.”

“Mutated cells stop for no one. They’re inconsiderate that way.”

“So I’ve heard,” Tahl says, and leans back into her pillows, her flat chest - the result of her double mastectomy (and a highly successful one, it should be pointed out) all the more apparent. “Tell me,” she adds, then, quieter, and though he knows she cannot see him Obi-Wan finds it hard to look at her, at how familiar her small smile is, waiting for her next grief.

“Your blood counts seem to have come back somewhat abnormal from your latest check-up,” he says, as calmly as he can manage, as he reaches for her chart. “Any other symptoms you’ve noticed recently?”

“I’ve been tired. Some shortness of breath when I go for my walks.”

“And these?” He touches her wrists gently, then, with her nodded permission given, turns her hands over so he can look at the subdermal specks of petechiae in her forearms. “Any pain or itching here?”

“No. What is it?”

“Could be nothing. A bad heat rash or an overreaction to generic painkillers - ”

“Dear Ben,” she interrupts; the sensation of being gently chided by a parent is acute. “What worst-case scenario are you mulling over in that busy mind of yours?”

He pinches briefly at the bridge of his nose - thankful, for once, that his performance doesn’t need to be visual as well as emotional, though he knows she can sense most of what goes on around her. “AML is a - it’s a form of adult leukemia. It can occur in patients several years after remission from other cancers, partly as a result of exposure to radiation and chemotherapy.”

“I see.” She’s nodding, damn her and her beautiful sightless eyes, like she’s been waiting for this next battle in her war for some time. “What’s the next step, then?”

“Bone marrow biopsy so we can see what your cells are really up to. We’ve got some excellent new nurses here - I can promise you the gentlest of needles.”

“Very well.” She’s already looking beyond him, brushing her rich brown hair out of her face. “Let’s get it over with.”

He’s nearly at the door, hardly aware of just how bewildered he feels, when she speaks again, quietly enough that he barely hears her.

“How is he?”

Fuck everything, he thinks, and turns back. “He’s well. Putters around his garden, mostly. And doesn’t regret a thing,” he adds, though he’s not sure why. It seems important, though Qui-Gon’s professional sins had extended far beyond Tahl’s case alone, to make clear to her that he would have done it again and again if it had bought her even a month longer - and he did, and did again, and it had worked.

“Don’t tell him I’m here,” she says, very clearly, with her face solemn and calm. “I think it would be best for both of us.”

He just about remembers to make a sound acknowledging her, rather than just nodding - and when he manages to get outside again, it’s all he can do to just lean against the nearest patch of wall and breathe.

Next time, Kenobi, he thinks sourly, just take a leaf out of Anakin’s book and stop caring.

It would save you a lot of grief.

[republich]

“I see you are quite recovered.”

Well, he’s half-right, Anakin thinks as he looks up from his mounds of food, blinking through half-shut eyes. The hangover isn’t doing him much good, he has to admit, but the waffles certainly are. Dex does know his breakfasts.

“Good morning to you, too,” he croaks, as Obi-Wan slides into the cafeteria booth across from him, bringing his steaming cup of coffee with him. “Why are you so cheerful?”

“None of your business,” Kenobi says archly, which means that soon it will absolutely be his business, because he’ll make sure of it. New squeeze? Must be a new squeeze. There’s always a particular sort of relaxed smugness to Kenobi after he’s slept his way through another colleague, Anakin finds, and he’s wearing it now, like he’s the only one in the entire damn building who’s managed to come through multiple trauma shifts unscathed. “How’s your patient?”

“She’s not my patient,” Anakin mumbles, angrier than he wants to show, and decides to make up for it by stabbing up the nearest sausage far more viciously than he needs to. “Resting comfortably, as far as I hear.”

“Good. You should go see her.”

“Why the fuck would I want to do that?”

“Because we benefit from contact with those we serve,” Kenobi says, and despite him sounding like every lecturer Anakin ever had in med school, and whom he despised to the last, there’s always that knowing fondness to Obi-Wan which makes it damn near impossible for Anakin to hate him for it. “You may even make a friend.”

“Not likely.”

“Why not?”

“You know why,” Anakin whines, and flaps his hands in a way which is supposed to convey just how inadequate he’d felt last time he’d been in a room with Padme Freakin’ Amidala, alone, only knowing how beautiful she was from the television and how intelligent she was from the newspaper; how he’d made a complete and utter ass of himself, and how there’s no way in hell he’s going to let himself think that briefly removing part of her ribcage in order to withdraw a three-foot-long metal spike from her punctured lung could somehow change that.

Judging by Obi-Wan’s reaction (raised eyebrows and a sideways smirk), said explanation hasn’t really gotten through.

“Fine,” Anakin grouses, petulantly dropping his fork. “I’ll drop by and see how’s she’s doing.”

“Very good,” Obi-Wan says cheerfully, and, mission accomplished, starts to get up - he’s interrupted, however, to Anakin’s returning delight, by two enormous arms plucking him up out of his seat in a bear hug that Anakin knows all too well. Going by the slow expiring wheeze Kenobi lets out as Dex lifts him into the air, he might be needing that rib resection, too....

“Obi-Wan!” the massive chef bellows happily. “You’ve been avoiding me, my friend!”

“Not you, Dex,” Obi-Wan coughs, grinning. From where Anakin’s sitting, the whole thing looks rather painful, which is perfect. “Just your terrible coffee.”

“Oh, now,” Dex says, faux-chagrined, and drops Kenobi back down to earth. “I’ve made several improvements recently.”

“Really? Because I still can’t feel my tongue...”

They make quite a pair, Anakin thinks, as the doctor and cafe manager bicker their way to the till - and always put on a good show. 

Just what I needed, he thinks, but that thought brings him back to what he needs to do, now, apparently, and his mirth quickly fades.

Damn it. 

Hippocrates is probably going to have something to say about this...

[republich]

Can Poe be a Fett cousin on someone's mother's side? Best pilot in the galaxy could be best ambulance driver in the city.

Absolutely 100% approved, oh my goodness. (Especially since Kix is technically alive in the TFA canon period!) He’d just show up every once in a while when his own ER is understaffed and turn donuts in the parking lot once he’s dropped off his patient. Everyone loves hates him and his perfect hair and his adorable EMTs Finn and Rey who have the happily-panicked 98% survival rate. The Domino Squad adopt them on sight. *cackles*