Give Me Love

chapter twenty six

Pain. That's all you could feel, the entire time you had been asleep-- at least that's what you think you were.

The burning of severed skin and bone from several limbs perforated your senses, clouding anything else from your mind. You could almost taste the burnt flesh, smoking and sloughing off the muscle, all black and dead. There were droids all around, scrubbing it off and attaching new, metal limbs to the stubs. The attachment sites were not numbed, and you could feel each piercing metal stunt enter your flesh as they were attached.

It wasn't you feeling this pain. It was the person before you. They were lying on a metal table, screaming in pain, burnt all over. But you could feel the anguish coming off of them so clearly, it may as well have been your own.

You were hot, burning hot, and every nerve in your body felt like it was being tortured. You were rotting from the inside out, your lungs seared and failing, your skin falling off, metal encasing you and trapping you and rubbing into your raw skin with every move.

It wasn't you. It was him. The man on the table, if what that was could even be called a man. He was more metal now than anything else-- metal that was still screaming in agony, limbs flailing about.

You wanted to reach out and help him, to soothe his pain, but you didn't have any limbs. You didn't even have a body. You just were.

Soon, the droids were packing the man in a black suit, and the helmet descended over him. His breathing was cut off, replaced with a low hiss, and he was being stood upright from the table.

A new evil.

You woke up feeling like you were missing your arms and legs.

It took a moment of wiggling your fingers and toes, and then kicking the blankets off your legs to expose them to the cool air before you realize they had not been burned or charred to ash, or cut off, or turned to metal. The excruciating pain you had felt was also slipping away, just a memory now, and not something you could actually feel.

Gory dreams were not unheard of for you-- working in the medbay, you had seen some things. But something about this dream just felt so uncannily real to you... just like the last dream you had.

Thoughts of getting a therapist were starting to resurface.

Slowly, like moving through molasses, you sat up and swung your legs over the side of the bed. Your head was all woozy, and it took a few more moments to remember what happened last night.

Humiliation made you forget all about the dream.

Turning around, you saw the other half of the bed was empty, and the balcony windows were open. Anakin's back was visible from here, now dressed and standing with his hands clasped behind him. He wasn't moving, so you thought he must be meditating or something. You were glad for the time it gave you to get your shit together before facing him again after last night.

Grabbing your duffel bag, you beelined for the bathroom and got dressed as quickly as possible. You chose the yellow dress to wear today, just because the sleeves came all the way down and were sheer and lacy. You liked the little addition, and also you wanted to cover more skin today because you knew you would be rethinking the embarrassing night before and wanting to hide all day.

The dress only came down to above the knees, but it was light and flowy for the hot weather. Quickly brushing your teeth and scraping the remnants of sickly sweet water out of your mouth with a towel, you did your hair and then exited the bathroom.

It was very early in the morning, a fog still clinging to the ground outside, but you wanted to check on Corina as soon as possible. You lingered behind the balcony doors, eyeing Anakin's still form, unsure on whether or not you should disturb him while he was like that.