tritanopia | The Mandalorian

thirty

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? Those rare moments, so few and far between and yet when they occur you can't remember ever existing any other way, where it feels as though somebody else is wearing your body...or, alternatively, you're wearing somebody else's.

Fae's eyes were fixed on the familiar metallic ceiling -- her eyelashes fluttering open being the only movement she had made since the second she had woken up. Because, despite the fact that she knew that she could feel her body -- could feel the scratchy material of the blanket against her finger tips so distinctly that she knew simply from memory that it was the blanket from Mando's bed. A part of her, the majority in fact, was hesitant to flex a single muscle in the fear that the muscle would not obey her will. For her skin felt foreign where it wrapped around her limbs; almost as if brand new, and unused, and Fae imagined that, if she checked, the stretch marks would be missing from her thighs and the scars on her hands would have miraculously smoothed over.

Maybe she would have stayed there forever, spine digging into the floor and slowly overheating under the vast amount of layers that somebody had piled on top of her, but her bones felt excruciatingly lethargic -- as if she hadn't moved in months. Which, in all fairness, Fae had no proof wasn't actually the reality of the situation. And so she did eventually coerce herself into standing, slowly and achingly, in order to make her way to the cockpit door. In her fever-dream-like haze, Fae's mind seemed to happily ignore the hole in the floor, and, more importantly, the ladder connected to it, which is what led the girl to fall the seven feet drop the hangar floor. Thankfully, she didn't smack her head on the floor -- instead landing on her knees, catching herself with her hands before she tumbled forwards, and remained still for a long moment as she groaned out loud.

The sun was streaming through the open hangar door and hit Fae right in the eyes as she stumbled blindly into the fresh air for the first time in five days. But of course, she didn't know that it had been five days.

Five days of a dread filled silence plaguing the cockpit.

Five days of the Child whining and complaining, because he didn't understand where she had gone.

Five days of Mando hearing her laugh in the way the wind rustled the trees in the morning.

Fae's eyelids closed instinctively to act as a shield against the blinding light...but, in a strange way, how her eyes watered and stung was the best pain the girl thought she would ever feel. Tears raced down her cheeks like shooting stars, no hand reaching to sweep them away, occasionally catching on Fae's lips and covering her deprived taste buds in salt.

The gentle warmth on her cheeks and the breeze in her hair almost smothered her senses enough for Fae not to notice the ever growing ache in her side. Admittedly, it had been present since the moment she woke up and she was simply choosing to ignore it, although the brief tumble down the ladder had certainly not helped anything. Fae didn't want to look...she didn't want the blissful moment to end and would have thoughtlessly sold her soul to the devil if it meant she could have stayed in that moment forever. But alas, it is called a moment for a reason...it cannot be an eternity.

It was only when she tentatively lifted the hem of her shirt that she realised her clothes were still a massacre of a sight, discoloured and crusty from the copious amount of blood. Her fingertips grazed over the contorted skin before Fae could bring her eyes down far enough to look. In her mind, she battled with it in order to convince herself that it most likely felt worse than it looked -- but in the end, she was sadly mistaken.

The point in which the blade had tore it's way deep into the young girl's flesh was nothing short of grim. Despite the fact that the injury was actually merely over an inch long, and only a handful of millimeters wide, it still miraculously managed to make Fae's heart clench in disgust simply from the sight of it. For she wasn't a tragic case of amnesia -- she remembered every single second of what unfolded as if it had been no time at all since it had occurred.