Before - Legends Where Faith Is--A Qui-Gon/OC Jemmiah Chronicles long story--Author's note, 9/21

K'Tai qel Letta-Tanku--It isn't the ones in the arm that hurt so much...the ones in the arse on the other hand...

Oh, yeah, my birth control was a shot in the arse every 3 months, so I know! All so I could be in more pain until I had surgery and then be in more pain recovering.

Do you suppose the Masters use the threat of innoculations to get their charges back in line? "If you don't come out of that tree right now, not only will you fall and break your arm, but I'll ask An-Paj to give you a booster shot or two for good measure!"

Maybe the masters do, but my mom certainly did!

 

Ironically enough, Sira left the medcenter feeling worse than when she had gone in.

This wasn't hard to do, since the crechemistresses had warned Li about her new Padawan's sometimes adverse reactions to medications. The strong painkillers that were being administered every twelve hours couldn't be helping matters, since they made her sluggish, groggy, and nauseated when they first began to take effect, but on top of all that, she had picked up what seemed to be the beginnings of a nasty chest cold.

Mostly, it consisted of a racking cough and severe chest congestion, accompanied for good measure by a considerable amount of drainage. Li's Padawan had probably used enough tissues to drain the natural resources of Kashyyyk in the last day alone, but An-Paj said to let it fester for another two days. If she weren't better in two days, they'd start medicating for bronchitis or a respiratory tract infection, depending on her symptoms.

That's the Healers for you, Li mused. They don't consider it a job well done if you're not miserable after the 'cure.'

Personally, she wasn't sure she could last two more days. It might have been a matter of sentimentality or empathy from personal experience, but the amount of suffering going on in the spare bedroom made her want to alternately cry and scream in frustration.

"Master?"

She glanced up from the breakfast she was preparing. "Yes?"

"How long until I can take the cough medicine again?"

She was grateful that she was turned away from the bedroom door so that Sira couldn't see her grimace. Her Padawan had to be in abject misery to be asking for more of the vile-tasting liquid.

Maybe she's hoping that it'll actually be the poison it tastes like and it'll put her out of her misery.

"Another hour," she answered apologetically.

There was an answering bout of coughing that was just as much an accusation as words. It went on so long that Li almost thought that the cough had replaced the natural instinct to breathe.

"I'll have breakfast in another five minutes," Li promised.

"Thank you," Sira rasped.

Another pause, but there was no coughing this time, only a rattle of relief at being able to draw a normal breath once in a while.

"I'm cold," was the next observation. "Could I take a bath before breakfast?"

Good idea. Maybe it will take her mind off how long the hour until the next medication will be.

"Of course," Li agreed. "I'll go run the bath, then be back to help you get there."

She started the water and inserted the plug, then headed back to the bedroom to carry Sira to the 'fresher. The girl was as pale as the moon and shivering rather badly, clutching the blanket around her shoulders.

"Miya phore," Li murmured.

My poor little daughter.

Sira rotated in the bed, then half sat up, pulling herself into Li's arms by clutching at the folds of her Master's robe. "Thanks," she mumbled again.

"My pleasure," Li lied.

I hate having to do this. I hate seeing anyone suffer, especially you.

It was fairly easy to get Sira undressed and deposited in the bathtub, but she'd left a towel for Sira to use in the bedroom and the rest were in the laundry.

"I'll be right back."

As if on cue, Sira started coughing again.

The towel was not on the bed, as she'd expected, but she saw something white over the edge of the bed, so she moved around, crouching beside the nightstand to retrieve the towel...

And froze in her tracks.

The corner of the towel was probably the only part that was still white.

Her heart pounded in time with the coughing still going on in the 'fresher, but it wasn't until there was a dull crash that she could remember that she still had a functioning brain.

Oh, Force, what's happening to her?

She dropped the soiled towel and turned, exploding from her crouch to run to her apprentice.

Sira had apparently tried to pull herself out of the bathtub and passed out in the process, since she was sprawled face-first on the bathmat, her coughing fi

 

I have a lot of friends who are nurses or doctors, so I have a running teasefest with them. You know that any character called indestructible will die in short order. And yeah, it happened very quickly, which is what makes it so anomalous. I did a lot of research on the particulars of how it would work and what might cause it and such...

 

Forgot to credit leona for making sure all that nasty medical thriller stuff was PG-rated.

 

Oh, no... Such a rapid degeneration. No wonder Li's master would find it difficult to cope with the idea of having gone from healthy padawan, to sick padawan, to finally deceased padawan. Something tells me that Gethin and An-Paj are going to have their work cut out in finding a accurate diagnosis for the illness Li was suffering with. A very sad ending to the post.

Can't wait for the next part!

 

Jemmiah--Oh, no... Such a rapid degeneration. No wonder Li's master would find it difficult to cope with the idea of having gone from healthy padawan, to sick padawan, to finally deceased padawan. Something tells me that Gethin and An-Paj are going to have their work cut out in finding a accurate diagnosis for the illness Li was suffering with. A very sad ending to the post.

Whoa, whoa, wait, you're killing the wrong person! Li is the master, Sira's the poor dead Padawan. And yes, Gethin and An-Paj are going to have their work cut out for them, but Leona will also be in on this.

Can't wait for the next part!

Cool, thanks.

 

Ooops! Sorry Ish...I realised this when I got to work, but I was typing my response this morning shortly after hauling myself out of bed when I was still half asleep and got my names mixed up.

 

LOL, that happens to me all the time. I kept referring to a story I wrote as In the Shadow of the Chosen One, which is a marvelous story by solojones. My story was actually In the Shadow of the Fallen One.

 

What? Did what I think just happened happen? You lulled me into a false sense of security and WHAM! Poor Sira's dead!

Then again I should have sespected it. Heartbreaking post Ish!

 

Wait a minute, whaddya mean a false sense of security? I foreshadowed the heck out of her! LOL.

 

Er... Sorry! I was hit with the happiness guru while I was reading it and was secretly hoping for a more happy ending.

I know! You're Ish! Queen of agnst. Ruler with the golden scythe. Don't know what I could have been thinking.

 

You're hilarious, ratoncita2...

 

She had not moved in almost a day.

It was not customary for the Jedi to perform an autopsy, but given the unusual circumstances of her Padawan's death, it had been strongly suggested. She had signed the flimsiwork, not bothering to look at the particulars of each clause.

"We will have to draw blood from you both," Simeon said quietly. "For comparison's sake and to ensure that if you are infected as well, we will be able to identify it in the early stages."

"Draw blood from her?" Li laughed, voice cracking with emotion around the mechanical sound. "You don't have enough of it pooling around her?"

He flinched, but shook his head. "That has been contaminated by exposure."

She did not respond to that, only extended her arm.

When it was over, she withdrew into a vain attempt at meditation, forcing her breath to quiet from the ragged sobs of a grieving parent into the desperate calm of a Force-attuned Jedi. She had no idea how she could consider herself in tune with the Force if there had been no way for her to save Sira, but the facade had to remain in place, more for her own sake than anyone else's.

She had to believe that the Force still trusted her in some way.

She heard little, even though the medcenter was filled with its usual cacophany of screaming Initiates, whining Padawans, and hostile Knights. The blood pounded in her ears as a torment to remind her that she was still alive and through it, she heard Simeon ask Ana if she would take her back to her apartment until the autopsy was complete.

"It won't do her any good to wait here, quite the contrary."

Finally, she was forced to move by Ana's persuasion, but An-Paj was the last one to speak to her before they left.

"We have scanned for anomalous organisms in both your bloods," he explained, "and we have few explanations, but we at least know that you are not infected with the same."

She nodded silently, cursing just as silently that the cruelty of the Force had not allowed her to follow close behind.
*****
"And there were no other symptoms?"

An-Paj shook his head. "A common chest cold, followed by bronchial affliction for one day, then uncontrollable hemorrhaging of the lungs and cardiac arrest."

Leona shuddered. "It's like nothing I've heard of before," she admitted. "I've heard of bronchial disease, but nothing this aggressive and certainly not in a Padawan who wa perfectly healthy."

"Could it be related to the fall?" An-Paj surmised. "Trauma of that kind can sometimes impact respiratory function."

"I would agree," Leona countered, "except that it is usually controllable by all the medications that her body automatically rejected. And I've never seen spinal trauma cause air to liquefy a person's lungs before."

"Which is why the autopsy was requested."

"Yes," she agreed. "I can think of no viable alternative than to consult the RIDI."

The Republic Infectious Diseases Index was a vast resource, rarely used by those who were called Jedi, but it was run by notoriously uncooperative sentients who thought that the Jedi should stick their noses in the Force, not in other people's business.

"Well," An-Paj said with a grim smile, "since you've volunteered..."

 

Sorry for the short stuff, but I've got finals today and tomorrow, but wanted to post. I'll get a longer one up on Friday.

 

Short posts are good too, Ish! And this one certainly was, in a sombre sort of way. I think the line that affected me most was this:

That was so sad! As was the whole autopsy thing. The last line of An-Paj's was typical of his sense of humor, volunteering Leona like that! Well done.

 

Thanks. Yeah, it does seem Anpajy to volunteer Leona.

 

Otherwise you'd go insane. That's what I tell my family if anything ever happened to my little ones to go ahead and book me a room at the local looney bin.

"Well," An-Paj said with a grim smile, "since you've volunteered..."

Typical An-Paj!

EDIT: That should be ones. I have two little ones.

 

Yeah, I'd go banoodly in that situation. Very typical An-paj...

 

Yuck, yup, and thanks.

 

"Welcome to Republic Infectious Diseases Index. Your visit is very important to us, but all of our representatives are currently busy, so if you will take a seat and fill out the necessary information, we will be with you as soon as possible..."

"So, I've come out in boils in the most awkward places and usually no one would see them, except they turned up the day after my wedding, so I was there on the beaches of Mon Calamari trying to get a tan while looking like I had third-degree burns..."

"And I said, 'That's fine with me. You ignore me, I'll bring down the plague of the seven-sided goddess of the Baruki on you!' Priestly prerogative and all that. Well, I called down the plague, wiped out most of the village, but caught it myself..."

"I bet you don't have chronic nosebleeds with yours. You humans have it so easy..."

"So," the priest interrupted the stream of consciousness, "what's your affliction?"

Surrounded by people who were oozing, sneezing, bleeding, and overall suffering, it seemed a bit ridiculous to be sitting in perfect health with six phials of blood in her satchel.

"A child died," Leona said quietly.

"Yours?"

She shook her head, running her hand over the name label on the phial. "Strictly speaking, no..."

"Well, until you've had your kid up all night coughing purple phlegm all over your antique coverlet..." the bleeding Bothan started again.

The priest, however, seemed to have learned empathy between his lessons on calling down plagues and lay a bandaged hand on her arm.

"Jedi Healer?" he guessed.

Her mouth turned up at the edges. "I suppose the uniform gave it away," she admitted.

"That and the fact that you haven't tried to one-up the rest of us," he replied. "I thought your lot kept to themselves for the most part."

Usually, this was the dismissal given when a Jedi asked for help in unconventional circumstances, though it was usually worded along the lines of 'May the Force be with you so I don't have to deal with your supernatural snot.'

It was true that, with the Force on their side and some of the best Healers in the Galaxy on-staff at the Temple, they usually didn't require specialized care of this kind. Every large-scale Jedi operation tended to have its own set of Healers, but this was more out of a desire to free up other resources for the wounded.

"This is a special case," she said flatly, finally looking up from her satchel.

"All children are special cases," he surmised with a smile. "How old was the child?"

"She had just turned thirteen and her name was Sira."

"Too young," he grunted sympathetically. "Any age is too young, but to lose one on the brink of discovery is most tragic."

She could remember Dimallie at that age, all elbows and stumblings, eager to please and despairing of her awkwardness. Of course, things hadn't changed much in the seven years since then, but she was at least turning out to be one of the more empathetic and patient Healers that the Temple had.

"Thinking of your own?" he interjected into her thoughts.

"I don't have a daughter," she said hastily, "but I have a twenty-year-old next-best-thing named Dimallie."

He doesn't need to know that once upon a time, I didn't need a next-best-thing.

Karina P'lila, six pounds, nine ounces, dark hair, her father's eyes. Squeals on cue, cries rarely. Missing, presumed dead...

He doesn't need to know that at all.

"Number 47?"

She hastily got to her feet, thankful that she wouldn't have to risk speaking her vulnerability, and scuttled to the doorway, where an impatient woman was waiting to take her to the analysis room.

"You have the samples?" she said brusquely.

"And the holos pre-mortem and during the autopsy," Leona responded.

"Good, that should make this relatively easy."

For whom?

The analysis room was as blank as the woman's face, but with a few touches of the button, they proved themselves to be floor-to-ceiling flatscreen terminals. Leona reached into the satchel and retrieved the phials, passing th

 

Nicely done, although I must say I was looking forward to the adventures of another disaster duo. Poor Leona...not only does she have to be stubborn with another "colleague", but she has to do it while reliving some of the past. This kind of stuff happening in RL is part of the reason I'm on the bench side instead of the clinical side of research.

 

Imagine anyone not trusting An-Paj! Even if they aren't fond of the Jedi! Good for Leona for mostly keeping her calm. The pained thoughts of her daughter were really touching. I especially loved the no-nonsence and practical way in which she managed to get the attention the case deserved by calmly and rationally explaining the differences in the medical tests.

 

Finally, they were making some progress.

Yeah! Once the Infectious Disease person shut up long enough so Leona could tell her what happened! Grrrr! I hate people like that!

I felt so sorry for Leona when she was thinking about her daughter.