Archive of Our Own ^beta

It's chasing us! It's chasing us!

Their cries are shrill in her ears, knives stabbing into the thin fabric of her sanity. What is?! She wants to scream back at them but her tongue is thick and clumsy in her mouth, as she’s unable to perceive the danger that must be fast approaching over her sibling’s chorus of panicked screams blurring her surroundings into a tunnel of smeared color and painful sound, individual voices and identities impossible to pick out. 

She feels as if launching through hyperspace unprotected, flesh and organs compressed and squeezed through the tunnel of awful sound, the screams fit to split her skull-

Seven wakes in a deep gasp of water, thrashing blindly in the night-dark before grasping to break the surface, expelling water from her mouth and gills as she drags herself onto dry land. She lies there panting for breath, calming the pounding of her heart. Once she’s secure enough in her shaking limbs to stand, she drags herself to her feet, stumbling up the path to the Fett house, missing the handle with her stump but getting it with her hand on the second try, opening the door and staggering to the refresher for the medicine cabinet.

Bottles of various pain killers and stims clatter uncaringly to the floor, Seven pulling a particular bottle out and popping off the cap, shaking a few capsules into her mouth and swallowing them dry.

Benzodiazepines, specifically formulated by and for Kaminoans and eagerly provided by Va Ke. To think she was going to get rid of them. Thank kriff she let Tech talk her into keeping them “just in case.”

She slumps against the wall with a miserable moan, head spinning, waiting with bated breath for the drugs to kick in, hand over her heart. 

She scowls at the sound of uncertain shuffling just outside the door “go to bed, Jango!” she hisses, pitching one of the strewn bottles out the door. She can feel his hesitation, the forming lecture of “this is my house, I’ll check on the fish having a panic attack in my bathroom if I damn well want to.” but, surprisingly, he respects her wishes, steps fading back to his bedroom.

She’s almost disappointed. Damn him. Damn all of them.

The medicine is kicking in, slowing her thoughts and the heavy thud of her heart. She should call Twenty-six in the morning, he was always a good conversationalist. Rational.

maybe he knows what’s chasing them.