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A Healing Hand (Warframe x Star Wars SI)

HarakoniWarhawk · 2024-06-15T17:55:57+00:00

Featuring an SI as an alternate Mara dumped onto Christophsis during the opening weeks of the Clone Wars without a Warframe... or perhaps not? Music for the chapter is from Ace (Adrenaline) Run, hide, survive. Easier said than done in my present state, but fear and childish terror are one heck of a motivator when battle droids with live blasters are involved. My gloved hands, a small comfort in this chaos, helped me scramble up and over the pile of rubble that blocked the store's entrance. I squeezed through the tiny gap at the peak, my squeak echoing in the tomb-like silence. My stomach churned as I slid down the far side, and I found myself in a darkened antechamber, lit only by a handful of flickering glow panels and a ray of sunlight that managed to filter through the rubble-filled front door. It was a struggle to keep my thoughts in check, to not let the fear overwhelm me... maybe the monsters wouldn't try and... I grabbed tiny handfuls of hair the same hue as the cyan crystals all over this eerily familiar world and screamed like a little girl, an immature wail of frustrated urges that nevertheless accurately reflected me. A violet glow permeated the debris-strewn room, my terrified brain calming as curiosity surged to the fore with a fascinated gasp. I raised my glowing hands with wide eyes and twisted the limbs this way and that to figure out the light's source. Feeling none of the aches of my tumble into the shop, I wobbled upright on unsteady feet and clenched and unclenched the incredibly small fists like this was my first time seeing them. These weren't the hands of my memories by any means, even discounting the spacy-looking gloves covering them. Too small, too weak, too... A pathetic whimper escaped my gap-toothed mouth with every mounting realisation that I wasn't just far from home in a strange body; I was also immensely vulnerable. Searching the darkened hiding spot with frightened eyes, my probing tongue found six gaps where baby teeth had fallen out. None had been replaced yet; when did kids start losing their teeth again? Was it six, no, five, or was it later than that? The answer elusively bounced through my sluggish mental fingers, taunting me with its presence and swiftness while always remaining out of reach. A scowl twisted my lips, and I petulantly stomped the ground with a huffy exhale that blew some of my overlong fringe out of my eyes. Somewhat foolishly and more than a little redundantly, I walked to the closest desk and just about got my outstretched fingers hooked on the worn edges. Unless the residents were giants, I was painfully short, couldn't keep my thoughts straight and... and might be a kid. In a warzone with battle droids. "Hey, where'd the small organic go?" I narrowly muffled my reflexive scream as clanking metal feet paused on the street outside, tasting plastics and rubber as I bit into my gloved hand to stay quiet. M-Maybe the monsters would leave if I stayed silent like a good girl? God, I must be regressing hard if my internal thoughts are reduced to childish stammering and naivety. Hating this latest revelation and literally unable to prevent it, I jerkily inched my way around the desk for the safe space my childish subconscious insisted lay behind the plastic-like furniture. Surely I'm small enough to hide under it until the battle droids left, right? And if I stayed quiet like a good girl, then the nasty monsters wouldn't hurt me like they hurt those men in white arm... Clones! Half-blind in the gloom, I didn't see the white-armoured corpse until my clumsy feet hit a stiff, thrown-out arm and tossed my shrieking form across a carbon-scored breastplate. Ears ringing from the girly scream, I blinked the stars from my eyes and found myself nose-to-nose with the cloudy eyes of a Clone Trooper, sightlessly looking at and through my petrified form. This time, the scream grew louder and louder until my entire existence narrowed down to the shrill, frightened wail of a terrified child who wanted nothing more than a protector from the creatures in the dark. Something tight in my chest built alongside the scream until it erupted with a breathless explosion where my thundering heart lay. The formless, limitless power screamed ahead of the pumping blood through my chest, down my arms and exiting my hands where they lay unwittingly against the clammy, dead flesh of the clone's corpse. Guided by means unknown to my fear-stricken mind, the questing energies hungrily absorbed information from the body and punched through the cloying fear to inform me of the perplexing results. "Hey, I think I heard something in there!" Broken fingers, ring, index and trigger from punching a B1 battle droid. Major burns on the abdomen and cauterisation and thermal transfer to the nearby organs from a close-range blaster bolt that slipped under the breastplate. "C'mon, maybe we can dig it out!" Acid burns inside the abdominal cavity thanks to a desperate retreat from the advancing clankers that ruptured the stomach lining. The deceased clone vanished in a blurry haze as unconscious tears poured from eyes that saw far more than anyone, let alone a child, should witness. A sharper, painful surge like a serrated knife buried itself in my heart, tearing me apart from the inside whilst I remained frozen over the soldier's body. His last moments forced their way into my brain via the wounds and injuries he'd suffered leading to his demise, the clone's imprint burnt into the fabric of reality through the sheer force of his dying will. Ruptured eardrums and soft-tissue pressure damage after fleeing into the shop and throwing his last grenade over the desk. Death... Blood loss, bruising of the brain and shock killed the lone trooper as the entrance collapsed in the grenade's wake. Blinded as surely by terror as the salty tears pouring down my round cheeks, I pressed my tiny hands against the dead clone as the shaft of light grew brighter with every noisy second. I tried to speak, but the crippling star replacing my heart stole the breath from my empty lungs like a blazing inferno hungry for oxygen. A pathetic wheeze was all that escaped, a hollow, ghastly shell of the boiling pains, emotions and jumbled memories rendering my existence hell on earth. Unable to continue and lacking the lung capacity to hold my breath any longer, I collapsed against the corpse and instinctively buried my face into the stiff crook of his neck. With the droids noisily clawing their way inside and the interior lighting up from the machine's ceaseless efforts, it was only a matter of time before I, too, joined this fallen guardian of the Republic in death, alone and frightened. I'd felt his final moments as if I'd lived them in his plastoid boots, yet the growing part of me that resembled the child I'd become refused to believe the truth of my mind. "P-Pleathe, wake up, Mister Clone," I begged with a little girl's voice muffled by the cold flesh. "I don' wanna die." A taut chord in my chest hummed like a live wire and snapped. The ball of agonising fire where my heart used to be surged from that final, all-too-mortal emotional outburst that only a young kid could achieve and exploded, much like the energies that'd mapped the clone's body. And just like that, ozone-tainted air poured into tiny lungs unsuited for the exertion I'd placed on them in the form of an exhausted sigh as I collapsed in a boneless heap. That star, bloated and corpulent with emotional energies, crossed the intervening space between our faces as a see-through miniature sun before bursting into glowing gasses that poured through the corpse's parted and bloodless lips. Almost as if it was drawn inside via a breath... Heralded by the abrupt clatter of tumbling debris, the battle droids incessantly tunnelling their way inside secured a path with an electronic cheer. I screamed. The lifeless corpse under me shouted and jerked upright, their forehead clocking me right in the head and knocking me out with a painful flash of light. CT-5581 had died. He'd died alone, in horrific pain and trapped inside a tomb of his own creation. CT-5581 woke up with a miniature human with bacta-blue hair atop him, unconscious with the distinctive clamouring of clankers on the other side of the desk. Confused, painfully stiff and unable to feel his extremities, the perplexed clone trooper's flash-training took over and put a securing arm around the insensate civilian. With the seppies' grating electronic voices boosted by his temporarily hypersensitive hearing, CT-5581 drew his DC-17s pistol, waited until the droids fumbled their way inside the store, and then emptied all seven bolts towards the loudest voices. Though unbearably loud in the enclosed space, the wincing clone waited out the ensuing ringing until he was confident of nailing the battle droids. He counted ten slowing heartbeats before poking his exposed head over the desk to see both droids collapsed in sparking heaps amidst the rubble and shattered crystal. Squinting against the light flooding through the wrecked doorway and lamenting his lost bucket, CT-5581 warily hoisted himself upright with the tiny human's arms locked around his neck. What was he meant to do now? Basic training on Kamino never covered interacting with civilians, and the simulations certainly didn't prepare the foundering trooper for blurred memories of dying in this very room. "Has to be a concussion," the trooper croaked, subconsciously tasting the lie before the words fell from his chapped lips. "Just a bad knock without my bucket." Mumbling the deceptive refrain under his breath a few more times, CT-5581 holstered his recharged sidearm and stared perplexedly at his softly breathing limpet. He hadn't the slightest idea what they looked like with all the bright blue hair in the way, so he brushed it aside for a better look. The revealed face was unlike any the clone had seen in his short life off Kamino, with deathly pale skin and soft, round features like the brothers that had just left the creches when CT-5581 departed from Tropica City. Even without outside experience, something told the trooper this was what a non-clone child looked like. With that said, CT-5581 enjoyed a scant few seconds of relief before the realisation that non-clones wouldn't be trained from an early age to use blasters or follow orders set in. Alarmed, the trooper pried the blue-haired child off and set them on the desk. "Do non-clones fall asleep sitting up...?" Even if they didn't typically, this awfully frail example of their kind was no closer to awakening than when CT-5581 woke up with them on his aching chest. So, fearing the child might never wake up if he left them there, he tenderly picked them up and sighed in relief as the tiny arms wrapped around his neck again. "Alright, Trooper, just pretend this is like the simulations," CT-5581 hyped himself up and began moving towards the deactivated droids. "Find a bucket with working comms, contact command and leave the kid with the other civies." Getting past the clankers -and driving a plastoid boot into their heads as he passed- and up the gentle slope to the outside world was surprisingly easy as the kid weighed nothing at all. Shielding his eyes from the glare of Christophis' star, CT-5581 warily checked both directions for roaming droids before risking venturing onto the debris-strewn street. Scanning for gleaming white plastoid armour with no luck, the clone worried at his lip and chose to follow the street east if the sun overhead was to be trusted. Within a minute, CT-5581's initial walk transformed into a swifter jog as his body practically carried itself along the empty street. Suspecting adrenaline, he mentally shrugged and paid the limitless energy infusing him no further heed as he traversed Crystal City, intending to rejoin his surviving brothers. And if none remained alive, CT-5581 would find a way to get this child off-world and in safe hands, no matter what the seppies threw his way. If death couldn't keep him down before, he wouldn't let it try a second time! ... On second thought, taunting death felt like a monumentally stupid idea behind enemy lines. Feeling in better form than since he'd arrived on Christophsis with Senator Organa, the lone clone trooper and his unconscious passenger snuck through the deserted streets. Sound echoed strangely within the crystal towers of the business district despite CT-5581's best attempts to pinpoint the distant fighting. He recalled part of the pre-mission briefing had mentioned "sonic resonance", but rummaging around his head in a warzone was a recipe to blunder into a droid patrol. Idle thoughts about unimportant things got shoved to the back of his mind, and focus on the mission took foremost importance. The most CT-5581 dwelt on the issue was the obligatory pause at every blind corner to listen for marching metal feet, just in case the faded echoes resolved into something he could guide by. It never did, but CT-5581 wasn't discouraged. He estimated they'd been travelling for a solid hour, give or take a few minutes, on account of the chronic lack of a chrono. Creeping along the fire-blackened gateway to what might've been a loading dock before the hovertruck inside it exploded, CT-5581 adjusted his grip on the unconscious kid before risking a glance. At first, he mistook the soft gasp as an errant gust of wind racing through the crystal towers and paid it no heed. Palming his DC-17s, he drew it to chest height before a warm breath prickled his neck. Well, fierfek. Biting back a curse, CT-5581 awkwardly shuffled into the dubious shelter of a recessed doorway and met his conscious limpet's eyes. Sharp green, like the deployment lights on a Larty, was CT-5581's first thought before he noticed the indigo shards floating in the depths of the guilless orbs. The kid smiled in response to his staring, her rounded cheeks dimpling to expose a hesitant, gap-toothed smile, prominently including one of her front teeth. Feeling a grin tugging at his lips, the clone trooper put a bit more effort into it and was rewarded with a nigh-inaudible giggle from the child. After a few seconds of listening to the strangely nice-sounding noise, CT-5581 holstered his pistol and rapped a finger against his breastplate. "I'm CT-5581, ad'ika," he introduced himself just like Senator Organa did to the locals. "You feeling okay?" CT-5581 panicked when the happy kid immediately pouted, her expression falling as she gazed at him with some unknowable emotion. Reading his brothers was one thing, but non-clone humans were an altogether more difficult task without the context clues every brother learned on Kamino. With heat prickling the trooper's heated cheeks, he mentally debated apologising before the blue-haired child huffed and placed a tiny hand on her envirosuit in a mirror of the clone carrying her. "Mawa... Mawa... Mawa." As tough as it was to read civies, even the blind could hear the frustration in the child's voice with every repeat of that one word. Wondering if it was a language issue, CT-5581's musings were proven correct when the girl lisped an entire sentence in a language that wasn't Basic and refused to meet the clone's eyes. To his credit, despite never expecting to meet a civilian who couldn't speak Basic, the embarrassed trooper patiently hid within the shadowed doorway out of sight of the street until his tiny passenger summoned enough courage to look at him. A palpable sense of willpower radiated from the little girl in all defiance of her youth and wobbling lower lip. Drawing a whistling breath through her missing teeth, the kid squared her shoulders. "Mara," she tapped herself after the resultant victorious smile, then CT-5581. "Thee Thee Five Five Eight One!" "It's CT-5581, ad'ika, not..." At the absolute limits of the clone's extra sensitive hearing, he detected the rhythmic hammering tread of metal feet on the road outside. "Fierfek!" Pulling little Mara tight against his chest, CT-5581 lunged for the path leading away from the droid patrol and then threw himself back against the sealed door with a pained grunt when a second echo of marching feet blocked his escape route. Alerted by the abrupt movement and lurching impact, Mara released a frightened squeak that tore at the trooper's heart even as he crouched in the shadows and drew his sidearm. Distressingly hyperaware of the kid's panicked gasping into the crook of his neck, CT-5581 lined his pistol's sights up with what he guessed was chest level for a B1. "Whatever you do, kid, don't look. We'll be okay, I promise," he whispered as the droids stomped closer and closer to their hiding spot. Following the rigorous training drilled into him over ten years, CT-5581 drew a breath to steady his aim just before the first droids appeared... and marched straight past without a glance. Rank after rank of skeletal battle droids walked along without so much as pausing to sweep the doorway not ten feet from their patrol route. Holding his fire only because he had no clue what was happening, CT-5581 eventually eased off the trigger as the second patrol traipsed along as if the clone and his charge didn't exist. Somewhat tardily, he quit glaring at the oblivious clankers and went wide-eyed in silent shock at the shimmering outline of his arm and blaster composed of swirling whirls and streamers of multicoloured, if primarily golden, gas. CT-5581's entire body, and Mara, for that matter, remained cast as a transparent outline filled with dancing clouds of colourful gasses until the marching droids had long since faded from view and even the trooper's sensitive hearing. Only then did the blue-haired child in his arms suffer from a full-body shudder, the hypnotic and impossible effect popping like a bubble of armour polish as Mara gasped for air. Dropping his pistol with a clatter, CT-5581 rubbed frantic circles across the child's back in a desperate, ignorant attempt to quell whatever had come over her. It took Force knows how long before the terrifying seizure faded to mere hyperventilating, and the relieved trooper finally expelled the pent-up breath he'd been holding in. What he'd experienced wasn't possible for an average human to achieve, so, in the absence of competing evidence, CT-5581 fell back on the only explanation for the paranormal event he possessed. Every clone was taught that the Jedi could do things like toss objects with their mind and jump several stories into the air with the power of the Force. And while CT-5581 hadn't yet fought alongside a Jedi General, he knew from brothers in other units that they tended to bring their younger Padawans with them. Viewing the child clinging to him in a brand new light, it made perfect sense that Mara must be one of those small Jedi and, thus, part of the GAR's command chain. He didn't know how to feel about Commander Mara being alone behind enemy lines, but it was up to CT-5581 to help the tiny Jedi find her lightsaber-wielding friends. The poor kid must've been terrified if she dropped her lightsaber and forgot to retrieve it, too. CT-5581 could relate, as he felt the absence of his DC-15a keenly and hoped to find another before reporting back to Command with the shame of losing his issued rifle. "Commander Mara?" It took a gentle shake to get the young Jedi's attention, her emerald eyes dulled by the sleepy exhaustion that tugged at her drooping eyelids. "C'mon, we can't stay here," CT-5581 grunted as he stood up. "I promised to get you to safety, and that's an order I won't break." Easing out onto the blessedly deserted street, the clone warily resumed his initial course eastward, forever grateful for the last-second rescue by the miniature Jedi clinging to him by the neck. As far as CT-5581 was concerned, his orders were to return the Commander to her comrades to the best of his ability. Even if Mara couldn't vocalise those orders, it was clear as day that a lost padawan needed reuniting with her master. The clone nodded to himself, favouring the top of Mara's head with a fond grin. "Good soldiers follow orders." This Mara isn't having a good day for a whole load of reasons both physical and mental, that's for sure. Luckily for the pint-sized Tenno, she made a friend via totally not eldritch and Void-related resurrection! Maybe...

Thread starter HarakoniWarhawk
Start date Jun 15, 2024

Created: Jun 15, 2024

Status: Incomplete

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Getting dumped on Christophsis as a painfully young Tenno during the Clone Wars is terrible enough without having not seen most of the TV show, too.

Luckily, the Void can compensate for many things with competent use and control that comes with age... Joy.

Welcome to the Clone Wars through the eyes of a kid with phenomenal eldritch powers and everyone who has to look after her.

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HarakoniWarhawk

I like thick Cats and I cannot lie.

Oct 2, 2024

#104

Where has Warhawk been? Life and Frostpunk/Warno, trips.

What's Warhawk doing? Telling y'all that a lovely reader has commissioned a new chapter, and I'm way fething behind posting it.

So, you'll be getting the commission chapter and a freebee as my way of saying sorry for the delay.

Expect the next chapter tomorrow or Friday at the latest.