Still Seen

Posted on Sun Apr 19th, 2026 @ 6:07pm by Thane & Bomoor Thort

3,744 words; about a 19 minute read

Chapter: Chapter IX: The First Verse
Location: Dunari's Delight Space Station, Mayagil Sector
Timeline: Late Day Two, almost Day Three

The door stood only a few paces away, but by the time Thane reached it the effort had stripped whatever thin illusion of control he had managed to impose upon himself. One hand braced hard against the frame, the other clenched at his side with enough force to make the last metal-tipped fingers twitch. His breathing had already begun to roughen again beneath the discipline he was forcing through it, each shallow draw scraping where it should have flowed, but he ignored it and fixed his attention on the sealed seam before him. He could feel someone beyond it. He pressed at the panel but nothing happened. The lock held.

At once, the frustration rose in him, hot and immediate, cutting through pain, through weakness, through the sick pull of his own body trying to fold in on itself. His jaw tightened. For one sharp moment, the anger gave him shape again, a hard line to stand inside, and the Force gathered with it in a bitter, instinctive surge.

Then, the mechanism clicked and the door unlatched with a soft internal release that seemed almost absurd against the violence gathering in him, and the panel slid aside before he could force it.

Long, sturdy ochre arms shot out to catch him. They trembled momentarily as they settled under his weight, before pulling him up, relieving Thane of the gravity that sought to bring him down to the floor. A pale, fatigued Bomoor Thort looked back at him. His large, spaced apart eyes gazed down at him, seeing his entirety. A trembling breath fell from his mouths, before his arms pulled him in tighter.

Relief hit Thane harder than pain had. It moved through him in one sudden, shattering wave, not easing anything but stripping away the last thing that had been keeping him upright. The anger went first, torn cleanly from his grasp, and with it went the Force he had been using to bind himself together. His back gave at once. Strength deserted his legs so completely it felt less like collapsing than simply being dropped, his body folding in on itself before he could catch or correct it. He barely had time to realise he was falling before he struck warmth and solidness instead of the floor, caught against Bomoor with all the graceless weight of a man who had already gone beyond what he could endure.

For a moment he could do nothing but remain there, held, the tremor in him no longer hidden by effort or anger. His head rested badly against Bomoor's chest and shoulder, the angle awkward, but he did not try to move from it. He only looked up. The side of Bomoor's face swam into view first through the blur of exhaustion and the strain in Thane's one eye, familiar in a way that hurt more than the ruin of Sleheyron had. Bomoor was whole, present and alive.

The sight of it broke something quiet and stubborn in Thane that no wound had managed to touch. His expression shifted with an almost boyish helplessness he could not stop, the hardness draining out of it as though it had never truly belonged there at all. Moisture gathered at the edge of his good eye and clung there before finally spilling free, one tear tracking slowly down through the heat and strain of his face.

His mouth parted. He tried to speak at once and failed, the first attempt catching uselessly in the wreckage of his throat. The second came no cleaner. He had to force himself to remember how to do it now, how to shape the breath softly enough, narrowly enough, how not to push where pushing only turned the sound to broken air.

"B... Bomoor..."

The name emerged as little more than a ragged whisper, flattened by the partially-active machinery within him and made stranger still by the care it required. Even that small effort cost him. His breathing hitched and he winced faintly, but his hand still rose, slow and unsteady, until his fingers found Bomoor's unwounded cheek. He touched it with a gentleness that seemed almost disbelieving, as though he needed the contact to confirm that none of this part was memory, hallucination or some last cruel distortion.

In that moment there was little of the self-titled Sith Lord in him at all - only Thane, injured past dignity and held together no longer by fury, but by grief, relief and the simple, aching fact that Bomoor had come back to him.

"Thane," Bomoor's duel vocal resonance washed through him low and steady, as his friend loosened his grip and allowed some of Thane's weight to return carefully to his control. His dark eyes peered down at him, not with shock or disgust but as though he was putting together the pieces in his mind. Confirming the truth he had already felt.

"We're still here," he answered for the both of them.

The words settled into him more surely than anything else had, not through the Force, not through instinct, but through something simpler and far harder to deny. Thane's gaze did not leave Bomoor's face as the Ithorian spoke, as though anchoring himself there against the pull of everything else. His breathing remained uneven, each quiet intake measured with care before being released again in a thin, controlled stream, but he forced enough steadiness into it to answer.

"Still... here..."

The reply came fractured but deliberate, shaped around the limits of what his voice would allow, each word placed rather than spoken. His hand lingered a moment longer against Bomoor's cheek before slipping away. Yet, something had settled within him all the same. Not strength yet, but a fragile, stubborn continuity. He inclined his head the smallest amount, as though acknowledging not just Bomoor's words, but the truth beneath them, and allowed himself, for the moment, to be held within it.

Bomoor finally allowed his gaze to drift away from Thane and into the room beyond; the shattered glass, the puddle of bacta fluid and the huddled healers in the corner.

He propped Thane up under one arm and he moved them both together back into the room. He did not speak immediately, just observed what he saw with quiet understanding. Eventually, his gaze settled on a sterile tray not far from the shattered bacta tank. Atop it was a compact respirator unit, clean and utilitarian, while, alongside it was a photoreceptor unit - a familiar piece he had acquired several months ago during his time working on the fabricant droid.

Bomoor looked at the devices with a certainty Thane could feel but not follow. Something in Bomoor’s stillness told Thane it went deeper: that the sight stirred a memory or meaning he could not reach.

But Bomoor lingered on it only briefly. He brought Thane back in front of him, his attention once again attuned only to the pair of them and blotting out the others in the room.

"You have suffered greatly," he stated, eyes fixed and piercing with plain clarity, "But you and I have a destiny to face that demands you carry on."

He released Thane, who staggered slightly as his feet took his full weight once more but stayed upright. By the time he had steadied himself, Bomoor had brought the two mechanical instruments towards him. He held them up, like a chalice being offered to a lord.

"Take these tools," the Ithorian pleaded, his own voice cracking a fraction as his mouths uttered the words, "And come back to me. For all the times you carried me, let me now carry you."

There was something hanging in his eyes - sadness, yes, but also a strength that was borne from it, "From this pain, become stronger."

For a moment, Thane did not move. His gaze instead fixed upon the devices in Bomoor’s hands with a quiet, growing tension that ran deeper than the pain still threading through his body. The respirator drew his attention first, almost like a recent memory. The forced rhythm of breath, the intrusion - the complete absence of control.

His throat tightened faintly in response, a reflex that came unbidden and immediate, and the shallow pattern of his breathing faltered as though his body had already begun to reject it.

The photoreceptor followed, its smooth, artificial surface catching the light, and he found himself staring at it with something closer to distaste than fear.

This was not healing. This was concession.

His jaw set.

For a fraction of a moment, something sharper rose in him, cutting cleanly through the hesitation. He felt it before he understood it, the familiar ignition of anger gathering beneath his ribs and along his spine, lending structure where weakness threatened to return. His posture straightened almost instinctively, the uneven balance correcting as the Force answered him once more, not in panic now, but in alignment. The tremor in his limbs steadied.

Axion’s face came with it.

The calm, knowing expression. The certainty and, beneath it, something else - something worse. Ventul’s final moment, the way his eyes had changed when he looked at him. Not fear of death, but a childish fear of what Thane had already become, even before his mutilation.

The thought settled into him with a quiet finality and his singular gaze lifted back to Bomoor. For a brief moment, nothing passed between them in words - only understanding... the weight of what had been lost and, importantly, of what still remained. Then, slowly, Thane inclined his head, the motion small but deliberate, and reached out.

His hand closed around the photoreceptor first.

The contact was immediate and wrong, the casing cold against skin that still burned with residual sensation. He did not hesitate beyond that, though. If there was any revulsion or resistance in him, he drove through it with the same hard resolve that had carried him to his feet moments before. Turning his head slightly away from Bomoor, not in rejection but for privacy, he raised the device to the ruined side of his face.

There was a brief, invasive pressure as it aligned, and then it engaged with a subdued click, latching into the crude socket with surprising ease. A thin red light flared to life at once, cutting sharply through the dimness of the chamber, and with it came vision - not restored, but replaced. The world did not return as it had been. It reassembled itself in layers, harsh and precise, every edge sharpened beyond natural clarity. Depth resolved differently, distances measured rather than perceived, surfaces breaking into gradients of light and shadow that carried an almost clinical exactness. Movement registered first, then form, then detail, each arriving in rapid succession as the system calibrated itself against the environment.

For a fraction of a second, the overlap disoriented him. His natural sight and the artificial did not align cleanly, the two perspectives clashing just enough to distort the space around him into something subtly wrong. A doubling - a slight delay, even as whatever mechanisms formed part of the cybernetics within worked to accommodate the schism. The world felt less lived in, more observed.

Then,it settled.

The red glow stabilised, the image sharpening into a singular, unified field of view, colder and more defined than anything his own eye had ever given him.

Thane remained still, his head angled slightly downward, as though testing it without fully acknowledging it out loud. His breathing remained minorly controlled if ragged and shallow.

His hand moved back towards the Ithorian without yet looking back, reaching out, palm open. He did not turn his head as Bomoor placed the second device into his grasp, but the weight of it registered at once, lighter than it should have been, its balance precise. Only then did Thane lower his gaze.

He studied it in near-silence, his broken breathing rattling painfully. The photoreceptor fed him more than sight now, though. Fine lines resolved across the surface of the mask in subtle layers of contrast and depth, each groove cut with deliberate purpose rather than ornament. The material itself appeared thin to the point of fragility, yet the way it held the light betrayed something denser beneath, a composite structure designed to flex without yielding. It was shaped specifically - the curvature matched the angles of his jaw, the line of his cheek, the ruined side accounted for without symmetry, built to sit against him rather than upon him.

His fingers tightened fractionally around it. There was still resistance in him, though. It was not fear, and not even quite disgust, but something more stubborn. A refusal. The same instinct that had rejected the apparatus in the tank, that had fought against imposed breath and external control. This was different, he knew that, but his body did not. The memory of intrusion lingered too close beneath the surface, and for a brief moment his throat threatened to close again in anticipation alone.

He forced it open. The anger remained, quieter now but no less present, a steady current beneath everything else. It gave him the clarity to act where hesitation would have rooted him in place. Without another pause, he raised the mask.

The inner surface met his skin with a precise, almost unsettling exactness, settling into place as though it had always belonged there. For a fraction of a second nothing happened - and then it connected.

The sensation was immediate and invasive, but not violent. A series of fine, internal contacts aligned along his jaw and beneath it, linking into structures already embedded within his throat and chest. He felt it as a shifting pressure rather than pain, something integrating rather than forcing, threads of mechanism settling into pathways that had been left waiting for it. The seal tightened subtly against his face, not constricting, but complete, enclosing the lower half of it in a way that left no doubt as to its purpose.

For a brief moment, there was nothing... And then he finally breathed.

The difference struck him with a clarity that almost staggered him more than the pain ever had. Air entered cleanly, without obstruction, without the jagged resistance that had defined every breath since he had torn himself free of the tank. It moved through him smoothly, drawn not by force, but by function, guided and filtered as it passed through the mask and into the systems within him. The pathways that had struggled moments before now held open under quiet support, the pressure along his throat shifting into something controlled, stabilised. It was not entirely natural, not entirely his - but it worked.

For the first time since landing on Sleheyron, breath did not feel like failure.

He drew in again, deeper this time, testing it. The air came cool and precise, stripped of the harshness that had scraped through him before, each intake reaching further into his lungs without collapse. The tension in his chest eased by degrees, not vanishing completely, but no longer the central battle his body was fighting. The respirator did not impose rhythm upon him as the apparatus had. It followed him, adjusted with him, supporting rather than overriding.

It was enough.

The strain that had defined his posture shifted as that single demand was lifted from him. His shoulders settled back, the uneven rise and fall of his chest evening into something controlled, sustainable. The pain remained, threaded through his body in all the places it had carved itself into, but it no longer dominated him. The Force answered the change at once, rising more cleanly now that it was not forced to compensate for something so fundamental. It flowed through him with renewed clarity, feeding the alignment he had only barely held before.

He straightened fully.

The instability did not vanish, but it receded beneath control. His weight settled evenly, his stance no longer a fragile compromise but something deliberate again. The tremor in his limbs reduced to something contained, his spine holding under its own strength where it had faltered before. What remained of the pain became, for now, managed, secondary to the function he had reclaimed.

Only then did he lift his head and turn to Bomoor.

The red glow of the photoreceptor burned steadily on one side, sharp and unyielding, while his remaining eye held its molten gold, bright against the unnatural magma-red that now surrounded it, the darkness within the Caanan near total after the recent ordeal and his reliance on the power to survive. Together, the pair fixed upon the Ithorian with a clarity that had not been there before, not even in his earlier strength.

He held the gaze for a moment.

Then, Thane spoke in his new voice.

"Bomoor."

His Force bonded brother inclined his head in a slow, steady nod. It wasn’t an answer to his name, but simply a quiet acknowledgement of what now stood before him. Thane felt the approval more than he saw it, a subtle shift through the bond that settled like a warm pressure in his now active lungs.

The chamber around them seemed to breathe too with the moment. The faint hum of the medical equipment pulsed in the background, steady and distant. Light from the overhead fixtures caught the rim of Thane’s new photoreceptor, carving thin lines in the metal that wove into the fresh scar lines on his skin. The air still carried the sharp scent of bacta and scorched metal.

"Good," Bomoor said, his echoic voice resonating with a clarity that reached Thane without strain, "I can feel you more clearly through the bond."

Thane drew in a smooth, controlled breath; the respirator guiding the motion with quiet precision. The sound of it was different, but steady. Bomoor watched him with a softened focus, taking in the way the mask moved with each inhale, the way Thane’s posture held without strain.

"They’ve preserved your voice well," Bomoor added. "It’s still unmistakably yours."

A brief silence followed.

Thane felt Bomoor’s gaze move over him, tracing the new lines of metal and composite, the faint red glow, the way his stance had shifted from collapse to something held upright by will and machinery together. The bond between them still held, but now rested more comfortably and attuned to one another than it had even been at its inception on Ossus.

Bomoor stepped closer, a fragment of transparisteel splintering under his heavy feet. His presence filled the space around Thane, warm and grounding, the kind of nearness that didn’t demand anything but offered everything.

"This will change things," he said quietly, "We can’t return to what we were."

Thane’s new eye adjusted with a faint mechanical whirr, the red glow narrowing as it focused on Bomoor’s face.

"But we can move forward. Together."

He stepped even closer. Close enough that Thane could feel the warmth radiating from Bomoor’s chest, could sense the conviction settling into him like a foundation being laid.

"Axion will answer for this."

The words carried no flare of anger, just quiet certainty. A promise spoken with the weight of everything they had endured, and everything they still had to do.

Silence held Thane for a moment after Bomoor spoke, carefully measured. His gaze shifted, taking in the fractured remains of the chamber with a steadiness that had not been there when he first woke within it. The shattered transparisteel, the drying streaks of bacta. He regarded it all without attachment. There was no regret - not even curiosity. It was more just acknowledgement, and agreement; they could not be what they were.

Something within him registered Bomoor’s words on a deeper level, both his friend's intent and his loyalty - the attempt to meet him where he now stood without pulling him backward. A faint echo of something older and familiar stirred in response, something that might once have taken hold more firmly, even a few minutes prior, where he once might have answered with equal warmth. It was not that he did not care, but the sensation simply could not ride so plainly, the affection mired in the necessary power sustaining function and form.

It did not linger, either; the vulnerability of the moments before disappearing with his face behind the mask, as the feeling passed through him quickly - too quickly, he briefly wondered - leaving behind only the structure of understanding without the weight of it. What remained was sharper and cleaner, as more focus returned to him, clearer than anything he had even felt before, in spite of his injuries and his pain.

His attention shifted again, drawn now toward the open doorway beyond. His body followed a fraction behind the thought, subtle adjustments aligning his stance more completely as the respirator continued its quiet work. Each breath came easier than the last, although the damage had lessened. The discomfort remained, constant and underlying, but it was no longer obstructive. It became something else - something to endure... something to use.

His jaw tightened faintly beneath the mask as he became aware of his voice again. He felt it in his throat before he used it, the altered pathways, the artificial assistance that now framed every word he would speak. It was his - but not entirely. The imperfection of it irritated something in him, a small, precise point of resistance that sparked and faded almost immediately beneath the greater current of rage moving through him.

That current remained. The sheer rage and anger had not gone - it had just changed, settling into something fierce but contained, predatory and waiting.

He turned his head slightly, enough to bring Bomoor fully back into his field of vision, the red photoreceptor narrowing fractionally as it focused, the molten gold of his remaining eye holding steady beside it. For a brief moment, there was something almost analytical in the way he regarded his friend, as though recalibrating not the bond, but his place within it.

"Axion is nothing."

The words came low and controlled, shaped carefully through the respirator, the tone flatter than it had ever been before, stripped of excess but not of intent. There was no strain in it now and no uncertainty. The hatred was there, but it did not dominate the statement. It sat beneath it, contained.

A beat passed - his gaze did not soften.

"They have Amare."

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