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Red had hoped to be discreet about their arrival on Coruscant, so rather than use a direct transport, Veshok Squad had caught a ride on the Negotiator with the 212th. They were cheerfully making friends with some of the technology specialists on board when the 212th's medic, Helix, approached him.
“May I touch you, ” asked Helix, quietly, reaching out to grasp their arm but hovering.
Red smiled at the courtesy that been drilled into them as cadets, so used to being surrounded by Rancor Battalion, who habitually lived in each other’s heads that he had almost forgotten.
“Yes of course,” they had established early on that rank and title were not to be used in these interactions, because any clone could be refused, regardless of rank. Red felt Helix’s mental touch, cool and soothing as it must be for his patients, but shot through with an undercurrent of worry.
“One of the troopers in Ghost company has a gift for taking away pain. He overdid it the other day with his best friend’s torn ligament - a training accident. I had them both in for treatment and when I looked… I have a seeing gift, not a healing one… at a vod whose pain had been taken away I noticed something unusual,” Helix explained. “I know you’re a Guide, so I was hoping you could help Waxer and I do some experiments and see if we could figure out what it means.”
“Of course,” Red sent back, sensing vague feeling of surprise from the CMO at the gentleness of their own presence. “First, would you be willing to show me how your mental networks are laid out, and how Waxer and his friend are tied into them?”
Helix agreed, sending an image of the golden web that was his network. Red hummed carefully as they examined the shining threads of it. It was not surprising to see how thoroughly anchored Helix was, not just to many of the individual vod he personally worked with, but to other strongly bonded pairs, like Waxer and his friend, Boil. The 212th seemed like a battalion that knew what they were doing.
“And what did you see?” Red asked next. What Helix sent back took a moment for them to process, as Red’s gifts were different, but eventually they understood that they were looking at the layers of Boil’s brain as Helix perceived them. In an area of the brain that was often, Helix noted, the source of headaches in clones, there was a small irregularity.
“I’m considering surgery to remove…” Helix started to share, but Red sucked in a breath, recognizing the shape of the thing from a vision they had seen many times. They shuddered.
“Do you have it on scanners, or just with your gift?” Red asked, frantically locking their panic in the deepest part of their mind. “Absolution,” they called out to one of their slicers, prone to the same kind of headache Helix had described , very softly. “Would you mind coming with us?”
When Absolution joined us, glancing back once at Confession with a worried expression, the three clones made their way to the medbay, a sense of doom heavy in Red’s heart.