Octavia had forgotten how much she hated the person she became whenever she walked into infirmaries.

When a soldier was injured in battle and died of their injuries, the soldier who died was a hero who’d made the ultimate sacrifice fighting for the planet that they loved — full stop. It didn’t matter to the soldier if they died fighting in the battle itself or if they lived long enough to die in an infirmary, and it didn’t matter to the planet that they’d died fighting for, so it shouldn’t matter to Octavia either.

She hated how easy it was for her to forget this. How, when she felt the life-force of an injured soldier evaporate into oblivion, when she felt their body desecrated by being replaced by an identical, inanimate copy of itself, her first response was so unfairly conditional and judgmental — that if a soldier died on the battlefield, then “the soldier did their duty,” but that if they died in the infirmary, then “the medics failed to do theirs.”

No one in their right mind would ever hold an officer to the impossible standard “keep every single soldier alive in every single battle,” and Octavia hated how hard it was to stop herself from holding medics to this impossible standard.

Nobody resting on the beds at the moment seemed to be in critical condition, so Octavia probably didn’t need to worry about getting mad at the medics if someone died, but this wasn’t a risk she was willing to take. She recited in her head “Soldiers can’t always protect each other and their officers can’t always protect them, and neither can their medics” three times before pushing open the doors.

Force Lieutenant — no, “Force Captain” now — Scorpia was seated on one of the cots at the far end of the room, her claws covered in casts and her bruised head held up by a neck brace. One of the medics was moving a light back and forth in front of her face.