Thankfully, the doctor had a picture of his son in the datapad he'd given Seth. It didn't occur to him that he'd completely forgotten to ask that until he'd left the clinic and walked for a few hundred meters. That was probably a good indicator of how screwed up he was just then. His headache was back and his body was aching and he was irritable. Seth studied the info as he walked on, and once he'd memorized the map, he set a good pace and tried to keep to himself, stuffing his hands deep into his pockets.

He wanted to be done with this.

He wanted to be off this miserable, awful cesspit of a world.

Seth tried to clear his head as he finished his little trip through the Lower City. Or this portion of it at least. As he came into another section, making his way slowly down one of the other thoroughfares, he could tell he'd come to a worse area. There were fewer people around, and those few that were in the area seemed to be sticking to themselves, trying to hurry to wherever it was they were going. Fine by him, the fewer people around the better.

Extractions were tough, especially if the person involved might not want to be extracted. Then again, this might not be an extraction. Seth wasn't sure what he was going to do, honestly. He was going in essentially blind. He didn't know the layout of the apartment building, didn't know if anyone was going to be there, or if they were, how many or how armed they were? Well, he was just going to have to wing it.

Seth thought that he was at least...kind of decent at doing that.

Not like he had a lot of options right now. But he did have a good bonus on his side: the stealth unit he'd picked up earlier. He moved in between derelict apartment buildings and heavily grilled and shuttered storefronts, past drifts of garbage and even the occasional corpse that was apparently just left to rot where it had fallen. Somewhere distant, he heard blaster fire, and someone shouting. Occasionally, in between the buildings, he caught sight of a tram shooting by on its rails, embedded in the area beyond the structures.

The Lower City's design was strange and dangerous and worrying. There were places that were just exposed to the massive drop down to the Undercity with seemingly little done to protect against the hundred meter fall. How many corpses were down there, resting on the roof of the Undercity? He didn't want to think about it.

Seth found the apartment. It didn't look all that much different from the others. The windows were mostly shuttered, the front door was closed, the place looked like crap, filthy and rusted in several areas. Garbage was scattered across the walkway in front of it. He kept walking, moving to the side apartment and slipping into the alleyway there. Okay, time for the run. Still not too sure what precisely he was going to do, Seth activated the stealth unit. He double-checked it and saw that it should be good for about half an hour of continuous use. Hopefully he could get in and out in that time frame. He began checking the windows.

All of them on the bottom floor were shut up tight.

He found an old ladder lashed to the side of the structure and made his way up it. It creaked and groaned occasionally, but held until he reached the top, finding no other windows that were easily accessible. No one on the roof at least. He crept over to what seemed to be a maintenance hatch and checked it out. It was old, to be sure, and in need of some maintenance itself, but it was still functional at least.

Seth opened it up.

Staring down into the room it led into, he froze as his eyes fell on a prone figure, lying on the floor, unmoving.

Crap.

Was it a dead body they'd stashed away?

One of the gang members sleeping off some drugs or booze?

A prisoner?

After a few seconds he realized that whoever it was, (they were mostly obscured by shadows and faced away from him), they were at least alive. Well, time to deal with this problem. Carefully, Seth lowered himself into the room, moving down the short ladder affixed to the wall nearest him. He put his feet down gently on the metal plate floor and then moved over to the body. Pulling out his blaster, he crouched and then placed a hand on the body's shoulder. No reaction. They were either faking or out cold.

He rolled the body.

"Aw crap," he whispered.

It was the doc's son, and he'd been beaten within an inch of his life. His face was bruised badly, one eye swollen shut, lower lip split, blood on his face. Suddenly, the good eye opened up. "Who-who's there?" he groaned, trying to move.

"Relax, I'm here to help," Seth replied.

The one good eye rolled, looked around, uncertain. "Where are you?"

"I've got a stealth unit, hold on." Seth deactivated it. "What happened to you?"

"Who are you?"

"Nobody you know. I was sent by your father to talk some sense into you. What happened to you?" Seth repeated.

"My father?" The kid groaned. "Of course. I'm never going to hear the end of this. He was right. These guys are monsters." He groaned and shifted again. "You got any painkillers on you?"

"Yeah, but tell me what happened," Seth replied.

He was trying to reign in his temper. He'd been irritable all day, and it had only gotten worse on his way over here. Obviously they had beat the crap out of him. Why? He doubted it was for anything even approaching a good reason.

"I'll keep it short," the kid groaned, twisting his head and then spitting out a thick mouthful of blood away from Seth. "I thought these guys were a good gang to join. They let me start running with them after I robbed someone. But then I started to hear them brag about stuff they'd done. Killing people. Bad stuff like that. I didn't want to kill anyone. I knew I'd screwed up when we were out for a robbery today. Broke into some apartment. Old couple was there. A pair of twi'leks. They didn't have much, but they weren't going to take the robbery sitting down, I guess. The guys I was with...they killed them. Like it was nothing. Shot them in the head. When we got out, I tried to leave, said I wanted out, they didn't react too well to that. They beat me and threw me in here, told me they were going to give me some time to think about my decision..."

Seth felt his eye twitching, his stomach churning, heart pounding.

He was losing his battle with anger.

"Hold still," Seth said, pulling out the medical kit he'd brought with him. It seemed like a good idea and now he was glad he'd made room for it.

"I think my leg is broken," the kid said.

Seth felt his control slip another notch.

"I'm going to knock you out, then I'm going to deal with your 'friends', and then I'm going to take you back to your father," Seth said as he grabbed an injector of heavy painkiller and sedative.

"I don't want to go back to him," the kid muttered.

"Too bad. That's my job. And clearly you need medical help, which he is quite qualified to deal with. Stop being such an idiot."

The kid began to respond, but Seth injected him and within a few seconds he went slack again, unconscious. He replaced the medical kit then checked his vitals. Good and strong, he was out like he was supposed to be.

And now Seth could deal with everyone in this apartment building.

As he stood up, he realized that he no longer had anything else to focus on but the facts that had been presented to him. The gang. Their atrocities. Their heartlessness. And it seemed to stack on everything else he'd seen and experienced so far.

Reaching for the door, Seth's control didn't slip a notch.

It collapsed and dissolved.

* * *

When it was over, the kid in his arms as he staggered back through the Lower City, Seth didn't remember a whole lot.

He remembered faces. And screaming.

He remembered blaster fire.

He remembered drawing a sword, his or someone else's he didn't know, and cleaving through armor and flesh and meat.

And bone.

Mostly, though, Seth remembered...red. Just red.

Red in his vision, red running down the walls, red splashing onto the floor.

He knew he had snapped, and he knew that he had killed at least a dozen people. He'd stalked through the corridors of that rundown apartment, owned by a bunch of punks calling themselves a gang. He'd kicked his way into several rooms, shooting everyone he'd found. No...not everyone, he remembered as he walked back through the thoroughfares, covered in blood, carrying an unconscious teenager.

He remembered seeing a twi'lek woman, an escort maybe, clearly not a gang member. He'd screamed for her to get out of there.

At some point, after he'd killed everyone, Seth remembered rifling through their pockets, snagging whatever credits he could find. He could feel those credit chips in his coat pocket, and he wondered how many he'd managed to snag, and if it would all be enough for that part they were trying to track down. Thoughts drifted through his jittery head as he hurried back to the clinic, but mainly there was just a low-thrumming frequently of terror.

Utter terror.

Seth had completely lost his mind in that apartment. That hadn't happened for...for a very long time. And he wasn't sure if it had ever happened so utterly, so thoroughly. Probably the scariest fact was that he simply had not expected it. He'd been agitated, and pissed off, and really angry, sure, but up until pretty much that last instant leaving the room that held the doctor's son, he'd felt basically in control of himself.

In a way, he was sure that he was more surprised and afraid of his snap than the lowlife pistol jockeys he'd murdered.

This was a deeply concerning development.

Seth came at last to the clinic and hurried inside.

"Need some help here! Where's Doctor Marhal!?" he snapped.

Now there were people in the waiting area of the clinic, of course. Everyone turned to look at him, and he saw all of them stiffen and subtly (and not so subtly) try to put some more distance between him and them, even if they were across the room. Well, he was sure he looked like a serial killer right then, with the amount of blood on him.

The far door opened.

"Oh by the Force, Steven," he heard Marhal say. Seth turned and marched over to him. "Please tell me he's alive."

"He's alive," Seth replied as they slipped through the doors and moved quickly down the hallway. Neither man spoke as they kept going to the end of the hallway, turning left, then entering through one of a dozen doors. They came to a simple exam room and Marhal had Seth set his son down on the examination table there.

He hit a button on the old, scratched control panel built into the side of the table.

"What happened?" he asked as he moved across the room and began gathering up medical supplies.

"Your son found out a little too late that the gang he was so eager to join were nothing but walking, talking garbage," Seth replied. His words sounded distant to him and darkness was beginning to boil around the edges of his vision. He felt like passing out and throwing up as the horror of his utter loss of control continued welling within him, rearing back like a tidal wave on the horizon, rushing towards him with an immutable, unstoppable motion.

"I told him..." Marhal muttered as he moved back and forth, setting down medical supplies and injections and bandages as he gathered them from around the room.

"When he tried to leave, they beat him within an inch of his life. I...dealt with them," Seth murmured, and something in his voice must have snagged Marhal's attention enough to actually get the doctor to pay attention to him again.

"Oh my, you look like you're about to pass out. Sit. Now. Close your eyes, focus on breathing," he said, dragging a chair over.

Seth sat, closed his eyes, and focused on breathing.

He did this for several moments, listening to Marhal begin to go about cleaning his son up and tending to his wounds. When he opened his eyes again, the darkness was no longer there, and his heart rate was calming down. He still felt sick, and his headache was considerably worse, but he no longer felt like vomiting or passing out.

"Did you find what I was looking for?" he asked.

"What? Oh, yes. Um...I don't want to leave this to anyone else," Marhal murmured. "In my office, there's a datapad in the top right drawer. It has all the information you need on it. Also, in the closet of my office, you should find some spare clothing. You're going up to the next level, to the Upper City, and blood will draw a lot of unwanted attention. Up there it all belongs to the rich and the Sith. You can leave your other clothes here. I'll, uh...deal with them. And you can catch a shower too, if you want. The room right next to my office is my private bathroom and it has a shower stall."

"Thanks," Seth said, standing.

"No, thank you. You very likely saved his life. If there's anything else you need, please tell me," Marhal replied.

Seth considered it as he turned to leave, his finger hovering over the open button, then he turned back. "Can you spare any medical supplies?"

"Some, yes, I could."

"All right, I'll need some painkillers right now, but prepare a package for me, whatever you can spare, and I'll pick it up when I can," Seth replied.

"Okay, I will. Painkillers are actually to your right, in that cabinet there. Just take a bottle."

Seth nodded and retrieved the bottle. He still had some painkillers in the medical kit he'd brought with him, but the more the merrier at this point.

"Whatever it is you're doing, good luck," Marhal said.

"Good luck with your son, doc," Seth replied, and left the room.

He moved slowly at first, as if he was getting his bearings back after a bad overnight drunk or how he sometimes felt when he was coming away from a particularly brutal battle. It took him a moment to remember where the doctor's office was, but he managed to track it down, and found the datapad and the spare set of clothes. Definitely nicer than what he had on, even before the blood. He found the bathroom and stripped naked.

His body still looked like crap, pale and bruised, scars and scrapes and cuts. His face, he realized for the first time since crash-landing, was stained with dark hair. He preferred stubble for a beard. Snagging an electric razor, Seth turned the shower up as hot as he could stand it, then slipped in. He luxuriated for as long as he could, because this place actually had decent pressure and just generally felt better than anything down in the Undercity. But he only managed that for so long before he again felt the press of time.

Lives were counting on him.

He buzzed his beard away and washed himself up as best he could, then killed the water, dried off, and dressed. The armor and the coat were a loss because they were so thoroughly stained with blood, and he figured that Marhal had a point. They would only grant him undue suspicion up top. With some reluctance, after transferring everything over to his pockets, he dumped the armor and clothing in the doctor's office.

After deciding against checking in with Marhal one more time, Seth instead headed out of the clinic as fast as he could without actually running.

And made for the Upper City.