Merry Christmas, everyone. Let me take this opportunity to thank you all for reading!
Chapter 21: The appointment
When Thrawn returned to Coruscant for a brief visit a few weeks later – he had to report on the investigation of Captain Dolmen's shuttle crash near the Retreat – Ayesha looked a little tired but she greeted him with a squeal of delight that made Tashi laugh. The two women had been sitting in the workshop and Thrawn followed Tashi to his usual place while Ayesha vanished to the kitchen to fetch the cortyg brandy. "She's so totally into you, Capt'," Tashi said with her wide Sullustan grin. "I don't think she ever made that kind of sound for a man before."
Thrawn gave an embarrassed shrug and enquired politely how their work for the Coruscant Public Transportation Authority was going.
"Not much," Tashi answered. "There's something on her mind. But it's okay, we have plenty of time."
The workshop was unusually tidy. The holograph of Anakin Skywalker and the abstract sketches of Padmé Amidala's memorial were displayed on an easel but the random assortment of tools that normally occupied the edge of the table was missing and the potter's wheel seemed abandoned. As soon as Tashi left, Ayesha pulled a folder from a shelf and spread a large collection of drawings on the table for Thrawn to see.
Some were those incomprehensible jumbles of lines that left him utterly clueless, but there were also several portraits of Anakin Skywalker, his face harder and his hair longer and more unruly than in the holo, as well as sketches of a three-way duel. "I told you, I'm keeping this a secret," she said when Thrawn gave her a disapproving look. "Now help me with these drawings. The movement isn't right."
Between his uneasiness and her impatience, their conversation was fruitless. He left back to Naboo early the next morning.
On his following trip nearly one month later, Ayesha was pale and drawn. The little bump of tummy fat no longer stretched the waistband of her trousers and her collarbone seemed more prominent under the shoulder straps of her tank top.
"We're worried," Lamtee told Thrawn on the second night, when she left the lounge to check on the bruallki roast. "She always looks tired, she doesn't eat, she hasn't sculpted anything in weeks, and it's all very unlike her."
Dacco looked at Thrawn hesitantly. "Is everything alright between the two of you, Capt'? I'm sorry for asking this, but Tashi says that she keeps staring at a holo of another man. For us Zeltrons that's completely okay, but it's really not her style."
Had Thrawn wanted to answer – the flash in his eyes clearly indicated that he did not – he would have been prevented from doing so by Onion, who stood up on his front legs and insulted the Zeltron copiously in Huttese. "You leave that woman alone," the Dug barked. "She'll find her way, she always does, and she doesn't need a nanny." There was an uncomfortable silence when Ayesha returned to the lounge, but Onion blurted one of his jokes and the conversation resumed.
She showed her drawings to Thrawn again. The folder was considerably thicker now, but her shoulders were sagging in defeat. "I keep getting it wrong," she sighed. "There's something missing."
"Perhaps you are not ready to do this yet," he replied. "Perhaps this is not the right time."
He had given up the frontal approach a long time ago, but the hint of disapproval was there. Ayesha shrugged angrily. "You're saying that because you don't want me to do it at all."
"I want you safe and healthy, Ayoo'sha. Right now it seems to me you are neither. Your friends are concerned about you, so am I, and they do not even know that you are tempting fate." She gave him a furious look but he scooped her up in his arms before things got out of hand. "Do not waste all your thoughts on some long-gone Jedi, at least not while I am here," he murmured as he laid her on the bed. "Unlike him, I am very much alive and I intend to deliver a reminder to the best of my ability." For the first time in two days, her face broke into a smile that actually reached her eyes and the games were on.
By the time his stint on Naboo ended and he returned to Coruscant for good, Ayesha was a ghost of herself. The circles under her eyes had become darker and she had lost a lot of weight. Thrawn was looking at her with genuine concern as he lay at her side, his fingers counting her ribs. "It's not coming," she finally whispered. "It's just not coming."
"Why can you not simply let it go, Ayoo'sha?" he asked. "Not because of the risks it entails," he added quickly when she glared at him. "This project is consuming you."
"I need to do this, Qubshi be-khadeeb. I just don't know how. Why can't you understand that?"
Tears were shining in her eyes. He entwined himself around her and tried to lull her to sleep, but she was still wide awake when the first rays of the morning sun found their way through the blinds.
They settled back in their three-nights-a-week pattern but they were now spending their evenings in an uneasy silence. He watched over her shoulder as her pencil ran on sheet after sheet of flimsi. She was sometimes so frustrated that she would throw away an entire day's work before going to bed. She engaged in several pointless arguments over unimportant things, and always ended up apologizing profusely, but she would not hear that she should give up.
On one particular night when she had simply stared at a blank sheet of flimsi for hours without saying a word, Thrawn asked her if he should come less often.
"Please don't do that," she said with anguish in her voice. "I can't do this without you."
He gave her a perplexed look, his eyebrows almost reaching his hairline, but then he shook his head and kissed her.
His step was a little more hesitant as he arrived and waited outside the transparisteel door, and his hug was a little tighter, but she didn't seem to notice and went on with her work.
She decided to try a different approach and read up about swordplay and fencing – literature pertaining to lightsaber combat or anything remotely connected to the Jedi arts was banned and hard to come by – but it didn't get her anywhere.
She was increasingly tense, her mood bordered on desperation, and things finally came to a head on a Zhellday evening. They went together to an official function she hadn't been able to avoid, and when they arrived home from the Palace, she told Thrawn that she had requested and obtained an appointment with Darth Vader.
"Absolutely not," Thrawn thundered, uncharacteristically letting go of his well-controlled temper. "You will go nowhere near that man."
She shot him a scathing look. "Says who?"
"I do," he snapped. "I will not allow you to do something so foolish."
His answer had her seething. "When did you start thinking of yourself as Kchak Pr'ollerg?" she asked nastily.
For a moment his face was like an open book as pain and sorrow washed over him. He took a deep breath to steady himself. "Ayoo'sha, please, please, listen to me. Lord Vader is a brave and brilliant man but he is impulsive and unbalanced. He was the main executioner during the Great Jedi Purge, it is very possible that he is the one who killed this Anakin Skywalker, and he might be responsible for the disappearance of your Jedi uncle as well. He is a user of the Dark Side of the Force, he chokes people routinely to express his displeasure at the most trivial things and it would be, to say the least, unwise to approach him with this misguided project of yours."
"Lord Vader has always been kind to me," she countered. "He's the one who told me about Anakin Skywalker, so I don't see why he'd choke me for asking about him. And my project is not misguided."
"I stand corrected. Your project is not misguided, it is suicidal and insane. You are willing to risk your life over something that happened more than twenty years ago."
She rounded on him with such fury that he took a step back. "Do you know what it's like?" she hissed. "Do you have the slightest idea what it's like? Not to have a name, not to own your body, to be an object that can be branded and traded and sold on a whim? I spent the past twenty-one years trying to come to terms with that and everything that happened after I came out of it. Yes, I am insane. I struggle every day to be a person, not a broken doll, and now that I might be able to put one of these horrible things behind me, you want to deprive me of it? What sort of man are you?" He opened his mouth to speak but she held up her hand. "This is not up for discussion. I asked Lord Vader for an appointment and he granted me one. I'm going to his palace tomorrow morning at nine hundred hours, and the only way you'll prevent me from doing so is by having me thrown in a high-security prison."
Thrawn held her that night as if his life depended on it. He entwined himself tightly around her as soon as they slipped under the covers and watched as she fell asleep in his arms. He was still staring at her when she woke up in the morning and, once she was showered and dressed, he helped her in the speeder and flew her to Darth Vader's private residence. He kissed her deeply under the mildly shocked gaze of the security guards, his tongue savouring her mouth as if it were some rare delicacy, and left without saying a word.