Confused
"Hello there."
Asajj Ventress gawked, nonplussed, at the Jedi before her. "Kenobi? What are you doing here?"
Kenobi flattened a small crease in his robes, then flashed his brilliant, irritating smile, "I was rather wondering that myself. Didn't expect to find myself here, and certainly didn't expect to find you. Where is 'here' do you think? I don't recognize this part of the temple."
"Temple? What are you blathering about Kenobi?" Asajj kept one eye on the dangerous Jedi while she scanned the fields, searching for any sign of backup. Jedi always seemed to travel in packs. "Corellia is the most force-dead planet I've ever known. Your Jedi would be fools to build a temple here."
"Goodness knows we know how to be foolish," Kenobi said, mostly to himself. Then more conversationally, "Corellia? Is that what you see? I suppose that makes sense. You are right, of course, the Jedi have never built a temple there to my knowledge; I'm still on Coruscant, as far as I can tell, but sleep can be deceptive on such trivialities."
"Sleep?" Asajj bristled, "You think I'm a dream, a creation of your mind?"
"That does seem the most likely explanation for this rendezvous," Kenobi said. "I'll admit, it is a strange dream. Much more constant than most, and rather dull; I've come to expect more action, or romance. And, forgive me, you are not the partner my mind usually conjures for either role."
"And why is it that I should believe that it is you who are dreaming?" Asajj asked, uninterested in Kenobi's ramblings. "You could just as well be a phantom of my subconscious."
"I'm afraid that's quite impossible, my dear," Kenobi said gravely. "You won't be doing much dreaming at all anymore."
"Is that so?" Asajj said, an argument in her voice, though she didn't know why she should care.
"It is." Kenobi said, head bowed, unwilling to meet Asajj's gaze. "After all, you're dead."
Asajj woke wanting to move. She couldn't say with any kind of certainty how long she'd been unconscious, but that time was passed now. Her mind was alive with questions, not least why she was bound wrist and ankle to her own bed. Her ship was running, engines producing their typical hum. Who was piloting it? And for that matter, why was she alive at all? She remembered rather distinctly being shot back on Corellia.
She reached out with the Force, trying to get a grip on her situation. She'd just located Ahsoka at the ship's helm when she felt the Banshee jolt from a rougher than usual landing.
She used the Force to release her bindings, and was surprised to feel no pain as she stood and stretched. She wasn't even stiff. A smile, a genuine smile spread across her face simply from the exhilaration of...existence? For the life of her, Ventress would not have been able to explain why she had so much energy coursing through her, but she wasn't complaining.
She opened the door and found Tano on the other side.
Suddenly all of Asajj's giddiness seemed horribly out of place.
Asajj's first, ridiculous reaction was embarrassment at Tano's state of undress. The second was horror at the state of the exposed flesh. It was difficult to find a part of Tano that wasn't injured. One arm limp, the other broken. Both legs were burnt through the skin, a good amount of muscle outright destroyed. Her nose was not its usual shape at all, and a trail of dried blood fell from it over her lips and down her chin. A dark rainbow of boot-shaped bruising decorated the left side of her face and was mirrored on the left side of her rib cage.
When Asajj's gaze made it back to Tano's face, she found a frown there.
"You should be in bed. You've been injured, take the time to recover."
Asajj was flabbergasted into silence by audacity of the girl's hypocrisy. If Asajj was injured and needing recovery, then Tano was dead twice over, and she wasn't even sure what that meant. Double-dead?
Asajj opened her mouth to say as much, but nothing happened. Asajj coughed slightly, we her lips and tried speaking again.
Her voice was gone.
Panic swelled inside Asajj's head, clouding her senses and pushing all thoughts aside save one, "I can't speak!"
Her eyes bulged wide, hands flew to her throat, where a brutal scar could be felt at her larynx.
"Okay, deep breaths Ventress," Tano said, raising her broken hand in what was probably supposed to be a conciliatory manner. "A lot happened while you were out; I can explain it all, but first you need to calm down."
Asajj felt her panic turn to bewilderment into scorn into anger, where her emotions stopped. This tiny togruta had to be drowning in her pain, physically and emotionally exhausted, and still her priority was upon making sure Ventress was safe and healthy. How could she hold any anger towards such a person?
Even though the promise of explanations was appealing, Ventress shook her head. She pointed to Ahsoka, and then to the bed.
Tano's gaze softened a bit around her eyes. If she wasn't in so much pain, she might have even smiled. "I'm fine, really. I couldn't sleep now if I...oh who am I kidding. I'm pretty sure we're safe here, but I don't actually know where "here" is. I'll explain when I wake up. Just do me a favor and try to get some more rest for yourself?"
Asajj nodded, lying easily, then held up a single finger before pointing to the door to Ahsoka's cabin across the way. She hoped the message would be obvious, "You first."
Ahsoka complied, gingerly making her way into bed, carefully arranging herself to avoid aggravating any of her many injuries. Even so, she was asleep within seconds.
When Asajj sensed that her business partner was lost to the world of the wake, she set to work. Her knowledge of nightsister magicks was nowhere near as extensive as Mother Talzin, nor as powerful as Old Daka, but she knew how to siphon the water of life.
Before opening the airlock onto an unknown planet, Asajj visited the cockpit to get a read on where they were. The results were not encouraging. The planet's gravity was exceptionally strong, to such a degree that the atmosphere, while non-toxic, had mostly settled in low elevation areas. Where they had landed, there wasn't air enough to support any kind of physical labor more intense than standing and walking.
Still, good enough for what Asajj needed. She grabbed a convenient bucket, falf filled it with water, and left the ship.
They'd landed on an open plain, the horizon nearly flat, marred only by a single far-off mountain peak. Asajj walked a few hundred years away from the Banshee, trailing her fingers across the tips of the tall grass. Despite the light air making her breath catch easily, and the intense gravity making the water bucket feel much heavier than it ought, Asajj couldn't help but find her task enjoyable, pleasant even. The sky was clear, the breeze was refreshing, and the bright blue star that served as sun for this planet put an ethereal tint on everything.
When she was satisfied that Tano wouldn't be harmed, Asajj tore up a few stalks of grass to make a flat surface for her water bucket.
Nightsister magick made use of the force, but in a way foreign to the Sith principles Asajj learned from Dooku and the Jedi methods Narec had taught. Nightsister magick was about disrupting and relocating balance. Take the harm from here, put it there, take the life from my enemies and put it in my allies. Actual application was rarely that simple, but the water of life was fairly straightforward.
Asajj closed her eyes, reached out, searching for the life around herself. That part was not difficult, she was surrounded by the green energy from all the wild plants. Then she focused, examined that vague green glow and looked closer, picked out the twisting, coiling, undulating strands of within that glow, and then within each of those strands, the gleaming core of life. Slowly, delicately, Ventress caressed that core, wrapped her fingers around it, held it firmly. And then she ripped it out.
Ten feet to Ventress's left, a blade of grass wilted, pale and dead.
Ventress took that core of life, brilliant and tiny, and deposited it into her bucket. Twenty seconds later, she added another.
For more than an hour, Ventress continued her task, until that green glow faded and ultimately disappeared. When she opened her eyes, a wide circle of dead grass surrounded a bucket filled nearly to the brim with her shimmering green potion, the water of life.
As she hoisted the heavy bucket back to the Banshee, Asajj mused on what sort of chemical process she'd just performed. She'd been told not to try to eat plants she'd killed in this way, even if they were normally edible. Had she just torn away calories, the vitamins, and the relevant amino acids, or did life consist of something more primal. Why was there never an analysis droid about when the interesting questions came up?
Asajj was careful not to spill any of her hard-earned concoction as she crossed the field and climbed the boarding ramp. She found Tano asleep on her bunk. Asajj brushed away the awkwardness incurred from this breach of privacy (made slightly more difficult by her partner's continued near-nudity).
Asajj was on the verge of putting the water to boil and beginning the healing process when she stopped to consider. Perhaps Tano wouldn't want this kind of healing. She might find it morally objectionable, or something. She tended to be bothered by odd things. Perhaps she'd prefer the pain of waking injured to being healed in her sleep if it gave her a voice in the matter.
With nothing pressing to do, Asajj turned to her weight-set. Her head was a buzzing mess of questions that Tano would doubtless answer, but in the meantime, exercise did wonders to clear the mind.
Lift.
Lift.
Putting together the facts, there wasn't much that Ventress really needed to ask about.
Lift.
Tano had saved her life, that much was certain, and had suffered grievous injury for her efforts.
Lift.
They also weren't on Corellia, which meant that Tano had somehow gotten her from the city street ambush back to the Banshee.
Lift.
Which she'd then flown out into space, and off to some yet-unknown planet in a very different star system.
Lift.
And somewhere along the way the Banshee was either crashed or attacked. Maybe both.
Lift.
And Asajj had been out long enough to heal. She could feel a scars to prove her injuries had really happened.
Lift.
And she'd had help healing. Her spine wasn't severed, her lungs were doing fine work, even on this planet.
Lift.
But her throat was another story. There was no pain there, but neither was there any sounds.
Lift.
Even trying to grunt or growl as she fought against the weights in her hands proved impossible.
Lift.
Asajj set the weights aside, trying to process her tangled emotions. There was some fresh anger towards Fett and his ilk. Not for what they'd done to her, but for what they'd done to Tano. Asajj had betrayed Fett, revenge was natural and expected. Ahsoka didn't deserve what they'd done to her.
That anger led to her gratitude towards Tano. The last they'd spoken before Asajj had passed out drinking the night before, the girl had spoken of her fear that they were beginning to resemble one another, of their shared hatred for who Ventress was and had been. And then she'd saved Asajj's life. She'd arrived without being alerted or asked, and then put herself in harm's way to save Asajj. So yes, gratitude.
But not just gratitude. Affection? Asajj didn't want to stay near Tano just to be there the next time danger struck so she could return the favor, balance the scales, erase her debt. She wanted Ahsoka around because she was probably the one person the galaxy who would have even tried to save her. She cared about Ahsoka because Ahsoka cared about her. When she thought about it that way, it was really pretty pathetic. 'Asajj Ventress: force user, war hero, assassin, and willing to be your friend if you can put up with her.'
Asajj put her self-flagellation on hold and backed up through her own thoughts. Something in there was pretty important and she'd just kept going.
She cared about Ahsoka.
No. No no no no no. No, no. Ugh, no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
Shit.
Ventress got into a new position and started lifting again.
By the time she was properly exhausted, there was no denial left. Asajj had broken her promises to herself, opened herself up to the inevitable pain of loss, abandonment, or betrayal.
Or happiness.
Was that hope? Asajj couldn't be quite sure, it had been so long since she'd held a real hope that she wasn't ashamed of. For so long, she'd been driven by anger, greed, desperation, the satisfaction of revenge. It was all reactive, with nothing past the end. The idea of having a real friend, not an ally or an asset working towards a shared cause, but some whose presence was genuinely enjoyable, who she could spend time with, find some lasting shred of happiness with? It was thrilling. It was terrifying. And it was more than she could process right now.
Asajj's heart fell a little when she realized that she wouldn't be able to talk to Ahsoka about this situation. Not without jumping through some hoops. Asajj had never been the most chatty of individuals, but the loss of her voice was hitting her harder than she'd have imagined. The cruelty of the Force would ensure that it was only now that she had someone who would listen to her, to whom she wanted to speak, that she lost her voice.
Spitting in the face of the Force's decrees, Asajj set about making herself a new voice using spare parts from around the ship.