Healing

Dooku and Qui-Gon: As a Jedi, Dooku had been interested in cultivating many powers, but healing had never been among them. He told himself that it was because he had little desire to be a healer. He thought that it was a practice taken up by the Jedi with the weakest power, and he refused to entertain the notion that he felt that way because he had little aptitude for it. He had no real compassion for beings who moaned and cried when injured, because he couldn't suppress that voice inside him that hissed that these individuals were weak and so deserved to suffer. His lack of interest in healing meant that he had few of the traditional healing arts to pass along to Qui-Gon, which, he supposed, was probably a pity for the weak who needed healing. After all, Qui-Gon had far more compassion for the weak than Dooku ever would.

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan: Qui-Gon never considered himself to be one of the Temple's finest healers. Sometimes he felt badly about this, since he felt that it was a Jedi's job to serve and heal others, but most of the time he could reconcile his mediocre mastery of the healing arts by reminding himself that not all wounds were physical and sometimes the most painful ones were invisible to the outside world. He could devote himself to healing those. Still, given his distinctly average grasp of the healing arts, he was grateful that Obi-Wan, unlike his friend Bant, was not obsessed with the healing arts. In fact, he seemed to have a stubborn aversion to medical centers in general. Yet, despite that, Qui-Gon was convinced that Obi-Wan was a better healer than he would ever know. After all, Obi-Wan had healed many of the wounds left by Xanatos' betrayal. Maybe Obi-Wan's healing was made all the better by the fact that he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he was healing someone at all.

Obi-Wan and Anakin: Obi-Wan had always known he was no healer. Part of his problem was that he didn't like healing wards in general. The strong smells that always filled the air in what felt like an attempt to sterilize everything made his eyes sting, his nose tingle, and his stomach curl up in protest. The ridiculous gowns that patients were forced to wear made him think of the clause prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment in the Republic's Constitution. As for the food, it was generally so awful and nausea inducing that it made dishes like tree bark frittata sound appetizing. On a level beyond the superficial, he felt that he lacked the ease with emotions that seemed essential for a healer, and that his bedside manner was nothing to rave about. After Geonosis, he tried to be the best healer he could be by helping Anakin come to terms with the dual blow of losing his arm and his mother. Seeing how his best efforts continually fell short of what was needed, he knew that he had been right when he had concluded that he was useless as a healer, since if he couldn't heal his best friend and his Padawan, then he couldn't heal anyone else.

Anakin and Ashoka: Anakin hated visiting the rimsoos that were set up during every campaign in the Clone Wars. He hated how much they shoved under his nose the stark lie of the Jedi belief that he had been taught and that he was expected to teach his own apprentice about there being no death and only the Force. That was a doctrine that it was impossible to accept when he was up to his wrists in someone else's blood or when a soldier had just breathed his last on the cot in front of him. He knew all too well that death was real, and that it snatched everybody eventually, no matter what comforting platitudes the Jedi created about the Force. Moreover, he knew that if there was only the Force, not death, he would be able to heal those assembled in the rimsoos, rather than basically work with the medics to attempt to make the clones' deaths less agonizing. No, death, and not the Force, must rule the universe, because if it were otherwise, the Chosen One would have been a healer and not a killer, his birth would have ushered in a period of galactic peace rather than a time of war, and he would have been able to bring order rather than chaos to his surroundings. He was the Chosen One, and he wasn't good enough. He just hoped that his Padawan never realized that.