Asajj knew that the next time she saw him, she would call him a coward. But Kenobi had the uncanny ability to pick only the times she was asleep and exhausted to visit. Perhaps she would catch the brown flutter of his robes as he went out of the room. He always left some sort of token in his wake, and she had gone from watching the flowers wilt and die out of spite to finally looking at what he had brought her. The vain part of her took this as him bringing supplicant gifts. Damn right, he had better think of her as a vengeful goddess needing to be appeased!
That and the plate of fried sugar-coated things were quite tasty. Asajj still didn't know what exactly was in the middle of all the breading, but it was very tasty, and she was rather pleased.
But the book... she was having trouble figuring it out.
It gave her something to do while her body ached too much for her to sleep, and she was amused by its quaintness. Flimsiplast pages, bound in leather. It could only be more backwards if it was pulpy paper, and all the ink was written by hand. Instead its manilla pages were printed by machine, and rather elegantly so. A large illustration of a moon reflected in a pool of water sat opposite of a story in whispy script.
Ryok, a Jedi master, lived the simplest kind of life at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited his hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.
Ryok returned in time to catch him. "You have come a long way to visit me," he told the thief, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryoken sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor man," he sighed, "I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon."
In any other circumstance she would have laughed, but it was a story she had listened to before. It was comforting like a raggedy blanket or the smell of home-cooked food. As she ran her fingertips over the slick flimsiplast, the words echoed in her head, but not in her own voice - in Ky Narec's.
Her childhood on Rattatak had not been a pleasant one, but even among the dirt, grime and misery, there had been happy moments. Most of them were after Master Narec had found her, and before his death. Not many other people had such clean divisions between childhood and adulthood, after all.
Ky Narec never had such a book. Instead he simply knew these stories - these old Jedi koans. As they walked from place to place, he would tell her stories, especially at night. She still remembered how he smiled at her confusion over the story. After she had laughed and called it absurd (though in a charmingly innocent, childish way), he had merely smiled knowingly before handing her a bowl of clean, fresh water, and pointing at its reflection.
"See, Asajj? I have given you the moon."
She hadn't quite understood, but she smiled anyway, inner glow of happiness spreading onto her face.
But those times were over, Asajj told herself. Long over. Even if it was harder than ever these days to reach out and find that familiar anger. She had been using it as her source of power for so long that now she felt lost. With the Force lost to her, or at least reduced to a tiny murmur, she was left alone with her own thoughts.
It was more than enough time for her to realize that not only was her own mind a desperately lonely place, but that she didn't like being there.
Gingerly, she ran her fingertips along the top of the book's pages. One page had been heavily dog-eared, and the spine seemed to open to it as if it had sat there for weeks if not years pointing to the same passage. She did not know that it had been a tome of reference to Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan both. She did not know the book's legacy of being the one possessions of Qui-Gon's that Obi-Wan kept for his own. It was a well-loved book that carried its own gravitas with it, despite her lack of knowledge.
And now the opposite page showed an illustration of two Jedi in plain robes, shuffling along a path.
In the wilds of Naboo, two Jedi - Tanzin and Eki - were travelling along a path. It was the end of rainy season, and all the pathways were still quite muddy.
Coming around a bend, they met a lovely woman in an ornate traditional gown. She could not cross a large mud-puddle in their path.
"Come on, girl," said Tanzin at once. Lifting her with the Force, he carried her over the mud.
Eki did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple, when he lashed out in irritation."We male Jedi don't go near women," he told Tanzin, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous, given our oaths to give up attachment. Why did you do that?"
"I left the girl there," said Tanzin. "Are you still carrying her?"
Asajj traced the words on the page, lingering at the last sentence of the parable.
Her mind drifted on the ebb and flow of her thoughts. Instead of the usual tempest her mind was almost approaching calm. Without the dark side of the Force constantly clawing at her, it was easier to simply focus on the moment. The orange-yellow of the flowers. The soft brown table. The blue walls. The way the wind was shaking the plants outside. There was not anger in those things. They simply were. They merely existed. It was easy to exist along with them.
The words on the page also did not demand anything of her, so she let her hand drift along, tracing them.
She wondered who Obi-Wan might still be carrying.
It was such a pleasant thought that she immediately turned back to the book, flipping madly through the pages to find something to distract her.
A padawan came to Kei-Sun and complained: "Master, I have an ungovernable temper. How can I cure it?"
"You have something very strange," replied Kei-Sun. "Let me see what you have."
"Just now I cannot show it to you," replied the other.
"When can you show it to me?" asked Kei-Sun.
"It arises unexpectedly," replied the padawan.
"Then," concluded Kei-Sun, "it must not be your own true nature. If it were, you could show it to me at any time. When you were born you did not have it, and your parents did not give it to you. Think that over."
It was the first story that, in her mind, was not narrated in Master Narec's voice. Somehow, that made it all much more true.
And it still took three days for Asajj to finally accept how truly grateful she was that Obi-Wan had shared the book with her.