Ahsoka, chapter 12: In search – part 2
The smell of fishy sea, sea weed and damp metal filled the small room. Together they had removed armor and weapons, then undressed Sabine, rubbed her dry with towels and used one to wrap her wet hair in a turban.
The injectable med-stim, that Huyang had given her right after laying her down on the bed still being clad, showed effect by stabilizing Sabine's pulse and her breathing evenly.
While Huyang turned on the heating of the room with the medical scanner in his other front hand, Ahsoka rose and said: "We shall let her sleep and recover again. The door can be left open, so we'll have an eye on her and she'll unconsciously hear us being around."
Back in the common room, Huyang picked up the compressed data stick from the table and examined it just by sight. Doing so, the droid already stumbled halfway to the workbench. Without the accustomed monocle, scrutinized it with the magnifying glass and its lamp attached to the work bench. "This is going to be fragmented and pedantic work. I like the prospect of it", he mused, put it down on the board in search for fine tools. "If we are lucky, the circuit board will be undamaged, although it is surely dented. It may need a bit of soldering and checking of the other wires. Then we'll see how much we are able to get."
"Shall I inspect your leg first?" Ahsoka asked.
"No need for that at the moment. It can wait", Huyang answered in concentration, triggered by the challenge.
Ahsoka smiled. "May I be of help?"
"It might take a while", Huyang grumbled with bent head. "In the med-kit I left with Sabine ...", the droid continued without interrupting its started screwing on the cover of the stick, "... are bacta batches, too. Do you need any help to care for your leg first?"
Ahsoka smiled again. "No, I think not. I'll be back."
"Mhh", was the only answer the Togruta woman got from the professor.
Sabine's eyes flickered under her lids as Ahsoka, slightly limping, entered. Otherwise, the Mandalorian woman remained in bed unchanged in her unconsciousness. Ahsoka fetched what she came for from the shelves to treat her wound on the bench in the common room and reminded herself to pick up the mess left on Sabine's floor.
- X – X – X – X – X -
Sabine dreamed of Kanan and she could also hear his voice in her mind: "Sabine, you're blocked." But Sabine's silent scream of "No, I'm not!" was directed to another face, to Ahsoka. "I had held the darksaber and I didn't want the power coming with it. Because power bears a responsibility that I often fail to see. One shouldn't wield such power, it only comes with destruction. I've had my share of killing my people unintentionally," she explained without words in thought, clearer than she could have voiced it awake, "I shouldn't be given such possibilities again, if even my bare hands can do that."
"Sabine, please listen …", she heard Kanan's voice in her mind, but drifted into darkness again, not being able to follow the rest of what his moving lips and vanishing face wanted to tell her.
- X – X – X – X – X -
She was exhausted, she was tired from the events of the day and doing the bare necessities afterwards. Huyang had their lightning lowered and was using the table lamp behind the magnifying glass of the working bench to build itself an impromptu monocle from scrap pieces of the stock and later to support its accuracy to handle the electronics for recovering what data may be left on the stick. Any contribution from Ahsoka's side would have been superfluous. So she decided to sit beside Sabine's feet, watching her sleep in the dim glow while leaning on the side wall of the lower bunk bed. By the blurring of Sabine's paintings on the hull wall, Ahsoka realized that she fell into a doze. She did not care and gave in. She needed the rest, too.
Sabine dreamed of giving her Loth cat Raku at home a stroke and that she would lay in her bed, snuggled in cushions with the sensation of the cat's weight on her legs, Raku's tail dangling over. Afterwards, it took Sabine a few seconds to realize that she was starring without blinking at her own drawing of Chopper on the metal hull of the shuttle with open eyes. Still feeling dizzy, her muscles hurting all over, she slowly turned her head and only then remembered where she was in a broader sense and why. The old Jedi consulate shuttle given by Bail Organa that Ahsoka calls home, Sabine thought. Planet Seatos. In search for the coordinates for Ezra's and Thrawn's whereabouts. Breathing in and out burnt in her windpipe and she could not move her lower legs, because her master was laying with her torso and arms across them, one Lekku hanging over the side of Sabine's knee, fast asleep. There is something else I should remember, something important. She knew it had something to do with her master in front of her – and Ezra. It emerged from her memory with just one word, a name: Kenobi.
As if the memory had drained her from present strength again, Sabine's eyes felt heavy and she closed them again. I miss Zeb, all of the sudden. Kanan, of course, Hera and Ezra, too. I guess Ahsoka also missed a lot of people after Order 66, Sabine thought, not for the first time. She had an idea. Before she gave in to the darkness, she heard a familiar sound a bit far off, the sound of engines which roared to stop and to land nearby. That's like music, she thought, with a clear feeling of coming home rising up, am I dreaming or did I hear that?
