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The thrum of machinery reverberates through the panels of the ventilation shaft as she creeps through, humming around her like the steady presence of the Force in her mind. She turns at a fork, seeing a patch of light shining up from an access panel right where she’d known there’d be one; she’d studied the plans of every known class of Republic ship so often before this that she hadn’t needed to look up the layout of the Amrita medical frigate at all when she accepted this mission.
She approaches the square of light and peaks into the compartment below, careful not to be seen. Reaching out with the Force to sense what lay ahead was out of the question this time; most on the ship wouldn’t notice, but some of her targets might feel an itch at the back of their skull, a twinge in their stomach or a strange anxiety simmering beneath their thoughts. Nobody could know she was here, and the targets would only know once it was too late.
“…run the diagnostic again, but with the RF-34W package on port III this time…”
The clone kneels beside a droid fiddling with an access port laid into the bulkhead, partially out of sight. She leans forward, stretching out a pale hand into the light shining up from the room below, then snaps her wrist inwards.
The droid shorts out, fizzing and whirring for a moment as sparks jump over the maintenance panel.
“Ah shit…Rao’s gonna kill me...”
She listens to the clone fussing over the droid before she opens her hand again, then slowly curls her fingers inwards, focusing all her intent into the action as the man’s words are choked off in his throat, cartilage squeezed, muscles bruised from the inside. It’s pitiful how completely he’s unable to resist, how he watches his own death in slow motion. He may be bigger than her, but he feels as small and fragile as a child’s plaything, just another useless object in her way.
She kicks the grate aside and drops next to him, landing silently while he falls to his knees, trying to suck in air and gripping in vain at the space around his collar. She stands over him, grinning as her figure cuts a shadow over his reddening face. His eyes are wild as her own bore into his, gathering up his terror and anger.
“Y-you! V–”
But Asajj Ventress kneels down and presses her fingers to his lips, smothering the accusation on his tongue. She cocks her head in amusement as she watches him die, lapping up the last of his presence in the Force like a smear of honey, thick and sweet with the pain and turmoil of the dark side.
Power and adrenaline surge in her heart as she toys with him in his last moments, trailing her fingers over his convulsing chest, feeling a final wave of panic like heat rising off his skin.
“If only we could’ve spent more time together…”
Her smile deepens, stretching the black tattoos at the corners of her mouth as the clone slumps to the deck, eyes open in the shock of death.
The clone’s boots scuff the floor of the med bay as he scoots away from her, clutching the wound in his side. She slashes her lightsaber over the ground by his feet, smirking as he hisses in pain and jolts backward to avoid the strike. Then he bumps into the body of one of his brothers and stops, so she stops too, looming over him. His breath is shallow as he gropes at the man’s waist, eyes still not leaving hers, not even as she brings up her lightsaber to point it over his heart.
The medic tries it anyway. He grabs the dead man’s DC-17 and whips his arm forwards at the elbow like a jackknife, aiming to shoot her wherever he can before she kills him. Asajj doesn’t even bother. Waving her hand lazily beside her, the blaster flies out of the clone’s hand and skids under a desk nearby. The last signs of hope are snuffed out from his face in the exact same way as the hundreds of other clones she’s killed before.
“Where are the dampeners?” Asajj nudges her lightsaber up towards the clone’s neck as a little motivation. She’s on a schedule, no time for games.
“Witch.” He spits on the deck and winces, one arm still clutching his abdomen, face defiant.
So… uncouth . She narrows her eyes and steps a little closer to him.
“Surely Obi-wan taught you better, my dear! Now…” She lowers the lightsaber so that it hovers over his chest again. “…where are they?”
His eyes flash with understanding and fearfully dart over her shoulder, looking at something at the aft end of the med bay.
“Come now…as a medic, you should know you can’t save everybody.” Asajj smiles at him in mock sympathy.
He doesn’t say anything for a few moments, probably choosing to stay silent until she either kills him or forces the information out of his mouth. She goes for the latter, tearing into his mind with a blast of the dark side, controlling him until he breaks and tells her just what she wants to know.
“R-row two…cabinet six…” Tears well in his eyes as she pushes him further, forcing him to betray every instinct and loyalty he’s ever had as he lays curled against a dead brother, blood streaking the beautiful white floor of his duty station.
He manages one more phrase before Asajj figures that’s good enough.
“Red…red c-capped bottles…”
She releases his mind like a frightened animal sprung from a trap. He gasps, his will his own again for a moment before she kills him with a sweep of her lightsaber, clean and fast.
The dampener bottles clink together in her hand with a glassy chink as she makes her way aftward through the med bay, heading for a control console in front of a row of bacta tanks. She raises her eyebrows when the three occupants of the foremost tanks become clear, pleasantly surprised to find all her targets so neatly bundled. Whenever intelligence from her master’s Skako Minor source came in, it was right on the mark; clearly this operation was no exception.
She makes a few selections on the console, popping open the port for adjuvants and therapeutics. Asajj nearly laughs; it doesn’t even prompt her for authorization or identity confirmation as she slots in both dampeners and hits the ‘initialize’ button on the screen like it’s no-risk, trivial procedure.
Asajj watches fluid fill the lines, tracking its progress as it flows up into the three bacta tanks before her. She nods as the dampeners are released, handcuffing her victims’ ability to wield the Force in any way that would pose a real threat to her.
She enters a command to cut oxygen to the three pods but stops, fingers waiting over the entry button on the screen. Asajj adjusts the lightsabers on her belt and looks at the Jedi in the leftmost pod, frowning as she thinks for a moment about something she can’t quite articulate to herself. Deleting the command, she enters a new series of selections and sends that through the console instead, head snapping up to watch the pod of the clone with a scar twisting up the left side of his face.
Warning lights flash over the tank and the screen. She hits a button off to the side without looking at it, killing all further notifications or possible alarms just as hidden clamps in the bacta tank release the man’s oxygen mask. The clone’s eyes fly open in distress as his head jerks back in the liquid, reacting to cool bacta slipping through his nasal passages where only air should be.
Asajj watches him for a few seconds, bored. Comatose as he is, his presence through the Force is barely noticeable; a single drop on a vast lake, further subdued by the dampeners. Even his panic is muted as he gulps down more bacta and his limbs twitch, instinctively straining his head back to try and break through a liquid surface that does not exist. She looks back to the console, typing in the next set of commands to cut off air for Kenobi and Skwalker’s padawan, then hovers her hand above the entry key, waiting for the precise moment.
Movements slowed by the liquid, the clone kicks and projects his arms out like he’s trying to grab something, but only comes up against more bacta and the smooth walls of the tank. He turns this way and that, casting his eyes wildly in every direction, looking at everything yet seeing nothing as he drowns.
She feels a warning in the Force and turns to General Kenobi and Skywalker’s padawan. They must be attuned to the clone’s presence, felt the waves of his passing. The togruta’s lekku curl at the tips and Kenobi twists and thrashes in his tank.
Asajj brings her hand down over the console button, removing the two Jedis’ oxygen masks at once. The gentle sounds of medical devices and the ship’s engines in the background overlay their slow-motion struggle to breathe. For a moment she thinks the padawan sees her, perhaps sensing her through her montrals, but the young Jedi’s face just shifts from alarm to determination to raw terror as she paws at the bacta, body shaking like she’s trying to cough yet can’t.
She walks up to Kenobi’s bacta tank, so close her nose touches the glass. She watches him writhe. It frustrates her a little how he’s just... drowning, like the clone or Anakin’s puny padawan, unable to fight. Even as he dies, the Force that ripples out from him carries an undercurrent of empathy and concern for his companions, and even something like...love? Asajj snaps her focus away from the Force, pushing those sensations away and trying to think of some teachings of her master again, but none come to her as Kenobi convulses in his bacta. Instead she wonders what sort of quip he’d make in this situation.
“I’m...” she presses a hand to the glass and takes a breath, “... sorry , that we’ll never have any more fun together, Obi-wan...”
The Force warns her then, like a splash of icy water at her back. The deck above her shudders as the Amrita ’s hangar doors open to admit a starship.
Skywalker.
Asajj wrenches her hand away and sprints for the maintenance hatch she’d come in through. Her frustration builds as she sneaks her way back out of the ship, stewing over how she’d gotten careless with her time at the end, how Skywalker might’ve ruined this entire operation had she wasted even more time. Her frustration congeals into anger, and she slips back into the dark side of the Force.