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Asajj supposes that she could be said to have started all this.
The thing is, normally when she flirts with people, it’s a weapon like any other in her arsenal. It’s a way to wrong-foot her opponent, to put him off guard for the few moments she needs to gain the upper hand. Usually, her targets don’t survive long enough for it to become a pattern .
Kenobi does, though.
On Cato Neimoidia, she murmurs in his ear and plays with his hair, just to see what he’ll do - the Jedi are supposed to be above such things, and she wants so badly to prove that notion wrong through him. She’s disapppointed, as he doesn’t visibly react. But since he survives and gets away, at least she’ll have another chance to try and get under his skin.
(The fact that she actually takes enough notice of him to contemplate such a possibility, to look forward to it, should probably be a warning sign. But it isn’t.)
She runs into Kenobi again several weeks later, him and his newly-ex-Padawan, during a scuffle at the Kuat Drive Yards. Doing her level best to look like she hasn’t been caught sneaking away from planting charges in a main control room, she smirks, resting one hand just so on her hip. “Hello, boys,” she purrs. “I was just thinking how I hadn’t seen you in ages.”
Skywalker’s lightsaber hisses to life. “Ventress,” he says sharply, “I might’ve known you were involved somehow. What have you been sabotaging this time?”
Asajj holds eye contact with Kenobi. “Nothing to worry your pretty little head about.”
Once again, he doesn’t seem flustered. But this time, he does something worse than not reacting:
He reciprocates .
“I think you’ll find we need to worry about it if the whole station comes down on our heads, my dear,” he says, deadpan, and he draws his own saber, but it takes Asajj a split second longer than it should to react and arm herself because...
...well...
...that’s not how this is supposed to work. He’s the one who’s supposed to be put at a disadvantage. Most males would be, when confronted with the cognitive dissonance of sweet nothings from someone who clearly wants to kill them.
Then again, she had tried this on him before. He had warning, had probably prepared in advance. She shouldn’t be this hung up on it.
All this takes her perhaps a second to process, and then her sabers are in her hands and she’s leapt into battle, dueling both of them at once.
(Skywalker is all aggression, a little too much so for an ostensible Jedi, but Kenobi is bright finesse that she wants to resent and can’t quite seem to.)
She shouldn’t notice that, except as a shred of tactical information. But then, she shouldn’t lie awake thinking about Kenobi’s voice saying my dear and trying to remember the last time someone unequivocally meant an endearment directed at her, either, and yet she does.)
(She thinks that last time might have been the day Ky Narec died.)
***
Obi-Wan isn’t quite sure when this went from something that just happened to something they do .
(Insofar as there is a “they”, which there isn’t, in all meaningful senses - in any sense save that of being recurring mortal enemies. He reminds himself of that frequently.)
It’s just that, well, what happened on Kuat happened. He doesn’t have the faintest idea what possessed him to flirt back at her. He’s fairly sure Anakin would have interrogated him about it, except that it seemed to give them a slight advantage in the ensuing duel with Ventress, so his former apprentice probably assumed it was some kind of battle tactic.
Which it wasn’t - for some reason, the idea of using such a cheap trick to defeat Ventress doesn’t sit right with Obi-Wan. As strange as it sounds even to himself, he respects her too much as a warrior to not fight her fairly.
He might write it off as a one-time anomaly, except that then he encounters her again, on his own this time, during a mission to Mygeeto, and the first words out of his mouth when he sees her are “How lovely to see you again, Ventress. This trip’s been much too quiet without you sowing chaos in your wake.”
This time, she doesn’t miss a beat. “Funny. I would’ve thought Skywalker would provide all the chaos you needed on his own.”
“Anakin’s not here. And in any case, but nobody does it like you.” Only after he’s let the words slip does the Negotiator realize how they sounded, and also that he’s just revealed he’s here without backup.
Ventress seems to realize he didn’t intend to let that information slip, and smiles dangerously. “Oh, you didn’t bring your tag-along? I suppose that means I finally get you all to myself.”
(Obi-Wan should definitely be dismayed at that, at the prospect of having to handle a dual-wielding Sith assassin on his own with one saber. He should definitely not enjoy the sharper, more elegant thing that the duel becomes when neither of them has to pay attention what Anakin might be doing.)
The next time he’s sent on a mission where Ventress is rumored to be in the area, Obi-Wan purposely brings Anakin along, in an attempt to derail whatever this thing is. It doesn’t work. They spend a week running around on Ord Mantell chasing Separatist contraband, only to find that Ventress has been leading them by their noses the whole time.
“Obi-Wan,” she says smoothly, ignoring Anakin entirely. “Did you come all this way just because you wanted to see me? Or was it a happy accident?”
“Accident,” Obi-Wan lies smoothly. “We’ve really got to stop meeting like this, darling. People will talk.”
Ventress actually grins, sharp as a razor, at that. “Why? We haven’t even given them anything to talk about...yet.”
They battle. Eventually, she runs. On the flight back to the Temple, Obi-Wan tries his best to stomp down the guilty gratitude that Anakin’s concussion seems to have rendered him once again uninterested in an increasingly well-deserved interrogation.
***
Asajj isn’t sure which is more alarming - the fact that flirting with Kenobi has become a regular part of their clashes, or the fact that she looks forward to it now. She wants him to turn up on her missions, even though he possesses a singular talent for wrecking them, just because bantering with him has turned out to be so entertaining.
She’s not supposed to feel like that. She’s a Sith. She doesn’t feel entertained or amused at such harmless things, particularly not at the actions of a Jedi. She’s supposed to hate him.
She does hate Kenobi, she tells herself repeatedly, meditating on the statement like it’s a precept of the universe. She hates the corrupted Order that he represents, the supposedly selfless principles he espouses that got her Master killed. She hates it when he disrupts her plans and causes her to be disgraced before her new Master. She hates the little smirk he gets when he snarks back at her, and the flash in his blue eyes when she pulls off a clever move (that is absolutely not admiration, nor does she want it to be), and she hates the way his voice sounds saying her name, full of emotions she can’t (won’t) quantify (and that perhaps he hasn’t quantified either).
She hates him, but she can’t seem to give up their back-and-forth. She hates him, but can’t quite suppress the thrill whenever their paths cross yet again.
Eriadu.
Agamar.
Zeffo.
Christophis.
(She’s hated people before. This doesn’t feel like the same thing.)
***
He calls Ventress my sweet on Christophis. She is not sweet and, more to the point, she is not his, and yet Obi-Wan finds that his pleasure in seeing her isn’t entirely facetious. He’s been slogging through squadrons of droids for weeks; fighting an opponent with a brain is refreshing.
(It’s that. It’s nothing else. It’s not at all about the beauty of the sharp planes of her face in the moonlight or the lithe grace of her body as she leaps and twists through the duel. It’s very definitely not about the tiny shoot of hope that had sprung to life inside him when he’d thought she might surrender - that perhaps they could turn her - just before she dropped them through the floor.)
He doesn’t have long to wait to see her again, after that. She’s involved with the kidnapping of Jabba’s son because of course she is, only when he encounters her on Teth, she seems...angrier, somehow. There’s always an edge of anger to her - she’s Sith - but this is more aggressive, more desperate than usual. Twice, she baldly threatens to kill him, a far cry from the banter of a few days earlier.
In a strange contradiction, though, when she actually does have the opportunity to kill him...she doesn’t. She holds him at saberpoint, glowers and postures, but doesn’t do what he knows she’s smart and ruthless enough to do and finish him off without bothering to gloat.
It’s that, and the increasingly strong feeling that she’s got more to lose from failure than it appears, that makes him ask her to surrender. Maybe he can make the trick on Christophis a reality. Maybe even if she doesn’t turn, she can spend the war in a cell instead of being thrown away on a battlefield.
(He doesn’t know where that thought came from, doesn’t know when he started thinking, with such strong emphasis, of Ventress’ death as a waste. But it would be, and he shouldn’t care, not when she’s threatened his life and his cause multiple times just this week, but he does.)
Ventress flees instead. Obi-Wan tells himself he’s disappointed, and does his best to release the tangle of emotions he actually feels into the Force, but only meets with marginal success.
***
Whatever is going on, Asajj has it under control. Until the mission on Fondor.
It’s all pretty much in accordance with what’s become a usual encounter for her and Kenobi these days - she’s there to wreak havoc on Republic infrastructure, he’s there to stop her, and they both pretend nothing ever happened on Teth.
(Which is a filthy lie, because Asajj knows she can’t forget how she was like an exposed nerve that day, or how she could absolutely have run him through, no matter what she told Dooku, and yet she didn’t. Or how he offered her a way out, and for a split second, she almost considered it. If it’s weighing on her mind, surely it must be on Kenobi’s mind as well.)
Where the Fondor mission goes out of control is the point where Kenobi’s been spotted by her forces and she’s on her way to intercept him, only to watch his position blow up under him after a squad of super battle droids rain grenades on him.
For approximately ten seconds, she thinks he’s dead, and unfortunately her snap reaction is not to celebrate, or gleefully comm her Master, but to descend on the overly-efficient squad snarling, “ Kenobi is mine to kill, no one else’s, ” and proceed to hack all of them to pieces with her sabers before they know what’s going on.
Then there’s a familiar voice behind her drawling, “How touching,” and she whirls around to see Kenobi standing there singed but intact, and she snaps, “Don’t let it go to your head,” and everything is back to normal again. It all happens so fast that she doesn’t really have time, in the moment, to process the implications of what she’s done.
She does later, though, and briefly panics before concluding that the only witnesses to her lapse were battle droids now in fragments. Still. What was she thinking? Kenobi isn’t hers, in any sense. She wouldn’t take him as a gift. Perhaps she prefers him slightly over other Jedi because he’s more likely to offer a truce than to try and bisect her, but that is all .
(That has to be all. She’s not sure which she’s more afraid of, her Master’s punishment if he doubts her loyalty, or the reckoning she’d have to do with herself if she were to abandon her hate of the Jedi, but she would have to face both if Kenobi were ever to be more than an enemy to her, and that cannot happen .)
***
Obi-Wan isn’t particularly concerned about whether or not he’s hiding things well, because for the longest time, it doesn’t occur to him that there’s anything to hide.
Yes, he finds Ventress a more refreshing opponent than, for instance, Dooku or Grievous (to say nothing of droids), and yes, he has noticed from time to time that she is physically very striking, and yes, perhaps he has offered her the chance to surrender more than once when he doesn’t typically afford that to his opponents, and yes, he has pondered on a few different occasions (all right, more than a few) just what might happen if she ever accepted those offers, if she were to try and come back to the Light...
All right, perhaps there is something, but he doesn’t really think of it like that, as a whole and as something that would cause others concern, until one day as they’re winding down after a mission, Anakin comments, “You almost had Ventress there for a second.”
“Yes, that does happen every now and then,” Obi-Wan responds absently, mostly focused on getting out of his less-than-comfortable armor for the short duration of their flight.
“Why didn’t you finish her off?” Anakin persists. “You could have. I know it. I thought you were going to, but then she got away. Like she always does.”
There’s something in his tone, a faint edge, that makes Obi-Wan take notice. “Jedi do not kill, Anakin,” he reprimands. “Not unless we have no choice.”
“You killed that Sith on Naboo years ago.”
Obi-Wan struggles for a moment. “That was a fight to the death. And we were not in a war; there was no framework for taking prisoners.”
“Ventress sure tries hard enough to kill us. She’s killed plenty of other people,” Anakin grumbles. “She’s evil, Master. She doesn’t deserve you pulling your punches.”
Somehow, for reasons he cannot (won’t) name, Obi-Wan can’t find it in him to accept that. “That can be for the Republic and the Council to decide, if we ever capture her. Not us.”
It’s only later that he fully realizes that, in the event of such a capture and trial, he would want to speak for Ventress, to argue against her execution and for...what? Rehabilitation? He has no proof that she would accept it, and no assurance that anyone else would be willing to attempt it.
It’s later still when he realizes what such an inclination, one that flies in the face of all good sense, might mean, and then he buries his face in his hands as he processes the fact that he needs to be more careful, now that he knows. He can’t let this...partiality become any more obvious than it already has been.
The next time he encounters Ventress, Anakin is with him again. He has to (gets to?) deal with her on his own after she sends Anakin flying across the room, and they end up deadlocked, sabers pressed together, so close that he catches a hint of her curious leather-and-jasmine scent.
Their eyes lock, and her gaze flicks downward, and then Anakin is up and running at her from behind, saber poised to pierce her through. In a split second, Obi-Wan twists so that Ventress is forced backward and into a quarter-turn, enough to put Anakin in her field of vision. She hisses and blocks him just in time.
Afterward, back on the ship, Anakin is clearly about to start asking questions about the moment, but Obi-Wan subtly and pointedly starts a conversation about the younger man’s most recent assignment to Naboo, and that is the end of that.
***
She’s been keeping this...fixation, or whatever it is, under wraps. She has to have been. If she hadn’t, Dooku would have confronted her about it in a highly unpleasant fashion long ago.
And yet, Asajj can only conclude that someone, somewhere, must have gotten a hint, because there is no reason why this security footage from the recent action on the Coronet should have ended up in her latest data dump for review.
She’s only supposed to receive files pertinent to her upcoming missions, but by some happenstance, she’s been sent intel from the mission involving Duchess Kryze, which she wasn’t involved with at all. At first, she watches the holos out of perplexed curiosity, trying to figure out why they might be relevant. Then, it becomes all too clear, and she can’t look away.
Kenobi and the Duchess, it seems, have history. She watches him discuss a long-past mission with Skywalker, watches him bicker and banter and flirt with the stuck-up pacifist. She watches, sickly, irrationally angry, as Kryze confesses her love for Kenobi and he admits he would have left the Jedi Order for her, like they’re starring in a particularly soppy HoloNet drama.
It shouldn’t bother her. Asajj has no reason to have any feelings about this at all, besides perhaps an annoyance akin to Tal Merrik’s. Kenobi does not belong to her. She should not - does not - want him to.
And perhaps she should be thinking about this strategically, taking note of the fact that Kenobi has a weakness for this woman, that properly applied emotional pressure could have the potential to make him turn his back on the Jedi. Perhaps that’s the only reason the footage was sent to her, after all.
But the jealousy, if she were to dare to call it that, lurks anyway, and it takes her many, many sessions of combative meditation for her to release the better part of it into the Force.
***
Obi-Wan is starting to think that, despite the opinions of those closest to him, he’s not actually all that good of a Jedi. Possibly not all that good of a person.
A good Jedi, a good man, would not enjoy flirting with his ostensible mortal enemy, would not begin to think of it as not just “a thing they keep doing”, but as “ their thing”.
A good Jedi would not allow long-abandoned feelings for an old flame to be stirred up again, and a good man would not have the hypocrisy to, mere weeks after wrestling with those feelings, be dismayed when his ostensible enemy/serial bantering partner is caught in security holos flirting with General Grievous and kissing a clone trooper on the cheek as she skewers him through the torso.
A good Jedi, a good man, would not have to stomp down that dismay in order to focus on the terrible fact that he is watching his enemy remorselessly kill a soldier under his command.
In Anakin’s report to the Council after the battle of Kamino, he mentions that he nearly had the troopers execute Ventress upon cornering her, only to have her narrowly escape. Obi-Wan knows, knows , that Anakin’s order would have been justified, that he has no right or reason to insist otherwise. He offers no commentary on the subject.
He doesn’t know when or why he became so convinced that there was the potential for more than Darkness in Asajj Ventress. He doesn’t know why he clings to that conviction despite having a front row seat to so many terrible things she’s done.
He doesn’t know when or why he became so invested in seeing her live through this war so he can, just possibly, find out for sure.
***
They’re dueling on Pillio, and Asajj misjudges a Force leap and goes over the edge of a catwalk. She barely catches herself with one hand, gripping the railing, and is trying to work out how to pull herself up without dismembering herself with her saberstaff, when Kenobi’s hand stretches out towards her.
“Grab on,” he says, like that makes any sense for him to say to her. “Before you slip.”
Asajj just stares spitefully up at him.
“It might help if you put up your lightsabers so you have a hand free,” Kenobi adds.
That should be a deal-breaker, but she’s starting to lose her grip, and she’s not entirely sure she could cushion her fall sufficiently with the Force from this height. With a snarl that isn’t as vehement as it could be, she deactivates the double-saber and clips it to her belt, reaching up to grip Kenobi’s hand.
Somehow, he’s ended up without his usual gauntlets. His hand is surprisingly warm, callused from years of saberwork, keeping a tight but not painful hold of her until her feet are planted on the catwalk again.
He releases her then, stepping back. “Shall we continue? Or do you want to come quietly for once?”
She didn’t expect him to give her a choice. She doesn’t know what to do with it now that she has it.
The only thing she does know how to do is draw her sabers and spring into battle again, so she does. Kenobi is quick to match her...and yet, she’s not convinced that she’s imagining the faint look of disappointment in his eyes.
Asajj does her best to dismiss it, but she can’t so easily dismiss the memory of the feeling of his hand gripping hers and then letting go, no matter how hard she tries.
***
He’s on Rodia.
Frankly, he’s not completely sure why he’s on Rodia. It’s been a long, awful string of missions, and the mandates have started to blur a little into a general “find out what the Separatists are up to and put a stop to it”. He doesn’t remember when he last slept. And now Ventress is here, and they’re dueling again because that’s how this works.
“You look like you got run over by banthas, Kenobi,” she observes, deftly blocking his strike. “The Council’s been careless with you lately.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d almost swear you sounded concerned,” he retorts, because this is also how this works now, apparently. The banter, not the concern.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’d just hate it if someone else started making your life miserable; that’s my job,” Ventress snaps.
Obi-Wan isn’t immediately sure how to respond to that (something he blames on the sleep deprivation). He’s spared having to come up with something, though, because at that moment, Ventress twitches, deactivates her lightsabers, and darts past his guard to slam bodily into him, knocking him to the ground.
A split second later, the building a few dozen meters away from them explodes.
Probably, this was because Ventress planted charges there before he showed up, but Obi-Wan only realizes this distantly, the greater part of his mind being occupied with Ventress being sprawled on top of him, closer than she’s ever been before, and with the fact that she’s there because she’d realized that the explosion was about to happen and acted to protect him.
For one seemingly elastic moment, they’re frozen there, eyes locked. He can feel her breath on his face, sees her throat move as she swallows hard.
Then she pushes herself up off his chest and onto her feet again, calling her sabers back into her hands. She doesn’t ignite them, though - she just looks at him, then turns and runs like he’s defeated her, when for all practical purposes he’s the defeated one here.
Frankly, Obi-Wan has no idea what to do with any of that, and settles for doing his own fleeing, sending a very concise report to the Council, and shutting off all comms as soon as he’s off-world to try and catch a nap.
***
Contrary to what the Republic would prefer people to believe, Asajj does have missions that go successfully.
This, however, has not been one of those missions. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
She’s been running herself ragged for three days to accomplish whatever Dooku’s latest demand is. She can remember the specific details of the demand, if she focuses hard for a moment, but really what she mainly knows is that she is tired, she is not going to be able to achieve a Separatist victory here today with the resources at hand, and she hates the Republic and the Jedi and the Separatists and droids and this planet and existence in general, but mostly she hates Dooku for what he’s put her through and what he’s going to put her through after she makes her report. He is her Master and she shouldn’t hate him, but she does.
And she hates Kenobi, who is here fighting her again and who won’t just be defeated already, who remains undefeated in part because she has made it so, because somehow she cannot stand the idea of never fighting him again, of never seeing him again at all. His sharp blue eyes see far too much of her, and he should be smirking right now with how clearly she’s at a disadvantage, but his lips are pressed tight in something alarmingly close to concern. She wants to feel the touch of his hands again, and wants to drive him far away so he can’t find her vulnerable places. She wants to kill him and wants to never let him go.
“Had enough yet, my darling?” he inquires. “You’ve had a busy few days, if reports are to be believed.”
“Shut up, Kenobi,” Asajj snarls. “Finish it, then, if you think you’ve got such an advantage.”
The look he gives her is sorrowful - but not pitying. “You know I don’t want to do that.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Ventress, I think I’ve always been fairly clear on what I want.”
Asajj can’t take it any more. With a frustrated twist, she knocks his saber out of his hand, dropping her own somewhere in the process, and seizes him by the front of his robes, yanking him in for a hard kiss.
It’s not exactly meant as a weapon, not like her flirting was in the beginning. She doesn’t know what this is, exactly, except that she’s tired of fighting and tired of bickering and this is what, deep down, she really wants to do.
As it turns out, she’s not the only one: Kenobi, after an initial split second of shock, reciprocates fervently, his Force signature humming not with confused anger like hers, but with relief . His hands move to cup her shoulders, trying to pull her closer, and she lets him, because this feels like the first good thing that’s happened to her since she lost her first Master.
It can’t last, though. This isn’t a thing she can have, and she should know better than to even entertain the possibility. As abruptly as she began, she wrenches away, calling her lightsabers into her hands and running for her ship, ignoring how Kenobi reaches out for her both physically and in the Force behind her.
She doesn’t think about it as she bids good riddance to the planet, and she doesn’t think about it when she makes a heavily edited report to Dooku, and she doesn’t think about it as she steals some rest and preps for wherever she’ll be sent next.
She doesn’t let herself dwell on what might have happened if she hadn’t fled, if she’d let Kenobi’s kiss and the gentleness of his touch hold her there, if she’d given in.
She can’t .
***
Obi-Wan doesn’t know what to think.
Asajj Ventress is his enemy. She opposes everything he stands for and would gladly see everyone he cares about dead. These are truths as inalienable as the laws of physics, or at least, so he’s always thought.
And yet he’s sensed something else in her, a flicker of Light that she tried to extinguish long ago, that will sometimes flare up just a little during their encounters. And when she’d broken every expectation and kissed him, it had been like she needed it to breathe.
He’s a Jedi. He’s not supposed to feel...any of what this is. The willingness to give Ventress leeway and second chances when he wouldn’t do so for any other enemy. The irrational desire to keep her from harm, to convince her to defect not just because it would help end the war sooner, but to save her from some unnecessary, wasteful death in battle. The wanting of her presence, her wit, her voice speaking warmly to him and meaning it, her touch and closeness...
He’s not meant to feel any of that for her, above all other beings in the universe, and that last part he should never feel for anyone at all.
Look at Anakin , he tries to argue with himself on occasion. He’s clearly emotionally attached to Padme, and you’re worried about him slipping towards the Dark, aren’t you? You’ve seen how close he comes to hate for his enemies because he chooses emotion instead of peace.
That’s correlation, not causation , he finds himself arguing back.
The next time he runs into Ventress, a few weeks later, neither of them is having a good day. They’d both been sent to try and win the allegiance of the local gang of pirates (a move on the Republic’s part that Obi-Wan questions, but here he is anyway), only to have the pirates turn on them both, forcing them to work together to get away.
Well, it’s less “working together” and more “working towards the same thing at the same time while arguing about ways and means a lot”, but it gets the job done. They’re just about to make good their escape.
And then they stumble across a young girl, no older than twelve standard, who has been taken by the pirates to be sold as a slave.
Obi-Wan is, of course, properly angry about this, on multiple levels - both because of the dreadful thing that’s been done to this child, and because the Council had received assurances, before they agreed to send him, that this particular set of pirates didn’t deal in sentients. His righteous indignation, however, is nothing compared to the cold fury that overtakes Ventress as she comes to understand the situation. She says nothing, but he can feel it radiating off of her in the Force as she makes a sharp about-face in the doorway and takes off down the hall, sabers already igniting.
He should stop her, talk her down from what he knows is an imminent and brutal slaughter. But he needs to take care of the girl, and even if he didn’t, somehow he’s having trouble coming up with an argument he could make that would actually do any good.
So he gets the child out, puts her on his ship, and tells her to stay put and he’ll be right back for her, and to not be afraid because she’s safe now. Then, for reasons that he refuses to fully tease out, he heads back into the pirates’ base to look for Ventress.
When he locates her, she’s in the main hub, surrounded by dead pirates - there aren’t any other living Force-signatures in the whole place. Her lightsabers are in her hands, but deactivated, and she’s breathing hard, head bent as she leans against a desk.
She looks up when she hears or senses his approach, glaring at him. “If you’re going to lecture me about how they deserved to live,” she growls, “spare me.”
“Even if I were going to, there wouldn’t be much point. It wouldn’t change the fact that they’re dead,” Obi-Wan points out - matter-of-factly, not accusingly.
“Or that they’re never going to steal another child again,” Ventress just as evenly.
He doesn’t contest the point.
She’s not done, though. “Did you know, it was scum like this that took me from my mother?” she comments, almost casually except for the tension pulling her body as tense as a bowstring. “I was a slave as a child - even younger than that girl I assume you stashed on your ship - and when he died, I would have ended up with someone with even less kindness if my Master hadn’t found me.”
“Dooku?” Obi-Wan inquires, though that doesn’t seem quite right.
“No. This was long before that.” Ventress’ voice is flat and cold. “He was a Jedi, Ky Narec. He raised me, trained me. He was stranded on Rattatak, left there by your precious Order, but he still tried to do the best he could for others. Until the day a bunch of pirates managed to kill him, too.”
Obi-Wan doesn’t know how to respond to that. He wants to say that there must be some mistake, because the Jedi would never have left one of their own stranded somewhere knowingly. He wants to ask how and why she ended up with Dooku if she was raised as a Jedi, but remembers enough of his feelings from when Qui-Gon was killed to know that those details ultimately don’t matter. He wants to take the opportunity to argue that she doesn’t have to let that define her, that she can turn her life around and do good in the galaxy, but suspects that if he did, she’d turn on him, and it wouldn’t even be wholly unjustified.
Which only really leaves “I’m sorry,” which he knows isn’t anywhere near right or enough, but is the closest thing he can come up with.
“I don’t want your pity,” Ventress snaps.
“You don’t have it,” he says quietly, stepping closer, into her space. “Empathy, yes, but not pity. You are many things, Ventress, but never pitiable.”
She tilts her head up to look at him, silver eyes searching. The Code and the Force and his orders and his own feelings are all pulling him in different directions, this close to her, and finally, he breaks and kisses her. It’s chaste and comforting and sad and laden with the confusion that sweeps through him whenever they run into each other these days--
--and all too short, as Ventress abruptly breaks away within a moment or two. “Get out of here,” she says tersely, already turned away from him. “Go. Before--”
Before we have to fight each other again, Obi-Wan understands, and he turns and goes and gets himself and the freed girl off the planet and back to Coruscant.
He does his best to forget the whole incident, and to release the associated emotions into the Force, but he is singularly unsuccessful on both counts.
Perhaps he hasn’t been entirely fair, judging Anakin as he has for being so hung up on Padme.
***
Dooku is not pleased with her when she returns from the failed negotiations with the pirates.
“Time and again, Kenobi is within your grasp,” he rumbles, “and yet he continues to live and to do damage to our cause. Whatever you may see in him, child, remember that I am your Master. I am the one who gave you purpose again. Are you perhaps too weak to do what must be done, to prove yourself worthy of being a Sith?”
Asajj cannot lose another Master. She cannot have her life pulled out from underneath her again - assuming Dooku would even let her live after casting her off, which is a pretty big assumption.
“No, Master,” she says, head bowed.
She hates Kenobi. She has to. Like air, it is something that must be if she is going to survive, and it doesn’t matter how much he knows her, or whether she wants to duel him someday without lives being on the line (or whether that’s already happening and they just won’t admit it), or how much, in a very far corner of her mind where she hopes no one can find it, she wants to kiss him again when there isn’t a battle or dead bodies nearby.
Dooku sends her to a fleet battle near Sullust.
Kenobi and Skywalker are there, naturally, and what she wants is to chase down the Skywalker brat, but because of that, she makes herself pursue Kenobi instead. She shoots at him, cripples his ship. She’s on thin ice and she needs to do him damage, maybe kill him, to fix it.
Deep in her chest, where the last flicker of the Light Ky Narec gave her lives, it hurts to do this, but a state of affairs where she could care about Kenobi’s, about anyone’s life more than her own safety isn’t something she can stand to contemplate.
Regardless, she and her forces are still going to lose. She needs to call in Dooku for reinforcements, much as it stings her pride to do so.
And then he shatters her world.
She thinks something breaks in her, when he cuts her off. She’s not fully present or herself during what follows - there’s only rage, the need to lash out at anyone and anything around her, to pass along the pain she feels. She hasn’t felt like this since her first Master’s death, only this is worse in some ways, because Narec was taken from her, but Dooku left . He actively chose this.
So she chokes Skywalker and Kenobi, fights them when it would serve her better to surrender, even though she can feel that she’s picked up internal injuries in the crash and she’s only making them worse. She hasn’t fought Kenobi this harshly, trying to do real damage, in a long time, and the realization makes her even angrier.
He’s been drawing her closer and closer to her death all this time and she didn’t even notice.
(The fact that he had the nerve to actually sound concerned when he commented that she wasn’t looking well is both irrelevant and the last straw.)
Later, when she does somehow manage to escape and death doesn’t take, there’s still a little of that anger lingering, and she tells herself that that’s why she avoids Kenobi when she can sense his approach on Dooku’s ship, why she doesn’t want him to know she’s alive.
She tells herself it doesn’t have anything to do with fear.
***
Obi-Wan spends a lot of time meditating - or at least as much time as he can spare, in an ever-escalating war - after Asajj Ventress’ death.
There was something wrong, during their last duel; he could sense it. She hadn’t been that furious and desperate since Teth. Sullust might have been worse, even - it was like she’d had nothing left to lose.
It keeps him up at night sometimes, wondering what he could have said to get her to surrender, to get her to come with them. If there was anything he could have said. Eventually, it’ll build to a point where he has to get up and meditate again, just to get his circling thoughts to settle.
Usually, heading to the salles for some saber practice works to center him when he’s restless, too, but as often as not, that just gets him thinking of Ventress again.
Anakin is downright cheerful about the turn of events, practically walking on air for days. Obi-Wan wants to reprimand him, remind him that it’s not the way of the Jedi to be so smug over the death of an enemy. But then, it’s not the way of the Jedi to mourn, either, for an enemy or for any other class of being.
And that is what he’s been doing, if he’s honest with himself.
***
For the first time that she can clearly remember, Asajj’s life is more or less her own.
She’s no longer under anyone’s thumb and she’s worked hard and she thinks she might be close to more than just surviving. For as much as bounty hunting is looked down on as a profession, she’s found it suits her quite well. She can walk the line between her more violent tendencies and the desire, that she’s slowly let grow in her, to help people that no one else will care to. She might not have fully gone back to the Light, but she’s not Dark anymore, either - she’s gray, she supposes.
So of course, naturally, just when she’s starting to think that she might have it all figured out, her monster has to come back to haunt her.
And of course Kenobi has ended up involved in the whole mess, too.
(She wishes he hadn’t called her lovely. She wishes it hadn’t felt so right, so clearly meant to be, when they finally fight as a team, the Force shivering with something that feels a lot like finally . And yet, contrarily, she also wouldn’t give these things up for all the kyber on Jedha.)
***
“So what will you do now?” Obi-Wan asks, after the silence in their puttering little escape ship has stretched out to the point of uncomfortability.
Ventress doesn’t look at him, focused on the ship’s controls. “That depends. Are you going to try and arrest me?”
Some might say that he should. Anakin would likely suggest even worse things. But... “Under the circumstances, I think not,” Obi-Wan says slowly. “I’m not even sure if there’s still a standing warrant out for you - you’ve been presumed dead for about a year.”
“All things considered, I wanted it that way,” she says. “I’ve kept my head down, kept out of you people’s way. I haven’t done anything illegal or for the Separatists since Sullust, if that’s what you’re working around to asking.”
“It wasn’t necessarily. But I’m glad to know anyway.” He leans against the wall, wincing slightly at the aggravation of his injuries. “You’ve been happy, then?”
“I’ve been satisfied,” she says shortly. “It’s good enough.”
“That seems a rather sorry state of affairs.”
She turns to glare at him. “Why does it matter to you, Kenobi? Up until about ten minutes ago, I was your enemy. I’ve killed people you wanted to live, people you cared about; I’ve tried to kill you. The last time we saw each other I choked you and kicked you in the ribs.”
“I know.” He’s tried to list all of her terrible deeds that he knows about to himself, late at night, for years, to try and smother the feelings he wouldn’t name, but it has never done any good. “And yet, although I don’t know why, that has never been able to stop me from caring.”
“Then you are a fool, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Ventress says, but...he dares to think that there’s a faint touch of affection in her voice.
And that does it, really. All of a sudden, he’s so very tired of this circling of each other that they’ve been doing since the Force knows when, maybe even since Cato Neimoidia. He knows now what he feels for her, what he wants, Code or no Code, and he thinks she just might feel and want the same things. And in that case, it’s stupid to keep on dancing around it, when today and basically every day of this whole war go to show that life is far too short.
He moves, with an effort, closer to her, taking her hand carefully in his. “I wouldn’t want it any other way,” he says quietly. “Would you?”
Ventress - Asajj - doesn’t pull away. For a long moment, she regards him with those silver eyes, like she’s assessing him.
Then, it’s impossible to say who moves to close the distance first, but they’re kissing, not with desperate frustration or with an attempt at comfort, but just finally dropping all the barriers and denials and pouring everything from the past three years into it, the antagonism, the reluctant admiration, the desire and struggle and loss and reunion.
The Force, somehow, feels positively smug .
***
When they break apart to breathe, for the first time, neither of them moves to run away.
True, that would be rather difficult logistically, seeing as they’re stuck on a very small emergency spacecraft. But Asajj still has her arms around Kenobi’s - Obi-Wan’s - neck, and his callused hands are still cradling the back of her head. (She could get used to that sensation, far too easily.)
“Don’t leave this time,” Obi-Wan says, voice low and a little ragged. “At least - I know you have a life of your own now, but I haven’t seen you in a year and I don’t want to spend the next year wondering where you are.”
Asajj takes a moment to contemplate this. Going anywhere with him long-term is likely to result in several people finding out she’s alive when she would much prefer them to assume she’s dead. But she’s also buzzing with the new and heady realization that, now that she’s broken from Dooku, there’s no one to punish her for caring for Obi-Wan. This opens up a whole new galaxy of possibility that she hadn’t ever contemplated before.
It had never occurred to her to think of a scenario where she could see Obi-Wan, spend time near him, without the prerequisite of them fighting each other or someone else - partially because there were far too many people who would never let them do so, and partially because imagining he would want such encounters seemed overly optimistic at best.
But now it seems he does. And she’s free, and can tentatively begin to admit to herself all the many, many things she might want to do about that, with him.
Still... “I can’t promise anything now,” she begins, finding that her own voice has gone a little huskier than usual, too. “Your Jedi Council and the Senate might think I’m dead, but if they found out otherwise, I imagine they’d try to rectify the situation as soon as possible.”
Obi-Wan starts to protest, but she places a finger over his mouth. “I’d have to take care of some things,” she says, “but it’s not all that difficult to get onto Coruscant if you know how, and there’s a lot of it that’s...under-regulated, to say the least. I don’t imagine I’d have any trouble finding work down there.”
Obi-Wan’s mouth slowly curves into a smile under her touch as he processes what she’s saying. “How will I know where to find you, my love?”
Love... Asajj swallows hard, tucking that aside to work through some other time. “I don’t suppose you know the lower levels well enough to have a place in mind?”
Surprisingly, he does. He tells her.
The corner of Asajj’s mouth quirks up, and in the moment before Obi-Wan leans in to kiss it, she says, “Then, my dear Obi-Wan, I suppose that’s a date.”