#holy shi tballs am i posting More Writing??? you bet your ass i am

[void-bitten-ghost]

Spidersilk

Or, alternatively: Oh No, They're Back At It Again With That One AU That's Consumed Them

Another post order 66 fic, set before the Night Terrors one. This is when they first work together again, years down the line from the jedi purge. Maul has his syndicate and Ahsoka is working as Fulcrum with the rebels, but they'd sometimes do things to help each other's group just because it fucks with the Empire. Here, they come to an understanding while begrudgingly working together on one of those missions.

Again, set in the ex mando/jedi Maul AU where they grew up together in the jedi order (plus other weird timeline divergent stuff). I don't think there's any trigger warnings but just in case there are mentions of being wounded.

But yeah, enjoy?

-_-_-

The first time she even acknowledged the bond they'd somehow built up again, they'd both been gravely wounded.

It was a smash and grab mission, too important to send anyone else. And apparently his organisation felt the same way. They somehow met on the bridge, carnage left in the wake of both of them coming from either side of the ship.

They were being caged in.

It was almost the end of them both, that day. But he'd gotten her out of that ceaseless line of fire, calling her to the air ducts. And so, she repaid the favour by getting him out of the still falling rubble of the ship. The ship he'd crashed, by the way. The irony was not lost on her.

But somehow, together, they'd survived.

Tending to his wounds hadn't been easy. He didn't make it easy. But she patiently insisted. He'd taken a deadly blow meant for her, after all. Plus, there was some maintenance needed on his prosthetics if they were to make it out of there and back to point B in time. Something was off with the stabilizers, it seemed, but that was something he insisted he could sort on his own.

She'd come to terms with the fact that they'd have a better chance of survival if they continued working together. And survival... she had people counting on her to get this intel back.

Eventually, under the logic of 'the quicker this gets done the quicker they can move on', he acquiesced to her assistance.

Didn't mean he was happy about it. And the feeling was mutual.

"If you'd just stop moving away from me, I could get this done quicker." She says, wrapping a wound on his shoulder, placing a bacta patch here and there on the problem areas. "Seriously, a youngling squirms less than you do."

Surprizingly, she only gets a deeper scowl aimed at the floor for the trouble. No sharp quip, no barbed words. Just the deepening of that ever present frown and him falling still once again.

She ignores it, that unnerving silence, moving lower to his ribs and attempting to disinfect the wound there.

He turns away, growls, but she ignores that, too. It'll take more than a pitiful noise like that to scare her off now. He'd had the chance to kill her more than once in the past few years of this strange arrangement, she doubts he'd try his luck now of all times. And over a bit of disinfectant at that? Ha. Please.

He's all bandaged up and recalibrated in no time, and he starts working on wrapping her back lacerations when it proves to be a monumentally awkward task for her to do on her own. She concedes begrudgingly, just as he had done to her.

It seemed appropriate in the dark to say nothing, to simply allow all this to happen. It was a separate space, a pocket of calm in the storm of their lives. And that was somehow soothing. If she closed her eyes for a bit, just a little bit, she could almost imagine them back in the temple training grounds, patching eachother up after a particularly gruelling bout of drills. Could almost feel the sand under her boots, smell the sun baked earth, hear the yells and clacks of younglings training just down the way...

She comes to when the smoke from the crash blows their way, breaking the idle dream into a thousand smouldering pieces. That was another time. Another life entirely. But here they are, together again in the chaos of a stark, new reality.

She breathes hard through her nose, tasting ash and oil on her tongue. Pinching her own thighs, she finally says the words that had been playing on her mind since the crash. Since he, against all preconceptions, saved her life by endangering his own.

"Thank you," she murmurs into the quiet. "For saving my life back there."

His hands still momentarily. Almost for a full breath before continuing, and she supposes that's the end of it, thinks nothing more of it and then-

"You're welcome." The words are so quiet, a barely there murmur just like her own had been. But then, even quieter, thrown into the emptiness of the room like a stone in a glass house...

"And thank you."

The bond between them, that spidersilk thread, once severed, grew thicker that day. And that, in turn, lead to them allowing their auras to push and ebb against eachother once again, just a little bit. Just a touch. A toe in the water.

That was when it started, she thinks. That day in the rubble, where they saved each others skin and thanked eachother for it.