The blood was hot, the pain behind it hotter. Her body shook violent little tremors, her hands covered in her own blood as she moved slowly. The battle was over, the very last of the Mandalorian attack force laying cold and dead in the small chamber just feet away from her, armor and flesh burnt black from the oversized blaster that ripped through the Mandalorian from behind. He'd shot the Jedi first, snapping her out of Battle Meditation. Then he gloated about it, and starting taunting the suddenly shot and suddenly bleeding Jedi Apprentice. The Guard Captain of the Palace had been ordered by Catsai to protect Vera. 

He'd saved her life. 

So why was Vera anxious about Catsai's return? 

[i]Because I'm bleeding. Because she's in love with me.[/i]

The thought alone sparked a hotter heat than any blaster wound, and left her feeling drunk. Vera snorted, loudly, as the Guard Captain hovered over her, ripping her robes away from her left shoulder and stabbing in the pain killer. Vera-Li howled, the haze of her body in shock, her knees sliding slowly over the polished marble floor below. The room was little more than a prayer chamber, as they called it. Six walls, two doors, and a ceiling so high it was lost in the darkness of shadow. It was in the center of the Palace, in a lower level where the walls were thicker and the paths much more of a maze than the palace main floors above. 

It was the perfect place for her to setup to turn the tide of the battle.

"I don't know how you did it," The Guard Captain said, "Even the youngest recruit started shooting straight."

She tried chuckling at the mental image, but instead the sound of pain came out, and her right hand went straight to her left shoulder in reactionary instinct. The narcotic started working on synapsis after synapsis in her brain, a chain reaction she could track if she focused. Which she could, for all of half a heartbeat, before the Force shifted around her, allowing her to sense what was coming.

Or rather who. 

"Slowly, Jedi," the Guard Captain's voice was calm, and firm, his body just the same as he very patiently helped her to her feet. "This was a small Mandalorian attack. We should be ready next time, now that we have enough time to prepare. Thank you Jedi. Now let's get you upstairs to the medics." 

Vera thanked the man, and tried to make a step, before her head became a whirlwind of narcotic heaviness and physical shock. A new appreciation for the human Guard Captain's physical sturdiness, that he kept her from falling right back to the floor, that.....[i]she's close.[/i] "Excuse me, Guard Captain, I'll get off here." She smiled, the sound of humor in her otherwise pained tone. 

"Are you certain? Your wound--"

"--will mend. Trust me when I say you don't want to be here in the coming minute or two. This wall," she said, patting it with bloodied left hand, as if she were an expert on walls testing it's soundness, "can hold me up just fine in the meantime." And as she said it, she shifted her weight, until her left shoulder was leaning hard into the wall so that it kept her upright. The narcotics, the pain, the reaction after reaction inside her body, reverberating from her physical being into the Force all around her. 

Even her heart leapt. Was it the pain? The narcotic?

Or the fact that she was in love with the woman coming for her in a beeline?

No, no. She shook her head, hard, harder, and again. Then there was even more heat, tears? Tears were streaming, steaming her hot cheeks. Then the shadow...Vera's eyes followed the shadow from the ground to the source of it: that figure in the door. Vera tried to smile at the figure in the door, tried to say something, but all she could think to say was...

"I'm okay," Her eyes flashing from Catsai in the doorway, to the dead Mandalorian on the ground, back to her Master. "I'm...I'm pretty dizzy but hey at least you got involved in the Mandalorian fight...I'm...gonna sit down." She said, her left shoulder rolled forward until her back was flat against the marble wall, and from there, she slid down until the marble floor stopped her. Her bright blue eyes cloudy and bloodshot, Vera frowned.

"Are you hurt?"