Safe Harbor. There was something about the way Vanech said that, something about the flowering strength of his Force print when he uttered those words.

Luke considered the term at length as the group followed Vanech through the empty alleys and unlit hallways, eventually climbing back up to the populated levels of commerce and crime. Luke wondered what it must have been like having one's entire lifestyle slaughtered at such a young age and surviving only by becoming a street urchin of the Temple District while the Imperial Palace was being built above his head.

To grow up without a home or family, surrounded by the threat of war, without the luxury to hide, or rest, or trust. . . . How exhausting it must be for those who must steal to eat, kill or be killed, without ever getting a good nights' sleep between unending days of gritty survival. This epiphany gave Luke a new understanding to the power of a true 'safe harbor'.

As tough as farm life was, Luke appreciated Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru on deeper level these days. Owen was gruff and strict, narrow-minded and racist, but he was solid. There was always food on the table, power in the lights, and heat in the house. Owen did and said things that Luke still swore he would never inflict upon his own children. But Owen's roughness was balanced by Aunt Beru's kindness, she who was always there to nurse Luke's bruised ego after each encounter. Aunt Beru was the quiet ballast in the kitchen to give him a pat on the shoulder, serve him a glass of cool water, and sit across the dining table to listen in friendly silence just so Luke could vent about Owen's cruel discipline.

Luke felt safe in that kitchen but all he ever did there was bitch about how badly he needed to escape that blasted rock. And, all the while, Beru just sat there, hands easily clasped in front of her chin, grinning softly with unlimited patience as 'Vader's son' stormed around throwing a temper tantrum.

Looking back now, Luke wondered if Beru didn't give him more Jedi training than Old Ben did.

Ben, Luke grinned to remember. Anyone could tell Old Ben was a safe harbor just by looking at the man. The more Luke understood the original customs of the Jedi, the more he understood why. But Owen wouldn't let Ben come around often enough to present anymore than an enigma in Luke's young life. Old Ben was a hermit, a misfit, a loony, shoved away from orderly society due to his idiosyncrasies, or perhaps Old Ben was running from society.

Or, perhaps, Ben was simply trying to help anyone that would let him. Luke wished he could have been bug on the wall the day Jedi Master Obi Wan Kenobi decided to use a wife, daughter, and two grandkids as a cover story. Thinking on what little he knew of the Lendra family, Luke realized anew that he had it better than she did. Owen Lars was a lot of things, but he was not an alcoholic or an abuser. Luke wondered why Ben let his pretend 'son-in-law' stick around for so long.

The answer was simple: Because Dane Lendra was her father. Step-father perhaps, but he was the only father Kess had. Luke would be the last person to understate the complications surrounding one's less-than-spectacular father.

Despite Kess's hard-luck family life, Luke figured her inner strength rooted from having her own secret safe harbor in Ben. He could easily envision Ben's arms and brown robe swooping up the crying, little girl and swallowing her whole into a hug so big and strong, protecting her from all that 'scum and villainy', that she would feel safe until she was ready to face it again. It would not have taken much for Obi Wan to whisper into her little ear and teach her how to withstand it all like a Jedi without letting on that his methods were stemmed from the original Order.

It was what it made it so easy for Luke to train her.

And so hard to train her.

She picked up some practices like she'd been doing them for years, but other skills? Kess wouldn't just 'not even try', she'd stand in the clearing for a moment to consider Luke's instruction and then spin around to face down the Commander-Master-Medal-of-Honor-wielding-Living-Legend and call, "bullshit!"

Luke wondered how much shorter her training would have been if he didn't have to spend so much time defending his own lesson plan to his apprentice. He tried to calculate how many times he dragged her out to the clearing for a specific exercise only to end up shouting in playful debate at each other the whole afternoon over the lesson's validity.

The most delicious moment began with a thought experiment about the milder forms of the dark side, using examples of a yummy meal when hungry or a drink of clean water when thirsty. Luke and Kess faced each other down, straddling that log in the clearing, yelling, laughing, and groaning at each other's crazy opinions for hours.

Luke felt his argument was simple: a starving animal forced to kill to acquire food was the dark side at work, driving a person to murder through the base need for survival. Kess fought back that conclusion meant eating anything at all was on the dark side. She added that craving certain foods for their specific vitamins or proteins could arguably be on the dark side. Luke rolled his eyes that no one kills over a stupid vitamin.

But that's when Kess got up to get a water bottle out of the duffel bag and passed out of his range of vision before muttering a sinister threat into his ear. "I haven't had sex with another person for over a year, Master, so if you don't think I'd kill for some chocolate right now. . . ."

She didn't finish her sentence. She just brightened with a sudden laughter of embarrassment, "We should probably go home for the day."

Now, Luke grinned fondly at the incident, but he remembered his face screwing into a knot to prevent his apprentice from seeing the natural reaction in his expression. He remembered how many hours he tried to meditate away what his imagination brought on by her need to specify not having sex 'with another person'.

True, the episode concluded with an M-word, but it certainly wasn't 'meditating'.

Sex. Now there was an argument they never finished debating. Luke still didn't feel comfortable discussing the topic with her, even now, but especially not in the solitude and privacy of the clearing. The clearing was too dangerous for the sheer fact that clearing wasn't dangerous at all.

It started out as just a place to get away and meditate. He found it entirely by accident in that narrow space between leaving Yoda and facing his father. They were using Yavin 4 again for the assembly efforts but this time for nothing more than a momentary rock with air and gravity. He imagined Kess probably was one of the repair crew stationed planet-side back then, but they never met. In fact, he spent most of that time running away from everybody.

He borrowed a speeder one day when the stress and infighting of the early Alliance thickened the Force like bitter stew so much that he had to get away from it all. Since most of the troops coagulated in some broken warehouse south of the base to get drunk, Luke drove north. He found himself following a fresh-mowed, straight line through the jungle away from Yavin Base. He reached the shield generator unit installed at the end of the road, humming protectively up to the sky, but the humming of the generator wasn't nearly as loud or as annoying as the gnats of flitting around his head.

Luke swatted away insects as he drove and hardly noticed how they faded with the growing distance. He got out of the speeder and walked around a bit, swishing away mosquitoes and grimacing his face to keep them from flying into his eyes. Luke held both sides of his head with his palms and gave in to a loud growl in a plea to make it all stop.

One zipped by his ear screaming in what were almost words in the Force, and he realized they weren't insects at all. They were thoughts, tiny shooting stars of emotion, revelation, passion, craving, hope, terror, prayer, pain, orgasm . . . all of the sentient beings on Yavin Base.

He'd felt it before but not that loud. He'd meditated it all away before too, but as his skills and practice grew, so did ability to sense all that stuff without even trying. And now that every sentient being on Yavin Base was steeling themselves to go up against a second Death Star . . . ?

As soon as Luke realized it was all just Force confetti raining into his brain, he concentrated to meditate it away right where he was standing. The harassment of insects drifted to silence. The air cooled on his sweating skin. He carefully pulled his palms from his ears, opened his squinting eyes and found himself standing a pocket of natural space amidst the deep green jungle, henceforth referred to only as 'the clearing'.

A.K.A. Jedi safe harbor.

In the Force, nature was like a pond with a gentle current. Sentients were the fools who turned it into tidal waves and hurricanes. Logical thought and the complexities of civilization is what pegged the Force into such extremes as dark and light, good and evil, sex and rage, capitalism and communism. In the end, if you broke anything down far enough, be it an emotion, an act, a culture, a government, or a religion into its most basic pieces, it was all 'none of the above'.

The Force is just life.

And Life just is.

Any sentient mind hungered to step away from the mess so it could remember that it was the sentient mind creating the mess to begin with. Nature provided physical places for sentients to hide so they could stop being strong for a couple of minutes and rest their minds. And for those who couldn't get to nature, or didn't know enough about it to meditate instead, there would always be places like Aunt Beru's quiet kitchen or Old Ben's hugging arms.

He told Kess about it; that Force confetti. She compared Force sensitivity to mental illness, saying that the Force was the voices in your head that didn't speak. It was hearing things, seeing things, and feeling things that weren't your own. She said that Jedi Training was just as much about turning it all off than it was to crank it up and make magical use of it.

She wondered aloud how many people in the galaxy were labeled crazy because of it. How many people medicated away depression and paranoid schizophrenia when the real problem was that they were Force Sensitive and just didn't know it.

Together in that clearing, Luke and Kess soberly wondered how many peaceful people committed murder because they were hearing the unbridled rage of the guy next door. How many struggling souls snorted spice just to control their own dark side for a little while? How many suicides claimed innocent lives just to because the victim knew no other way to shut the Force up?

Luke squinted up through the never-ending stairwell behind Vanech, Han, and Lando, opening his mind for a peek and felt the throbbing tempest of that Force confetti here. He thought it was bad enough that day he found the clearing, or when they retreated from Hoth, or when fleet scrambled for cover over Endor, but nothing compared to this chaos that was Coruscant.

There was too much sentient emotion cooking the Force and not enough nature to cool it off. No wonder the crime rate in cities grew exponentially higher with the density of the population. Unless, of course, you stomped it out with an iron-healed boot of an Empire or punished it through some asinine commandments until no one could legally feel anything in the first place.

At the end of the long hike, Vanech pushed open a door and they were out on the floor of that mechanical gully again, picking through garbage to reach the still hanging cable from the severed landing pad above and the Falcon on top of it. Han and Lando led the efforts to strap up in the harnesses, using the climber's grip to zip themselves back up its length. He could sense Kess up there helping out, and saw Chewie reach down a furry arm to bring up the bodies safely.

Luke and Vanech waited at the bottom in silence. Vanech lit up a death stick, leering at Luke through his own smoke like a snake ready to strike out at any moment and not feel one whit of remorse over doing so.

Both harnesses dropped on the ground by their feet, but Vanech only took a rocking step back and gestured at them. After you.

Force sensitive or no, this man was on the dark side. There was no doubt about it. But Luke had to admit that if he'd grown up underneath the Imperial Palace, scratching a living by stealing food and fighting authorities without a safe harbor in which to meditate and recharge, he would probably be on the dark side too.