Luke wandered through the lower level of the temple, trying to find something to do. Every stretch of two weeks, he felt like he was doing less and less. He was more restless than bored. He tried meditating more. He tried watching other people teach. But that seemed to make people uncomfortable. Interestingly, the only person who didn't seem uncomfortable teaching while he watched was Brianna. He'd watched several more of her classes since the one Corran had participated in. Junior students, more advanced students, different forms, sparring. It was fascinating.

He almost wished Mara was still around to see it. She might have been interested to see what a good teacher Brianna was and how much she had grown up, in some respects at least. Of course, Mara still might have commented on Brianna's characteristic snark and tendency to turn things into games. And Brianna would have taken exception and it would have started a fight. Luke sighed.

Luke poked his head into the control room. Brianna was at one of the consoles, probably working on her class schedule. She was slouched in the chair, her leg draped over one of the arms. She was twirling a lollipop in her mouth. That definitely would have started a fight. He let out another sigh, slightly louder than he meant to.

"Yeeeeeesss," Brianna drawled out without turning around. "How may I assist you?"

Did he actually need assistance with anything? He probably needed assistance with a lot of things. "Do you know what happened on the medical center platform?" He didn't actually expect an answer. No one else had given him one.

Brianna partially turned her head, but didn't quite look at him. "Well, I was there."

"No one else will tell me about it."

"So I've heard."

Luke frowned. He knew they were all talking to each other about him. He didn't realize they were talking to Brianna too. "Are you allowed to?"

"Allowed?"

"I presume you're not subject to Wedge's rules."

Brianna chuckled. "I am subject to whatever rules I wish to be subject to."

That was certainly true. But it didn't really answer his question. "So, you can tell me?"

"I can do whatever I want."

"Will you tell me?"

Now Brianna leaned over the back of her chair to look at him. "Are you sure you want to know? It's not as if they're bad rules. Wedge is pretty smart about stuff."

That was true, Wedge did usually have the better track record of being right. "So, you're saying I shouldn't know."

"No, I'm asking if you're sure you do want to know."

Luke frowned. Why couldn't anyone ever give him a straight answer?

Brianna sighed and hung her head. "I know how to settle this. Stay here." Brianna left the control room. A few minutes later she came back, this time holding two sticks in her hand. The sticks stuck out evenly, about three centimeters from the top of her fist. She extended her arm to offer the sticks. "Pick a stick," she said. "If you pick the small stick, you are the adult in the room, and I will tell you the answer to whatever question you ask. If you pick the long stick, then I am the adult in the room, and I will decide what I tell you."

"Picking the short stick is supposed to mean you lost," Luke said.

"That is correct. Having to be the adult in the room should always be a losing proposition. Now, pick a stick."

Luke reached out to take one of the sticks, then hesitated. He tried to sense which one was the short one. But it wasn't clear. His hand hovered back and forth between the two. Was she blocking him from trying to sense it? Maybe… Maybe he didn't want to know after all, if it was such a big deal to everyone that he not know. This was mostly to satisfy his own curiosity. It didn't seem to hurt anything, not knowing. Still, at some level he felt like he deserved to know. He could handle knowing. Did other people get to decide whether he could handle knowing?

Not ready for the burden, were you.

Except that I was.

Luke slowly pinched the stick on his left, and pulled it out of Brianna's fist. He held it in his hand. It was about five centimeters long. Brianna turned her hand around and opened up her fist, revealing the other stick. It was about six centimeters long. "You lose," she said with a grin. "What would you like to know?"

"I want to know…" What did he actually want to know? "I want to know what Corran said to me."

"Oh," Brianna said. "Apparently he invited you over for dinner."

Luke frowned, slightly annoyed that he had played the game. "No, really."

"Yes, really!" Brianna said. "Or at least, that's what Camie told me he said, because that's what he told Camie, because I wasn't actually close enough to hear anything."

Luke glanced away, then back again. "That...doesn't make any sense."

Brianna shrugged. "That's what you wanted to know."

"But, why would that have generated the - whatever it was that came next?"

"Why? I don't know, I'm not the expert on why, you'll have to ask Wedge that part," Brianna said. "It was definitely a thing though, like, an emotional volcanic explosion." Brianna grew more animated as she spoke. "I was talking to Jaina - she wasn't there, she was parking her X-Wing - and she had her mom on her other other line at the same time. And I had Corey on my other line, and he was sitting with Lu and the kids. And then, the thing happened," Brianna held up her hands for emphasis, "and everyone was like, 'Holy Sithspit. What. Was. That.' And I could see Camie on the other end of the platform, she was kinda freaking out. And Corran froze, he didn't know what to do. And Dingleberry Durron, he was halfway between me and you. He was all bug-eyed, he didn't know what to do. I could hear the kids crying in the background. It was a bit of chaos. And then," Brianna reached out to mimic her words, "Corran put his hand on your shoulder, and there was a bit of a mini aftershock. After a moment, Corran turned around and walked back to Camie and Mirax. You turned around the other way and three of us got back on the shuttle. No one said a word the entire way back to Yavin. It was like it never happened. Super weird."

Luke paused for a moment. "How did I - what did I say to Corran?"

"Apparently you politely declined," Brianna said. "Right, so all this chaos was internal. Externally, you, at least from a distance, looked super chill."

Politely declining was the most believable thing she'd said so far. "That doesn't sound like me."

"Well, if you did something that sounded like you, I doubt anyone would have made a fuss about it," Brianna said.

Luke shook his head. None of it made any sense. "That's it?"

"That's it."

"Nothing else?"

"Did you have a particular question in mind?"

Luke realized he still had the short stick in his hand. Could he really ask anything he wanted? Did he want to ask anything he wanted? "Corran said you scolded him."

"I'm sure I did."

"Three times."

"He probably deserved it."

"He said you told him that communications devices work in two directions."

Brianna laughed. "Oh yeah, I did say that part."

"Why?"

"Probably because it was funny. Aside from being true."

"No, I mean why are you scolding people? I heard you scolded Tycho too."

"Oh. Probably because they had the audacity to think they know more than me. Which they clearly do not."

"Know more about...what?"

"It's a long list."

Luke paused. There did, in fact, seem to be limits to what he could ask, and get a reasonable answer to. Brianna was staring at him, actively waiting for the next question. "I'm sure it is," Luke said.

Brianna grinned. "What else can I answer for you today?"

Asking questions turned out to be exhausting. "Nothing, I suppose," Luke said.

"Fabulous. Consider yourself newly knowledgeable." Brianna went back to her chair and her schedule.

Luke didn't feel newly knowledgeable. The whole thing actually made less sense. He started to leave, then stopped at the door and looked down at the short stick still in his hand. He did have another question. He turned around. "Brianna?"

"Yo."

"What would you have said if I picked the long stick?"

"Oh, I don't know," Brianna said. "Probably would have told you anyway."

"Why?"

Brianna shrugged. "Eh. At least you were willing to play."

"Hmm." Luke took another look at the short stick, then left the control room.

Luke sat on the couch at the end of the hall and flipped through the pages of his journal. He was waiting for Wedge to come out. It had become something of a ritual. Luke was always up early - he still didn't sleep very much. He'd get a cup of coffee or tea down in the lobby and then watch the sun come up over the city skyline from the couch. After a while Wedge would come out with his own cup of coffee and they'd wave goodbye to Iella as she was on her way to work. Sometimes they'd go out, sometimes they'd catch up with Wes and Hobbie and Tycho. Sometimes they'd just stay sitting on the couch all day. He'd gotten better about saying no when he didn't feel up to doing something. Though sometimes the distinctions were still fuzzy, saying yes because wanted to or saying yes to avoid someone else's disappointment; saying no because he didn't want to or saying no when he really should say yes.

Wedge came out of his apartment and sat down next to him. "How many hours do you sit here before I come out?"

"Oh...not that long," Luke said.

Wedge, of course, already knew the real answer and gave Luke a friendly but skeptical look to confirm his disbelief. "What's that?" he asked, nodding to the book in Luke's lap.

"This," Luke said, picking it up, "is a journal."

"Like a real paper book?" Wedge asked. "I don't even remember the last time I saw one of those. If I've seen one of those."

"It was a gift from a planetary delegation from a mission I went on for Leia several years ago. Came with a pen, and everything."

"Have you written anything in it?"

"I've been writing in it for the last several months. Almost every day. Ever since that one dinner with everyone. You know."

"Oh!" Wedge said. "You didn't tell me that."

"I was...trying to prove something to myself."

Wedge nodded. "Did it work?"

"Perhaps, though not the way I expected," Luke said. He opened up the journal to the very first page and held it up for Wedge to see. "This was the first thing I wrote in it."

Wedge nodded slowly. "Ridiculous, huh?" Luke shrugged. "Do you still think that's true?" Wedge asked.

Luke hesitated, still not entirely sure what he actually thought. "Do you?"

Wedge paused. "I'm certainly not qualified to diagnose anything," he said. "Never was. However," Wedge paused again. "I think...things have been better over the past few months. I think it's still worth asking someone who is qualified to say whether that's true or not."

"Mm."

"What do you think?" Wedge asked again.

Luke folded the book back up and put in his lap. "Brianna told me what happened on the medical center platform."

Wedge hesitated at the seeming change in topic. "Oh?"

"I told her I assumed she wasn't subject to your three rules. She said she was subject to whatever rules she wished to be subject to."

Wedge rolled his eyes. "Sounds about right." He turned serious. "Are you upset about it?"

"Well," Luke said carefully. "No. I don't suppose I am."

"At all?"

"You expected me to be."

"Well, yes," Wedge said. "I'm usually pretty good at predicting you…"

Luke smiled. "You are. Better than anyone else. Including me." Luke ran his finger along the spine of the book. "I was thinking about how Yoda said he hadn't told me that my father was Darth Vader because he thought I wasn't ready for the burden of knowing. And I thought, but I had been ready." He looked at Wedge. "I mean, I think I handled it pretty well, all things considered."

"Sure," Wedge said.

"So, I can decide when I'm ready to handle knowing things. Then she told me. It all seemed...disproportionate. How could one thing lead to the next thing and lead to everyone making such a big deal of this? I thought about it a bit more, and, in context of everything else I've been told - other people breaking your rules - I supposed I could understand how other people might be concerned."

"Yeah."

"I started to write about it," Luke tapped the book, "but because I don't actually remember it, it was hard to put myself in my own head, you know? Then, I thought of something."

"What?"

"I've been writing in this since, not that day, but pretty close to it." Luke held up the book. "So, I've got what amounts to a little time machine here." Wedge smiled at the analogy. "I went back,"Luke said, "and read every single entry from the beginning."

"What did you find?"

Luke set the book down again. "Some of the entries are a bit...darker than others. A bit more pessimistic. Cynical, even, maybe." Wedge was frowning at him now. "What do you make of that?"

"Probably the earlier entries?" Wedge said.

Luke nodded. "Certainly those, yes. I noticed another pattern though. I dated all the entries. And, from what I was writing about, I can tell whether I was writing on Yavin or here on Coruscant. And, there's an ebb and flow to the - well, the tone of the entries. The...lighter ones, I guess - mostly, not always - are from here or right after I'd left. And the...darker ones are more into the second week on Yavin before I came back here. There are a few other dips, you might call them. Like," Luke shifted and took a breath, "Brianna explaining about Yvonne's lightsaber. It's like an upward gliding sine wave of tone, up and down short term, but, generally, kind of, up." Luke stopped and took another breath. He looked at Wedge. "I'm not sure if that made sense."

"That actually made perfect sense," Wedge said. "To me. That's more or less how I might have described you over the past several months too."

"It made me wonder how I might have felt about it if you had told me right away," Luke said. "And the truth is, I don't really know."

"I didn't want you to think you were at fault for something when you weren't," Wedge said. "I didn't want it to make you withdraw more or feel like you'd been abandoned. Even though you kind of thought that already. I just," Wedge shook his head, "wanted to fix it. And I thought that would be harder if you were upset."

"You weren't necessarily wrong about that."

"So what made me right and Yoda wrong?" Wedge asked. "If either of those things are true."

"That's a good question," Luke said. "You do just know me better." Wedge smiled. "If I were to ask Brianna, she'd probably say Yoda was just covering up his own failures and it didn't have much to do with me at all. But that's not you here."

"No..."

Wedge glanced away and Luke sensed a sudden spike in...guilt? Anxiety? It faded just as quickly. Despite not being Force sensitive, Wedge had figured out how to hide from Luke when he really wanted to. Luke let the silence linger a moment, then decided to let it go. "In any case," he said, "I started writing in this thing to prove to myself that you were wrong. I guess I kind of did the opposite. I suppose I should know better by now."

Wedge looked back at him again with another small smile. "So what are you going to do about it?"

Luke frowned. He'd actually been trying to avoid thinking that far. It was one thing for Brianna to complain about him or give him a hard time about something. It was something else for a professionally qualified person to actually say there was something wrong with him. "I don't know. We did both agree it was getting better," Luke pointed out.

"Yes," Wedge said. "But, it could get more better."

"Yeah…"

"And if nothing else, you should get a physical. You haven't done that properly in decades."

"Yeah… Not even sure how..." It still made him uneasy. Like it was somehow admitting defeat. That he had failed to even manage himself. Even though he'd kind of discovered that already anyway. "What if...what if it was true? I'd probably have to...have to come back here permanently, right?"

"Well, I wouldn't complain about that," Wedge said. "And I'm sure Tycho, Wes, and Hobbie wouldn't either."

Luke started to smile again. They'd all done so much.

"And if it is true, once you know, it should make it easier to manage, right? It's not like they tell you there's something wrong with you then kick you back out. You can do something about it."

Instead of everyone else doing it for me. "Yeah…"

"Tell you what," Wedge said. "You're going back to Yavin tomorrow, right? You think about it, while I work on how. If you don't want to do it, or only part of it, you can come back in a couple of weeks like usual. And if you do want to do it, I'll come pick you up."

Luke let out another small breath. Of course it was the smart thing to do. As Brianna had said, Wedge was pretty smart about stuff. He always had been, far more than Luke. Somehow, that never made doing anything easier. "I'll...think about it."