~4~

Flicker


After a while, Luke and Lilandra's laughter subsided into a reflective silence, laced with unspoken gratitude and broken only by the soft hum of the messaging console.

Luke leaned his head against the back of his chair and shut his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, all he could see were stars close enough to hold. He sat up again.

"Lil," he said, startling her out of her own reverie.

"Mm?"

"I never got a chance to thank you for last night."

"Well, it was beneficial for me, too, I think," she said, her eyebrows coming together in thought. "I feel I forget sometimes the insignificance of material possessions. It's easy to buy into the microcosm of Coruscant, and all the money and flash. Last night was a very 'Jedi' experience. You know, what's simple is true, yet unbelievably and incomprehensibly complex and all that. The stuff you hate teaching."

She grinned wryly.

"I don't hate teaching it," Luke disagreed. "I believe in it, don't I? How can you despise your personal beliefs? It's still my way of life, for the most part. Recently, though, I find a lot of the older teachings really don't apply to my or anybody else's way of life anymore. I liked the Galaxy Lake; it's not trying to force you to see something that isn't there. Quite the opposite, actually. By showing you what really exists, whether you believe it or not, it makes you feel things that make sense to you. Religion in the true sense of the concept: experiencing a reality that is so deliciously unreal, a part of you can't help but acknowledge some higher transcendent power – something greater than anything humans or aliens could conceive – that put it there."

"It's a big universe," Lilandra mused. "Even seeing our tiny section of it in its totality was quite literally mind-boggling."

"Sure," Luke shrugged. "Think of that little planet we saw, way out there on the edges of time – how different the galaxy must look, when you're on the outside, looking in."

"I wonder … if you were standing on the side of the planet facing outward, into interstellar space, at nightfall, would you see stars? Or only blackness? What if you grew up there, night after night, having no concept of stars?"

The thought made Lilandra nervous. Luke laughed gently, and reached out to pat her hand, which rested tersely on the messaging console. It occurred to him, for some unknown reason – perhaps because of the extraordinary nature of their conversation, which had made him suddenly aware of the massive significance of every tiny thing in the room – that it was the first time he had touched her at all since the night before.

Very lightly, he cupped his palm over her knuckles … and then suddenly jerked his hand back as a shock of static electricity sprang from the touch of her skin.

However, even when he had drawn his hand protectively to his chest, words of good-natured admonishment poised on his tongue, the sharp, prickling sensation did not stop.

All at once, a bitter, biting cold whipped through his veins, his muscles clenching of their own accord, as a most indescribable feeling whirled into and through his mind. It was a feeling of fear, of childish fear, the fear of shadows and darkness that Luke had never quite grown out of, but beneath it was a more sinister undercurrent: a heartbreaking loneliness, a powerful sense of loss and abandonment, of something that has gone away and will never, cannot ever come back. He felt something had died, worse than died. Been taken away. The feeling was not altogether unfamiliar, but that it was punctuated with flashes of anticipation, joy, curiosity – happy emotions – sent confusion washing over Luke, and he felt suddenly full. Stuffed full of emotion and sick from the effort of trying to digest it all.

His stomach heaved, and he doubled over in his chair, but only a single word tumbled from the top of his head to his lips: Help.

He choked on the bitterness of the word, his hands gripping the arms of his chair, while his entire body shook with the force of feeling so powerfully, as though a thousand other people had taken up residence in his skull and promptly begun to fight to make their anguish heard.

He tried to stand, thinking perhaps that running away would rid him of the voices whirling and shouting through his brain, but he was frozen in place, paralyzed while every ounce of energy in him fed the riot in his head.

Then, just as he felt himself losing his grip on consciousness, it was all gone, the voices, the feelings, the pain, and he was left shaking hard with his arms hugged around himself for sheer comfort.

He sat still for a moment, waiting on the last of the ache in his head and stomach to subside and for the spots to clear from behind his eyes before he opened them.

When he did, it was to a room empty of anything untoward, any explanation for what had just occurred. The communications room was void of any feeling, perhaps emptier than it should have been. Luke tried to sense Lilandra, sitting next to him still with involuntary tears pouring down her white face, but his awareness had left him momentarily. It was as though his telepathic sense had a volume dial, and some malicious deity had turned it up to way past its normal level, bordering on a dangerous level of sensory capacity, then guiltily switched it right off.

Hesitantly, Luke reached for Lilandra's hand again, and this time, their fingers met without incident. Luke relaxed only slightly. It was okay to talk now, he felt.

"Lil, I … I'm sorry," he tried. He had only wanted to touch her hand … for some reason, he was irrationally tempted to blame Mara, but even she wasn't capable of producing the energy needed to create the effect that had taken hold in the instant that Luke's skin made contact with Lilandra's.

Lilandra shook her head, still crying silently, and Luke was filled with pity – the first real emotion he could muster. With it, his Force sense returned, and again, the room began to buzz. His head still felt unnaturally empty without the voices, though.

"Are you alright now?" Luke asked.

Lilandra shook her head both yes and no, and swallowed hard, wiping her eyes.

"What if you knew stars once," she whispered tearfully, not meeting Luke's compassionate gaze, "and had them taken away?"

The hollowness of her words made his soul ache, and he too had to look away, and that was when he noticed the light.

His pulse climbed to the speed of anxiety as his eyes came to rest on the messaging console, where the receiving light was frantically blinking red.

A message was waiting.

***

Tara Jaksbin was a bare few meters from her apartment door when the flicker in the Force's usually unwavering guidance hit her. She felt a bitter, unhappy cold whip through her veins like an injection of misery, and then welcoming blackness seized her before the emotions could. The last sound she heard before she hit the ground was one of terror; a scream that she was certain had come from her own mouth, at least in part. Voices swirled in her head, and she felt she was sinking down into a great pit of despair, and she knew no more until the only audible voices she could pick up were the familiar ones of her boyfriend, Anakin, and his sister Jaina.

" … Hit by it, too," Jaina was saying, clucking with dismay.

"We'll … find Master Skywalker," said Anakin, sounding strangely distant. "Come on, Jainy. Help me…"

Tara felt someone's arm slide underneath her knees, and another arm supported her waist from beneath. Someone else placed a smooth, cool palm on her forehead, and two fingers on her jugular, feeling for vitals. Then, she was aware of her body leaving the cold stone floor, and the pressure on her lower back and ankles was graciously lifted. She let her muscles relax, and whoever was carrying her grunted suddenly as her body went limp and her weight increased.

"Tara, can you hear me?" Jaina whispered at her as Anakin, obviously the one doing the heavy lifting, started off down the hallway.

Tara dared to crack open an eye, but all she could see at first was the dusty sand-brick wall of the corridor drifting slowly past, as her head was dangling from Anakin's elbow. She lifted her neck, and saw Jaina, walking at Anakin's side. She looked awfully white.

"Solo," Tara called her boyfriend. Anakin glanced down at her from his towering, gangly height, and Tara assessed his state of mind. He appeared tired, withdrawn. Apparently, he and Jaina had felt the flicker as well.

"Put me down," Tara commanded in a croak, and Anakin obliged, keeping an arm around her waist to steady her until she found her center of gravity. Tara's feet met the floor, and the hallway began to swim before her eyes, the phosphorescent lights bearing down on her tired retinas. Yet she remained standing – this was a good sign.

"Any idea where Luke might've gone?" Anakin asked Jaina.

She shook her head – Tara briefly wondered why she didn't just put out some mental Force-feelers and sense her way to Skywalker's location, but then she realized, as she tentatively tested her own Jedi sense, that the Force flicker had not only breathed misery into the three of them, it had sucked out their strengths as well. Tara could not even feel Anakin, walking beside her in the corridor.

"Hope this is a temporary side effect," Jaina muttered, turning her eyes threateningly towards the ceiling, as though the flicker were some bird that had swept down from the clouds and stolen her hat, as though she could call it back with a flash of her dark brown eyes.

"Have a peek in the dining room, will you, Jaya?" Anakin said as they passed by the adjacent doors of the common lounge and the eating area.

Jaina gave the door a push with her palm, but found only Jacen, her twin; inside clearing away abandoned breakfast dishes with a drained expression on his face. A sandglass mug lay shattered beneath the back window.

"Luke, Jace?" she asked, meeting his identical brown gaze and flushing angrily as he shrugged, running a hand through his shaggy brown hair.

"Dave in hangar bay," he added, as though that would help.

"Dave not Jedi," Jaina said testily. Jacen gave her an apologetic half-smile, and brushed past the table to the kitchen door, balancing his stacks of plates on his palms.

"Hangar bay," Jaina said darkly, gesturing down the hallway, and set off, evidently beginning to feel well enough to take command as she usually did. Anakin and Tara followed, giving each other an oddly wide berth. Tara kept close to the inside wall, running her fingers along the bricks lest she become disoriented, while Anakin trailed along some feet back, glancing nervously in all the rooms they passed along the way.

They reached the main entrance hall, beneath the peak of the temple. The layered ceiling rose fifty feet above them, closing off after twenty to accommodate the second-floor apartments, while two wide corridors branched off in either direction. On the left and towards the front of the temple was the hangar bay corridor, where thin shafts of sunlight streamed into the corridor from between the slats in the huge metal door sectioning off the garage from the rest of the temple. Evidently, the outer doors beyond had been left open – Dave was in there, most likely servicing Lilandra's shuttle.

To the right lay the second-floor and roof stairs, the roof stairs curving up one terraced wall and out of sight, the second-floor stairs directly ahead against the back wall of the entrance hall, wide and grand. Behind them were the double wooden doors that opened into the windowed great hall, and the smaller, more informal war room, rows of wooden benches visible in the dusky light filtering from its single muddied window.

Jaina steered them in the direction of another corridor that branched off just alongside the roof stairs – the private lab hallway and, across from it, the communications room.

"You two go and find Master Skywalker. I need to let Dave know what's happened," Jaina dictated, and gave her brother a small push towards the hallway. He grabbed Tara's hand, and they ventured across the hall together, while Jaina ran in the opposite direction.

They watched her disappear through a man-sized door in the larger metal one, and then glanced urgently at each other.

All of a sudden, it was as though Tara's rightful voice had returned to her, and a flood of words spilled forth from her mouth – fears and explanations and apologies for nothing whatsoever. Anakin placed a finger against her lips to silence her, and she gave a loud yelp as her Force-sense snapped back into focus. Her awareness increased to a hundred times its previous level, and she began to notice things again – the hesitance of the small sand-snake in the corner boring its way through one of the bricks, Anakin's concerned presence, and the anxiety of two other Jedi creeping into her senses.

"Comm. Room," she said, proud of herself.

She and Anakin pushed through the metal door on their left, and promptly walked straight into Lilandra and Luke, who had apparently been huddling against the wall in terror.

"Ho! What's going on in here?" Anakin asked, blue eyes peering analytically around the room.

"Not what it looks like," Lilandra replied, quickly dropping Luke's hand. Tara noticed with some amusement that her knuckles were white, while her cheeks were red.

Luke pointed a shaking finger at the message console.

"Message ahoy," he said, voice filled with petrified awe.

Anakin and Tara exchanged a glance. There was no need to ask the reason for the anxious looks circulating the room – clearly, Luke had reason to believe that the innocuous flashing of the receiving light had something to do with the disturbance in the Force.

"It's probably just …" Anakin started boldly, but trailed off. He'd been about to say his parents, or Lilandra or someone removed from the academy when it had dawned on him that all were currently present on Yavin 4, preparing to while away their summer vacations in the searing jungle heat.

Jaina strode into the room then, Dave in tow, and stared quizzically at the small group of Jedi massed around the message console.

"You all look sufficiently stymied," she commented, sucking one fingernail in concentrated thought.

"Message waiting, Jains," Anakin informed her, not bothering to look up.

"So? I don't get it! You're all acting like you've never seen a flashing light before. Just answer it!"

The group turned uniformly and gaped at Jaina and her husband as though the pair had just suggested they all play blaster roulette for a bit of indoors fun. Lilandra even gave a rather obvious shudder and backed away from the console, hands raised.

"You do it, since you seem so keen to lose your mind again," Tara said, extending her palm invitingly towards the console.

"Dave, you do it," Jaina said.

This was not simply a last-minute act of cowardice – it was actually quite good thinking on Jaina's part. As Dave was the only non-Jedi in the room, any strange emotional vibes the message may be carrying wouldn't affect him in the slightest. Also, being brave, Dave was only too glad to oblige.

He stepped through the crowd, and seated himself at the console; finger poised above the button marked 'receive'.

"First crisis of the summer is always the most dramatic. You'll get over it," he shrugged, and lowered his finger as all five Jedi in the room cringed simultaneously.

Instead of the cataclysmic disaster they'd been expecting, however, all that appeared on the pop-up message screen was faintly glowing whiteness, unaccompanied by any further wavering in the Force.

"Well, that was anticlimactic," Anakin put in, whistling, and turned towards the door.

"No, wait – " Tara started, going and kneeling beside Dave. She squinted at the screen. "Focus it up a bit, Dave."

Dave tweaked a knob at the side of the screen, and a large square cursor appeared. Pressing another button, he zoomed in on the center of the glowing white screen.

A gasp rose from the crowd as a pale square speckled with thousands of tiny black, labeled stars appeared in place of the void. Lilandra and Luke looked particularly astonished.

"Look familiar, Lil?" Tara asked, almost vindictively.

"Oh, sweet …"

All the color had drained from the senator's face. Anakin patted her shoulder sympathetically.

"I'm convinced. Disaster follows you, Ilkhaine. It *knows you by name*."

"Oh, come on!" Lilandra cried. "I'm not responsible for this!"

"Well who else could be? Either you or Luke awakened some vindictive beast when you went to that temple last night," Jaina pointed out. "The Te'am Galatsia – heard of it. A map of the galaxy beneath the water. What's this?"

"A map of the galaxy," Luke groaned. "But how –?"

"It's impossible," Lilandra stated flatly, folding her arms over her chest. "It's just a coincidence that whoever sent this to us decided to do it the morning after Luke and I visited the lake."

Jaina glared skeptically at her. "Do you *really* believe that, Lil? You, of all people, should know by now that there's no such thing as coincidence."

"I refuse to believe that Luke and I are responsible for this somehow," Lilandra said with a haughty toss of her head.

"Well, there's only one way to find out," Luke interjected. Everyone turned to look at the Jedi Master, who had been uncharacteristically silent throughout the exchange.

"Lilandra, remember how we discovered last night that the map beneath the lake showed the galaxy exactly as it was at that moment?"

Lilandra nodded.

"Well … we realized that obviously, Alderaan was no longer present, correct?"

Lilandra nodded again, looking increasingly sour.

"All we need to do is check to see if this representation of the galaxy shows Alderaan. If it doesn't, then we accept all blame. If it does, then we'll just have to assume that this is someone's idea of a joke."

Jaina stepped forward, shooing Dave from the chair in front of the console, and drew up the cursor on the map. Tapping in some memorized coordinates, she tweaked the focus knob, and the image responded, finding immediately the planet she had requested. Or rather, finding the blank area labeled "Alderaan Asteroid Plain" in the place where twenty years ago there had been a planet.

"'Alderaan Asteroid Plain'," Jaina read, a dangerous edge in her voice. The group of Jedi turned and looked pointedly at Lilandra, who blanched and pressed her trembling lips together.

"It's okay, Lil," said Anakin with thinly veiled cynicism, "we don't blame you for returning mayhem to the academy."

"Yeah, we've survived worse – barely …" Jaina added with a grimace.

"Alright, that's enough," Luke barked, shaking off the last of his previous stupor and becoming his old business-like self. "We need to get to the bottom of this. Dave, I'll need about four copies of that map drawn up – durable printouts if you can. Anakin, Tara, I need you to analyze the message for information: origin coordinates, sender, anything you can find out about what it's for and why we've got it. Lilandra, you've got the history books – hit the library and start reading up on that lake. Read between the lines, if you have to. Jaina, you come with me. We're going to ask the other students how the flicker affected them. Maybe we can find something out that way.

"Everybody clear on where they're supposed to be right now?"

There was nervous nodding all around.

"Good. Let's get on with it."