Luke and Kess awoke to the sound of Nik retching in a lavatory. Kess rushed to get up, but Luke stopped her with a gentle hand. His eyes were at the air, his senses stretched to the other room. Half sitting up, Kess paused and tried to clear her mind with sleep and worry.

"He's embarrassed," Luke whispered. "You sense it?"

She didn't think to sense out for Nik's mood before she jumped to go take care of him. Now that she paid attention, she could sense it. Nik's soul was bruised purple with shame. This painful experience of an alcoholic aftermath, of his being in this foreign place he didn't like, of being ousted by his wife and son, of needing daycare by his little sister... this violently painful moment was a punishment Nik felt he deserved.

It took some time, but they waited and listened with wrinkled brows of sympathy until the man recovered and went back to bed, but now Kess sat up in theirs too shaken to go back to sleep. It was almost morning anyway. "He needs a bacta tank."

Luke set his arm back under the pillow. "Yes, but It might be better if we keep him out of the public. The longer the press doesn't find out he's back, the easier his recovery will be."

Kess considered that.

"Give him the option," Luke recommended. "I can handle the Kilrathi arguments today. Take the hopper and take him to Iktri for a few hours. Get him some peace quiet."

Her eyes widened with hope, "That's a good idea."

Luke rolled onto his back and grinned a little. "That's what we got the place for. And here. Let him get comfortable in a personal space." He sat up and rubbed the sleep from his face.

"You sure you don't need me today?" She cringed gently.

"Nah, I got it. Besides, we're going to have to get used to tag-teaming this stuff soon enough, in the office and out of it." He pulled his feet out of bed and hopped onto them. "I have a feeling a whole lot more pre-training days are coming up."

As he moved to the bathroom, he caught her uncertain eyes. She wanted to spend time taking care of her brother, but she didn't want to duck out of her responsibilities either. Luke grinned, "Go hang out with your brother for a day. It'll do you both some good."

Kess did convince Nik to go to a clinic for a bacta dunk. She used her fame to arrange a droid-operated taxi and a private back-entrance access to the public outlet so no one would see him. She also shrouded him in Luke's old black robe and cowl just in case someone spotted him through the speeder window. Nik didn't like it. He said it made him feel like he was trying to be the Emperor again, but Kess won the argument that if anyone knew he was back on Coruscant, a whole bunch of people would come out of the woodwork and try to make him become the Emperor again.

By 1000, they were in the hopper and off to Iktri. For the two hour jump, she didn't try to get him to talk, but he did anyway.

"It's not that I can't stop," he said. "I don't sit there and fight myself whether I should have another. It just seems easier to procrastinating facing the real world, y'know?"

Kess vaguely understood. She never had a drinking problem, but she used to have other, milder, not-physically-addictive habits that she, once upon a time, over-used just so she didn't have to face the truth.

"How did you do it?" He asked with genuine curiosity.

"How did I do what?"

"Get through training? How did you turn into this? You're so together now. So grown up. It's like you're ten years older than you were a year ago."

Kess thought on that for a long minute and didn't really plan her words before they came out of her mouth. "I guess I realized my standard method living wasn't going to help me get what I really wanted. Sure, I liked partying and blowing up when a repair didn't go the way it should've. All that was easier than facing the truth that I didn't have anybody for my own, or facing the truth that the repair didn't go right because it was me that fucked up something somewhere."

Nik grinned with wistful sympathy. He stared at the streaking of hyperspace.

"At first I tried to do it all," Kess admitted. "Tried to pick up the good habits without dropping the bad ones. I guess I was still trying to keep them in reserve so I could use them for comfort or something. But I realized - not consciously mind you, I can only see it now that I'm looking back on it - I realized there wasn't enough room for it all. And I would get scared. I was walking away from an old trick that I knew would work and started this new habit that hardly worked at all. Seemed like a waste of time. Like I wasn't really accomplishing anything. " Now she too stared at hyperspace and into memory. "So I'd meditate and then go out with my friends afterwards, and I'd end up staying out later than I would have otherwise, later than I should've, just because it felt like it was helping me prepare for the next day. But it wasn't. It was having the opposite effect. Eventually, I started burning out on it all, and I'd meditate like I was supposed to, and stay home because I was just too damn exhausted to do anything else, and that's when it started to work. Not a lot. Not well. But it started to work. So instead of rushing to go out, I'd just meditate a few minutes longer before I went to bed. And the more I did it, the better I got at it, and the better it worked. But then," she flashed a smile at her memory, "I still wouldn't quit the bad habit. I wanted to keep it handy, like for emergencies or something. I didn't want to let it go."

"So what'd you do?"

"I guess, eventually, I realized I had to get better at it. I couldn't do both. I didn't have enough time to get any real benefits out of either. And I hadn't seen it for myself yet that meditating worked. All I knew was that everyone else told me it worked, science and theology . . . and Luke . . . they all insisted this other habit was better. And I didn't believe 'em. All I knew is that the first habit had a dead end. I knew that because I saw it with my own eyes." She sighed and brightened a little. "So I decided to turn it around. Give it some real effort. I decided that being scared meant I was doing something right. Because being scared means you're doing something different. It means you're changing something. And you can't get better at anything if you're not changing it up."

Nik absorbed that for several minutes, and then he closed his eyes to enjoy the quiet of hyperspace.

"I also had Luke," she murmured finally. "I mean, yeah, I was in love with him the whole time, but we never did anything about it. And any time I had a shaky moment when the new habit wasn't working well enough and I fought from falling back into the old ones . . . y'know that time when you feel like your straddling a canyon and the mountains you're standing on are slowly moving your feet apart in both directions? Those times. You want to jump backward because it feels safer, and you know you don't have the skill to jump forward, and you don't have any proof that you will ever have that skill. All you can do is stand there and cringe, scared out of your wits you're just going to fall right down into nothing. . . ." she rubbed her lips. "And he'd stop being a Jedi Master for a minute, he'd stop being my Commander, for just a minute, and he'd catch me." Her voice fell to a distant whisper. "Every damn time."

Nik grinned over, having no interest in interrupting her deep reverie, and just watched her stare out at hyperspace.

"Y'know the weirdest part? And I'm only seeing it now that I'm looking back on it. . . . but to put it terms of that 'straddling a canyon' metaphor: Luke caught me every time, but he didn't throw me forward, and he didn't throw me back. All he did was keep me from falling into the canyon, hold me steady until I wasn't shaky anymore, and then he'd let go so I could try again."

Kess didn't say anything else after that. Nik's eyes were back on hyperspace and he too was mentally laying over his own history onto that 'straddling a canyon' metaphor. She noticed his lips parted and eyes open at this. She sensed out to be sure of it. Nik was finally looking at his life, past and possible future, just as it was. No judgment. No regret. No hope. Just the truth.

Quietly, she went to the back of the ship for the rest of the flight. It was its own kind of meditation, she knew, looking at the macro landscape of one's life, habits, youth, family, work, friends, horrors, happiness . . . all compared to the unrealistic dreams you once had when you were a kid. Only looking at this macro landscape of one's own life, without judgment or regret, could you see the different patterns: the things you did that held you back, and the things you need to change before you could move forward.

It was another gorgeous green day on Iktri. Kess made a mental note how much easier it was to land a slow, clumsy, used RV than a fast ass-on-fire A Wing, and she considered a new are where she could step out of her own comfort zone.

Nik already seemed to be doing better when they landed in the field. When he stepped down the ramp to look at the grass and trees and distant mountains, the man looked like he was getting a booster shot of vitamins.

"Where is everything?"

"We still have to build it."

They had both been on the occasional weekend trip to wetter planets, but Nik had never seen such a great space of raw, lush nature before. He looked a little intimidated by it when he stepped respectfully out and looked around.

"Holy shit," he smiled up at the sky, then pointed like a little kid. "Birds!"

Kess waved him off. "Go walk around some. I got a warning light on the dash and I want to check it out. " She was lying, but he couldn't detect that yet. Still, she returned to the cockpit and ran a diagnostic program just to look busy. Nik saw her disappear back into the ship and blinked a tiny spike of fear that she was leaving him alone in all these...plants. He worried about which flowers were poisonous, if the rustling of field creatures were the kind that attacked, and stepped carefully and slowly, trying not to crush the grass as he moved.

Curiosity drew him to the closest tree line where he stared up at a towering pine; whispering quietly in the wind and waggling its fingers as if saying hello.

"Well, you're a big fella, aren't ya?" It felt like the tree was a wise elder. Nik found himself stepping forward and placing a gentle palm on the soft, reddish bark.

Kess eventually peeked out a porthole to see what he was doing and found him mind-melding with the tree. She smiled at the memory. "If you could manipulate the Force any way you wanted, what would you do?"

"I'd hear what the ocean had to say."

She smiled and returned to the interior of the ship, muttering to herself. "By all means, Nik, listen."

She spent her time reading the old operator's manuals to the hopper and began to think of ways she could customize it better to their needs. Nik came bounding back into the ship on a full run. "Kess! Kess!"

She hardly had the chance to sit up with alarm before he burst into the main compartment. His brown eyes were bright like twin suns, his face was the smile of a child, and he pointed back behind him with amazed glee. "There's a water ocean out there!"

"He was like a little kid at a playground," Kess reported to Luke that night as she pulled off her boots.

And Luke grinned to hear it. Nik clearly still had stress and struggles to work through, but his mood was significantly better than it was when he arrived, and vastly better than that raucous week after the battle.

"That is the really nice thing about Iktri," Kess murmured thoughtfully. "It has such a replenishing effect on people."

His eyes hung on nothing as he unbuttoned his shirt by the bed.

She looked over her shoulder at him. "Maybe we should get Leia out there some time. Make her take a Benduday off."

His brows lifted and his chin nodded. "That's not a bad idea."

Kess continued to report the events of her day to him:

She and Nik commed Leia together that their father had been informed of the engagement-no, it did not go well-but the Lord Chamberlain was clear to do her press release. Leia said she would use it to their advantage in that the release would include the news of Nik's return as, "just here for the wedding and its preparation. Not here to engage in politics at all."

Nik strongly approved of that. He was even more relieved when Leia gave him a contact in her office in case anyone approached him about anything political. This way, he could pass either pass the contact info and not get involved, or pass the info along to the contact and the Lord Chamberlain's office would handle it from there. Either way, Nik could stay out of it.

The contact? Yana Dietrich. Kess asked, "You're not giving this to her just because she's my old roommate and First Lady, are you?"

"No," Leia said shortly. "I'm giving it your old roommate and First Lady because she is the most experienced in Jedi matters out of everyone in my office." And that was the end of that. "Except me." She added with a shrug of her head. Then the woman turned the topic to more sensitive matters. "Nik, I don't want to pry, but what would you like me to put in the press release about why Gina and Ben aren't here with you?"

Nik stiffened to the question. Kess and Leia gave him all the time he needed, but it didn't take long for him to shrug and shake his head. "I guess, say... they're staying home to provide stability for Ben."

Leia nodded distantly. "Anything I can do to help?"

"You're already doing it," Nik muttered appreciatively.

Leia smiled warmly through the comm screen. "Well, you're about to be family." She admitted with a sad shrug, "and we don't have a lot of that left."

Kess shared this story with Luke that night to illustrate her suspicion, "She's lonely out there."

Luke nodded as he continued to get ready for bed, worried, and vowed to start working on a plan to take care of the rest of his family too.

"There's something else that was weird," Kess said. "On Iktri. He was thrilled to see the water ocean, but he wouldn't go near it. I tried to get him to hike down to the beach with me, but he flat refused. It was like... it was like he was looking at the water as though it was the alcohol he's trying to quit. As if the ocean itself was the enemy. And all the giddiness and peace he'd developed so quickly just seemed to dribble right down the drain again."

"War fatigue." Luke sighed as he slumped down onto the bed. "PTSD. Battle shock. Whatever you want to call it. After what they put him through, I'd be surprised if he didn't suffer from it."

She rolled onto her side and propped her head in her palm. "How do you cure it?"

Biggs was panicking, "I can't shake him! I can't shake him!"

Luke rubbed his eye with the flat of his fingers and heard it as clearly as if he were wearing the helmet right now. "When I figure that out," he looked over at her, "I'll let you know."

Kess absorbed that with a faint nod. She absorbed the sudden tremor in his mood and the look in his eyes. And she knew exactly how he felt.

Cheenan was smug, "Congratulations, Kess. You're going to be a mother."

"Yeah," Kess pressed an uncomfortable mouth and nodded again. "Please do."