The Legion Renewed

Chapter Thirteen

It had rained before when Luke had been on Dagobah, but never as hard as it was doing now. It was as if the skies had opened up, and giant cargo-holds of water were being dumped on the ground below. And the weather was not only soaking wet, it was also uncharacteristically cold. The rain couldn't penetrate the little stone hut, of course, but the chill and the dampness did.

Usually Briande slept outside. Since it was comfortable enough out there if one had a blanket, Luke had merely shrugged at her decision and let her be. He himself had spent many nights on that very same patch of moss. But tonight, the elements forced his student indoors. Even so, Luke thought he detected just the barest hesitation before she entered the small dwelling.

Ever since the night he had awakened to find Briande shivering with the Force, he had often checked on her while she was supposed to be sleeping, and each time he found her caught up in the same dream-like restlessness that she had been in before. If it was a dream, she couldn't seem to remember any of it when she woke up. But whatever it was, the cold, faint chill in the Force always accompanied it. Briande herself seemed to have no idea of what was happening. Whenever Luke questioned her about it, she always insisted that she felt fine and had been sleeping like a torrel in hibernation.

But despite her words, Briande seemed to grow more and more fatigued over the days until now she was on the edge of exhaustion, dangerously so. She tried to hide the outward signs, but Luke was too much of a Jedi not to see through the deception.

It was a puzzle Luke couldn't find the answer to. In truth, he wasn't even sure what the question was. There were too many pieces missing to get even a vague idea of the picture.

He had tried teaching Briande the techniques for deep-relaxation, but with no visible results. Even extending her sleep periods didn't seem to help. Something was draining her of her physical and mental energies, and he didn't know what it was.

Luke had not been at all pleased with Briande's performance with the seekers earlier in the day. She had relied too much on physical prowess. She used her physical senses, not the Force; she reacted with her brain, not with her feelings. She was just a fraction too slow, and a fraction too short of the mark. She would have done quite well for a non-sensitive. But for a Jedi Knight, "not bad" wasn't good enough. And over the course of the training, her abilities had deteriorated, not improved.

As for the verbal aspects of her training, Briande was a quick pupil. She could repeat any of the lessons Luke had given her, practically word for word. She learned them well-but only in the sense of committing them to memory and being able to recall them again later. They were not a part of her in the way that they were all a part of Luke. They meant nothing to her, and Luke didn't know how to help her make the connections.

He had intended to use the time tonight for a short lesson on the history of the Jedi, but Briande's fatigue was worse than ever, despite her protests to the contrary, and he realized that she probably already knew everything he wanted to say-possibly better than he did himself. He decided that the time would be put to much better use if she were to rest.

Skywalker glanced over at the corner where his student was undoing the strings of her bedroll. "You'd be much warmer over here," he suggested, nodding to the area in front of the fireplace where his own blanket was spread out.

She stopped struggling with a knot long enough to look at him. "I'll be fine here," she said.

Luke shrugged mentally and went over to help her with her bedroll. As he knelt down beside her, he put his hand on her back.

Briande stiffened at the unexpected touch, only slightly, but Luke caught it. He watched with surprise as she purposefully busied herself with the knot. His action had been made unconsciously, without thinking, but Briande's reaction suggested that there was more in the meaningless little gesture than there actually was.

"Briande, what's wrong?"

She glanced up at him for just a second, then looked away. "I'm sorry, Luke. It won't happen again."

"What are you afraid of?"

"Nothing. I-I just don't like to be touched, that's all."

"Don't like to be touched?" He stared at her.

"I wasn't ready for it that time. Like I said, it won't happen again."

Luke felt both awkward and perplexed. To him, touching was a natural and necessary thing. It satisfied a basic need that he thought was common to all humans. With the clarity of hindsight, he thought back to the few times during the course of Briande's training when they had touched, and realized that even on those occasions when necessity had required it, it had always been Luke who initiated the contact.

"Briande, I wasn't trying to seduce you."

"I know."

His hand wavered between reaching out to her and dropping to his side, until, deliberately, he laid his hand on her back again. But this time-as promised-there was nothing. Not a flicker of reaction. He withdrew his hand again.

"Why don't you like to be touched?" he asked.

"I just don't."

"There must be a reason."

Briande shrugged. "People don't touch me, I don't touch them." She bent over her knot again.

"Briande-" Luke began. He shifted his focus of attention for a moment, listening to an inward voice, then asked, "Briande, your father. Just how badly did Vader cripple him?"

He could see her muscles contract as she stopped her work. Then she nodded slowly, stoically, and turned around to face him. "Very perceptive of you, Luke. All of his limbs were completely severed. There wasn't even enough left to attach bionics to."

Luke was shocked. "Nothing? Surely they must have been able to do something..."

Briande looked away. "Oh, yes, there was something. They managed to give him some metal prosthetics. Not as functional as bionics, of course, but it still would have been enough if he'd-" She stopped suddenly, as if realizing the level of anger and bitterness that had crept into her voice.

"If he'd what?"

Briande Brellis cleared her throat, then continued on in a matter-of-fact voice. She was telling him only because he had asked, not because she herself wanted to share. If anything, she seemed to regret having told him so much already. "If he'd ever wanted to show any physical affection. I used to try to convince Brenna that he still loved us, that there was only something...locking him up inside since our mother was killed. I kept telling her that he'd get over it, but he never did. Except for lessons and studies, he never even spoke to us."

The Jedi looked at her with compassion. "It must have been very difficult for you," he said.

"Brenna and I still had each other."

"I thought you and your sister were enemies," Luke said, puzzled.

Briande shook her head. "Not always. Growing up, Brenna and I were more than just sisters. We became...compassiatos-what you might translate as 'best friends,' but more than that. We did everything together. We even-" She stopped and gave him a wry, rueful expression. "We even both started working for the Rebellion together."

Luke was surprised. But then he remembered that Darth Vader had once been Anakin Skywalker, before he turned to the Dark Side. When it was clear that Briande wasn't going to say anything more, Luke urged her on. "Tell me about her. What was she like?"

Briande was silent for another long moment and looked off into the distance. A slight, sad smile came as she remembered. It was only a trace of a smile, but Luke realized that it was the first genuine, unbidden one he had seen.

"Brenna was...a free spirit. Everything was a game to her. She even thought of our work as a game, receiving secret messages on behalf of the Rebellion and passing them on to people she didn't know. She didn't seem to realize how dangerous it was, and she ignored all my warnings to be careful. She took greater and greater risks, in exchange for more valuable information. More risks than I was willing to take. And she loved playing jokes on people. Sometimes when we were children, she would convince me to trade places with her. We knew each other and could imitate each other so well, that no one except our father could tell us apart, and sometimes we could even fool him. Once, she-" Briande's voice trailed off suddenly, and the almost-invisible smile vanished from her face.

"What?" Skywalker asked gently.

Briande turned away again. "One day it stopped being a game." Abruptly, she changed the topic. "You said you were going to tell me something about the original Jedi, Je-he-di, you said they were called."

Luke smiled slightly and shook his head, as much at his own actions as in answer to her change of topic. Even thinking in terms of Briande's sister, he'd been focusing on his and Briande's similarities, when he should have been focusing on their differences. Luke had never wanted for affection from his Aunt Beru. Even Uncle Owen, who had always been more reserved, had been a genuinely caring parent. If the only affection Briande had known was between her and her sister, it must have been an incredible blow for her when her sister turned to the Dark Side. No wonder she did so poorly in the training. She saw it as preparation to destroy the only human being she had ever loved. In fact, she had told him as much. She had told him that she didn't want to be here, that she was only here because she had to be. He just hadn't been listening.

As for the sense of comfort that human touch created, if Briande had never really experienced it, then she couldn't know that it was a good thing. He held out his hand to her. Sometimes, before moving ahead, it was necessary to go back to the beginning. "Briande, I want you to spend the night with me."

She whirled to face him, saw the hand, and panic came into her eyes as she realized what he meant to do. "I can't, Luke."

"Why not?"

"I-I just can't!" She turned away.

"I'm not asking you to do anything more. I just want you to spend the night with me, that's all." He put his hands on her shoulders. Now that he was looking for it, he could feel her body give a slight tremor-not quite a shudder-as he touched her.

She pulled away. "I don't want to."

"You're free to leave Dagobah any time you want," he replied.

She bit her lip at the ultimatum. "Luke, it was Darth Vader who did that to my father."

"I am not Darth Vader."

"You're his son."

Luke sighed. "Make up your mind, Briande. Stay with me, or abandon the training." He held his hand out to her again. It was her choice, but it had to be made. He couldn't teach her to move ahead until she unchained herself from her past.

Briande swallowed and slowly, tentatively, put her hand in his. She didn't look at him.

Luke clasped her cold, unresponsive fingers warmly and led her to the wall near the fireplace. She offered no resistance, but her movements were stiff and unnatural.

"This is silly," she stated.

"Maybe," Skywalker said, conceding no more than that. He applied a soft, insistent pressure on her shoulders, and Briande slid down with her back to the wall. Luke seated himself beside her comfortably.

"I still don't think this is such a good idea."

Luke said nothing, but wrapped his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his chest. He wanted to take her back to her girlhood and give her the warmth of the physical affection she had been deprived of.

"Luke, I-"

"Shhh..." he whispered. With his free hand, he began stroking the side of her head. Luke could feel her stiffness and her tension as she forced herself to endure his touch. He brought his hand to the top of her head and let it slide down slowly, over the smooth lump where her ear was, down to her neck, then lifted his hand to repeat the stroke in a slow, gentle rhythm. There was no thought of having her return the touch; she was already much too uncomfortable. He thought only of taking her back through the years to a time when she could accept her own needs. "Relax..." he said softly.

He could feel the conflict of her emotions. She submitted, but she did not relax. Everything seemed to churn within her so fast that Luke couldn't say for sure what she was feeling, but sensed that first one emotion and then another rose to the surface and spun away again. Luke tried to let a calm sense of warmth pervade the Force, to contrast against the whirlpool of emotions and the cold dreariness of the weather.

Perhaps this whole idea was absurd, after all, but something told Luke that he was accomplishing more now than in all the previous long hours of training put together.

"Luke-" Briande said tightly after a while.

"Yes?"

"I can't...take much more of this."

"Why not?"

"I'm too tired. I can't...fight it much longer. I need to get some sleep." There was an implication in her voice that they should each return to their own bedrolls.

Luke smiled to himself. "Close your eyes," he suggested.

He continued to stroke her hair.

For hours they remained like that. Briande's need for sleep became overpowering, but she was still fighting it. Luke had the feeling that sleep, when it did come for her, usually forced itself on her. She didn't know how to let herself drift into it naturally.

Eventually, Briande's physical weariness and the slow, compelling regularity of Luke's touch became too much for her. She began to slip into the depths of the subconscious, floating on the edge of it for just a few seconds before pulling herself out of it with a start. Luke sensed shock, and then a determination not to let go of her conscious self again. He waited.

But despite her resistance, sleep now had a foothold on her. Though she strove to stay awake, her depleted reserves of energy could not endure a sustained battle of wills, and her grip on objective reality began to slip. Slowly, the pull of her physical and mental need grew stronger, until she could no longer fight it, and her wakeful mind began to drift‑‑‑not into the powerful current she seemed to fear she would be caught in if she let go, but into the gentle, rocking waves of her own subconscious self.

Luke didn't stop brushing his hand along her head, but maintained his gentle rhythm to lull her deeper into sleep, creating little waves of movement to wash her farther and farther away from the shores of consciousness.

When he was finally certain that he could stop the movement without waking her, he still continued stroking her hair for a while longer yet, then gradually slowed his tempo and lightened his touch until he had stopped altogether. He bent his head down to look at her face.

What he saw surprised him.

Briande's cheeks were lined with the tracks of dried tears. She was floating peacefully now, but the force of her inward struggle had been so strong that it had manifested itself physically until, at last, she had cried herself to sleep. And yet, she must have wept in complete silence, for she hadn't made one sound, given one clue, to let Luke know.

There was more.

The soldier he had come to know was no longer there. The determination that usually hardened her face was gone. Her features were soft now, and she was sleeping peacefully. There was no trace of the restlessness that had seemed to possess her the nights before. Briande was a full-grown woman, but this was a child's face that rested against him, with a child's need to be held. He could feel her physical warmth through his tunic and the warmth of her presence through the Force. There was an aura that surrounded her, now, whose overall effusion was one of child-like innocence. The cold waters, the violent storms of conflict that surrounded her before, were gone.

This was what Briande must have been like as a child, what she could be like now. The other Briande, the gladiator-soldier, just didn't seem right now. The hard shell seemed like a false shield to cover up another, warmer but more vulnerable, person inside.

Briande shivered once, from a chill of the air, not of the Force. With one hand, Luke reached over to his bedroll for a blanket and pulled it over them both. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, then settled back to his own much-needed rest.

Just before he drifted off, he thought he heard someone calling his name. Luke sighed and wrapped his hands a little tighter around Briande's shoulders, pulling her closer. A few minutes later, his mind wandered to another time and another place, to a far-away desert world that somehow didn't seem quite as hot and barren as he remembered it...