Unprecedented
It was like a key turning an old-fashioned lock, a piece of a missing puzzle snapped into place, an answer to a question that had lain in wait for days in the back of her mind.
"I knew it," Leia whispered.
Dripping muddy swamp-water onto the Falcon's freshly-cleaned deck, Luke's hair had slipped into his eyes and his shoulders hung low. Those earnest eyes, dimmed with fatigue and knowledge, were somehow decisive and troubled at the same time. His eyes reminded her of her fathers', Leia realized with a flash, the weight and the hope and the fear present in equal measure. Optimism under pressure. Hope shrouded in favor of pragmatism.
"I don't get it. How do you know that he's lying?" Han asked into the stillness, his deep baritone like a blade through grass, startling where it usually soothed.
Luke hesitated, then stepped closer to them. "You're not going to like it."
Even now, even in the midst of this ridiculous spectacle of bloodlines and mysticism, Leia found a spark of humor in Luke's reticence to admit to Han his… what? His particular brand of magic? His colors and auras? To a man of a cruel, tangible universe like Han Solo, it was like her brother had started speaking Thalisi, something completely foreign to him.
Letting her smile grow like a vulnerable sapling in torrid terrain, she marveled at the two men before her. So different and yet so very similar in all the important ways, not the least being their adaptability to new situations and their general need to protect the ones they loved, which incidentally included one another.
Warmth suffused her body, and it triggered a sense of disbelief in what she was feeling. Love blossoming, in the middle of a late-evening discussion about the lies of an exiled Jedi master?
Strange. Where was her anger? Where was the deep well of personal injury that inspired resilience of character? It felt… missing in action: a suspicious absence from its usual perch on the forefront of every thought, every motivation, every solution to every problem. She was not angry by nature, but she wielded it to survive and to fight a war to which she had committed her entire soul.
And now she couldn't seem to find that deep, dark well. Very strange.
"Ahhh, this is some of your shit, isn't it?" Han answered for himself, interrupting her musings with his characteristic index finger of attack, a glower on his face but a lightness in his eyes that told her he was only mildly annoyed.
She catalogued the response, further intrigued by his lack of reaction. Where was his anger? Luke was the only one in the hold who seemed affected, like a creature under pressure by the constraints of time.
"It's not shit," Luke defended, smacking Han's finger out of his face. "Put that thing away before someone gets hurt."
"Try and make me," Han grumbled, throwing Leia a quick look, as if to gauge her response. When he saw her sapling-smile, he returned it with a suggestive quirk to his lips.
You perceived it through the Force?
Luke nodded at Chewie's low rumble, their great harnesser, their grounded giant. "His color—his energy—felt different when you asked him about Bail. I couldn't tell you then; he's really powerful, and he would know. So I had to wait until he was out of… out of range, I guess."
Her smile faded, replaced with a troubled contemplation. Oh, but she should want to confront the master, to demand the answers she so desperately sought. She had overreacted in thinking he was holding that knowledge hostage earlier, but not anymore.
And it was fine. It wasn't good, not by any stretch of the imagination, but the sparks and embers and flames didn't have the tinder they needed to flare into life. She was like the damp earth that had seeped from Luke's boots into the Falcon's decking.
"He's manipulating us," she said. "Or trying to, at least."
Luke nodded. "I wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't—"
"—attacked her for being human?" Han supplied.
"Not attacked," he defended. "He did overstep, but it gave me time to see him more clearly. And he is definitely lying about meeting your father, Leia."
The jocular air of the hold abruptly changed; it now felt colder, barer. Han was suddenly on his feet, pacing like a vronsknr in a cage, Chewie lifted his tankard of a spirits glass and drained it, and Luke stood frozen, watching their reactions with tired eyes and a defeated heart.
And Leia… Leia wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel. Yoda, an unjust teacher, a liar, had warned her of her anger, of the destruction that could come to bear if she let her emotions run wild. And she felt some anger, of course; she didn't like being lied to. But it wasn't the familiar inferno to which she was accustomed.
Instead, the deepening worry she felt was like a bucket falling in a dark well. She could understand lying to nurture hope for a better galaxy; she had done that herself in the Senate. In the very fringes of her capacity to empathize, she could even understand why someone might be willing to separate a set of Force-sensitive twins in the infancy of the Galactic Empire. If it had been her decision, she would not have made the same choice, of that she was sure. Sometimes before she fell asleep at night, she would imagine a set of small children running through the Aldera Palace, hand-in-hand, a little featureless blonde boy and the petite princess she had once been. Straining, she would try to focus on the children, even as their images wavered, often lost to sleep before she could discern more.
The image tore a small hole in her heart, and although she tried to patch it over with strength and stubbornness, the hurt was deep and sometimes difficult to ignore.
That was how she knew her choice would not have been the same as Yoda's, or Obi-Wan's, or whomever had been at the helm during the moment of their separation. The idea of having been raised with Luke was too enticing a prospect for her to ignore.
Yet she could comprehend why another might have made it. She could understand the fist of righteousness that made such decisions seem necessary in times of great peril. With a heavy heart, she remembered some of the previous years' hard choices, all the beings who had died as a recourse to history. For the life of her, though, she could not understand why her father had agreed to it. It seemed entirely out of character. But that was a different, more complex question for another time.
"My biggest question is when I can kill him," Han said.
She shook her head and reached for his hand, pulling him bodily down to once again sit next to her. "Hey, Commander," she said. "Cool your jets. We need a plan that doesn't include murder."
There must be a reason for his untruths.
She smiled sadly at the Wookee's faith in his old friend. "Unfortunately, I think you're right. But I also think that reason involves our real parents and that he's not likely to tell us why."
Luke exhaled in a rush. "I was afraid you were going to say that."
"I thought Kenobi told you about your parents," Han said in Luke's general direction, his fingers squeezing Leia's next to her thigh. "I know it wasn't a lot but—"
"He told me about my father," Luke corrected. "Our mother is a complete mystery."
Han turned to Leia before Luke had even finished the sentence. "So you think Short Stuff knew your dad, uh. Your father, Leia. Bail."
Leia nodded. "And I think my father is connected to our biological mother. Obi-Wan said our father died in the Clone Wars, so the secrecy has to be about her."
Luke seemed to find movement in the stillness that followed her pronouncement. He trailed mud into the holochess bench and leaned dirty elbows on the dejarik board.
"If that's true, then we need to confront him about it. We only have a few more days here. We have to know why he's lying."
He would not simply lie, Chewie rumbled from the corner of the hold. There must be more—
"No," Han interrupted, his finger reappearing but this time not in playfulness. "This isn't just a lie, pal. It's a lie he has committed his life to. He's not just going to roll over and tell us what we wanna know."
Part of Leia flooded with warmth when Han said we with such vehemence; it hadn't yet grown old when he included himself in their crusade. But another part of her found truth in the words he spoke, the futility in trying to discern more from the master than what he wanted to share. Han was right. This endeavor had consumed Yoda from before they had been born. It was not something he would lay down simply because they asked. Or threatened.
"I'm so sorry, Leia," Luke said, grabbing her free hand in both of his. "I really did think he would help us."
"You and the furball, kid. Leia and I knew better."
"The only reason you wanted to come here," Luke continued despite Han's impertinent comment, "was to learn more about your father and… and there's more here, you were right, but…"
He trailed off and she witnessed the transformation in his eyes as the hope became dirty, as the blue became stagnant like the swamp-water outside.
Her anger had fled, and it appeared his hope had, as well. And that was unacceptable to her, to see him so fragile that one revelation too many could hurt him so deeply.
She had been wondering where her anger had gone, and she finally had her answer. Foolish and impossible as it might seem, it felt like Luke had stolen it, turning it on himself.
She let that ridiculous thought go, let it evanesce into the ether of his colors and his energies, the mist she couldn't see and didn't understand. Emotion wasn't transferable, of course. She knew that.
A set of small children running through the Aldera Palace, hand-in-hand, a little featureless blonde boy and a petite princess. The image appeared before her eyes and then was gone again in an instant.
"Hey," she said, turning her palm over to clasp his hand. "We know what we know and we know what we don't know. That is something, at least."
That does not sound like you know anything, Little Princess.
"It's more than what we knew yesterday."
The hold dissolved into quiet once again, and Leia slid her hand out of Luke's, thinking hard about what she wanted to do, what she felt obligated to do, and what the right move might be. She fell into a familiar pattern, into strategy, and it was as if she had been transported back to her fencing bout days, into slick competition and seamless connection between body and mind. She imagined a larger dejarik board than the one on which she rested her hands, with opponents of free will and extraordinary abilities. She imagined an enormous battle between good and evil, her war against the Empire, and then another one happening simultaneously, with the eviscerated Jedi Order and two small children waging a war against… who?
"We shouldn't say anything to him," she said into her mental bout, which prompted Han's fine imitation of an avian squawk from outside the hulls.
"No," he said. "We should leave and not come back."
We should calmly ask him to explain his actions—
She interrupted Chewie in order to answer both their suggestions at once. "If we leave, we will never know anything more than we do now. And we've already established that he isn't going to answer our questions. He has a reason to lie, and therefore a reason not to tell us why he is lying."
Luke's voice was but a gloomy shadow of himself. "And meanwhile we just accept that we're going nowhere? That this is a waste of time?"
"Is it?" she countered. "Luke, you levitated objects on your first day of training. Have you ever done that before?"
His lack of an answer was answer enough.
"So what are you thinking, Worship?" Han said, still crossed, still glaring. "Do nothing? That doesn't sound like something you'd do."
She caught his eye, the corner of her lips lifting into the smallest of smiles.
"Of course not. I'm thinking we should interrogate him for all he's worth," she said. "But we do it covertly and get Luke as much training as we can."
—0—
Hours later Han lay awake, staring into the darkness of their cabin. He wanted to sleep, wanted the blissful quiet and release of a good night's rest, but was left bereft by an odd itch that he couldn't seem to scratch. It nagged at him like a gnat-fly bite.
The cabin wasn't silent: the hum of the environmental stabilizers drifting up from the decking, filtering air softly moving throughout the space. But it felt impossibly loud, his breathing, his heartbeat, the words on his lips… it was too quiet and all he could think was—
She shouldn't have been so calm.
The conversation in the hold had been revelatory, even if it had led to more questions than answers. But lately every conversation felt that way. It was like trying to reassemble an engine destroyed by a direct strike from the scattered and burnt pieces lying on the ground. They didn't even know what type of engine they were assembling here, and it was mystery on top of mystery all the time now.
And still Leia had been cool as a klucumber, reacting to Luke's little announcement, like...
… like she had known what he was going to say.
And that sure as hell didn't sit well with him. Leia was the one person he thought he totally understood.
Ah, fuck this.
He rolled over and softly jostled the tiny woman to his right, trying to wake her without startling her. "Leia."
She exhaled and then her eyes slowly opened, searching the darkness before they landed on him, sleepy brown in a pale landscape. "Hmm?"
It threatened to distract him, the way she looked at him: half-awake, disheveled, in his bed, in his shirt, but he fought for a clearer mind in the face of such a beautiful presentation.
"You're too okay about this stuff," he said.
She furrowed her brow. "What stuff?"
He laughed, hush-quiet, in disbelief. "Short Stuff. The lying. Luke being all out-of-sorts. That stuff."
She blinked at him, confused, making the same face she'd made last year on Tralph when she had been translating the citizen's obscure language into Arrelufee and from there into Basic. The crease in her forehead smoothed after a quiet moment and the familiar sharpshooter brown alighted on him.
"I'm not okay," she said. "I don't like that he's keeping things from us."
"Right, but you aren't yelling, or demanding answers, or marching over to the lizard's house. That's not like you."
"I don't yell."
He cocked an eyebrow and waited.
"Except at you," she capitulated. "And not anymore."
Han's lips turned up despite himself and he reached a hand to brush against the braid running down the side of her head. "Stop hedging, Leia. Spill."
She rolled her eyes but relented. "I don't know why I'm not angry. I mean, I am angry, but it's not… what I've felt before."
"What did you feel before?"
"I don't know."
"You have to know. You're the one feeling it."
She made to turn over, away from him and back to sleep. "Do we have to talk about this now?"
"Yeah, we do," he said, slipping his hand over her waist and keeping her put. "We do, because it's freaking me out. You've been all locked up tight for three days and now it's just fine? Now, when you know he's lying?"
He didn't understand it at all. It seemed like something big had changed and he wasn't sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing or a nothing, but it was there, and he didn't like not knowing what was going on; that was how he'd convinced himself she wasn't in love with him way back when, and it had only caused them problems.
Had he missed something important during that first lesson? He'd been watching them like a nestle-hawk, eyes trained on their movements, and he'd seen Luke succeed, seen Leia fail. He'd even witnessed how she had reacted to that failure, her muddy trek to the 'fresher, the frustration in her shoulders and twist to those beautiful lips.
He had been prepared to soothe and listen to things he didn't understand in service to helping her figure her shit out. But then she'd come out of the 'fresher and it had been like she'd been replaced by a droid. And while his real-water 'fresher was a true luxury aboard a ship the size of the Falcon—and particularly on wet, muddy, disgusting Dagobah—it wasn't powerful enough to lighten the load of that baggage.
When they were faced with Luke's news and the hydrospanner had come down, she'd been like a smooth rock in the middle of a heavy stream. Passively immovable but stronger than the current.
It confused the hell out of him.
"I think part of it is that Luke was right," she finally spoke. Her words were soft, her eyes even softer. "His progress after only one day of training is remarkable. We've been doing combat drills for weeks and he hasn't had a breakthrough like that at all. He needs Yoda."
"Okay," he said, a placeholder until he could decide on a response. "But what about what you need?"
"I need?"
"You didn't have a breakthrough today. If you can't get the answers you want, why are you going through with this?"
She grew quiet, reflective, and Han gave her the space to think through the heavy question he'd asked. He understood Luke's perspective on staying here on Dagobah. He understood dealing with untrustworthy people to achieve a goal that would be otherwise impossible. He'd done the same thing in the Imperial Navy as a fresh-faced cadet. Sometimes you just had to deal with the bullshit to get what you wanted. But Leia didn't want this goal. Unless something else had changed, he couldn't see what was in it for her.
"I don't know what you're asking me," she admitted at length. "I need to know what my father knew. I need to be able to fight with the Alliance. I need you. That's what I need."
He could feel the tone change, the darkness that loomed, and he didn't want that, either. So he changed tack completely, as only he could do with her.
"Glad to hear I made the top three."
"You always do."
He liked that answer best of all and leaned in to brush his lips against the silk of her temple in answer. He didn't want to cause her to withdraw back into her anger, but he was worried some of that nonsense about not feeling emotions was going to infect the relationship they'd built. And that really was bullshit, because Leia was too good to fall into whatever "dark side" mumbo-jumbo Short Stuff liked to sell her.
"So when you say you need me...?" he prompted, murmuring against her hair.
Her hand slipped between them, pressing against his chest, and he swore he could hear her smile. "I do occasionally need a pilot."
He hummed and then trailed his nose through the sweet-smelling strands of her tumbling braids, the ones he'd tried to ignore earlier. "You think it's cute to pretend you don't need me, but it's not," he chided. He found her earlobe, pressed a kiss there. "A lesser man might take offense."
"Take offense?" she repeated with a soft laugh. "Am I sleeping with Threepio now?"
He pulled away sharply, wrinkling his nose. "Fuck, woman. We need to work on your dirty talk."
A light peal of laughter answered him and he was instantly infected by it, this mood of hers, the way she seemed unencumbered by her own worries. He settled them down, wrapped himself around her like the shield he wanted to be for her, the one she probably didn't need, and they tumbled to sleep together, lighter for the conversation they hadn't really had.
—0—
"Where is your focus, young Skywalker?"
Luke huffed and redoubled his efforts, ignoring the heat of the swamp around him, the sharp eye of Yoda, the careful presence of his sister as she watched him attempt to repeat the successes of the day before. It was warmer today, and more humid, and the mountain that was the Force seemed much steeper: the path more rugged, the destination less clear. He hadn't slept well the night before, shrouded as he was in questions he couldn't answer, and had found the sound of Leia's laugh in the middle of the night annoying and kind of disturbing.
So he'd left the Falcon and tried to find peace in the same way Leia always seemed to find it: an early-morning run. But the desolate, murky landscape had felt so incredibly lonely and the water had been so bogged down with mud, that every stride was met with a suckling sound that had disturbed him just as much as what had made him leave the Falcon in the first place.
"Concentrate," his master said. "Feel, you must."
He tried to make the stones in front of him move, he tried to replicate his childlike astonishment, but they remained stubbornly still, a disappointing sight on this irredeemable day and his mood darkened further.
Where was his light?
He felt clouded, hazy, unseen. Around base, he was widely known as an eternal optimist, a kind of human sun around which others revolved. He was somehow a product of his desert upbringing as much as he was a repudiation of Tatooine's slavery and unjust ways, and that was fine by him. He liked brightening a room; it was a kind of superpower outside of his Force-sensitivity.
But the clouds had rolled over him today, and everything had refracted into mist and darkness from the second he'd entered the Falcon's hold the night before. He'd felt burdened by a listless anxiety that, while not totally unfamiliar to him, wasn't usually present in his day-to-day life. He saw futility in the shadows. He saw hopelessness among the boughs of Dagobah's sprawling bogs.
Focus, he urged himself as he tried to open himself up to the beautiful golden light of the Force. When he'd done this yesterday, he'd felt as if he had been embraced by warmth, like he was fulfilling a destiny laid out for him. Surely it hadn't been a fluke.
But the stone still did not move.
"I can't," he gasped, suddenly too tired to continue. "It's... impossible."
"Impossible only today, it is?" Yoda said. "Strong in the Force, you are. Always it is with you. Harder, you must train."
"Harder!" he laughed without humor. "I am training as hard as I can!"
"Stop pressuring him," Leia said. "Perhaps he needs rest."
Luke was thankful for Leia's support, but it did nothing to improve his mood. The realization that Yoda had lied to them was tempering his focus, burdening every single thing he had tried to do today. It was like a lightsaber hung over his head, not descending so much as threatening, and he was endlessly aware of his master's duplicity.
You lie.
Yoda's words from the other night, and they rang in Luke's head, as much a recrimination to their author as they were a memory.
Perhaps the Force was angry—could the Force sense emotions?—or perhaps it was him and his sour disposition. Whatever the case, he was too tired to do much but stare at the stone and pretend to try.
"A Master, are you?" Yoda asked Leia. "Know how to train the Jedi, do you?"
Leia sighed and shook her head. "I know when Luke has had enough. I know how to respect his boundaries."
He tossed a half-heartedly grateful glance her way. Her fatigues were less muddy today than they had been yesterday, since their run this morning had been shorter and through drier territory. Her tank had come untucked on one side and her coronet of braids was frizzy around her head. Her stance was wide and her arms were crossed, having chosen not to sit on the ground with Luke, and he couldn't help but think how similar Han and Leia were in pure habit by now.
The midnight peal of laughter sounded in his ears and his grateful glance turned into a scowl.
"To me you came for training," the master said. "My own counsel will I keep on how to proceed."
Leia brushed a hand over her ruined braids and simply murmured a quiet fine.
In any other situation, Luke would have laughed at her typical obstinance. As it was, he was firmly mired in his own misery, a pixellated mess, fragmented and unfocused, knowing he had to pull himself together sometime soon or he was going to ruin everything for them.
"Your turn, it is," Yoda said.
Leia's eyes ticked to Luke's and then back to the master. With a curt nod, she sat down across from Luke at the gathering of stones, crossed her legs, and settled her hands on her knees.
"Why not?" she muttered to herself, in another extraordinarily Han-ish manner.
He stifled a small, frustrated laugh and then focused on his sister as she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. He had the sudden image of a dune-serpent coiling, preparing to strike.
"Flows from the Force, your power does," Yoda said. "Focus only on that, you should."
Luke wanted to roll his eyes. Yoda kept saying things like that, and today these words felt like a high-pitched sound that only served to trigger a headache. The repetition, the ongoing drone of the same words, over and over and over again.
It didn't even mean anything! What Luke felt from the Force wasn't power, it was energy. Warmth. Yoda spoke about the Force like something to be harnessed, a crop to yield from work, a choice to be made. For Luke it felt more like... a surrender.
But what did he know?
The stones remained as motionless for Leia as they had been for him, and Luke felt a twinge of satisfaction at the sight. Don't be petty, he reprimanded himself. She's your sister. But his mood was so foul that even the one familial connection he had felt hollow to him. Leia didn't even want to be here. She'd made that abundantly clear. Her mind was on the Alliance and on Han—it had been for months, years even. She had a wealth of connections in her circle, people who adored her, a man who would follow her to hell and back if she asked him, too.
You're jealous.
The thought came unbidden but with velocity and mass. He'd been alone at the beginning of this journey, had fought tooth-and-nail for every centim he'd gained toward his goal, and Leia had just waltzed in, uninvited—
"You."
Opening his eyes, he found Yoda looking directly at him. "What?"
He turned to Leia, who was entirely engaged in the unmovable pile of rocks, and then back to his master, confused.
"Angry, are you? Jealous?"
Leia furrowed her brow but otherwise didn't move, and he felt entirely alone in his sudden discomfiture. "I'm… it's been a long day, Master Yoda. I'm just frustrated."
"Long days Jedi have not, you think?"
"No, of course not," he defended. "But it isn't easy being here, learning so quickly."
The master narrowed his eyes. "Time, we have not. Patience, you must have, but time… no."
Luke exhaled and leaned back on his hands, unwinding his legs and looking to the dreary sky. The clouds seemed to thicken, and his whole body sagged into the dirt, falling silent as he glanced at the stone pit.
Nothing had moved, and he chanced a glance to his sister, expecting her usual inscrutable aura, the way it whipped around her in terrifying plumes of fire when it wasn't soldered to her body in a tight line, like a silhouette on top of a silhouette.
But she wasn't either of those things. She was a pale, sedate mist, a calm pool, a wide Tatooine sky.
The sight startled him from his miserable shroud, unpinned a mass of surprise bottled up inside his chest, made him sit up in wonder.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked, suddenly intrigued.
Leia didn't look at him but she did manage a soft murmur. "You don't want to know."
Han, then, he thought but chose not to say in Yoda's presence. "You look calm."
"I'm in a good mood. Are you trying to ruin it?"
"No."
"Well, you're doing a spectacular job of it, anyway."
He huffed and again lowered himself to his elbows, now effectively lying down on the dirt next to the pile of intractable stones. "Fine," he said. "It was just a question."
"Understand you two, I do not," Yoda groused. "A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. Acting like your friend, you are."
Luke's anger flared at the slight to Han and he struggled to contain it, remembering that Leia wanted to use Yoda's pride against him while not letting on that they knew of his deception. But it felt so ridiculous to pretend that he wasn't angry at him, wasn't furious on Leia's behalf and at the very clear negligence everyone had had about what was best for the twins' upbringing. He hated lies. Hated them. And here he was, listening to them as if none of it mattered.
"There are worse things I could be, Master Yoda."
Luke closed his eyes and tried to find his wayward sunniness. It was exhausting, feeling this way, the wariness and surliness stuck in his chest like tar, mucking up the naturally-bright flow of the Force through him.
"Yes, good," he heard.
Encouraged, he took a deep breath and let himself fall into the world of sensations and emotions, the nestle of sweet relief that felt like a bacta salve against sunburned flesh. Cool, clear air breathed into his lungs, a mist of comfort pitter-patting against his skin. It settled behind his eyelids—what he was starting to think of as energies—and he tried to let it all go, the anger, the frustration, the pain and the darkness.
It was so difficult to let go of those negative forces, like trying to remove wet, twisted clothes from his body. The frustration clung to him stubbornly, and it expended mass amounts of energy to lift himself from the gloom, leaving him exhausted.
But he tried. He tried.
"Balanced, you are," Yoda said, and it caused a moment of confusion. Luke didn't feel balanced at all, he felt weary as he struggled, nothing like how he'd felt yesterday when the stones had levitated so easily. "Focused, yes. Temperate. Calm."
Now fully certain Yoda wasn't speaking to him, Luke opened his eyes and immediately found Leia's slight form across from him. In front of her was one very small stone, hovering in the air.
His mouth opened in an O and his senses flooded with the very-missed sense of optimism, hope and brightness he'd been searching for all day. Like a fuse sparking to life, his energy flipped its polarization and now he was bigger than Tatooine's twin suns, a ball of pride and hope that could engulf the whole galaxy.
Leia had always been powerful to him, but to see her now, successful in a purely Force-centered endeavor, brought him a surge of happiness. He was so proud of her, of their journey, that it all eclipsed what he knew had been true concerns about Yoda, about their history. That had all been pushed back in favor of this wholly unexpected and amazing development.
Another day, perhaps, they could examine the skeletons in their shared closet. But this day had suddenly become clearer, and they could do this, they could do it all, if they could just figure out how to do it together—
"Oh," Leia breathed.
Her brow furrowed and the stone dipped. Blinking, Luke redoubled his efforts, imagined spreading the joy he felt to every corner of the clearing. This was all the proof she needed! This would help her see that their destiny was here, that she could fight the Empire in a different and more impactful way by training with him. Twin Jedi Knights, ready to defend goodness in the galaxy, supported by an Alliance who respected their contributions?
They would be unstoppable.
The stone fell back to the pile with a loud thud, and Luke turned, startled, and looked at her.
Leia's eyes were still closed but she was panting in exertion, the crease between her eyes deeper, her lips turned downward. She hadn't moved but she suddenly seemed smaller, pulled into herself, a little ball of fury and pain. He could feel the loss of that calm that had felt so penetrating, so complete, just a few moments before.
And she was flaring bright plumes of scarlet into the heavy air.
He scrambled to her side. "What happened?"
She exhaled, opened her eyes, and looked at him with such a sense of disappointment that he put his hand on her shoulder to steady her. "I lost it," she murmured. "I had it and then I lost it."
Luke smiled brightly, trying to inspire her joy with his. "That's okay! The important thing is that you did it at all."
"For a moment," Yoda said. "But more than a moment you will need, to defeat the Emperor."
Luke and Leia both examined their master, his big eyes, his ears slanting downward, the troubled twist to his lips.
"Why did you fail?" he demanded.
Luke bristled. "Master Yoda, she didn't fail—"
"Fail, she did," he interrupted. "Lost your focus, you did. Why?"
She shook her head. "I don't even know how I did it in the first place. How am I supposed to know why I couldn't maintain it? Isn't that your job?"
"My job? No. My job, this is not."
Luke caught a flicker in the energy surrounding Leia, her frustration sparking to life. He watched as the plumes of scarlet soured into a dim maroon, like a festering wound, like tissue fermenting with infection. Helpless, he tried to reach out to her, to try and shelter her from her own douring energy, to sneak light into the cloudy gray of her aura.
Don't patronize me.
He felt more than heard it, a sentiment without words, yet he assigned them to the vague notion. Struggling not to react, he sent her a message of his own, a larger burst of sunlight to combat the overwhelming darkness that suddenly surrounded her. He shaped it into a single name, a single face, the only one he was sure she would understand.
Han.
She had been thinking about him when she had succeeded before. Maybe it would help her now.
"Finished today's lesson, we have," Yoda continued, as if nothing had happened between his two students. "To your angry friend, you go."
Luke wasn't sure if the reference to Han was an indication that Yoda had caught the exchange between the twins or not, but the news was welcome nonetheless, and he stood quickly, ready to leave the confusion of the clearing and the complexities that lived within the construct of Master Yoda's instruction.
—0—
Have you seen this before?
As Obi-Wan's voice came to him again late that night, Yoda was amused at his old student's persistence, his consistency in this new era of training the Skywalker twins. He had so rarely interacted with the dead that Obi-Wan's presence felt like a novel annoyance.
It wasn't enough to pull Yoda out of the deep concern he had felt since the atrocious lesson at the Dry Lands. This was a most fearful development, and one that worried him greatly.
"No," he answered truthfully.
What causes it, do you think?
Yoda struggled to find adequate words, to describe the torrent that flowed between the children, the way he had so radically witnessed the shifting of emotion from one padawan to another.
"Powerful, they are," he said, settling for the obvious.
Is this a result of bonding?
"Many bondings did we have within the Order," he replied. "Master and padawan, friendships, connections. Energy-sharing, we did not see."
It had been extraordinary and terrifying, the way the boy's energy had transferred to the girl and enabled her to levitate the stones. More so how quickly the boy had taken it back into himself.
"Skilled in telekinesis, some Jedi are," he murmured. "Talented swordsmen, others."
Even now, even dead, Yoda could still feel the notch of faint pride that emanated from Obi-Wan at the vague compliment.
"For others, emotional manipulation is easiest. Attempt to better his weaknesses, a Jedi must."
Luke is a powerful empath, Obi-Wan noted.
"A skilled warrior, she is," Yoda said, the worry settling deep into his old bones. "And if share energies, they can, a foreign entity they could be. Something we have not seen."
They are Anakin's children, after all.
Yoda sighed, troubled and tired. "Most afraid of that, I am," he said.
"Most afraid."
Author's Note: Happy February, friends! How has it already been a month? Thank you for your wonderful reviews and comments. I am always humbled and inspired by your feedback. It means the world to me!
Special thanks to AmongstEmeraldClouds for her editing this month, and also her unwavering emotional support. Both December and January have proven to be difficult and full of insecurity. Your kindness is so desperately needed, my friend, and I am lucky to have you on the front-lines of Specter with me!
Chapter Eighteen will be posted Monday, March 1st. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! - KR
