Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [43]
Comfort I would relish.
Comfort that would cost me.
I wasn’t worried about being seduced by her—my assumption was that Tionne had no interest in me, and I had no interest in anyone besides my wife. What worried me was accepting the sympathy she would offer. I had, since the time of my father’s death, held myself closed to all but a very few good friends. With Mirax I had opened myself even more and while I could be very open with friends, joking with them and accepting their jibes; vulnerability still scared me.
In part it came with the jobs I’d had. In CorSec the last thing you want to let a criminal see is that he can get to you and can hurt you emotionally. To combat that you tend to deaden your feelings and deal with the people you meet professionally as “them.” They are not part of your family or your organization. They are not as real and therefore what they think and say can’t get to you. It is a dehumanization of people that allows for detachment; a detachment you need if you are going to survive while dealing with grand tragedies and cruelties.
Even in Rogue Squadron I fell prey to this distancing. When friends died, it hurt a lot, so I held myself back from becoming engaged with the new pilots. I didn’t really even realize I was doing that until Wedge called me on it one day. He sort of smiled and told me he’d caught himself doing the same thing, but that by overcoming that natural tendency, he found he could reach out to pilots, help make them better, so he wouldn’t lose them.
The sense of Tionne as a danger set itself up as another wall around my heart. I suspected it would interfere with my accessing and feeling the Force much as my inflated self-conception had previously. The fear of vulnerability was really just another aspect of my core personality. To reach my full potential as a Jedi I knew I would have to work around it or blast past it, but I didn’t feel ready to decide on how I wanted to do that yet.
The sound of Luke’s voice brought me out of my introspection. “Without opening your eyes or shifting away from your partner, I want you to place your pebble in the palm of your partner’s hand. I want you then to reach out, to find that pebble, and use the Force to make it move. This is a big step. Up to now you have used the Force in a passive sense, to enhance your perceptions. Now you will apply the Force more directly and use its energy to make the stone move. If you can lift it clear of your partner’s palm, so much the better.”
I felt Tionne’s stone land in my hand. “This will be fantastic, Keiran. Stories of Jedi levitating all sorts of things abound.”
“I’m certain.” I dropped my stone in her hand and immediately lost all sense of it. This boded ill for me. I reached down and just touched it with a finger, hoping to kindle echoes of my tactile sense of it.
Nothing.
“You touched it with your finger, Keiran.”
“I know. Sorry.”
I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. I gathered my thoughts and reconstructed my sensory screen. I projected it out and down toward her palm and mapped her hand. I could feel her flesh and how the Force flowed through her. Between us I could feel a resonance and I could even detect a dead spot in the middle of it. The stone, it had to be the stone. I smiled and bent my will to shifting the stone.
Nothing.
It did not help at all that at this moment her stone danced in my palm as if a groundquake was shaking the planet. Her sharp giggle—half shriek, half laugh—let me know that she