Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [9]
Jacen shook his head. “It doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly a fanatic. It just means that I’ve grown up.”
“I wonder.”
“Ebbak is waiting outside. She’ll take you back to your shuttle.”
When Wedge was gone, Jacen sat again and stared at the office doors, not seeing them.
Blast Wedge, he thought. As if losing an adolescent sense of humor has anything to do with fanaticism. As if…
There was a thought circling around the periphery of his awareness. It was something Captain Lavint had sparked into existence, something Wedge had fanned into a live flame. But he couldn’t quite bring it into focus.
Well then, he needed to look more closely.
Captain Lavint thought Jacen used to be a hero. Clearly, if such things were measured by numbers of admirers, he was now a greater hero than he ever had been, and yet she thought he no longer constituted one. Why? Because he’d passed judgment on her? Perhaps. Maybe it was because the sentence he’d passed on her was one that would have broken his father’s heart, or the heart of any smuggler. Perhaps it was because he’d hurt her where she was most vulnerable. It wasn’t necessarily a heroic thing to do, he conceded, but it was fair. So let’s dismiss that for now.
Wedge thought the loss of his sense of humor meant that he’d become a fanatic of some sort. Whether it had or not, Jacen had to admit, it did mark a change in him.
Both Lavint and Wedge had addressed changes Jacen had experienced, and that recognition bothered him at some level.
For a moment, he tried to recapture a sense of what he had been as a teenager, before the war against the Yuuzhan Vong: gawky, happy, usually in the company of his twin sister, Jaina, and younger brother, Anakin, all too infrequently in the company of his parents…His sense of humor, always present, had usually manifested itself in the form of awful jokes learned in the four corners of the galaxy.
And then there were animals, Wedge’s “cubs in trees.” Once upon a time he’d been able to charm a sand panther into purring, had been able to coax the cub of any species into his hand. How long had it been since he’d done that? Since he’d wanted to do that?
Animals, evil animals, with their razory teeth and their hatred for Jedi…
He snapped out of the half doze into which he’d fallen, but didn’t sit up. There was an answer for him. At the height of the Yuuzhan Vong war, he, Jaina, Anakin, and an elite unit of young Jedi Knights had mounted a mission to an enemy world, there to destroy the voxyn—creatures bred by the Yuuzhan Vong, creatures that could sense the Force, creatures that had hunted and claimed the lives of numerous Jedi before this mission destroyed them.
But Anakin had been fatally wounded on this mission. Had died.
The children of Han Solo and Leia Organa Solo had suddenly gone from three to two. Had suddenly stopped being invincible, invulnerable, immortal. Suddenly there was no room in his life, no room in his universe for humor.
And from that time on animals had all seemed to wear the faces of voxyn. They were no longer his friends.
Jacen had been captured, ending up in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. Ending up under the tutelage of Vergere, who was sometimes Jedi, sometimes Sith, sometimes neither. She had taught him much, including how to separate himself from pain or embrace it, how to survive when drowning within the Force or cut off from it, how to be human or Yuuzhan Vong or neither.
She had taught him to distance himself from everything, should he need to.
And now, more than a decade after those events, after her death, he could see another reason why. Only separation offers perspective. All learning benefits from perspective. Therefore all learning benefits from separation.