Whisper Your Weakness

I'll catch up with author replies at a later date. Right now, DMS is chomping at the bit to see this and I think I've made her wait long enough. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I have! Oopsie! Still love ya, though D!


Chapter Twenty-Five


Several days later, Luke’s friends and family were trying their damnedest to contain their frustration. On one level, they realized the scope of the ordeal that Luke had been through and they’d known that he wasn’t going to wake up and suddenly be the old Luke that they had all loved. But on another level, they were stumped at how to help someone who apparently didn’t want to be helped.

Luke had wanted to follow the advice his father had given when Anakin had come to him in his dream-like state, but the moment he’d opened his eyes, his fears had paralyzed him. He couldn’t imagine telling Leia, Han, or Force forbid, Mara, about how deeply and cruelly Viktor had violated him. Luke wanted to forget the entire thing had ever happened, but everyone insisted on ‘talking him through it’. That was what they all said, as though a few words would somehow make everything better.

‘Talk to me, Luke.’

‘Let me help you, Luke.’

‘We only want you to get better, Luke.’

They were smothering him, driving him insane. He wanted to ask Leia what had happened to her promise to keep everyone, even herself, away if that’s what he needed. But he should have known she’d never be able to keep her word on something like that. She’d been far too involved in her ‘little’ brother’s life for too long to try and do any such thing.

Funnily enough - and it had been the one time that a smile had almost crossed his face - she actually had tried to keep Mara out the first time she’d come to see him. The two women had stood at the doorway, staring each other down, fire blazing out of both of their eyes. Fearing that one of them was about to go for a weapon, Luke had wearily called out to Leia that Mara could enter.

He knew that his response to her disappointed Mara. Luke could see it in her face, as well as feeling it through the Force...well, the little that he would allow himself to touch the Force these days. It was still entirely too painful to deal with all those emotions, and a tiny part of him still feared the Dark side despite his father’s promise that he was still Light.

He wasn’t outright rude to her, but he was cool and distant, and he could tell that she didn’t understand. Mara was always one to hide her hurt, but Luke could see it, and it only strengthened his resolve to stay away from her. He wasn’t worthy of her, not anymore. If he was a stronger man, he’d try and find the words to tell her that their relationship was over, but he found he couldn’t even do that much.

So, he did the only thing that he could think of to do, the thing that had saved his sanity when he was in Viktor’s hell. Luke withdrew into himself again, not as far as he had been in his ‘sanctuary’, but far enough that they couldn’t reach him. He responded to questions and comments, if at all, with a grunt or a nod.

Most of his days were spent brooding and staring out the window of his hospital room, since the doctors wouldn’t let him go home until they were reassured about his physical health. He’d lost a lot of weight and he tired easily, his body still occasionally aching from the results of Viktor’s torture.

Mara and Leia had both hesitantly suggested he enter a Jedi healing trance, but Luke had sharply refused to do so, as that was deeper into the Force than he wanted to go right now.

Luke half-hoped that Mara would be the one to finally get her fill of his moodiness, so her famous temper would explode and she’d storm off and leave him. She deserved better than the pitiful remains of Luke Skywalker that he could offer her. Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t the fiery redhead that lost her temper with him first, it was his sarcastic brother-in-law.

They were sitting at the small table in Luke’s room and Han had been attempting to talk to him, even though Luke could tell his lack of response was trying the Corellian’s patience. Han wasn’t exactly known for his patience anyway.

“Ya know, Kid, maybe you could just let me know when you’re gonna get over this little fit of selfishness you’re showin’ and I could come back then,” Han suddenly snapped at him.

Luke turned to scowl at him. “It’s being selfish to simply want to be left alone?” he asked coldly.

“Yes, it is! You went through hell, and I understand that, but we went through hell, too, thinkin’ you were dead. Leia...” he paused for a moment, visibly trying to calm himself. “She locked herself in our room for an entire day. I thought I’d have to break the door down, and I was scared I might not find her still breathing in there. Mara broke down at the funeral. I’ve never seen her cry and she didn’t just cry, Luke, she completely lost it. Wedge is killing himself with guilt, thinkin’ that this is all his fault.”

Luke didn’t say anything, and Han abruptly stood, the chair he’d been sitting in falling sharply to the floor, to pace around the room in frustration. “I mean, stang it, Luke! I held your bleeding body in my kriffing arms! I gave you CPR until Wedge and Corran had to tell me it was too late, that you were gone, that my best friend was dead! Do you have any idea how that felt?!”

Luke glared at him fiercely, his fingers gripping the edge of the small table. With shocking suddenness, he stood as well, throwing the table towards the wall where it smashed with a loud clatter. He faced Han, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, seething with anger.

“Do I know how it felt?” he asked, his voice a mocking sneer. “As a matter of fact, I do. Because Viktor showed me as part of his little game. I had to watch you all at my ‘funeral’ and even without the Force, I could feel your pain. But the worst part was...I knew that meant no one was looking for me.”

“But we were, Luke! We realized within days that the body we found wasn’t you. We looked for weeks, following every tiny clue, every little whisper.”

Han’s choice of words unintentionally reminded Luke of everything he’d lost, and how far it was out of his reach now. He turned away from Han, his head lowering in pain.

“You didn’t come soon enough,” he said in a low voice.

“Aw, Kid...” Han groaned. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could to find you.”

Luke shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut tightly against the memories that were threatening to swarm his mind. And he knew then. He couldn’t stay here any longer, not in this hospital, not on this planet.

“But it wasn’t enough,” Luke said too softly for Han to hear. He gained enough control of his emotions to turn and look at his brother-in-law once again. “I need to have some time alone, if you don’t mind, Han,” he said, his expression carefully blank.

Han simply stared at him for a long moment, and Luke could read the frustration in his eyes. He knew they only wanted to help, but it was no use...he couldn’t bear the thought of dealing with all this heartache for one more day. Finally, the Corellian gave a small nod and turned to leave. He paused at the doorway to Luke’s hospital room.

“You know we’ll do anything you need us to do, Kid. Anything. Just remember that.”

Luke nodded slightly and Han gave a sigh as he left the room, closing the door behind him.

“Even leave me alone to deal with this my own way?” Luke whispered sadly to the empty room. Somehow, he doubted it.

*****************************

He waited a couple of days until the perfect time. Leia was tied up in meetings, Han had taken the children to the Coruscant Zoo, and Mara - back working part time for Karrde now - was temporarily off planet. Most of his other friends only came to see him sporadically these days, so he didn’t have to worry about them either.

Luke called a male nurse into his room, mindtricked him into changing clothes with him and left the dazed young man sitting on his bed. He felt somewhat guilty about that, wondering if that was still the Dark side with its clutches into him, but he decided to just look at it as a necessary task, if an unpleasant one.

Clad in the young man’s hospital attire, Luke walked casually out of the Manarai Medical Center. Plans had already begun forming in his head, and the first thing he had to do was stop by his apartment. Then one other stop, and he would leave this place, headed for... Well, he wasn’t sure yet, but it would be somewhere far away from here.

Once at his apartment, Luke swiftly changed into plain trousers, boots, and tunic. He paused at seeing his lightsaber still sitting on his workbench, the inner workings of it strewn out over the surface. He supposed no one had wanted to tinker with the device, perhaps worrying that they might mess it up. A Jedi’s saber was a personal thing, no two of them designed exactly alike, although there were obvious similarities.

Hesitating only a moment, Luke picked up the weapon, wrapped it in a piece of cloth to protect the delicate wires, and placed it into the small travel bag he was packing. Walking over to his comm, he sighed as he sat down, knowing that he was about to place a call he’d never thought he’d have to.

His father’s personal lawyer was a quiet man, his work for the Dark Lord having gone completely unnoticed by anyone in the Empire or in the New Republic. Luke himself only knew of Silas Larin because the man had contacted him a few months after the events of Endor. Apparently Vader had been quite wealthy and had left everything to his son. Luke had been stunned, but had refused in all these years to touch any of his father’s bequest.

Things were different now, though. He would need credits, and he would need them to be untraceable by his family and friends. Silas didn’t seem a bit surprised to hear from him, not even commenting on his client’s miraculous return from the dead as he made notes of what Luke wanted him to do.

After Luke disconnected the call, he sat in silence for a long moment, grateful now that he hadn’t ever told Leia about the money their father had left him. At the time, his reasoning had been that she was still sensitive about anything having to do with her parentage. Later, it had actually slipped his mind for a while, but now it worked well for Luke in that she wouldn’t be able to contact Silas and demand to know what was going on.

Two hours later, Luke met Silas in an out of the way docking bay, where the lawyer handed over codes to a small ship that had been bought under a false name, along with enough credits to last him several months. Completely silent on whether or not he was judging Luke’s actions, the man simply told him to contact him in the event that he needed more later. Luke nodded his thanks, and then turned to his last task before he left Coruscant.

************************************

Dr. Darek Mondahl was officially more nervous than he’d ever been in his life. He knew that he was about to walk into a potentially explosive situation, and it scared him more than a grown man liked to admit to himself. Still, taking a deep breath to fortify his nerves, he knew he couldn’t put it off much longer.

The conversation that morning with Luke had been troubling and difficult. Darek had been surprised to see him out of the medcenter, and saddened by how tragically different this man was from the patient - and friend - that he’d known for the last several years. There was no joking conversation as he was accustomed to with Luke, instead there was a simple request for help.

Although, it wasn’t really simple. Darek knew, and he suspected Luke knew as well, that Skywalker was asking a lot of him. But there was no way that he could refuse, especially when one considered the fact that Darek was well aware of everything that had happened to Luke while he was under Viktor’s control. Everything.

Even his family did not know that Luke had been sexually assaulted, a fact that Dr. Ansel had discovered during his initial examination of his patient, and a fact that he had shared with Dr. Mondahl as Luke’s primary physician. The two of them had agreed that if this news were to leak to the media, the consequences could be devastating to Luke’s recovery, so they had decided to keep it quiet until they could discuss it with Luke himself.

Darek had wavered on that decision when Luke had shown up in his office unexpectedly, but again had thought it more important to consider Luke’s fragile state of mind. He wasn’t certain that disappearing for a while was the best option either, but there wasn’t much he could do to stop a grown man from leaving the planet if he chose to do so. He didn’t think it was the right time to bring up everything he knew about Luke’s ordeal, so Darek remained silent, hoping that all his friend and patient needed was just a little bit of time and distance.

Luke was unaware that his doctors had discovered the depths of Berdin’s brutality, or at least Darek was fairly certain that he was. You never could tell exactly what a Jedi was thinking, after all, but Darek had been a doctor for longer than Luke had been a Jedi, and he felt confident that Luke believed his secret to be safe.

He opened the door to Luke’s room at Manarai Medical Center and was immediately overwhelmed by the sound of several people arguing vehemently with each other. There stood Luke Skywalker’s sister; his brother-in-law; his fiancée; a man that Darek recognized as Luke‘s friend, Wedge Antilles; and the Manarai Medical doctor in charge of Luke’s case, Dr. Ansel. They were all shouting and trying to make themselves heard over every one else in the room, creating utter chaos.

Using a trick he’d learned with his own five children, Darek reached over and hit the light switch, turning it off for a few seconds. The noise in the room instantly ceased as everyone turned to look in his direction and then Darek turned the lights back on.

“Hello,” he said pleasantly to the hostile stares facing him.

Perhaps the only one not looking at him with anger was Princess Leia Organa-Solo, but that might be because she knew him personally, whereas the others did not. In fact, Luke’s fiery fiancée was looking at him as though she intended to take his head off. He coughed a little nervously.

“Darek, Luke is gone!” Leia cried out, her voice panicked.

“I know,” he replied quietly.

Mara Jade looked at him with a dangerously narrowed gaze and said, in a menacing voice, “What do you mean, ‘you know’?”

Darek swallowed, before reminding himself that he was doing what Luke wanted him to do. As Luke’s personal physician, his first obligation was to his patient, not his patient’s family. He only hoped they’d see it that way.

“First of all, I want you to know that Luke is absolutely safe-”

“And just how do you know this?” Mara asked sharply.

“Let the man talk, Mara!” That came - rather bravely, Darek thought - from the man who’d flown against two Death Stars. Briefly, Darek wondered if testing a former assassin wasn’t the more bold move.

“Guilt still eating at you, Antilles?” Mara said in a nasty tone, as her gaze swung around to pierce the dark-haired man.

“And whose turn was it to be with Luke this morning?” Wedge shot right back. The two of them glared at one another, before Han interrupted their stare down.

“That’s enough, both of you,” Han said. “Dr. Mondahl, why don’t you tell us what you know.”

Solo spoke calmly enough, but Darek could see the tension and fear in his stance. Coughing nervously, the doctor let them know what Luke had done.

“He’s left the planet because he wants to deal with what happened to him in his own way.”

He actually managed to get that whole sentence out of his mouth before the room erupted in outraged shouting. Taking a step backwards, he raised his hands in a defensive gesture as a couple of Luke’s friends got a little too close. The fierce expression on Jade’s face was really starting to frighten him.

“All right, that’s enough!” Now it was Leia’s voice being the one of reason. The roar in the room died down to a grumble and then everyone turned to Mondahl expectantly. “Explain please, Darek. We won’t interrupt again, will we?” she said with a meaningful glance at the others in the room.

There were mumbled assents from the occupants and Darek breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Feeling more confident that they wouldn’t kill him, he told them of Luke’s visit to his office that morning.

“He came by to see me, asked a favor of me. Luke wants to go into seclusion for a while to try and deal with this, try to figure things out on his own. He’s coming back, he’s just not sure when.”

“What? That’s insane! That’s the last thing he needs, to be alone like that. That was part of the problem when Viktor had him. He thought he was alone!” Han said incredulously.

Darek shrugged helplessly. “Personally, I agree with you, Captain Solo, but Luke is a grown man, fully capable of making his own decisions.”

“Hold on. What was the favor you agreed to do for him?” Mara asked, again giving Darek that penetrating stare.

That wave of apprehension thrummed through Darek once again. They were definitely NOT going to like this part. He cleared his throat and spat the words out as quickly as he could.

“He doesn’t want to talk to any of you right now, so I’m to be his intermediary.”

That announcement didn’t garner the vocal outcry that he’d supposed it would. Instead, they all stared at him in shock. The Princess paled as her mouth hung open a few centimeters.

“Doesn’t want to talk to anyone, not even-” she pressed one hand to her chest in bewilderment, her voice breaking off as tears gathered in her eyes. Her husband reached over and took her other hand, squeezing it, and Darek could see the hurt in his own grim face.

For once, even the volatile former Emperor’s Hand seemed stunned, although she was slightly better at camouflaging her expression. She raised one hand to rub at her forehead, pacing around in a little circle before she abruptly turned back to him.

“Why is he doing this?” she asked calmly.

“He feels overwhelmed, smothered by all your attention. No matter how well-meaning you are, it’s just too much for him right now.”

“Dr. Mondahl, as a fellow physician, surely you cannot think that a man who’s just been through a trauma such as the one Master Skywalker has suffered needs to be without psychiatric care. He’s not stable, he could...” Dr. Ansel said insistently. He trailed off with an uncomfortable look at Luke’s sister and fiancé. “He could decide to do something drastic,” he cautioned.

“We discussed that, actually,” Darek said, attempting to ignore the little gasp of pain that came from Leia’s lips. “He promised me he would not do anything of the sort, and if there’s one thing I know about Luke, it’s that he’s a man of his word.”

“I...I don’t understand. We tried to be so understanding. We tried not to push him in any way,” Leia stammered.

“Just a little space, Princess, that’s all he needs for now. He, um, he asked me to remind you of the promise you made him when he first awakened. He said that you’d understand what he meant.”

**********************************

Leia closed her eyes and lowered her head as her own words came back to haunt her. I will keep everyone out of this room, including myself, if that’s what you want. And yet, she’d been unable to do it. Everyone, including herself, just wanted to see him, to talk to him, to reassure themselves that he was alive and well. They’d ignored what he might have needed to help himself heal; a little distance, a little time to readjust to being back among the real world.

She raised her head and looked at Darek, her inner strength shining in her eyes. “All right. If that’s what Luke wants, then that’s what we’ll do. How often is he going to contact you?”

“You can’t be seriously thinking of going along with this!” Mara said harshly.

Leia turned to Mara, and was able to read the distress and pain she was radiating in the Force, although she didn’t show it outwardly. She’d never attempted to ‘talk’ to Mara the way Luke was able to communicate with both his twin and his fiancé. But she thought that might be the only thing that would get through to the hot-tempered redhead.

*Mara, it’s only for a little while. Luke needs this.*

Jade started slightly at Leia’s voice in her head, and blinked at her, uncomprehending for a moment. Leia realized she probably hadn’t used this form of communication since before Luke had been kidnapped, and no doubt it was disconcerting coming from Luke’s sister. It did serve to get her attention, however, which was Leia’s goal.

*I promised him, whatever he needed to heal, we’d make sure he had. Try to understand?*

Everyone else in the room watched the two women staring at one another intently, wondering what in the sith was going on, but Leia and Mara ignored them. Mara finally answered Leia and her pain, matching Leia’s own, was more than evident.

*He needs me...us, Leia. That’s what he needs, he’s just being too stubborn to see it.*

*I agree with you. But if we just give him this little bit of space, then he’ll be more likely to cooperate with us when he comes back. And we will be right there for him then.*

*I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all,* Mara sent mulishly.

*But?* Leia sent, raising one brow expectantly.

*But I’ll go along with it.* She still glared, but Leia could see the softening in her stance, and her sense in the Force. “I’ll give him a month, and then his butt better be back on Coruscant or I’ll go looking for him,” she said bluntly.

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