We are twice armed if we fight with faith.
--Plato
--
Her dreams were bloody things, nightmares from which she couldn't wake herself. That unsettled her, almost as much as the dreams themselves.
"I'm never able to tell that it's a dream," she told Luke, when she could bring herself to ask his help. It was getting hard to get a full night's sleep, and she needed that to keep up with an enthusiastic young apprentice. And everything else in her life, of course, but she felt Jaina was her greatest responsibility right then. "It always feels real enough to me that it just doesn't occur to me to wake myself up."
"What are they about?" he asked, and she could detect nothing but gentle concern in his eyes. He'd always been the one to wake her up from these nightmares, but he never pressed her to talk about them, though it was clear he wanted to know. But he'd obviously been willing to wait for her to be ready to tell him, and she appreciated that.
"I don't remember the specifics," she said, a little uneasily. She'd always prided herself on her ability to remember her dreams, down to the most insignificant detail, but a fog seemed to descend on her whenever she awoke, obscuring almost everything about these. "Just a lot of general suffering and death. Sometimes I catch your presence, or Han and Leia's, or Anakin's or the twins'. You're fighting, and hard, but I can't tell against what. And the only impressions I get of myself are fear, intense protectiveness, and a sense of being very, very tired."
Luke sat back in his chair, blue eyes unfocusing briefly. Then he asked, "Does it feel like a premonition? Some sort of warning from the Force?"
She gave an elegant shrug of her shoulders. "I can't tell," she replied frankly. "I can't feel the Force in these dreams, no lingering traces, but I don't know if that means anything. Sometimes..." She sighed. "Sometimes it feels like my Force ability is being...smothered, I guess."
He looked at her, gaze suddenly sharp. She could tell that he wanted to launch an immediate reassurance, to protest that there was nothing wrong with her Force ability, but he kept silent. She knew that it was out of respect for her ability to judge her own capabilities, and she gave him a quick smile of thanks. He may be a Jedi Master, and a very good one, who knew her very well--but it was still her body, her mind, and she knew it better.
He returned the smile for a moment, but then it dropped away. He hesitated, then said, "Your illness. Could it be the cause?"
"Of what, the dreams or the smothering?" She'd considered the possibility as well, for both problems, but she didn't know. It was grating, knowing nothing about this illness and what it could do, what it would do, except that everyone else who had it was either dying or already dead, and likely the only reason she was still alive and relatively well was--
She felt fear race down her spine, looked at her husband to see that same fear reflected in his eyes. But she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let her fear drain into the Force. When she opened her eyes again and looked at him, Luke appeared to have done the same, for now all she could see was his love and support.
"Both, maybe," he said. "However you got this illness, whatever created it--your dreams might be warning you against that, or showing you what might happen if it's let loose in the galaxy."
"It's not communicable, as far as we can tell," she replied, carefully. He might be onto something, but then again, he might not. "You're not sick, and you would have caught it from me, if anyone could have. Or Jaina, and she's not sick either."
"Maybe it's not communicable," he countered, "but you still caught it, somehow. Those other people caught it somehow. We don't know what caused it, or what will stop it. Not even the Force can get rid of it."
"It can hold it back," she pointed out.
"For how long?" he demanded. "If it's really the cause of that smothered feeling you have--if it's hampering your ability to keep it at bay--" He stopped and closed his eyes, his face paling. "Mara..."
"What do you suggest we do, then?" she asked, but she knew it was a rhetoric question. What more could they do, that they hadn't already done? Already she'd been sick for more than a year, and slowly, she knew, slowly she was losing ground. Those dreams, her difficulties in sleeping, her constant exhaustion, how she sometimes had to fight away nausea and a persistent ache in her bones...she was losing ground.
"What we can do is not give up," he said, fiercely, grabbing her hands and holding them tightly. She looked at him and saw that familiar, wonderful determination that she'd always found attractive, and saw as well the love and confidence that could so easily cause warmth to bloom in every part of her body. "We can keep fighting, and not give in, because I know, Mara, I know that someday we'll know more about this, that we'll be able to learn its weak points."
"Hey." She gently freed one of her hands and cupped his cheek, leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his forehead. "Have you ever known me to just give up? I've been fighting, and I'll keep on doing so, thank you very much. I'm not dead yet, and as long as I'm alive, I'll have the will to keep fighting."
Luke simply nodded, and said, "I know you will." His arms slid around her waist, bringing her to him until their heads were pressed together, forehead to forehead. "I believe in you, and I'll do everything I can to help. I have faith."
She smiled, then decided some levity would not go amiss. "And I have an eager teenager to teach in the morning," she said, then added pensively, almost as an afterthought, "If I'm tired enough, I might very well avoid the dream and get some real sleep. Know anything that will exhaust me that much?" She quirked an eyebrow at him.
He raised a hand to his mouth, but not quickly enough to hide his grin. "Were you thinking of a sparring session?" he suggested, and raised an eyebrow of his own.
"Of a sort," she agreed, then leaned in. Her smile widened as he met her halfway.
She was alive. She was alive, and still well enough to train her niece, and keep up with her husband. And she'd give everything she had to keep things that way.