Head Above Water

I squirted a mouthful of medium that had lapped into my mouth back out and redoubled my efforts. After so much treading, my limbs were sluggish to respond, but I was a Jedi Padawan, and I could work past fatigue. Even with my breath rasping painfully in my chest from accidentally inhaling a drop of the medium I swam in, even with muscles cramping and going stiff, I tread on.

The cold liquid medium leached away my body heat even as I produced it, but I had been treading for so long that I felt feverish. Yet I didn't mind too much. I had just surpassed the point where I had quit yesterday, and without calling on the Force to shore up my failing body. And yesterday's stopping point was farther along than it had been the day before. I was getting markedly better. My trained body was resilient enough that every time I found the limits of its capacity, it responded by setting those limits farther away. It was a wonderful feeling.

Still, I felt like my ears were going to fall off. The cold on the rest of my body was fine; I either had enough blood moving through various regions to keep them working or they went numb. I could ignore the lumps of semi-digested food in my body, no longer being processed now that I was devoting so much of my energy to staying vertical. But my ears hurt. I had given up on trying to keep them clear of the swimming medium. My ear canals had long since been filled, and they ached fiercely, from my eardrum to the external curves.

I thought for a moment that I had heard something. It took a second before my brain could translate it through the distortion caused by liquid and cold.

"There you are. Why do these 'long-term recovery' ships all have to be the size of asteroids? I thought that I'd found you before, and I was off by one floor. Why are you swimming?" The speaker was clearly in a good mood. I fought and conquered the idiot grin that appeared on my face before allowing myself to turn, sloshing.

"Hello, 'Lak. I'm doing great," I said, keeping my chin just above the medium. My lungs complained; I was wasting air on speech when I should be devoting them to breathing and nothing else. I did my best to ignore them.

My best friend tilted his head, just a bit, and decided to play along. "How are you doing, Revan?" Life seemed to be treating him pretty well. The tank put my head at a considerably higher point than his, but I suspected that he was even taller than the last time I'd seen him. Still rather gangly, though. He held a big, lumpy bag under one arm. I hadn't expected to see him until tomorrow, at the earliest.

"I'm swimming," and I paused to gulp air with a "hahh" sound, "to build my strength." He raised an eyebrow up at me, so I added, "Good exercise. Hahh. Better on the joints." From the messages we had sent one another, he knew about the knee injuries I'd had. They would heal completely with time and more slow treatments, but it was best not to push it.

"Ah." Malak wavered for a moment, then told me, "I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere," before leaving the room.

He returned before I had to wait much. The bag under his arm was even lumpier than before; Malak has always been terrible at packing. I could still remember when we had moved from Alderaan to Dantooine as children. He'd left most of his clothes and coursework behind and brought a collection of brightly-colored rocks and model ships instead. Most of them hadn't even been his.

More important, at the moment, was what he was wearing. It looked much like a jumpsuit fashioned of some kind of thick, durable material, but it was, if anything, even baggier, with the sleeves rolled up, and liberally festooned with pockets and loops, a bit like a Republic pilot's uniform. It was also a particular shade of red which I had never seen in a full-body piece of clothing before. Frankly, the effect wasn't the best I had ever seen.

"What's that?" I managed before sinking past my nose and having to struggle back up.

He grinned. "This is my flightsuit. Nice, isn't it? That would be a rhet... um, a rhetorical question, by the way. Quatra helped me pick it out. I'm supposed to grow into it. She says it won't take too long."

"I noticed." It felt like a long time ago when I had been the tall one... I wasn't jealous about it any more, but the thought did come up now and again.

"Good. She's enrolling me into flight school, Revan! Quatra always said that I was too young before, but apparently there's a special academy on Carida that takes younger trainees if they have a 'vocation'. Special uniforms and everything. I passed the test and they let me pick out my flightsuit. It's going to be a few weeks before classes start, but I'm in!" Laury was right. He is a flying fanatic.

Waving my arms under the surface like a maniac, I managed to 'spyhop' my head above the water long enough to manage, "Good for you! I hear it's tough," and then sunk to my lips again.

Malak came right up to the side of the tank and climbed up the ladder set into it. From the way he moved, he wasn't entirely fresh, but he still had that youthful energy that made our teachers sigh with envy. He paused on the grated platform at the top, asking "Do you mind?" Thinking that he wanted to sit and maybe stick his feet into the tank, I shook my head.

He surprised me by plunging right in, swamping me and making the surface of the medium surge in waves, even lapping over the tank's rim in places. Perhaps stunned by the cold, he stopped moving and sank like a brick of duracrete. After a moment, Malak started trying to swim up to the surface, but he didn't meet with much success. Despite his efforts, he stayed near the bottom, clearly frustrated.

I used the Force to fortify my body as I took a moment and watched him striving slowly airwards, too proud to ask for help. "Idiot," I muttered, slightly annoyed but mostly laughing inside. Then I dove after my friend.

Remembering the rescue-swimming lessons I'd taken at various times on various planets, I hooked an arm around Malak's neck and kicked strongly upwards, moving my free arm in powerful strokes. He clutched at the encircling arm but did his best to help, kicking energetically. The tank wasn't much more than four meters deep, but even with the Force to strengthen me it felt like rather too long before we broke the surface.

"I lost one of my boots," my best friend gasped after I had hauled him back to the platform. He hung from it by one arm, shivering and looking quite drowned; his eyelashes, usually almost invisible, had clumped into spikes. The flight suit wasn't as soggy as I would have expected it to be, but it still clung to him in heavy-looking wrinkled folds, probably trapping half a liter of medium against his skin. I noticed his lips were starting to turn purple, too, and he was clamping his teeth together to stop them from chattering.

Shaking my head, I dove again, found the damn boot lying on the tank floor, and hauled the waterlogged thing back up. Perhaps because the boot, even filled with liquid medium, couldn't have weighed more than a few kilos, it didn't take as long to surface.

"You're an idiot, 'Lak," I said as he heaved himself, dripping heavily, up out of the tank and back onto the platform. He lay on it as if drained for a moment, then reached one arm back in to accept the boot.

"Thanks... So I've been told," he half - agreed, making space on the platform by moving himself painfully to one side. Deciding that I might as well stop now anyway, I pulled myself out and onto that space. Medium streamed from both of us, running between the holes in the grating and back into the tank. Malak did his best to squeegee the medium out of his braid and the short crest of pale hair growing on the top of his head, telling me, "Quatra puts it differently. She called me Meathead when I chased that guy halfway across Selonia. I think she meant it in a different way, though."

"You chased a guy halfway across Selonia?" I tried to wring the medium out of my own hair, but it was currently at that inconvenient length where squeegeeing didn't work but twisting was hard. This was clearly a job for a towel. Or a minute in a sonic shower. "Why would you do that?"

Malak blew out a lungfull of air in a sigh. "Well, across a city, anyway. Quatra wanted to question him; she thought he might know something about what the Exchange is doing with that new drug - I wrote you about that. He ran, I chased, in the end it turned out he'd just been feeling guilty because he had friends that he didn't want his wife and parents to know about. Headblind." He shook his head and started twisting his flight suit to get the liquid out. "They're all absolutely insane."

"Don't do that," I advised quietly. "You'll warp the fabric." Imagining what Kae would have done had she seen him mistreating an expensive fabric, I hid a smile.

"No, not this. Bombyx synthsilk; you should have heard Quatra and the salesman having it out at each other. From the way he talked, it's the Force incarnated into cloth. Lightweight, packs into a small bundle, resistant to tearing and cutting and frictions, completely impervious to flame, waterproof, won't wrinkle, stain, fade, or come unraveled, lets air through and keeps a steady, comfortable temperature even when wet, deemed inedible by fabric-eating insects all over the galaxy, will outlive and outlast me, you, and every other human in the galaxy." The way he rattled that list of qualities off did sound exactly like a sales pitch, calculated to overwhelm and impress a prospective buyer.

"From the way Quatra talked, it's all trash and trickery. And part of it was, but this is still a pretty good material. You should have seen her bargaining him down." Malak licked his lips and winced a bit, either reflecting on his folly or noticing the medium's astringent taste. "I put it on because of the 'waterproof' part. My Master warned me that part of flight school involves treading water for half an hour while wearing this and the rest of the gear a pilot uses. Simulating an emergency landing over water. I can't believe how out of practice I've gotten... Looks like I'll have a harder time than I thought."

He sounded so dejected that I snorted and decided to reassure him. "I don't think you'll have that much trouble. This isn't water. It's some kind of 'neutral immersive medium', whatever that is. Lighter, not as buoyant as water. It has some kind of therapeutic purpose, I can't imagine what, but it's a hell of a lot harder to swim in than the regular pool. I would have warned you, but you just jumped in after me." I finished on a light if exasperated note. "You idiot."

Malak's face took on that flat quality that he used whenever he was trying to hide some emotion. He pulled off the boot which had not been lost and poured a thin stream of medium out of it, back into the tank. "It didn't seem to bother you."

Is he sulking? My calling him an idiot wouldn't upset him; I made a point to do that every time I thought he deserved it. Not too often, but now and again. He returned the favor, usually. "Then you weren't watching," I informed him, making my voice tart. "I've been here for the better part of a week getting used to this. I'm also wearing a kneeskin; there isn't enough fabric to get waterlogged. And fat floats; muscle sinks."

The masklike quality broke as he frowned. "You're not about to start complaining to me about your weight and fat-to-muscle ratios, are you? I hate it when people do that."

Closing my eyes, I pinched the flesh on my forehead between my thumb and first finger, pained. "I'm not." My voice was flat. "You've spent too long with the headblind. And you know me too well to think that." I opened my eyes to give him Riii's Look, the one that said, 'You are usually better than that, and right now you are quite spectacularly wrong.' It was one I had seen several times.

I was glad to see that Malak was not immune to its effect; he reddened and twitched his head awkwardly, muttering, "Sorry."

Accepting this with a measure of grace, I went on. "We're already physically a bit denser than a non-Sensitive, so that makes it more of a pain to stay afloat. I was challenging myself. Working with Master Riii is much more of a mental effort than a physical one. I need to move around now and again. He banished me here while he worked on 'a project'; I'm not going to just lounge around."

"How is that working for you, anyway?" my friend asked suddenly. "Master Riii, I mean. I thought you hated him."

A bit taken aback by the subject change, I took a deep breath before answering. "I did. I'm older now. It's... complicated. I would have lost that eye if he hadn't come in when he did. He was scared too, at the time. Jedi aren't supposed to take off their lightsabers unless circumstances demand it." My fingers stole over and found the damp wrapped hilt of my own 'saber, solid and cylindrical. I hadn't quite managed to ask my current Master why he'd made it a habit to leave his weapon in his rooms when visiting old friends... maybe I would get the chance later.

Malak poured the medium out of the boot he'd dropped, studiously not looking at me. He waited a long moment before saying, "I knew it was a bad idea to sneak into his room to see his stuff while he was out. I should have told you. I always know when something you want to do ends badly."

"That's true," I told him, thinking back. "You've managed to keep me alive this long, though. Pay attention to your 'bad feelings'; whenever they get ignored I end up in trouble." Of course, the flip side of that was the fact that when he ignored my ideas, he tended to fare pretty poorly. Whatever ability let Malak know if my plans had crucial flaws didn't seem to work for his plans. Following me and warning me off trouble meant that he had the chance to dabble in interesting things without getting himself hurt or in big trouble. Usually.

The shivering that I had been trying to suppress briefly manifested itself in a violent shudder before I stilled it. I was chilled. Force techniques or no Force techniques, I had stopped moving and now was cold. It wasn't as bad as that thin-ice-on-a-frozen-river incident back on Dantooine during the winter, but it was as close as I wanted to come.

My friend would have had to be blind - physically or psychically - to have missed that shudder. Knowing that I wasn't fond of overdone shows of concern - or perhaps not wanting to look worried - he frowned and started back down the ladder. "Towel off, Revan. We can buy each other hot theobrom and I can tell you about all the crazy things Quatra's done."

"Oooh, impressive. That sounds like a good course of action." It was.