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Star Wars: A Healing Force AU

"The Making of a Mask"

"Daddy?"

Dr. Ben Solo looked down at his daughter. "What's up, honey?"

"I gotta question."

Ben smiled. His daughter Hanna had a lot of those at four years old, just like he had growing up, and he looked forward to hearing what she'd come up with next.

In Ben's case, those questions--and the honesty with which they were answered--had eventually ended up saving not just his own life, but possibly even other lives as well. Come to think of it...Hanna herself probably wouldn't be here to quiz him if it weren't for those acts of candor all those years ago, and the precedent that had set for everything he and his family had gone through since.

This didn't have the deadly serious feel to it that those lifesaving questions had had all those years ago, thank all that was precious. But he, his wife Ara, and the entire Solo-Skywalker family had made a pact with each other when Hanna, the first of the new generation, was born, that they would do their best to be as open and honest with their children as they could be. Within reason for a child's age, of course, but honest. Even the little things, Ben and his family would try to address as factually and accurately as possible, and when they didn't know, be open about that, too, and endeavor to find out as best they could.

Ben's grin widened as he caught Hanna's eyes. "All right," he invited her. "Shoot!"

Hanna pointed at his chest with thumb and forefinger, with a very familiar-looking, crooked grin. "Pssewwwww!"

"Ohhh!" Ben's eyes flared wide and he staggered back, hand to his heart. "Oh, I'm hit! She's got the skills of a Jedi and the trigger finger of a rogue!" He flung himself back on the couch with a loud flump, glad for a second that Ara wasn't there to chide him for 'trying to break the furniture.' He was especially glad Ara didn't see Hanna get a running start on a flying leap into her daddy's lap--a leap that, without thinking about it, Hanna had imbued with a little extra momentum with the Force.

Ben reached up with one hand, sensed his daughter's trajectory and called a halt to it through the Force, suspending her midair, squealing with a mix of fear and delight.

"Errrrk!" Ben mimicked the sound of mechanical brakes--not that well, Ara would probably tell him. Not to mention that sound effect definitely did not go with the description that followed. "Tractor beam!"

"Hey!" Hanna pouted, as it really sunk in she was going nowhere. Not very hard, but she did still scowl a very familiar scowl as her lower lip jutted out.

"Where do we play with the Force, Hanna?"

"At the gym," she grudgingly replied, suspended over the coffee table.

"Where else?"

"Outside." Not that there was a lot that really qualified as outside on Coruscant, but there were cultivated park spaces that counted, not to mention the places on Naboo and the Temple World that the family visited every so often.

Ben nodded. "That's right. And what do we check for before we play with the Force?"

"Nobody in the way."

"Anything else?"

"Nothing's gonna break."

Ben nodded again as he gently lowered Hanna towards a spot next to him on the couch. Once he had her a few centimeters above the cushion, he released her all at once, and she dropped that last little bit with a joyful squeal.

But that faded. Catching a little frisson of guilt from his daughter, he lowered his voice and said, "I know stuff happens sometimes. Especially when we get really excited. I'm not mad at you..." He looked straight into her eyes, guiding her to the open door at the surface layer of his mind. "Can you feel it?"

He felt Hanna's presence there at the edge of his thoughts, peering at the emotions that bubbled around at the top. After a moment, she relaxed...some.

"What is it?" Ben asked.

"Is Mommy mad at you? About the couch getting broke?"

"What?" Then a smile broke across his face: he knew what Hanna had caught a hint of. "Oh, that! That was my imagination, Hanna. We haven't broken the couch. Yet. But," he admitted, "I guess grown-ups have to be careful sometimes too, just because we're big and we weigh a lot more, so it's easier to break stuff without the Force. And Mom wouldn't get really, really mad...but she might make me fix the couch if I broke it. And," he added with a conspiratorial whisper, "if I have to fix it, it might end up inside-out!"

Well, maybe that was just a touch exaggerated. But when it came to people, the Force gave him a lot more help than it did with objects or machines. True, Grandfather's Force gifts had been the other way around, but when it came to Ben, his non-Force-sensitive wife had the greater gift with fixing inanimate objects.

Even at her age, Hanna was well aware of the difference. She giggled. "Bad daddy!"

"Yeah, I guess, bad daddy!" Ben chuckled. "Maybe we both need to play at the park later. So," he said, aiming his gaze at her once again, "what's on your mind, my little leapitty lizard? What's the big question?"

Hanna drew her little body into a distinctly regal-looking 'being serious' pose that was the absolute spitting image of her grandmother giving a holo-interview. "How come you got all those masks?"

Ben's breath caught. There was something unnervingly familiar in the question, something too much like the deadly skepticism the Guardian in the Dark had sought to instill in him when he wasn't much older than Hanna was now. The twisted being had tried again for them both when Ara was still pregnant with Hanna, not even willing to give her that little bit of time to know the love of his family before trying to drive a wedge between them and take him for its own. Again, it had failed. Oh, Force, was it trying again?

And then there was one of the avatars the evil had presented itself to his family with that second time: as a dreadful Dark Side doppelganger of Ben himself, who had at times hidden himself beneath a mask. The Dark presence had severely underestimated Ben and his family. Underestimated what not only Dr. Solo himself could do, but all of the Skywalkers and Solos, with and without Force-sensitivity. Still, Ben shuddered at the memory.

"What brings this up?" Ben asked, schooling himself to calm.

Hanna's answer came back after hardly a beat. "Kaeron says it's how you spot bad guys. But you're not a bad guy...!"

Relief coursed through Ben's body. Kaeron Skagg...he knew that name: that was one of Hanna's human kindergarten classmates. A bit of an annoyance to Ben right this minute, but far from an eldritch Force-presence bent on seizing his family's souls. This, Ben Solo could more than deal with.

He smiled. "No, I'm not a bad guy," Ben replied. "I'm just your dad. I make mistakes every now and then, like everybody does, but I don't think I'm a bad guy. I try to take care of you and Mom as best as I can. Same thing with all my patients at the hospital, and everybody I work with when I'm on duty as a Jedi."

"But how come you need a mask? Kaeron said bad guys wear masks 'cause they gotta hide. Or 'cause they're really gross inside." Truth be told, those descriptions hit pretty close to the mark where Hanna's great grandfather was concerned, in his Darth Vader days. But even back then, that had been far from the whole story, not just for Vader, but for plenty of others who wore masks for one reason or another.

"Well, that might be true occasionally," Ben admitted. "That means a little of the time," he clarified, sensing the flickering of curious unknowing. "But not most of the time. There are a lot of reasons people wear masks. Some people have to because they're visiting a world where they can't breathe the air. Kel Dor are like that when they visit oxygen-breathers' worlds like Coruscant. There are other species who can't breathe this kind of air either...Ubese, or Morseerians. We'd have to wear breath masks if we visited their worlds. There are other medical reasons, too. Remember when I told you about Nurse Mychatt? The nice Grindalid man who helped me when I had to go to the hospital as a kid?"

"Um..." Hanna stuck her tongue out as she thought about it. "I think?"

There was some flicker of recognition, Ben noted through the Force. Still, a friendly reminder couldn't hurt. "Nurse Mychatt was definitely not a bad guy. He was a great nurse...very kind, and great with children. He even put up with me, and all my questions." Ben laughed softly to himself. It had partly been an act of distraction--a way to avoid thinking about the horror the Guardian in the Dark had just put him through. But he truly had hungered for knowledge about how humans and Grindalids worked, and all the different species of children Nurse Mychatt had treated at the very same medcenter where Dr. Solo now worked. "He's actually a big reason I became a doctor."

"And he wore a mask?" Hanna asked.

Ben nodded. "Yep. Grindalids like him have to wear masks and cover their bodies against sunlight, or any other lights that have ultraviolet radiation, because they burn really easily. They come from Persis IX, where the light of their sun doesn't reach the surface. They get most of their warmth from the core of their world instead--hot springs, undersea vents, that kind of thing. That means life on their world never had to adapt to sun exposure. Once in a really rare while, a human is born with the same kind of skin problem, and they have to cover up too. But they're all just normal people who have to be extra careful to protect themselves so they don't get hurt or sick."

Hanna's brow furrowed. "Uh-oh...are you sick, Daddy?" She reached for his forehead in an adorable imitation of the basic Force-diagnostic her father often started his exams with.

Ben smiled. "No, honey...I'm good."

Hanna released a theatrical sigh that broadened her dad's grin even further. "Whew!"

Of course, this still meant Hanna was left with an unresolved question, and much like him at her age, she wasn't going to let go until she had an answer. "There are other reasons people wear masks too, non-medical ones."

"Like what?"

"Some people don't believe in showing their faces. Religious stuff, or customs on their planets. The Tuskens on Tatooine feel that way. They don't like humans, so they haven't told us why. The Kaleesh also do, and they have told us why. They worship their ancestors and gods, and they use their masks to honor them."

"Why?" Hanna eyed her dad with a look of confusion. "Do they think their faces are ugly?"

"I dunno about 'ugly,'" Ben said. "Probably more like really private." The second he said that, he almost winced. If Ara came home from the store and found out he'd led Hanna right into the talk at the tender age of four, he'd never live that down. "But that's really just a guess," he quickly added. "I've heard a little, but I don't understand what the Kaleesh believe all that well. And sometimes it's not a very good idea to say you know why someone is doing something when they haven't actually told you for themselves. I think that's the mistake your friend Kaeron is making."

Hanna scowled, folded her arms over her little chest, and stuck out her tongue. "Kaeron is not my friend."

"I stand corrected," Ben replied with mock formality. "So okay...you're not friends with Kaeron. But anyway, assuming things about people without looking closer and paying attention to how they behave isn't a good idea. It might take Kaeron some time to learn that...maybe when he gets a little older."

Hanna nodded again, accepting that at face value.

A wistful smile traced its way across Ben's face. Oh Force, if only Hanna could hold on to that innocence a little longer than he did. He hadn't been much older than she was now, before the Guardian in the Dark had started to steal his own innocence away.

But then...at least when it came to that particular threat, it had been defeated three times now. First when Ben was little--second with Keric Alsovar, and third when Ara was pregnant with Hanna. And that last defeat had been the most devastating one it had been dealt yet.

Even so, Ben was very careful. He and Ara had taught Hanna telepathic etiquette early. What was right, and what was not right. Not in a way meant to scare her, of course, but to at least make her more aware than he had been.

He'd taught Hanna that good mind-voices always asked permission first and went away immediately if you said no. Even Ben himself made sure to follow that rule to an absolute--even if Hanna's reason for saying no was a temper tantrum, he still restrained himself. He had also taught her that good mind-voices said what they wanted to say where an adult from the Solo-Skywalker family could hear (if they weren't one of those to begin with) and never hid from the adults or suggested hiding. That good mind-voices never made you feel afraid or sad, or said bad things about people you loved. And that good mind-voices always showed themselves. Always spoke in person so you knew exactly who they were, where they were, and what they were doing. There'd come a little more flexibility on those rules when she spent her time on the Temple World and became an adult, but for now, those rules...and Ben's own regular psychic checks of the environment around them...had given Hanna the security he hadn't had at that age.

Come to think of it, those rules actually could explain a bit of why what Kaeron had said had gotten under Hanna's skin so much. Not that this had anything to do with a telepathic voice, but the whole thing about showing yourself and not hiding...it made sense why Hanna might have made that connection.

"So anyway," Ben continued, hoping to distract himself from that line of thought before he got too morose and it rubbed off on his daughter, "some people wear masks so they can get away with bad things without people knowing who they are, or because they are trying to hide something nasty. But a lot of people don't. You have to look at the whole situation...what the person is doing, how they're talking, what the Force is saying to you...all of it. And you should always ask Mom and me if you have questions. That's always a good thing, Hanna." He grinned at her. "You did good!"

"Yay!" Hanna squealed.

"How about this," Ben offered. "You've seen most of my masks before, but how about I tell you what each of them is for? What do you think of that?"

"Okay."

The first one was easy...in fact, Ben could pull one right out of the pocket of the doctor's coat he hadn't taken off yet: an unused surgical mask. "I know you've seen this one before," he said. "Do you know what this does?"

"It's for medcenters," Hanna answered.

"Right," Dr. Solo replied. "This is for when I'm working with a patient whose body is weak, and I need to be extra careful not to breathe my germs onto them."

"Ewwwww! Ewwwwww!" Hanna giggled, pinched her nose, and started singing. "Daddy is a bo-oy! Daddy has ge-erms!"

"Hey, no fair!" Ben exclaimed with a fake scowl that quickly got broken up by his laughter. "Everybody has germs, not just boys! Everyone's germs are a little different, but we all have them. I have Daddy germs, and you have Hanna germs, that are just for you. And you know what else is neat?"

Hanna's eyes went wide as she leaned towards him in anticipation.

"Most of them are good germs. The best ones even help our stomachs to make sure you can enjoy yummy things like blue ice cream, and some even make some vitamins for you to keep you healthy and growing strong. There are even some things that used to be germs, that got gobbled up by our cells billions of years ago, and they stayed in us to help make energy for our bodies. There might even be some germs that like to be around when people are strong in the Force."

"Ooh, Force germs!"

"Maybe so!" He smiled, then gestured with the surgical mask again. "But sometimes we might have a bad germ we don't know about. Or one of our good germs might not be good for someone because they're already sick with something else and their body isn't quite acting right. So at times like that, I'll wear a mask like this, or other kinds of medical masks, to make sure I keep my germs to myself, and I don't get their bad germs. That doesn't sound like a bad guy, does it?"

Hanna shook her head. "Nope!"

"All right," Ben said, getting up from the couch and heading into his office, where most of the rest of his masks adorned the upper shelves. The first one he reached for resembled a white and grey pilot's helmet, with a solid visor that completely covered the user's eyes. "Some of these masks are for training. This one is to help people learn how to see through the Force." He set it on his head for a moment. "This makes it a lot harder to accidentally cheat...or cheat on purpose...and use your eyes instead of the Force. We won't use the Force in the house," he reminded her as he took the helmet off, "but we can play some games like that next time we go to the gym. Does that sound fun?"

"Okay," Hanna decided. Then she pointed at another shelf of masks on the opposite side of the room. "That one's really pretty!"

Ben removed it from the shelf--an ornate silver and black mask with humanoid features, and backswept ornamentation that framed the face in the shape of a sunburst. "This mask," he explained, "is one I use once in a while for going places where some people might not think it's polite for people to show their faces." Or, Ben noted to himself, where it specifically wouldn't be polite for him, Ben Solo, to show his face: the Silver Flame, an Imperial veterans' bar where once in a while, he and his colleague Rylkir Zarander visited so that Ryl could talk openly about his military experiences without judgment. That was the one place he'd used this specific mask, since the first time he'd selected it for that purpose.

"But I don't wear it because I want to scare people or do something bad," Ben added. "Times like that, even if I don't show people my face, I want to show them something about me. Something that is true. With this mask, I want to show them I respect them by wearing something nice. Something they might enjoy looking at. So I'm really glad you like it! That makes me feel like I picked a good one."

"Yep." She straightened herself up to her full height, and in imitation of her grandmother's most senatorial voice, she gave a thumbs-up and said, "'Hanna approves.'"

"Well, I'm glad you do," he replied. And he meant it. He gestured at a few other masks from different artists and different worlds, each in their own unique style, some carved in wood, some fashioned with metal and engraved or ornamented with contrasting metals and stones. "I collect these because people spent a long time making them, and took a lot of care and love to make them beautiful. I've always thought of art like this as a sign that even though not everybody can do things with the Force like you and I can, they still can kind of feel it deep down, in their own way." He pointed at another black, humanoid-looking mask, this one with copper patterning on the features. "Even that one, that I wear for really fancy Jedi stuff, wasn't made by a Force-sensitive. It didn't need to be, to work great for me."

Then Ben turned back to the other shelf, where the more utilitarian helms and masks resided. "I have a few more for training, and fighting. Thankfully I don't have to fight much, but when I do..." He frowned for a moment. There was one of them--his battle mask--that he'd owned for years...another black mask, this one with a silver-rimmed visor...and it wasn't just the occasions upon which he'd had to don it, that gave him pause. True, it didn't exactly resemble the one he'd seen on that horrific, Dark version of himself...his was more utilitarian than menacing, not fixed into the permanent silver scowl of the other's, and offering a far wider field of view. And thankfully, his battle mask showed much less sign of battle wear than the other's had.

It was not the same. He reassured himself of that yet again. Yes, it was because his face revealed entirely too much in battle--where he was looking, for starters, what he might be planning...and the pain it cost him as a physician to be forced to take life rather than to nurture it. But it had a time and a place, and a rare one thankfully. He did not live in that place of terror and anguish. He was so much more than just that.

"Daddy?" Hanna gazed up at him. He could feel her mind, reaching out gently to the edges of his.

"Well, I don't like to fight," Ben said. That was, very much, a true statement. "And," he added, a small smile returning to his face as he regarded his daughter's features, "when I train, or fight, I really, really don't want to get poked in the eye. That's not good for you. And I also kinda like my eyes, so I'd like to keep the originals."

"Mom says they look like baby fathier eyes," Hanna informed him with the utmost seriousness.

Ben laughed. He'd heard it too, plenty of times before, typically when he was trying to get out of something ridiculous he'd done, but he adored his daughter's gesture nonetheless. "Awwwww...that's really sweet of Mom!"

Then it occurred to Ben. There was one more mask in their Coruscant apartment, one that wasn't yet on display, but soon would be. "You know, Hanna..." He allowed himself a conspiratorial grin. "There is one more thing masks are for...pretending because we're having a celebration, and we want to have fun. Do you know what we celebrate here on Coruscant for a whole week this month?"

Hanna squealed. "Festival Week!"

"That's right!" Ben said. "Remember, there are three different Festival Weeks on Coruscant--New Year's Fete, the Festival of Life, and the Festival of Stars." That had come as an exciting surprise for Ben when he was a child, moving from Chandrila Prime to Coruscant, for many worlds only celebrated the New Year's Fete, and sometimes even as only a single day. But Coruscant...like everything else on the sprawling city-planet, they did it on an extraordinary scale. "Can you tell me which Festival Week it is this month?"

"Life Week!"

"Well, definitely make sure you call it 'Festival of Life' when Uncle Chewie comes around...the Wookiees have a Life Day, which is something else. Something we're going to go see on Kashyyyk this year when school gets out." He could feel the excitement radiate off of her at that. "But right now, Hanna...I've got a little project for us."

Out of a desk drawer, Ben produced a festive mask--a half-face tooka mask in violet and green with gold trim and great huge ears standing tall. He put it on, where it covered the upper half of his face, but definitely not the enormous, beaming smile. "Ta-da! I got a Festival mask so I can come to your kindergarten parade! And that's not all..." From the same drawer he pulled out a face-painting kit. They might end up using up all of the important colors before the actual day, but buying another kit would be totally worth it for this. "I need a little help making the rest of my face look like a Festival tooka. Do you think you can help paint me up so we can see how these paints look?"

"Ooooh, yeah!" Hanna jumped up and down, clapping her hands.

"All right...let's go into the kitchen and I'll put a sheet out on the floor for us to sit on so Mom doesn't come home from the store and find a mess on the carpet if we drip."

Hanna put her hands on her hips in imitation of Ara. "'Stains are for the shop, not for the house!'"

"Exactly," Ben agreed. "Let's go!"

Before long, father and daughter were deeply engrossed in their enthusiastic, admittedly very impressionistic, Festival art project. So much so, that even Dr. Solo, with his extraordinary Force-gifts of the mind, only got his first inkling Ara had returned from her errands when he heard the little 'click' of a datapad taking a picture...one he knew Ara would never delete.

And Ben Solo was absolutely, one hundred percent okay with that.

Description

Star Wars: A Healing Force AU

"The Making of a Mask"

"Daddy?"

Dr. Ben Solo looked down at his daughter. "What's up, honey?"

"I gotta question."

Ben smiled. His daughter Hanna had a lot of those at four years old, just like he had growing up, and he looked forward to hearing what she'd come up with next.

In Ben's case, those questions--and the honesty with which they were answered--had eventually ended up saving not just his own life, but possibly even other lives as well. Come to think of it...Hanna herself probably wouldn't be here to quiz him if it weren't for those acts of candor all those years ago, and the precedent that had set for everything he and his family had gone through since.

This didn't have the deadly serious feel to it that those lifesaving questions had had all those years ago, thank all that was precious. But he, his wife Ara, and the entire Solo-Skywalker family had made a pact with each other when Hanna, the first of the new generation, was born, that they would do their best to be as open and honest with their children as they could be. Within reason for a child's age, of course, but honest. Even the little things, Ben and his family would try to address as factually and accurately as possible, and when they didn't know, be open about that, too, and endeavor to find out as best they could.

Ben's grin widened as he caught Hanna's eyes. "All right," he invited her. "Shoot!"

Hanna pointed at his chest with thumb and forefinger, with a very familiar-looking, crooked grin. "Pssewwwww!"

"Ohhh!" Ben's eyes flared wide and he staggered back, hand to his heart. "Oh, I'm hit! She's got the skills of a Jedi and the trigger finger of a rogue!" He flung himself back on the couch with a loud flump, glad for a second that Ara wasn't there to chide him for 'trying to break the furniture.' He was especially glad Ara didn't see Hanna get a running start on a flying leap into her daddy's lap--a leap that, without thinking about it, Hanna had imbued with a little extra momentum with the Force.

Ben reached up with one hand, sensed his daughter's trajectory and called a halt to it through the Force, suspending her midair, squealing with a mix of fear and delight.

"Errrrk!" Ben mimicked the sound of mechanical brakes--not that well, Ara would probably tell him. Not to mention that sound effect definitely did not go with the description that followed. "Tractor beam!"

"Hey!" Hanna pouted, as it really sunk in she was going nowhere. Not very hard, but she did still scowl a very familiar scowl as her lower lip jutted out.

"Where do we play with the Force, Hanna?"

"At the gym," she grudgingly replied, suspended over the coffee table.

"Where else?"

"Outside." Not that there was a lot that really qualified as outside on Coruscant, but there were cultivated park spaces that counted, not to mention the places on Naboo and the Temple World that the family visited every so often.

Ben nodded. "That's right. And what do we check for before we play with the Force?"

"Nobody in the way."

"Anything else?"

"Nothing's gonna break."

Ben nodded again as he gently lowered Hanna towards a spot next to him on the couch. Once he had her a few centimeters above the cushion, he released her all at once, and she dropped that last little bit with a joyful squeal.

But that faded. Catching a little frisson of guilt from his daughter, he lowered his voice and said, "I know stuff happens sometimes. Especially when we get really excited. I'm not mad at you..." He looked straight into her eyes, guiding her to the open door at the surface layer of his mind. "Can you feel it?"

He felt Hanna's presence there at the edge of his thoughts, peering at the emotions that bubbled around at the top. After a moment, she relaxed...some.

"What is it?" Ben asked.

"Is Mommy mad at you? About the couch getting broke?"

"What?" Then a smile broke across his face: he knew what Hanna had caught a hint of. "Oh, that! That was my imagination, Hanna. We haven't broken the couch. Yet. But," he admitted, "I guess grown-ups have to be careful sometimes too, just because we're big and we weigh a lot more, so it's easier to break stuff without the Force. And Mom wouldn't get really, really mad...but she might make me fix the couch if I broke it. And," he added with a conspiratorial whisper, "if I have to fix it, it might end up inside-out!"

Well, maybe that was just a touch exaggerated. But when it came to people, the Force gave him a lot more help than it did with objects or machines. True, Grandfather's Force gifts had been the other way around, but when it came to Ben, his non-Force-sensitive wife had the greater gift with fixing inanimate objects.

Even at her age, Hanna was well aware of the difference. She giggled. "Bad daddy!"

"Yeah, I guess, bad daddy!" Ben chuckled. "Maybe we both need to play at the park later. So," he said, aiming his gaze at her once again, "what's on your mind, my little leapitty lizard? What's the big question?"

Hanna drew her little body into a distinctly regal-looking 'being serious' pose that was the absolute spitting image of her grandmother giving a holo-interview. "How come you got all those masks?"

Ben's breath caught. There was something unnervingly familiar in the question, something too much like the deadly skepticism the Guardian in the Dark had sought to instill in him when he wasn't much older than Hanna was now. The twisted being had tried again for them both when Ara was still pregnant with Hanna, not even willing to give her that little bit of time to know the love of his family before trying to drive a wedge between them and take him for its own. Again, it had failed. Oh, Force, was it trying again?

And then there was one of the avatars the evil had presented itself to his family with that second time: as a dreadful Dark Side doppelganger of Ben himself, who had at times hidden himself beneath a mask. The Dark presence had severely underestimated Ben and his family. Underestimated what not only Dr. Solo himself could do, but all of the Skywalkers and Solos, with and without Force-sensitivity. Still, Ben shuddered at the memory.

"What brings this up?" Ben asked, schooling himself to calm.

Hanna's answer came back after hardly a beat. "Kaeron says it's how you spot bad guys. But you're not a bad guy...!"

Relief coursed through Ben's body. Kaeron Skagg...he knew that name: that was one of Hanna's human kindergarten classmates. A bit of an annoyance to Ben right this minute, but far from an eldritch Force-presence bent on seizing his family's souls. This, Ben Solo could more than deal with.

He smiled. "No, I'm not a bad guy," Ben replied. "I'm just your dad. I make mistakes every now and then, like everybody does, but I don't think I'm a bad guy. I try to take care of you and Mom as best as I can. Same thing with all my patients at the hospital, and everybody I work with when I'm on duty as a Jedi."

"But how come you need a mask? Kaeron said bad guys wear masks 'cause they gotta hide. Or 'cause they're really gross inside." Truth be told, those descriptions hit pretty close to the mark where Hanna's great grandfather was concerned, in his Darth Vader days. But even back then, that had been far from the whole story, not just for Vader, but for plenty of others who wore masks for one reason or another.

"Well, that might be true occasionally," Ben admitted. "That means a little of the time," he clarified, sensing the flickering of curious unknowing. "But not most of the time. There are a lot of reasons people wear masks. Some people have to because they're visiting a world where they can't breathe the air. Kel Dor are like that when they visit oxygen-breathers' worlds like Coruscant. There are other species who can't breathe this kind of air either...Ubese, or Morseerians. We'd have to wear breath masks if we visited their worlds. There are other medical reasons, too. Remember when I told you about Nurse Mychatt? The nice Grindalid man who helped me when I had to go to the hospital as a kid?"

"Um..." Hanna stuck her tongue out as she thought about it. "I think?"

There was some flicker of recognition, Ben noted through the Force. Still, a friendly reminder couldn't hurt. "Nurse Mychatt was definitely not a bad guy. He was a great nurse...very kind, and great with children. He even put up with me, and all my questions." Ben laughed softly to himself. It had partly been an act of distraction--a way to avoid thinking about the horror the Guardian in the Dark had just put him through. But he truly had hungered for knowledge about how humans and Grindalids worked, and all the different species of children Nurse Mychatt had treated at the very same medcenter where Dr. Solo now worked. "He's actually a big reason I became a doctor."

"And he wore a mask?" Hanna asked.

Ben nodded. "Yep. Grindalids like him have to wear masks and cover their bodies against sunlight, or any other lights that have ultraviolet radiation, because they burn really easily. They come from Persis IX, where the light of their sun doesn't reach the surface. They get most of their warmth from the core of their world instead--hot springs, undersea vents, that kind of thing. That means life on their world never had to adapt to sun exposure. Once in a really rare while, a human is born with the same kind of skin problem, and they have to cover up too. But they're all just normal people who have to be extra careful to protect themselves so they don't get hurt or sick."

Hanna's brow furrowed. "Uh-oh...are you sick, Daddy?" She reached for his forehead in an adorable imitation of the basic Force-diagnostic her father often started his exams with.

Ben smiled. "No, honey...I'm good."

Hanna released a theatrical sigh that broadened her dad's grin even further. "Whew!"

Of course, this still meant Hanna was left with an unresolved question, and much like him at her age, she wasn't going to let go until she had an answer. "There are other reasons people wear masks too, non-medical ones."

"Like what?"

"Some people don't believe in showing their faces. Religious stuff, or customs on their planets. The Tuskens on Tatooine feel that way. They don't like humans, so they haven't told us why. The Kaleesh also do, and they have told us why. They worship their ancestors and gods, and they use their masks to honor them."

"Why?" Hanna eyed her dad with a look of confusion. "Do they think their faces are ugly?"

"I dunno about 'ugly,'" Ben said. "Probably more like really private." The second he said that, he almost winced. If Ara came home from the store and found out he'd led Hanna right into the talk at the tender age of four, he'd never live that down. "But that's really just a guess," he quickly added. "I've heard a little, but I don't understand what the Kaleesh believe all that well. And sometimes it's not a very good idea to say you know why someone is doing something when they haven't actually told you for themselves. I think that's the mistake your friend Kaeron is making."

Hanna scowled, folded her arms over her little chest, and stuck out her tongue. "Kaeron is not my friend."

"I stand corrected," Ben replied with mock formality. "So okay...you're not friends with Kaeron. But anyway, assuming things about people without looking closer and paying attention to how they behave isn't a good idea. It might take Kaeron some time to learn that...maybe when he gets a little older."

Hanna nodded again, accepting that at face value.

A wistful smile traced its way across Ben's face. Oh Force, if only Hanna could hold on to that innocence a little longer than he did. He hadn't been much older than she was now, before the Guardian in the Dark had started to steal his own innocence away.

But then...at least when it came to that particular threat, it had been defeated three times now. First when Ben was little--second with Keric Alsovar, and third when Ara was pregnant with Hanna. And that last defeat had been the most devastating one it had been dealt yet.

Even so, Ben was very careful. He and Ara had taught Hanna telepathic etiquette early. What was right, and what was not right. Not in a way meant to scare her, of course, but to at least make her more aware than he had been.

He'd taught Hanna that good mind-voices always asked permission first and went away immediately if you said no. Even Ben himself made sure to follow that rule to an absolute--even if Hanna's reason for saying no was a temper tantrum, he still restrained himself. He had also taught her that good mind-voices said what they wanted to say where an adult from the Solo-Skywalker family could hear (if they weren't one of those to begin with) and never hid from the adults or suggested hiding. That good mind-voices never made you feel afraid or sad, or said bad things about people you loved. And that good mind-voices always showed themselves. Always spoke in person so you knew exactly who they were, where they were, and what they were doing. There'd come a little more flexibility on those rules when she spent her time on the Temple World and became an adult, but for now, those rules...and Ben's own regular psychic checks of the environment around them...had given Hanna the security he hadn't had at that age.

Come to think of it, those rules actually could explain a bit of why what Kaeron had said had gotten under Hanna's skin so much. Not that this had anything to do with a telepathic voice, but the whole thing about showing yourself and not hiding...it made sense why Hanna might have made that connection.

"So anyway," Ben continued, hoping to distract himself from that line of thought before he got too morose and it rubbed off on his daughter, "some people wear masks so they can get away with bad things without people knowing who they are, or because they are trying to hide something nasty. But a lot of people don't. You have to look at the whole situation...what the person is doing, how they're talking, what the Force is saying to you...all of it. And you should always ask Mom and me if you have questions. That's always a good thing, Hanna." He grinned at her. "You did good!"

"Yay!" Hanna squealed.

"How about this," Ben offered. "You've seen most of my masks before, but how about I tell you what each of them is for? What do you think of that?"

"Okay."

The first one was easy...in fact, Ben could pull one right out of the pocket of the doctor's coat he hadn't taken off yet: an unused surgical mask. "I know you've seen this one before," he said. "Do you know what this does?"

"It's for medcenters," Hanna answered.

"Right," Dr. Solo replied. "This is for when I'm working with a patient whose body is weak, and I need to be extra careful not to breathe my germs onto them."

"Ewwwww! Ewwwwww!" Hanna giggled, pinched her nose, and started singing. "Daddy is a bo-oy! Daddy has ge-erms!"

"Hey, no fair!" Ben exclaimed with a fake scowl that quickly got broken up by his laughter. "Everybody has germs, not just boys! Everyone's germs are a little different, but we all have them. I have Daddy germs, and you have Hanna germs, that are just for you. And you know what else is neat?"

Hanna's eyes went wide as she leaned towards him in anticipation.

"Most of them are good germs. The best ones even help our stomachs to make sure you can enjoy yummy things like blue ice cream, and some even make some vitamins for you to keep you healthy and growing strong. There are even some things that used to be germs, that got gobbled up by our cells billions of years ago, and they stayed in us to help make energy for our bodies. There might even be some germs that like to be around when people are strong in the Force."

"Ooh, Force germs!"

"Maybe so!" He smiled, then gestured with the surgical mask again. "But sometimes we might have a bad germ we don't know about. Or one of our good germs might not be good for someone because they're already sick with something else and their body isn't quite acting right. So at times like that, I'll wear a mask like this, or other kinds of medical masks, to make sure I keep my germs to myself, and I don't get their bad germs. That doesn't sound like a bad guy, does it?"

Hanna shook her head. "Nope!"

"All right," Ben said, getting up from the couch and heading into his office, where most of the rest of his masks adorned the upper shelves. The first one he reached for resembled a white and grey pilot's helmet, with a solid visor that completely covered the user's eyes. "Some of these masks are for training. This one is to help people learn how to see through the Force." He set it on his head for a moment. "This makes it a lot harder to accidentally cheat...or cheat on purpose...and use your eyes instead of the Force. We won't use the Force in the house," he reminded her as he took the helmet off, "but we can play some games like that next time we go to the gym. Does that sound fun?"

"Okay," Hanna decided. Then she pointed at another shelf of masks on the opposite side of the room. "That one's really pretty!"

Ben removed it from the shelf--an ornate silver and black mask with humanoid features, and backswept ornamentation that framed the face in the shape of a sunburst. "This mask," he explained, "is one I use once in a while for going places where some people might not think it's polite for people to show their faces." Or, Ben noted to himself, where it specifically wouldn't be polite for him, Ben Solo, to show his face: the Silver Flame, an Imperial veterans' bar where once in a while, he and his colleague Rylkir Zarander visited so that Ryl could talk openly about his military experiences without judgment. That was the one place he'd used this specific mask, since the first time he'd selected it for that purpose.

"But I don't wear it because I want to scare people or do something bad," Ben added. "Times like that, even if I don't show people my face, I want to show them something about me. Something that is true. With this mask, I want to show them I respect them by wearing something nice. Something they might enjoy looking at. So I'm really glad you like it! That makes me feel like I picked a good one."

"Yep." She straightened herself up to her full height, and in imitation of her grandmother's most senatorial voice, she gave a thumbs-up and said, "'Hanna approves.'"

"Well, I'm glad you do," he replied. And he meant it. He gestured at a few other masks from different artists and different worlds, each in their own unique style, some carved in wood, some fashioned with metal and engraved or ornamented with contrasting metals and stones. "I collect these because people spent a long time making them, and took a lot of care and love to make them beautiful. I've always thought of art like this as a sign that even though not everybody can do things with the Force like you and I can, they still can kind of feel it deep down, in their own way." He pointed at another black, humanoid-looking mask, this one with copper patterning on the features. "Even that one, that I wear for really fancy Jedi stuff, wasn't made by a Force-sensitive. It didn't need to be, to work great for me."

Then Ben turned back to the other shelf, where the more utilitarian helms and masks resided. "I have a few more for training, and fighting. Thankfully I don't have to fight much, but when I do..." He frowned for a moment. There was one of them--his battle mask--that he'd owned for years...another black mask, this one with a silver-rimmed visor...and it wasn't just the occasions upon which he'd had to don it, that gave him pause. True, it didn't exactly resemble the one he'd seen on that horrific, Dark version of himself...his was more utilitarian than menacing, not fixed into the permanent silver scowl of the other's, and offering a far wider field of view. And thankfully, his battle mask showed much less sign of battle wear than the other's had.

It was not the same. He reassured himself of that yet again. Yes, it was because his face revealed entirely too much in battle--where he was looking, for starters, what he might be planning...and the pain it cost him as a physician to be forced to take life rather than to nurture it. But it had a time and a place, and a rare one thankfully. He did not live in that place of terror and anguish. He was so much more than just that.

"Daddy?" Hanna gazed up at him. He could feel her mind, reaching out gently to the edges of his.

"Well, I don't like to fight," Ben said. That was, very much, a true statement. "And," he added, a small smile returning to his face as he regarded his daughter's features, "when I train, or fight, I really, really don't want to get poked in the eye. That's not good for you. And I also kinda like my eyes, so I'd like to keep the originals."

"Mom says they look like baby fathier eyes," Hanna informed him with the utmost seriousness.

Ben laughed. He'd heard it too, plenty of times before, typically when he was trying to get out of something ridiculous he'd done, but he adored his daughter's gesture nonetheless. "Awwwww...that's really sweet of Mom!"

Then it occurred to Ben. There was one more mask in their Coruscant apartment, one that wasn't yet on display, but soon would be. "You know, Hanna..." He allowed himself a conspiratorial grin. "There is one more thing masks are for...pretending because we're having a celebration, and we want to have fun. Do you know what we celebrate here on Coruscant for a whole week this month?"

Hanna squealed. "Festival Week!"

"That's right!" Ben said. "Remember, there are three different Festival Weeks on Coruscant--New Year's Fete, the Festival of Life, and the Festival of Stars." That had come as an exciting surprise for Ben when he was a child, moving from Chandrila Prime to Coruscant, for many worlds only celebrated the New Year's Fete, and sometimes even as only a single day. But Coruscant...like everything else on the sprawling city-planet, they did it on an extraordinary scale. "Can you tell me which Festival Week it is this month?"

"Life Week!"

"Well, definitely make sure you call it 'Festival of Life' when Uncle Chewie comes around...the Wookiees have a Life Day, which is something else. Something we're going to go see on Kashyyyk this year when school gets out." He could feel the excitement radiate off of her at that. "But right now, Hanna...I've got a little project for us."

Out of a desk drawer, Ben produced a festive mask--a half-face tooka mask in violet and green with gold trim and great huge ears standing tall. He put it on, where it covered the upper half of his face, but definitely not the enormous, beaming smile. "Ta-da! I got a Festival mask so I can come to your kindergarten parade! And that's not all..." From the same drawer he pulled out a face-painting kit. They might end up using up all of the important colors before the actual day, but buying another kit would be totally worth it for this. "I need a little help making the rest of my face look like a Festival tooka. Do you think you can help paint me up so we can see how these paints look?"

"Ooooh, yeah!" Hanna jumped up and down, clapping her hands.

"All right...let's go into the kitchen and I'll put a sheet out on the floor for us to sit on so Mom doesn't come home from the store and find a mess on the carpet if we drip."

Hanna put her hands on her hips in imitation of Ara. "'Stains are for the shop, not for the house!'"

"Exactly," Ben agreed. "Let's go!"

Before long, father and daughter were deeply engrossed in their enthusiastic, admittedly very impressionistic, Festival art project. So much so, that even Dr. Solo, with his extraordinary Force-gifts of the mind, only got his first inkling Ara had returned from her errands when he heard the little 'click' of a datapad taking a picture...one he knew Ara would never delete.

And Ben Solo was absolutely, one hundred percent okay with that.