Fic: "Survival Guide" -- Jacen, pre-LotF, 1/1
Title: Survival Guide
Characters: Jacen, Tenel Ka, Allana
Timeframe: Between Dark Nest and Legacy of the Force
Warnings: Torture (flashback)
Summary: It's not the nightmares Jacen fears.
A/N: Okay, time for a fic that's been mouldering on my hard drive forever. I still have this nasty sense it strays into anviliciously fanon territory, but then fanon's kind of hard to avoid with Jacen 'choose your motivation of the minute' Solo. So - fanon ahoy?
Jacen dreams that he is not dreaming.
He is held within the Embrace of Pain, its tendrils wrapped around him, suspending him in the place between agony and ecstasy where the mind slivers into shards. He has always been here, and he always will be. Nothing else is as real as this.
The pain has transformed from a thing that consumes him into a thing he accepts as inevitable. He no longer trusts his mind, because it broke first and so easily. He no longer trusts himself, because his self has betrayed him so profoundly. It is reduced to tearing muscles and splintering bones, to thoughts that skitter and bend and cry out for absolution, and he once believed he was more than this, but he was wrong.
He is always wrong.
Something hollow grows within him: a beautiful, cold thing. A certain thing.
He knows that there is no rescue. He knows that there is no happy ending. He’s found his truth at last. For so long he struggled to define what was right, to preserve integrity in the face of darkness that tore him down. He comprehends at last, in this unending finish, that there is no underlying justice holding the galaxy together. Nothing to strive for and uphold. There is only the dark, stripped naked, bloodied and brutal and empty. Only the dark. Always, forever waiting.
Red vapour puffs from his lips and everything else is meaningless.
The Embrace moves, thorns biting deeper. It will seep acid soon. He laughs because it’s a living thing, and once he loved to collect living things, beneficent in his godlike care to their small lives. It’s a perfect mockery. Blood trickles on his face like tears.
All he feels is pain, and he can no longer feel pain at all.
Jacen opens his eyes in a darkness that is warm and breathing. The air is bland with the antiseptic flavour of having been filtered many times, poorly disguised under the aroma of wildflowers and Dathomiri rock blossom. Beneath slippery sheets, his skin is whole.
Tenel Ka is there, a pale shadow in the deeper darkness. She’s awake and watching, and Jacen is afraid.
“You dreamed,” she whispers. She reaches for him, but he sees the angle fingers make when broken in the shape of her hand, and he pulls away. “The Vong?” she asks, voice low, as if the words are regretful but necessary.
He draws himself together, catches her hand. It takes effort to do so, and that seems strange. “I don’t remember,” he lies. Her fingers are cold. He can remember a time when they were always warm, the nails short and rough, making patterns he could run his thumb over and map. Now they’re manicured, rounded and perfectly smooth. He traces his hand to her arm, to her bare shoulder, and he kisses her.
She tastes of sunlit, humid days that stretch forever under a brilliant sky; of brief, snatched moments in wartime, extempore and confused and without resolution; of the tenderness and sadness in the passage of time, in the slow healing of scars, and in the cautious, aching passion of old friends.
Her fingers sink into his hair. Her body is warm against his as they bear back onto the enfolding softness of the bed. Her fingers drift to his cheek, his jaw, brushing across his skin with infinite gentleness, as if she fears what her touch might do.
The pliable surface of the bed presses against his shoulders, and he thinks of the Embrace, its tendrils encircling and enveloping before they sprout thorns. His skin feels damp, as if an invisible film clings there. He gasps, catches the scent of Tenel Ka’s hair, but it’s not enough to break the shadow.
She has already pulled back. She gives him the frank and impenetrable look that he has never understood. He sits and runs his hands through his hair. Says, “I’m going to take a walk.”
She draws her knees up under the heavy bedclothes and the silky sheets. Her hair tumbles around her shoulders, rust and fire glinting. As he pulls on a tunic, she says, “I could come.” Her tone is reserved, as shaded as the moonlight in the far corner of the room.
He looks at her. She’s beautiful, but he can’t shed the taste of old blood. “No.”
Her fingers move, opening and then curling softly. “Don’t be seen,” is all she says.
“I never am.” He hesitates, then leans and kisses her lips. He leaves the room without looking back, sliding from shadow to shadow to become darkness.
The outer room is attentively guarded by tall soldiers whose gleaming weaponry is anything but ceremonial. Jacen throws a haze across their minds before he reaches them, and they stand unmoving as he passes. He erases his passage from their awareness as he steps into the shadows beyond the outer door.
There is a wind in the gardens, circling through hidden leaves as though trapped within the fortified walls. Here in the inner precinct, patches of wildness are allowed to intrude on the purposeful beauty of augmented Hapan flora. Amid the softer greens and the delicately curved stems, Dathomiri growth is marked by its blunt durability and its narrow, inward-turned leaves. In the public gardens, Hapan aestheticism rules supreme, but within Tenel Ka’s private sanctum, it is locked in battle against the pragmatism of conservation and survival.
Bejewelled, bioengineered Hapan vines whisper on the path as they move silently away from of Jacen’s combat boots, flickers of distracting movement in the gloom pooling at ground level. Water trickles somewhere out of sight. The air tastes like exotic aromas from a thousand worlds mingling to something vaguely putrid, underlain with rock and the faint scent of dirt and leaf rot.
The edge of a smile tugs at Jacen’s lips, unbidden, as he glimpses a creepervine native to Yavin IV wrapped around a silver Hapan flower. He kneels and prods it with a finger. His smile falls as he straightens, gaze turning upwards.
The night sky is overrun with the glitter of the Consortium and its backdrop of nebulas so close to the centre of the Cluster. The rest of the galaxy is veiled within the darkness between the systems, a profusion of silence.
He stands, inhumanly still, as the wind whirls around him. He watches the emptiness in the laden sky.
After a long time, he turns. A flowering Hapan vine, having crept back, glimmers in the shadows as it teasingly withdraws from his movement. He looks at it thoughtfully, and thinks that it is creeper-like.
Tendril-like.
The flowers glow softly in the gloom, white edged with red, crusted with flakes that shimmer like diamonds.
Jacen grinds it beneath the solid heel of his boot. The juices of the stem flow red.
He heads down the path, not looking back.
He confounds the guards again, returning to the complex, and erases memory of the haze which conceals his passage with a negligent twist of the Force. He moves silently through the shadowed halls, passing the corridor to Tenel Ka’s chamber, continuing to the room in which his daughter sleeps. He slips past the guards outside, throws confusion across the monitoring systems at the door, and enters.
The room is a haven of softness and faint golden light. Allana’s cot is in the centre. To the left is the door which connects the nursery to the royal chamber.
Jacen moves soundlessly to the bed, standing over the malleable barriers which ensure his daughter’s safety as she sleeps. There’s a strange asymmetry to her as she lies, adrift in unconsciousness and nurturing shadows. Her flaxen-red hair curls in soft wisps. Her lips move, pursing and straightening. Her fingers open and close.
There’s something wrenching about the perfect innocence held there, something that hurts Jacen almost as much as it moves him. It can’t be natural to love this much, so that he feels he bleeds with it.
He touches her head, his fingertips gliding, lighter than a feather. Her hair is so wisp-fine that he feels the skin beneath, warm and vulnerable.
He never imagined himself a parent, but if he had, it would not have been like this. He would, he was sure, have imagined - expected, even - that he would ensure something far removed from his own upbringing, something that promised any child of his a normal, settled home and parents who were never far away.
Such a thing is, he finds, as far beyond his ability as it was for his own parents. Allana grows within a society obsessed with beauty and vanity, where the threat of assassination is as routine as breathing. She will never know him as her father, and he will never be able to call her his daughter.
It doesn’t matter. He’s learned to accept pain as a matter of course, and this is a gentle torment, compared to others. The chance to know her at all is a gift in itself.
He adjusts her sheets with great care, drawing them up so that they are no longer askew, tucking them around her so that she is protected from any draft that might violate the warmth of the nursery.
He looks at her again, and her purity almost breaks him. Somehow, he has to protect her from the darkness that lingers in every reach of the galaxy, from the ugly and inevitable soullessness of galactic war, from the blackness that steals all meaning and destroys good people and transforms beings into monsters. From the bloody foam and the filth and the emptiness, hanging suspended in a torture device.
He will ensure that such things never touch her. She deserves a galaxy such as the one he dreamed might exist when he was younger, one that sought peace at all costs and honoured principle above all else. A galaxy in which she will be safe.
Allana’s eyelids flicker, her small hands opening, her breath sighing out disrupted. His fingertips brushing her fine, coppery hair, Jacen gently nudges her mind toward the warm velvet of sleep that hovers not far away, encouraging her to forget her hazy waking impressions.
He hums a snatch of lullaby he heard a mother sing to her child in the middle of the Vong war, a refugee camp on Duro or Dantooine. He has forgotten the words, if he ever knew them, but the tune is sweet and sad.
In the shadows, Allana sighs and sleeps, her mind softening to colours and music. Jacen watches over her until morning.
[end]
Characters: Jacen, Tenel Ka, Allana
Timeframe: Between Dark Nest and Legacy of the Force
Warnings: Torture (flashback)
Summary: It's not the nightmares Jacen fears.
A/N: Okay, time for a fic that's been mouldering on my hard drive forever. I still have this nasty sense it strays into anviliciously fanon territory, but then fanon's kind of hard to avoid with Jacen 'choose your motivation of the minute' Solo. So - fanon ahoy?
Jacen dreams that he is not dreaming.
He is held within the Embrace of Pain, its tendrils wrapped around him, suspending him in the place between agony and ecstasy where the mind slivers into shards. He has always been here, and he always will be. Nothing else is as real as this.
The pain has transformed from a thing that consumes him into a thing he accepts as inevitable. He no longer trusts his mind, because it broke first and so easily. He no longer trusts himself, because his self has betrayed him so profoundly. It is reduced to tearing muscles and splintering bones, to thoughts that skitter and bend and cry out for absolution, and he once believed he was more than this, but he was wrong.
He is always wrong.
Something hollow grows within him: a beautiful, cold thing. A certain thing.
He knows that there is no rescue. He knows that there is no happy ending. He’s found his truth at last. For so long he struggled to define what was right, to preserve integrity in the face of darkness that tore him down. He comprehends at last, in this unending finish, that there is no underlying justice holding the galaxy together. Nothing to strive for and uphold. There is only the dark, stripped naked, bloodied and brutal and empty. Only the dark. Always, forever waiting.
Red vapour puffs from his lips and everything else is meaningless.
The Embrace moves, thorns biting deeper. It will seep acid soon. He laughs because it’s a living thing, and once he loved to collect living things, beneficent in his godlike care to their small lives. It’s a perfect mockery. Blood trickles on his face like tears.
All he feels is pain, and he can no longer feel pain at all.
Jacen opens his eyes in a darkness that is warm and breathing. The air is bland with the antiseptic flavour of having been filtered many times, poorly disguised under the aroma of wildflowers and Dathomiri rock blossom. Beneath slippery sheets, his skin is whole.
Tenel Ka is there, a pale shadow in the deeper darkness. She’s awake and watching, and Jacen is afraid.
“You dreamed,” she whispers. She reaches for him, but he sees the angle fingers make when broken in the shape of her hand, and he pulls away. “The Vong?” she asks, voice low, as if the words are regretful but necessary.
He draws himself together, catches her hand. It takes effort to do so, and that seems strange. “I don’t remember,” he lies. Her fingers are cold. He can remember a time when they were always warm, the nails short and rough, making patterns he could run his thumb over and map. Now they’re manicured, rounded and perfectly smooth. He traces his hand to her arm, to her bare shoulder, and he kisses her.
She tastes of sunlit, humid days that stretch forever under a brilliant sky; of brief, snatched moments in wartime, extempore and confused and without resolution; of the tenderness and sadness in the passage of time, in the slow healing of scars, and in the cautious, aching passion of old friends.
Her fingers sink into his hair. Her body is warm against his as they bear back onto the enfolding softness of the bed. Her fingers drift to his cheek, his jaw, brushing across his skin with infinite gentleness, as if she fears what her touch might do.
The pliable surface of the bed presses against his shoulders, and he thinks of the Embrace, its tendrils encircling and enveloping before they sprout thorns. His skin feels damp, as if an invisible film clings there. He gasps, catches the scent of Tenel Ka’s hair, but it’s not enough to break the shadow.
She has already pulled back. She gives him the frank and impenetrable look that he has never understood. He sits and runs his hands through his hair. Says, “I’m going to take a walk.”
She draws her knees up under the heavy bedclothes and the silky sheets. Her hair tumbles around her shoulders, rust and fire glinting. As he pulls on a tunic, she says, “I could come.” Her tone is reserved, as shaded as the moonlight in the far corner of the room.
He looks at her. She’s beautiful, but he can’t shed the taste of old blood. “No.”
Her fingers move, opening and then curling softly. “Don’t be seen,” is all she says.
“I never am.” He hesitates, then leans and kisses her lips. He leaves the room without looking back, sliding from shadow to shadow to become darkness.
The outer room is attentively guarded by tall soldiers whose gleaming weaponry is anything but ceremonial. Jacen throws a haze across their minds before he reaches them, and they stand unmoving as he passes. He erases his passage from their awareness as he steps into the shadows beyond the outer door.
There is a wind in the gardens, circling through hidden leaves as though trapped within the fortified walls. Here in the inner precinct, patches of wildness are allowed to intrude on the purposeful beauty of augmented Hapan flora. Amid the softer greens and the delicately curved stems, Dathomiri growth is marked by its blunt durability and its narrow, inward-turned leaves. In the public gardens, Hapan aestheticism rules supreme, but within Tenel Ka’s private sanctum, it is locked in battle against the pragmatism of conservation and survival.
Bejewelled, bioengineered Hapan vines whisper on the path as they move silently away from of Jacen’s combat boots, flickers of distracting movement in the gloom pooling at ground level. Water trickles somewhere out of sight. The air tastes like exotic aromas from a thousand worlds mingling to something vaguely putrid, underlain with rock and the faint scent of dirt and leaf rot.
The edge of a smile tugs at Jacen’s lips, unbidden, as he glimpses a creepervine native to Yavin IV wrapped around a silver Hapan flower. He kneels and prods it with a finger. His smile falls as he straightens, gaze turning upwards.
The night sky is overrun with the glitter of the Consortium and its backdrop of nebulas so close to the centre of the Cluster. The rest of the galaxy is veiled within the darkness between the systems, a profusion of silence.
He stands, inhumanly still, as the wind whirls around him. He watches the emptiness in the laden sky.
After a long time, he turns. A flowering Hapan vine, having crept back, glimmers in the shadows as it teasingly withdraws from his movement. He looks at it thoughtfully, and thinks that it is creeper-like.
Tendril-like.
The flowers glow softly in the gloom, white edged with red, crusted with flakes that shimmer like diamonds.
Jacen grinds it beneath the solid heel of his boot. The juices of the stem flow red.
He heads down the path, not looking back.
He confounds the guards again, returning to the complex, and erases memory of the haze which conceals his passage with a negligent twist of the Force. He moves silently through the shadowed halls, passing the corridor to Tenel Ka’s chamber, continuing to the room in which his daughter sleeps. He slips past the guards outside, throws confusion across the monitoring systems at the door, and enters.
The room is a haven of softness and faint golden light. Allana’s cot is in the centre. To the left is the door which connects the nursery to the royal chamber.
Jacen moves soundlessly to the bed, standing over the malleable barriers which ensure his daughter’s safety as she sleeps. There’s a strange asymmetry to her as she lies, adrift in unconsciousness and nurturing shadows. Her flaxen-red hair curls in soft wisps. Her lips move, pursing and straightening. Her fingers open and close.
There’s something wrenching about the perfect innocence held there, something that hurts Jacen almost as much as it moves him. It can’t be natural to love this much, so that he feels he bleeds with it.
He touches her head, his fingertips gliding, lighter than a feather. Her hair is so wisp-fine that he feels the skin beneath, warm and vulnerable.
He never imagined himself a parent, but if he had, it would not have been like this. He would, he was sure, have imagined - expected, even - that he would ensure something far removed from his own upbringing, something that promised any child of his a normal, settled home and parents who were never far away.
Such a thing is, he finds, as far beyond his ability as it was for his own parents. Allana grows within a society obsessed with beauty and vanity, where the threat of assassination is as routine as breathing. She will never know him as her father, and he will never be able to call her his daughter.
It doesn’t matter. He’s learned to accept pain as a matter of course, and this is a gentle torment, compared to others. The chance to know her at all is a gift in itself.
He adjusts her sheets with great care, drawing them up so that they are no longer askew, tucking them around her so that she is protected from any draft that might violate the warmth of the nursery.
He looks at her again, and her purity almost breaks him. Somehow, he has to protect her from the darkness that lingers in every reach of the galaxy, from the ugly and inevitable soullessness of galactic war, from the blackness that steals all meaning and destroys good people and transforms beings into monsters. From the bloody foam and the filth and the emptiness, hanging suspended in a torture device.
He will ensure that such things never touch her. She deserves a galaxy such as the one he dreamed might exist when he was younger, one that sought peace at all costs and honoured principle above all else. A galaxy in which she will be safe.
Allana’s eyelids flicker, her small hands opening, her breath sighing out disrupted. His fingertips brushing her fine, coppery hair, Jacen gently nudges her mind toward the warm velvet of sleep that hovers not far away, encouraging her to forget her hazy waking impressions.
He hums a snatch of lullaby he heard a mother sing to her child in the middle of the Vong war, a refugee camp on Duro or Dantooine. He has forgotten the words, if he ever knew them, but the tune is sweet and sad.
In the shadows, Allana sighs and sleeps, her mind softening to colours and music. Jacen watches over her until morning.
[end]