Fic: SW: "But You And I Know The Reason Why" (AU; Jaina, Jaina/OC) [2/2]
Part 1
*
“It’s getting worse,” Kyp Durron snaps into her comm. It’s a message, and somehow more shaming as a recording than if she had taken the call. “Your leak was just the starsdamned warning sign. If you can pull yourself away from your boyfriend, or even just out of those clubs for a while, we need to work overtime before one of the assassination attempts actually take.”
Traest looks around the corner; he was in the ‘fresher. “Did he say ‘assassination attempts’? The kriff is going on, Jaina?”
She deletes the recording, tries not to look guilty. “I told you work was crazy.”
She’ll call back just as soon as Traest stops looking suspicious. Kyp is perpetually pissed about one thing or another; a few hours won’t change anything.
*
Anakin is back on planet for the first time since he graduated, and he gives her a flat stare. “Have you seen the tabloids?” he asks; it’s really an accusation. Anakin is impossibly hard on himself, and he applies the same impossible standards on everyone else.
Jaina rolls her eyes at him. “You shouldn’t read that garbage. They could put Mom in the middle of a scandal.”
“But could they get holos of her throwing up outside of clubs on three different nights?”
“Don’t be such a self-righteous little brat, Anakin,” she says. “You’ve been gone months, you’re going to judge me on the first tabloid story you see?”
Anakin’s jaw tightens; he always looks too old, like he probably thinks he is, but now he seems somehow very young, too. “This isn’t like you, Jaina.”
“You sound like Mom.”
Anakin’s face whitens in anger. “I’ve been focusing on research with Uncle Luke.”
“Research?” She’s surprised. Jacen may be the type to think himself into an early grave, but Jaina and Anakin are more likely to focus on action. Of course, she considers, Anakin has always been a brooder, not to mention slightly convinced that he’s going to fix all the galaxy’s problems with his destiny.
He shrugs, blushing just a little, the baby brother. “You do research, too. Just not lately.” Before she can respond to the renewed edge in his voice, Anakin keeps talking. “I’m helping Jacen and Kyp with the investigation about the spies, so you don’t need to worry about it.”
“‘Don’t need to worry’?” she demands, sobering up so suddenly that she has whiplash. “People died because of them, whoever it is, and you know it’s a person, not just surveillance, so somebody is betraying somebody. You’ve got to be kidding me, telling me not to worry.”
“So you do care about that.”
Jaina can’t even move, she’s so godsdamned furious.
“Well, when you aren’t drunk or hanging off your boyfriend.”
It’s the closest Jaina has ever come to hitting her little brother outside of training, and she has to breathe through it, has to force her hand to lower again. It takes her another two minutes to speak. “Don’t say something that stupid to me again, Anakin. You haven’t-” She swallows, thinks of everything she’s tried to forget. “Wait until someone you know dies in your arms, maybe then you’ll get it.”
She pivots and strides out of their parent’s apartment; Anakin’s gaze follows her out. The worst thing about Anakin is that he always sees too much and acts on it twice as fast as Jacen ever could.
*
Jaina’s toe goes up-and-down-and-up under the dinner table as she and Traest eat takeaway. Her hangover presses at her temples, the food tastes bitter, and their flat is too warm, like Anakin’s watching stare has followed her back into Traest’s arms. Traest looks restless, too, keeps running a hand through his hair and then dropping it to check his jean pocket.
“I have some work to do tonight,” she says, breaking the fidgety silence. “It’s getting worse.”
“What is?”
She rubs the palm of her right hand, along the lightsaber calluses. “It’ll be over soon. Anakin joined the team, so we’ll be getting more people on it.”
“The kid can be trusted with this-whatever-and I can’t?” He doesn’t sound angry anymore, just bitter, which is worse.
“I’m not sure if any of us were ever just kids, but Anakin never was. Not about being a Jedi, at least.” She looks away. “Anyway, I think he’s working with Uncle Luke-or for him, since he’s far too busy to deal with this sort of thing himself.”
Traest becomes more alert. “He’s being trained by Luke Skywalker?”
“He’s apprenticed. Anakin is very special, after all.” Her voice is heavy with resentment; Anakin’s self-righteousness won’t be made better with Luke’s mentorship, and the idea only loops her thoughts back to her brother’s accusations. “They’re probably setting him up as Uncle Luke’s protégé, heir, whatever, and it’s his internal investigations training unit. You should have heard him earlier-”
“So he’s taking over for you?” Traest asks casually, but he’s very focused.
Jaina scowls at her food, most of which still tastes bitter except that parts of it are too sweet at the back of her mouth. “It’s my responsibility-”
Traest rolls his eyes and Jaina’s mood swings to cold anger even with her lover.
“My family and missions are in trouble, so I have help, not a shift off.” She stands, feeling volatile and cutting like he’s made her free to be, but for a rare time with him; she wants to be away from them all, for things to go kriffing right again, to not feel so frayed at the edges. “I’ll be at the archives. Don’t wait up.”
*
The archives have a policy about alcohol, but being a Skywalker-Solo has its advantages, and the librarians pretend her flask might actually hold water. Besides, she’s reviewing enough reports, supply lists and surveillance footage that no one could think she’s ignoring anything. Not until early morning, anyway, but the archive staff hardly ever enforces any official policy they might have about sleeping at the desks, except to deactivate the nearest study light.
*
She dreams, an exhausted jumble of frustration and guilt, and then it tapers into something deeper once her mind has stopped scratching at her skull. A hand is on her shoulder, then rests on her forehead and makes her think of the Jing’quis flu and hourly cold rinses; she frowns and turns into the touch; it gentles into a stroke, then leaves her.
*
On her second day in the archives, Jacen pulls a chair up to her desk. His hand brushes her back before he sits down. “So, where are you?” he asks, and then they fall back into their rhythm.
Anakin comes a few hours later. He and Jaina eye each other, but Jacen is experienced at navigating his siblings through their fights. Anakin, to his credit, has not let his master go to his head (much), and he mostly (sometimes) lets Jaina and Jacen take the lead as the ones who’ve led the investigation from the start (even if, he mutters once, they are his siblings). He even reviews their analysis trail for two hours (okay, one hour and forty minutes) before throwing it in their faces.
“You’re looking at the wrong people,” says the sixteen-year-old who thinks he could stop wars if everybody would just get out of his way.
Jaina’s twin speaks before she can thump their little brother, but even peaceful Jacen sounds impatient as he says, “Easy for you to say now that we’ve gathered the base information.”
Anakin’s cheeks are ruddy. “It’s too serious now. You know it isn’t just surveillance, or even only bribed staff. You’re looking for a traitor.” He pauses and stares across the table at both of them. He’s academically detached; Jaina is tired, and wants to smother him with a pillow before he figures out the depth of what he’s saying. “It’s someone you trust.” When his gaze meets Jaina’s, it sticks. “You need a list of people close enough to you that they could do something like this.”
*
Anakin makes his list. He brainstorms with Jaina and Jacen about new friends and landlords, but refuses to show them the names, or even the number of holes he thinks they’ve left.
Jaina, needless to say, returns home in a mood even worse than the one she left with two and a half days ago. She and Traest settle it with a bed and a lot of alcohol. It doesn’t make her forget for long.
“Your kid brother sounds like a brat,” Traest remarks the next morning.
It’s one of the kindest names Jaina has for her little brother at the moment; she only snorts. “Anakin Solo, the Second Jedi Coming of The Brat. Give him a year, he’ll be interrupting Council members.”
“That bad?” Traest says; he sounds delighted.
It would be just like Anakin to waste time investigating Traest. Her lip curls. “Some days.”
*
Jaina opens the door of her apartment and stares: Leia is waiting in the hallway. “How did you even know I’d be here?” Jaina blurts out. “You could have spent an hour trying to find it and missed three meetings for nothing.”
Leia is steady and intent. “I cleared my schedule. May I come in?”
Instead of asking why, Jaina moves to the side, leaves room for Leia to enter. Jaina’s mother has never been to the apartment; she has lacked both time (in negatives, even) and a regular, flexible invitation. Besides, Jaina knows what the Chief of State thinks of her daughter’s street rat boyfriend; Jaina can only imagine what Leia thinks of their sixth level apartment. Jaina gives the four room tour, studying her mother’s reactions as she does.
Leia studies the apartment. She walks into the flat’s only bedroom, can’t miss the one bed that takes up most of the room, and then goes to their one window. She peers out for a moment, then turns back around. Her mouth is soft and somehow off, not quite sad. “I’m surprised you didn’t demand a better view. You can’t see the sky at all from here.”
Jaina shifts her jaw and then her shoulders, settles on crossing her arms over her chest. “I work on the top level. And Traest already rented here before I moved in, I didn’t take much extra room. The rent’s good.” She lifts her chin. “I like it.”
Leia can probably see one of the club districts from the window, but she doesn’t say anything about it. “Have you given up on cooking yet?” she asks. “I can’t imagine you learned anything of food prep from me; I always ate out whenever I could, when I first moved out.”
“Or you got a droid or a servant to make it for you,” Jaina points out. “It’s different for us.”
Neither Leia’s expression nor her stance changes, but Jaina doesn’t need the Force to know that Leia just held back her first reply. “Perhaps. But neither of us are very domestically inclined, are we?” She pauses and searches Jaina’s face for something. It’s one of her mother’s looks that Jaina has been the frequent target of, and she resists the urge to check her face for a grease stain. “Do you have a place to tinker?” Leia asks. It doesn’t sound like the question she was planning to ask.
Jaina shrugs. “The kitchen area is pretty big.”
Leia doesn’t flinch. Perhaps she knows, from Han, that it doesn’t have to be as unsanitary as it sounds. Jaina leads her mother back into the kitchen/dining area/front room. Leia hardly looks at the old radio pushed into one of the corners. Instead, she sits at the table and nods at the seat across from her. Jaina rocks back on her heels, uncertain, then sits.
Jaina has many things to say to her mother, but none of them are worth it. She lets the words fester between them for a day when Leia will allocate time to her own family and heritage and Jaina won’t care. It sinks; Jaina can see the weight in Leia’s eyes, though she doubts it will last.
“Traest is out,” Jaina says to say something. “Work.”
Leia looks back, as steady and unreadable as an ocean. “What does he do?”
Jaina shrugs. “Whatever comes by. He’s been working in a ship bay lately. Mechanics, some cleaning.” She drums her fingers on the table. “And there’s his map of the undercity, of course. He’s been working on that for years.” She grins, then flushes; it seems more personal, a concession.
“What about the job for which he left Coruscant?”
Jaina hesitates, wondering if she should admit her doubts about any such job, then her eyes narrow. “How did you hear about that?”
“You must have mentioned it.”
Jaina snorts. “When?” She shakes her head. “It must have been Jacen.”
It is Leia’s turn to hesitate, something Jaina has rarely seen-if ever. When Leia speaks next, it is without her usual grace, as if she has removed the Chief of State and left only Leia Organa Solo. “I know that I…haven’t been around much lately. At all, even, now that you’ve moved out. We’ve hardly spoken in months. I am very sorry for that, it was never my intention. You, your brothers, and your father mean everything to me.”
No, Jaina snarls, not everything. Leia has been the Chief of State for years, has been involved in the highest level of NR politics for longer than Jaina’s been alive, and it has always been more than just a distraction. She throws the silent accusation into the space between them, and hopes she’s there when Leia finally misses Jaina.
Leia, if anything, becomes even more serious. “And I know that work hasn’t been going well. You could have used a mother.”
Jaina’s back stiffens. “I’m fine.” She sounds too defensive, so she bites the inside of her cheek. “I have Traest. He’s been a big help. You guys make way too big a deal about a few tabloid stories. I’m fine,” she reiterates, “except for everyone breathing down my neck.”
Leia studies her for a long time until Jaina is convinced that she really does have grease on her cheek. “Very well. But if you have some free time today, I have nothing scheduled. I would like to spend as much time together as we can.”
Jaina nods slowly after her own delay. Jaina can put up with the Chief of State until her pager goes off about trade agreements on Kuat, or a Hapan government holiday.
*
Leia stays until after dinner. Traest alternates between silent and outrageous, usually in opposition to Jaina’s own mood. Leia sits calmly in the middle of their unrest as if cheap takeaway in a tiny flat with her daughter’s boyfriend is no less normal than a Senate hearing. Jaina is certain she grew up with five fewer elbows, but the three months she spent as a child imitating her mother’s grace are long gone.
“How guilty do you think she feels?” Traest asks as soon as the door has closed behind Leia. “Just showing up as if that’ll fix everything.”
Jaina is leaning against the door; she is as winded as if she sprinted ten kilometres after three sucker punches. Or maybe four. “I just want to go to bed and not talk about it.”
He loops an arm around her shoulder. “Poor baby.” He’s a little too mocking, but he’s the orphan. “Well, you’ve got me.”
*
The next evening, seven months after he came back, Traest puts his fork down in the middle of dinner and asks her to marry him.
While she’s half-choking, half-swallowing her food, he fumbles with a gold ring. He can’t meet her eyes as he says, “It’s just, you can stay. With me. Or not, you don’t have to-” He cuts himself off, looking wild and as surprised as she is.
She doesn’t give him a chance to bolt. “Yes,” she says, not quite leaping over their dinner table and into his arms. There is going to be takeout all over her clothes, but she’s too delirious to care. “Yes, yes, of course I will,” she says between kisses. “Yes, I love you, I’ll marry you, yes.”
His chair tilts too far and they fall, but his grip is tight on her waist, they’re getting married, and they fall together, and everything is perfect.
*
It’s a gold band; simple, with just a few engraved stars around it, and it suits her perfectly. Jaina has seen plenty of glitter in her life, and she knows that Traest must have been saving up for weeks (she daren’t think months) and gotten a loan to pay for the ring. He’s only said the words once, into her shoulder, but the ring says it a hundred times and ways.
*
Jaina and Traest tell her family together. Jaina can’t stop beaming; it’s just like a speeding flight over Coruscant’s skyline, but with Traest there the whole time: freedom, and she found it all on her own. It’s easy to ignore her family’s stunned expressions, Anakin’s pale face, Leia’s hidden reaction.
Jacen is the first to hug her, tell her congratulations, and shake Traest’s hand. Han is gruff when he holds her tight and tells Traest that if he so much as lifts his voice…. Leia’s reaction is still kept secret as she congratulates them, brushes an affectionate hand along Jaina’s hair; but then Leia glances back at Anakin, and Jaina senses a short burst of concern.
Anakin, who hasn’t been just a child since he heard about Anakin Skywalker, looks half his age or younger, white face turning even paler as he watches them all, his blue eyes wide and latched onto Jaina’s or Traest’s face in alternating moments. Some of Jaina’s joy withers as he only stands there, not making any move to accept her fiancé or choices. She didn’t expect this from Anakin, even if he’s been obvious about his opinion of Traest.
He’s just a child, she reminds herself. Anakin doesn’t always know to look past his own dislike.
Traest is the one who steps up, holds a hand out to Anakin. “So, little brother?”
Anakin grits his teeth and shakes the hand, sparing them teenage melodrama. Jaina reaches out and hugs her youngest brother as the rest of her family talk about just surprised us and wedding dates. Anakin is taller than her by a few inches and will be by more than that in the next few years. For now, her little brother can still tuck his head into the crook of her shoulder. She holds tight, and smoothes his hair when he clings more than she expected. “I know you don’t approve,” she says quietly, “but I love him. He makes me happy. It’ll work out.”
Anakin sighs, snuffles like he’s still a child after all, and stays another minute. “I want you to be happy.”
She smiles, let him sense her freedom and joy. “Love you, little brother.”
He releases her slowly, and isn’t smiling when he pulls back. “We need to talk. About the investigation.”
Jaina sighs, crosses her arms over her chest and keeps the ring visible. “At my engagement dinner, Anakin? Really?”
He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I have a few things to check on first. But-in a couple days. It might be really important.” He bites his lip and finally smiles. “Hopefully not.”
“Okay.” She can’t keep her smile down for long. “C’mon, broody pants. I’m engaged, you’ve almost figured out the spy’s identity, and you’ll be exploiting your bragging privileges right through my honeymoon.”
“I hope I’m wrong,” he says seriously. The colour is mostly back in his cheeks.
“Wouldn’t be the first time, little brother,” she says cheerfully.
*
Jaina can think, now, sober, about the missions that went wrong. The first one, dealing with drug smugglers; the second with Jacen, the Coruscant crime syndicate, and Charco; three subsequent attempts to fix or at least figure out the disastrous second mission; Kyp’s mess of diplomatic negotiations (although that could have been just Kyp); the backlash against the Jedi; the multitude of Jaina’s team members who ended up in the med-ward, and the two who died. There’s a leak-no, a traitor, Anakin is right about that.
Maybe it’s just as well that Anakin has taken over the investigation like a cocky brat. If Jaina were in charge, she wouldn’t have any mercy. It’s hard to think that three days after her engagement; she wants to ignore the truth as it sits just over the horizon, but she can only do that for so long. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when they have the spy’s identity.
Well, unless they can be saved, she reminds herself, because then it’s just part of the Skywalker-Solo formula; Jaina has the script memorized, just in case.
*
Two days after the engagement dinner, Anakin suffers a hail of blaster fire. He is shot four times, and falls to the landing bay from two floors above-a less than successful Force jump. He is unconscious when found, but looks dead. He will spend nearly two weeks in bacta because of damage to his lungs and head. The assassin was thorough, only unlucky (or Anakin, very lucky).
Jaina only vaguely remembers the distressed Force call she has heard too many times in her life. She was already in a taxi to the Jedi med centre when Kyp called. She doesn’t remember anything of running through the med centre’s corridors, or of finding Jacen and then the surgery room that holds Anakin and three healers.
There are hours of meditating, sustaining Anakin between his family and closest friends. Anakin’s face is whiter than when he found out about Jaina’s engagement-hard contrast with the bruises and dirt. She sees him five years old, crying and snotty after the remarks about their grandfather; seven, watching her fix a hyperdrive, beaming and sprinting for the toolbox whenever she asked for help; ten, curling up against her in her bed in the middle of the night or early morning because he couldn’t sleep, asking what if I’m like him? and what’s a destiny like, Jaya? until she hit him with a pillow and told him the only special thing about him was his abnormal powers of brattiness, so just go to sleep already and he did. Sixteen years old, bossing his older siblings around and floating in a bacta tank. A thousand arguments, embraces, insults, jokes, and now the most serious hospitalization that Jaina has ever seen in her family.
Once Anakin is stable, Jacen and Kyp storm out of the med centre together. Jaina stays knotted up in the chair by Anakin’s bed. Leia and Han sit on the other side; Jaina can’t meet their eyes, only wants Anakin to go back to being too old and young, special and bratty.
She can’t imagine anyone who could do this and be trusted. She can’t imagine what she or Jacen have missed. Whatever it is, Jaina is only just big enough to hope they’re long gone, to wonder what she will do now and if she will care.
*
She wakes up; she is in her own bed. “It’ll be over soon,” he tells her. “Do you know anything more?”
She stares at her ceiling. She is sober, and this has to change, preferably yesterday. “Only that someone is going to pay.”
A hand in her hair; a glass of brandy held above her. “Someone.”
She stops listening.
*
She wears the ring for inside of a week before it’s all over.
Jaina is eighteen, a part-time Jedi Knight and a fiancée-the tabloids, if they knew, would probably think it’s romantic, young and in love with the boy from underground. Jaina doesn’t really care except that it involves running, laughing, being whatever she wants to be. Until it ends, of course.
Jacen and Kyp knock at her apartment door, sit on her couch, then stand again as if important things aren’t discussed every day over Leia’s tea setting. Kyp stays quiet and stormy, pacing the room and keeping a tight grip on his lightsaber. Jacen’s face is flushed and angry; he doesn’t move, but only because he can’t decide where to go or what to do, besides avoiding Jaina’s eyes. He tries to stare down Jaina and Traest’s cloak rack.
Jaina stands too, feels as if they’re facing her down, but Kyp looks too furious to be quiet at the source, and Jacen is horrified and pitying. “You found out who the spy is, didn’t you?” she says. It isn’t a question; her fingers are numb, and her throat is as dry as Tatooine.
Kyp looks at her; she can feel him hovering, ready to lash out at an enemy but holding back to try to comfort. She swallows. “It’s someone I trust.” She pins Jacen with her stare; the waiting is the worst part, he should know that about her by now.
She knows as soon as Jacen looks at her, but she still isn’t ready to hear: “Traest has been working for Brakiss for the past four years. Brakiss-you remember him, the one who started the Second Imperium, went off into organized crime later, he’s been…they’ve been expanding, and….”
Kyp continues when Jacen falters. “Traest has been feeding them information, running some of their jobs-he’s been keeping a low profile for the past six, seven months.” Since Traest started spying on you, Kyp doesn’t say.
She licks her lips, blinks. “Anakin figured it out?”
Jacen and Kyp share a look. “He’s awake now,” Jacen says. “He got the message through a few hours ago, once he could get his thoughts together.”
Jaina doesn’t stop herself to think as something ugly, even dark, grips her tight and she lets it. The truth is starkly obvious now that she has it-he hardly had to lie at all, did he, and Jacen and Kyp wouldn’t tell her this without evidence-but she refuses to dwell on it, on a hundred I love you’s and the Skywalker-Solo tradition. She sees only Anakin, who knotted his five-year-old arms around her and cried miserably into her shoulder when a playmate poked and pushed him.
She clears her throat, looks at Kyp. “He’ll be back in thirty minutes.” She glances at her chrono, then blinks and can read it. “Maybe twenty. We ran out of-” Oh, gods, she thinks suddenly, the mother kriffer drugged me. On the heels of it: Not that he needed to, with my blood-alcohol level. She digs a spare blaster out from the cabinet above their comm station. The weight is solid in her hand, steadies her stomach. Jacen is her twin, but Kyp argued with her voice mail about irresponsibility; her cheeks are aflame, and she can’t look at either of them.
Jacen reaches out. “Jaina-”
“Don’t.”
Her twin retracts as if she pushed him, but stays firm. He clears his throat. “Whatever it started out as, I think he really does-”
“I don’t care,” she snaps.
“Even if you could save him?”
Jaina snorts, fights to contain the hysterical laughter. “You saw Anakin.” She checks the blaster’s power cell.
Kyp rests his right hand at the back of her neck, sympathetic. “Get your lightsaber,” he says. “We’ll do this the right way.”
*
Thirty minutes pass, then an hour. Jaina’s knuckles stay white around her lightsaber’s hilt. When she finally looks in the cooling unit, the milk jug is still half full.
He’s gone. Long gone, long warned.
Another hour goes by; Kyp rumbles into his com-link, Jacen gives up on talking to her, and Jaina disassembles their comm and holo-net console. The console’s cam has hours of footage logged, all recent; everything older than three days has been deleted. The comm is clean.
He’s gone. “I’ll find him if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Find him?” Jacen parrots.
Jaina considers the console, then smashes it cam-first into the wall. “And take care of this.”
*
She doesn’t think of the holo-cams and recordings until she’s forced Jacen and Kyp out of her apartment. She saves that realization until she’s already puking in the ‘fresher.
*
She empties their fridge, breadbox, cupboards, pantry, and liquor cabinet. She wears gloves. She doesn’t bother to analyze their food or drinks, only packs it all into garbage bags; she considers burning it, but doesn’t know if there could be any biohazardous material. Besides, the last thing her family needs is more tabloid fodder: Jaina Solo, pyromaniac. Instead, she drags the bags out to the garbage compactor and lets the drugs leave anonymously. She doesn’t care what they were, or where he left them, only that every last trace is gone.
They never had much need for meds; hangover cures and pain relievers are almost alone in the cabinet above the sink. Jaina flushes what she can, throws out the rest.
The bedroom is stripped, the sheets burned and the mattress thrown away. His clothes-most but not all of his wardrobe-are bagged to be given away. Except for one of his favourite shirts, which she tears apart before she thinks.
Room by room, she clears him away, even if it does mean more hours of cleaning than the apartment has ever seen. Even the first sweep isn’t finished until after two midnights; Jaina has to take breaks when her stomach fails her, or her eyes smart and she has to clean them out with cold water. There isn’t anything left in her stomach, and for obvious reasons nothing is in her kitchen either, so she goes out to buy food. She walks into a supermarket, makes her purchases, walks out, then goes back to return the bottle of brandy because she can’t do that now. She ignores the diners she and Traest frequented on her way back. She’ll cook her own food if it kills her (which it might).
She goes back to the apartment, locks the door behind her, changes the access code, activates lockdown, and shoves their heaviest chair to block the entrance.
The flat is stripped but not empty; there are still bags to incinerate, to throw into the most disgusting undercity heap she can find, or to give away in pieces to a dozen off-world charities so Traest will never be able to put them back together even if he looked for them.
Except the last bag, which she filled with a collection of Traest’s treasures, is not in the ‘fresher closet into which she stuffed it a few hours and a retch ago.
Jaina stares at the empty spot, then stomps to the bedroom. Traest’s maps of the west undercity are arranged on the bare and frighteningly clean floor. Three days ago, she thought these maps were his only outlet for thought and dedication; no one has ever detailed a useful amount of the undercity and its countless levels; Traest enjoyed the work. She shakes her head, reminds herself that it was every bit a lie. He left the maps, every one of the flimsi drafts and even the ten datapads in which he stores his backups and notes. The maps are nothing to him; if she looked properly, they might not even show real coordinates or warnings.
There is a bottle of brandy sitting in the far quadrant of the room, on top of a square of the map. She walks over and sees a bright red dot, and a sticky note: 60 minutes after you read this. I’m leaving at 61 minutes. It’s an hour-and-a-half trip through comm dead zones; she and Traest have been there a half dozen times or more for some of the bars and clubs.
Jaina grabs the map square and her jacket and heads out the door.
*
Uncle Luke told Jaina, once, that trying to save Anakin Skywalker was both as natural and as difficult as anything he had ever done. He said it wasn’t easy even afterwards, but that trying was the only right thing to do. “There are monsters out there,” he told Jaina after the Nightsisters’ attack on the praxeum, “but they are few, and even they rarely started out that way. Everyone can be saved, Jaina, I believe that without reservation.”
Leia overheard and Jaina remembers thinking that her mother was stubborn and at least a little angry. Leia’s movements were stiff and straight; she stood behind Jaina and put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Don’t confuse her, Luke, it isn’t that simple. Jaina, you can’t strongarm someone any day into changing their life. They have to want it, the timing has to be right.” She paused. Jaina turned around to look up at her mother, who gave the Chief of State’s Tough Love Smile. “Some people won’t be saved, no matter how hard you try.”
But Jaina had known that her mother and uncle were really talking about their father, and so she thought, fifteen years old, that of course her mother would say that, but Jaina was going to believe.
*
X marks a club that Jaina and Traest visited once or twice, a true undercity place which the tabloids didn’t consider to be worth their trouble. She remembers it, patchwork, some memories blurring one into the other and others all too vivid. She ignores the entrance and walks into the club’s back alley. She’s seven minutes late, even having broken half the traffic laws and possibly a few laws of physics, but she takes the time to read her surroundings.
Traest, whose Force signature was rarely sought out but still familiar, is probably alone. The club is almost empty at this time of day, but the undercity is loudly alive; it’s impossible to be certain. She keeps her lightsaber in hand and walks into the sickly light.
He joins her. “You’re late.”
She props one fist on her hip. “You’re still here.”
He grins suddenly, like a vibro-shiv in her chest. “Well?” he prompts.
Her hand is slick on her lightsaber’s hilt; she switches hands and wipes the first one dry on her shorts. The undercity is too hot. “You lied to me about everything,” she says, too stiff. Her chest is falling inward; she breathes shallower; it’s too soon.
Traest steps closer, but halts sooner when he sees her shift her grip. “Actually, I got in some trouble for how much I didn’t lie to you.”
“All those times I can’t remember,” she says through gritted teeth, “when my drinks tasted off, you were drugging me. And you-” She swallows, because if she can say this, keeping her self-control for the rest will be a piece of cake. “You tried to kill Anakin.”
“No,” he says immediately, looking angry. “I told them to find out what he knew, throw him off. They weren’t supposed to hurt him.”
“Even if I believed you, it’s still your responsibility. You- Gods. And all this time-”
Traest’s eyebrows dip toward his nose, but his expression begins to close. “You can start any time now, Princess.” He grins suddenly, sharp. “Or am I supposed to go first? This is really more your area.” He waits, but she only stares back. His short temper-and by gods, she thinks, I’ll cut it shorter-flits across his face. “You do know why I picked this spot, don’t you?”
“No comm reception,” she says, clipping his taunt in some last hope that it wasn’t any more personal than his complete betrayal. “Your turf. Too far for me to make it and call for backup. It won’t save you, Traest, I don’t care what kind of training you sold out for. I’m still a Jedi.”
He laughs quickly, though there’s something else at her periphery. “Well, that’s all good, but it’s not what I meant.” He holds his arms out, like he’ll catch her. “This is where you said you loved me. The first time,” he clarifies, obviously smug (and why shouldn’t he be, job well done).
“Why?” she finally manages to say. It doesn’t matter, she doesn’t give two kriffs about his why’s-it’s probably money or free sex, she thinks viciously, or even a sadistic gratification she missed, little blind child. But she opens her mouth and says it anyway: “Why, gods damn you?”
He doesn’t actually, but she’s reading him now and he rolls his eyes before he stops the physical reaction. “Because you made me a promise. It’s like…metaphorical or some shavit, symbolic, whatever.”
“I have a promise to keep?”
His smile starts slow, then stretches wide like he and Jaina are on the same page. She wants to claw it off, except that wouldn’t be control and she will scrap at least that much together. Traest says, “Now that you have the chance.”
She clips her lightsaber to her belt; this isn’t the fight she wants to throw herself into. She imagines her mother to spite both Traest and herself, and crosses her arms over her chest. She’s thinking now, will do if it drives her off the deep end, and Leia told her once-she was dressed up and preparing for a disciplinary hearing-that she’d give them enough silence to hang themselves by.
“It was just work,” Traest says like he’s picked a route through this. “Real work, not just picking pockets, credits to fill my own pockets. I didn’t plan to come back or anything.” He shrugs. “It’s just how things went.”
“So you just thought, hey, why not ruin an old friend’s life,” Jaina snaps, her temper showing before she thinks Leia and Jacen again and closes her eyes to Anakin until later.
“So just come with me if it’s so wrecked. No need to be a drama queen, I thought you’d take it better.”
She blinks, or tries to. “Are you crazy?”
He rolls his eyes again, this time so she can see it with her eyes. “I didn’t give them anything that would get you hurt, did I? Look, are you going to jump in any time soon? What do you even need to save someone?”
It strikes her hard enough to shake loose the numbness and hurtle her into the ugliness from before. Screw control and enough silence to hang himself by, if he’s throwing that in her face. “Is that all you want?” she says, mocking him back. “The script?”
He stands still, almost patient like she never thought he was, and looks-if she didn’t know better, she would think that he looks sincere. “You promised.”
Mired in the ugliness, she sees a thousand times she said I love you, defended Traest to her family and friends, lost herself, and she thinks no. Even if the timing is right, even if he’s genuine and not mocking her (if), even if he isn’t a monster-no. She doesn’t believe him, doesn’t want to. He doesn’t deserve it. “Traest, you can go to-”
“You promised,” he says, furious.
“Anakin’s in a tub of bacta,” she retorts, because that’s true, too.
“That’s not my fault!”
She raises her chin. “I don’t believe you.”
He swallows, his throat working around it and reminding her of a thousand kisses he tricked out of her. “I have information on Brakiss, if you-I could-”
“I don’t believe you,” she interrupts, cold and loathing. “And I don’t care,” she says over his look and the redemption stories she was weaned on. “After what you did-I’ll never take another chance on you again.” She reaches into her jacket, pulls out standard issue cuffs, and begins to feel like the ground is firm enough for walking on again. “You’re under arrest, Traest, and by gods, I hope you put up a fight so I can kick your lying ass,” she says as she steps forward. She reaches for him, but she couldn’t stand close to him before and now he’s too quick to move backwards, giving her a chase, and she hates being so short.
“Then I won’t disappoint you,” he spits over his shoulder before he twists around a corner and darts downward.
*
They run for hours through the undercity, until Jaina is winded and knows that Traest was always pretending when he breathed shortly, until she wonders if he is being chased or if he is getting her lost in the maze of undercity no one has ever completely mapped. She knows some of these places, recognizes most, but Traest is home here and pulls her into his trap. They’re running, but she isn’t laughing anymore.
They run for hours, Traest ahead and Jaina in pursuit, until Traest jumps and Jaina only thinks regular jump until she’s down through a garbage heap hole and flying before she lands hard, slanted the wrong way looking up at where she fell, and gods, her arm hurts, did she imagine the sound of bone snapping? She shudders to a stop, gulps air and the closest thing she has to control, before sliding off her right arm and pulling it loose, and no, she didn’t imagine the snap at all, but she can bite her lip through and not cry. She holds it gingerly, keeps breathing and biting down, looks up and sees Traest staring down at her from the lip of his trap. She can’t see if he’s grinning, wild and smug, but he must be-Jaina thinks he must be, because he tricked her once, but she’s eighteen, a Jedi Knight and an ex-fiancée, and she’ll never believe in him again. He made her a leak, used her and left her a fool, and put Anakin in bacta-that’s the limit of her caring; she sees him gloating, will always see him gloating above her before he darts away.
She stays down until she can roll right-ways and stagger upright, and then she walks home. It’s a long walk back to her family, back to the med centre where Anakin will still be floating and breathing, but she gets there. Traest was a traitor, but Jaina is a Jedi Knight, the daughter of heroes, and by gods she will make it through this; she only has to let the stars pull her forward.
*
Jaina is Han’s daughter in a thousand and one ways. There are stars in her blood and brandy in her eyes; the adrenaline curls slick through her gut; she never goes anywhere without her multi-tool; and she can hide neither the grease stains on her hands nor the heart just under her sleeve. Jaina is her daddy’s girl, and she’s never not known that.
Sometimes, though, she is Leia’s daughter, too.
The truth is, once Kyp and Jacen told her, Jaina never really thought about saving Traest. Not when she confronted him, not when he made his offer, not for years.
Solos make choices, and they stick by them. Traest was an enemy. She never wondered if she could pull him free of Brakiss, or if he loved her enough to let her fix him. She spent months thumbing her nose at her family’s legacy with Traest, but in the end she made the hard choice and didn’t look back. Solos and Skywalkers think a lot about redemption, but Vader’s granddaughter didn’t even consider it when the betrayal stared her in the face.
She didn’t wonder if that was a wrong until she heard another boy’s story and thought about his what-ifs. Even then, though, Traest’s redemption was only academic. She had made her decision, and she never looked back.
That was Jaina’s betrayal.
*
So, I will head out alone and hope for the best
And we can hang our heads down as we skip the goodbyes
You can tell the world what you want them to hear
I've got nothing left to lose, my dear
So, I'm up for the little white lies
But you and I know the reason why
I'm gone, and you're still there
-“The Reason Why” by Rachael Yamagata
Please let me know what you think! :D
*
“It’s getting worse,” Kyp Durron snaps into her comm. It’s a message, and somehow more shaming as a recording than if she had taken the call. “Your leak was just the starsdamned warning sign. If you can pull yourself away from your boyfriend, or even just out of those clubs for a while, we need to work overtime before one of the assassination attempts actually take.”
Traest looks around the corner; he was in the ‘fresher. “Did he say ‘assassination attempts’? The kriff is going on, Jaina?”
She deletes the recording, tries not to look guilty. “I told you work was crazy.”
She’ll call back just as soon as Traest stops looking suspicious. Kyp is perpetually pissed about one thing or another; a few hours won’t change anything.
*
Anakin is back on planet for the first time since he graduated, and he gives her a flat stare. “Have you seen the tabloids?” he asks; it’s really an accusation. Anakin is impossibly hard on himself, and he applies the same impossible standards on everyone else.
Jaina rolls her eyes at him. “You shouldn’t read that garbage. They could put Mom in the middle of a scandal.”
“But could they get holos of her throwing up outside of clubs on three different nights?”
“Don’t be such a self-righteous little brat, Anakin,” she says. “You’ve been gone months, you’re going to judge me on the first tabloid story you see?”
Anakin’s jaw tightens; he always looks too old, like he probably thinks he is, but now he seems somehow very young, too. “This isn’t like you, Jaina.”
“You sound like Mom.”
Anakin’s face whitens in anger. “I’ve been focusing on research with Uncle Luke.”
“Research?” She’s surprised. Jacen may be the type to think himself into an early grave, but Jaina and Anakin are more likely to focus on action. Of course, she considers, Anakin has always been a brooder, not to mention slightly convinced that he’s going to fix all the galaxy’s problems with his destiny.
He shrugs, blushing just a little, the baby brother. “You do research, too. Just not lately.” Before she can respond to the renewed edge in his voice, Anakin keeps talking. “I’m helping Jacen and Kyp with the investigation about the spies, so you don’t need to worry about it.”
“‘Don’t need to worry’?” she demands, sobering up so suddenly that she has whiplash. “People died because of them, whoever it is, and you know it’s a person, not just surveillance, so somebody is betraying somebody. You’ve got to be kidding me, telling me not to worry.”
“So you do care about that.”
Jaina can’t even move, she’s so godsdamned furious.
“Well, when you aren’t drunk or hanging off your boyfriend.”
It’s the closest Jaina has ever come to hitting her little brother outside of training, and she has to breathe through it, has to force her hand to lower again. It takes her another two minutes to speak. “Don’t say something that stupid to me again, Anakin. You haven’t-” She swallows, thinks of everything she’s tried to forget. “Wait until someone you know dies in your arms, maybe then you’ll get it.”
She pivots and strides out of their parent’s apartment; Anakin’s gaze follows her out. The worst thing about Anakin is that he always sees too much and acts on it twice as fast as Jacen ever could.
*
Jaina’s toe goes up-and-down-and-up under the dinner table as she and Traest eat takeaway. Her hangover presses at her temples, the food tastes bitter, and their flat is too warm, like Anakin’s watching stare has followed her back into Traest’s arms. Traest looks restless, too, keeps running a hand through his hair and then dropping it to check his jean pocket.
“I have some work to do tonight,” she says, breaking the fidgety silence. “It’s getting worse.”
“What is?”
She rubs the palm of her right hand, along the lightsaber calluses. “It’ll be over soon. Anakin joined the team, so we’ll be getting more people on it.”
“The kid can be trusted with this-whatever-and I can’t?” He doesn’t sound angry anymore, just bitter, which is worse.
“I’m not sure if any of us were ever just kids, but Anakin never was. Not about being a Jedi, at least.” She looks away. “Anyway, I think he’s working with Uncle Luke-or for him, since he’s far too busy to deal with this sort of thing himself.”
Traest becomes more alert. “He’s being trained by Luke Skywalker?”
“He’s apprenticed. Anakin is very special, after all.” Her voice is heavy with resentment; Anakin’s self-righteousness won’t be made better with Luke’s mentorship, and the idea only loops her thoughts back to her brother’s accusations. “They’re probably setting him up as Uncle Luke’s protégé, heir, whatever, and it’s his internal investigations training unit. You should have heard him earlier-”
“So he’s taking over for you?” Traest asks casually, but he’s very focused.
Jaina scowls at her food, most of which still tastes bitter except that parts of it are too sweet at the back of her mouth. “It’s my responsibility-”
Traest rolls his eyes and Jaina’s mood swings to cold anger even with her lover.
“My family and missions are in trouble, so I have help, not a shift off.” She stands, feeling volatile and cutting like he’s made her free to be, but for a rare time with him; she wants to be away from them all, for things to go kriffing right again, to not feel so frayed at the edges. “I’ll be at the archives. Don’t wait up.”
*
The archives have a policy about alcohol, but being a Skywalker-Solo has its advantages, and the librarians pretend her flask might actually hold water. Besides, she’s reviewing enough reports, supply lists and surveillance footage that no one could think she’s ignoring anything. Not until early morning, anyway, but the archive staff hardly ever enforces any official policy they might have about sleeping at the desks, except to deactivate the nearest study light.
*
She dreams, an exhausted jumble of frustration and guilt, and then it tapers into something deeper once her mind has stopped scratching at her skull. A hand is on her shoulder, then rests on her forehead and makes her think of the Jing’quis flu and hourly cold rinses; she frowns and turns into the touch; it gentles into a stroke, then leaves her.
*
On her second day in the archives, Jacen pulls a chair up to her desk. His hand brushes her back before he sits down. “So, where are you?” he asks, and then they fall back into their rhythm.
Anakin comes a few hours later. He and Jaina eye each other, but Jacen is experienced at navigating his siblings through their fights. Anakin, to his credit, has not let his master go to his head (much), and he mostly (sometimes) lets Jaina and Jacen take the lead as the ones who’ve led the investigation from the start (even if, he mutters once, they are his siblings). He even reviews their analysis trail for two hours (okay, one hour and forty minutes) before throwing it in their faces.
“You’re looking at the wrong people,” says the sixteen-year-old who thinks he could stop wars if everybody would just get out of his way.
Jaina’s twin speaks before she can thump their little brother, but even peaceful Jacen sounds impatient as he says, “Easy for you to say now that we’ve gathered the base information.”
Anakin’s cheeks are ruddy. “It’s too serious now. You know it isn’t just surveillance, or even only bribed staff. You’re looking for a traitor.” He pauses and stares across the table at both of them. He’s academically detached; Jaina is tired, and wants to smother him with a pillow before he figures out the depth of what he’s saying. “It’s someone you trust.” When his gaze meets Jaina’s, it sticks. “You need a list of people close enough to you that they could do something like this.”
*
Anakin makes his list. He brainstorms with Jaina and Jacen about new friends and landlords, but refuses to show them the names, or even the number of holes he thinks they’ve left.
Jaina, needless to say, returns home in a mood even worse than the one she left with two and a half days ago. She and Traest settle it with a bed and a lot of alcohol. It doesn’t make her forget for long.
“Your kid brother sounds like a brat,” Traest remarks the next morning.
It’s one of the kindest names Jaina has for her little brother at the moment; she only snorts. “Anakin Solo, the Second Jedi Coming of The Brat. Give him a year, he’ll be interrupting Council members.”
“That bad?” Traest says; he sounds delighted.
It would be just like Anakin to waste time investigating Traest. Her lip curls. “Some days.”
*
Jaina opens the door of her apartment and stares: Leia is waiting in the hallway. “How did you even know I’d be here?” Jaina blurts out. “You could have spent an hour trying to find it and missed three meetings for nothing.”
Leia is steady and intent. “I cleared my schedule. May I come in?”
Instead of asking why, Jaina moves to the side, leaves room for Leia to enter. Jaina’s mother has never been to the apartment; she has lacked both time (in negatives, even) and a regular, flexible invitation. Besides, Jaina knows what the Chief of State thinks of her daughter’s street rat boyfriend; Jaina can only imagine what Leia thinks of their sixth level apartment. Jaina gives the four room tour, studying her mother’s reactions as she does.
Leia studies the apartment. She walks into the flat’s only bedroom, can’t miss the one bed that takes up most of the room, and then goes to their one window. She peers out for a moment, then turns back around. Her mouth is soft and somehow off, not quite sad. “I’m surprised you didn’t demand a better view. You can’t see the sky at all from here.”
Jaina shifts her jaw and then her shoulders, settles on crossing her arms over her chest. “I work on the top level. And Traest already rented here before I moved in, I didn’t take much extra room. The rent’s good.” She lifts her chin. “I like it.”
Leia can probably see one of the club districts from the window, but she doesn’t say anything about it. “Have you given up on cooking yet?” she asks. “I can’t imagine you learned anything of food prep from me; I always ate out whenever I could, when I first moved out.”
“Or you got a droid or a servant to make it for you,” Jaina points out. “It’s different for us.”
Neither Leia’s expression nor her stance changes, but Jaina doesn’t need the Force to know that Leia just held back her first reply. “Perhaps. But neither of us are very domestically inclined, are we?” She pauses and searches Jaina’s face for something. It’s one of her mother’s looks that Jaina has been the frequent target of, and she resists the urge to check her face for a grease stain. “Do you have a place to tinker?” Leia asks. It doesn’t sound like the question she was planning to ask.
Jaina shrugs. “The kitchen area is pretty big.”
Leia doesn’t flinch. Perhaps she knows, from Han, that it doesn’t have to be as unsanitary as it sounds. Jaina leads her mother back into the kitchen/dining area/front room. Leia hardly looks at the old radio pushed into one of the corners. Instead, she sits at the table and nods at the seat across from her. Jaina rocks back on her heels, uncertain, then sits.
Jaina has many things to say to her mother, but none of them are worth it. She lets the words fester between them for a day when Leia will allocate time to her own family and heritage and Jaina won’t care. It sinks; Jaina can see the weight in Leia’s eyes, though she doubts it will last.
“Traest is out,” Jaina says to say something. “Work.”
Leia looks back, as steady and unreadable as an ocean. “What does he do?”
Jaina shrugs. “Whatever comes by. He’s been working in a ship bay lately. Mechanics, some cleaning.” She drums her fingers on the table. “And there’s his map of the undercity, of course. He’s been working on that for years.” She grins, then flushes; it seems more personal, a concession.
“What about the job for which he left Coruscant?”
Jaina hesitates, wondering if she should admit her doubts about any such job, then her eyes narrow. “How did you hear about that?”
“You must have mentioned it.”
Jaina snorts. “When?” She shakes her head. “It must have been Jacen.”
It is Leia’s turn to hesitate, something Jaina has rarely seen-if ever. When Leia speaks next, it is without her usual grace, as if she has removed the Chief of State and left only Leia Organa Solo. “I know that I…haven’t been around much lately. At all, even, now that you’ve moved out. We’ve hardly spoken in months. I am very sorry for that, it was never my intention. You, your brothers, and your father mean everything to me.”
No, Jaina snarls, not everything. Leia has been the Chief of State for years, has been involved in the highest level of NR politics for longer than Jaina’s been alive, and it has always been more than just a distraction. She throws the silent accusation into the space between them, and hopes she’s there when Leia finally misses Jaina.
Leia, if anything, becomes even more serious. “And I know that work hasn’t been going well. You could have used a mother.”
Jaina’s back stiffens. “I’m fine.” She sounds too defensive, so she bites the inside of her cheek. “I have Traest. He’s been a big help. You guys make way too big a deal about a few tabloid stories. I’m fine,” she reiterates, “except for everyone breathing down my neck.”
Leia studies her for a long time until Jaina is convinced that she really does have grease on her cheek. “Very well. But if you have some free time today, I have nothing scheduled. I would like to spend as much time together as we can.”
Jaina nods slowly after her own delay. Jaina can put up with the Chief of State until her pager goes off about trade agreements on Kuat, or a Hapan government holiday.
*
Leia stays until after dinner. Traest alternates between silent and outrageous, usually in opposition to Jaina’s own mood. Leia sits calmly in the middle of their unrest as if cheap takeaway in a tiny flat with her daughter’s boyfriend is no less normal than a Senate hearing. Jaina is certain she grew up with five fewer elbows, but the three months she spent as a child imitating her mother’s grace are long gone.
“How guilty do you think she feels?” Traest asks as soon as the door has closed behind Leia. “Just showing up as if that’ll fix everything.”
Jaina is leaning against the door; she is as winded as if she sprinted ten kilometres after three sucker punches. Or maybe four. “I just want to go to bed and not talk about it.”
He loops an arm around her shoulder. “Poor baby.” He’s a little too mocking, but he’s the orphan. “Well, you’ve got me.”
*
The next evening, seven months after he came back, Traest puts his fork down in the middle of dinner and asks her to marry him.
While she’s half-choking, half-swallowing her food, he fumbles with a gold ring. He can’t meet her eyes as he says, “It’s just, you can stay. With me. Or not, you don’t have to-” He cuts himself off, looking wild and as surprised as she is.
She doesn’t give him a chance to bolt. “Yes,” she says, not quite leaping over their dinner table and into his arms. There is going to be takeout all over her clothes, but she’s too delirious to care. “Yes, yes, of course I will,” she says between kisses. “Yes, I love you, I’ll marry you, yes.”
His chair tilts too far and they fall, but his grip is tight on her waist, they’re getting married, and they fall together, and everything is perfect.
*
It’s a gold band; simple, with just a few engraved stars around it, and it suits her perfectly. Jaina has seen plenty of glitter in her life, and she knows that Traest must have been saving up for weeks (she daren’t think months) and gotten a loan to pay for the ring. He’s only said the words once, into her shoulder, but the ring says it a hundred times and ways.
*
Jaina and Traest tell her family together. Jaina can’t stop beaming; it’s just like a speeding flight over Coruscant’s skyline, but with Traest there the whole time: freedom, and she found it all on her own. It’s easy to ignore her family’s stunned expressions, Anakin’s pale face, Leia’s hidden reaction.
Jacen is the first to hug her, tell her congratulations, and shake Traest’s hand. Han is gruff when he holds her tight and tells Traest that if he so much as lifts his voice…. Leia’s reaction is still kept secret as she congratulates them, brushes an affectionate hand along Jaina’s hair; but then Leia glances back at Anakin, and Jaina senses a short burst of concern.
Anakin, who hasn’t been just a child since he heard about Anakin Skywalker, looks half his age or younger, white face turning even paler as he watches them all, his blue eyes wide and latched onto Jaina’s or Traest’s face in alternating moments. Some of Jaina’s joy withers as he only stands there, not making any move to accept her fiancé or choices. She didn’t expect this from Anakin, even if he’s been obvious about his opinion of Traest.
He’s just a child, she reminds herself. Anakin doesn’t always know to look past his own dislike.
Traest is the one who steps up, holds a hand out to Anakin. “So, little brother?”
Anakin grits his teeth and shakes the hand, sparing them teenage melodrama. Jaina reaches out and hugs her youngest brother as the rest of her family talk about just surprised us and wedding dates. Anakin is taller than her by a few inches and will be by more than that in the next few years. For now, her little brother can still tuck his head into the crook of her shoulder. She holds tight, and smoothes his hair when he clings more than she expected. “I know you don’t approve,” she says quietly, “but I love him. He makes me happy. It’ll work out.”
Anakin sighs, snuffles like he’s still a child after all, and stays another minute. “I want you to be happy.”
She smiles, let him sense her freedom and joy. “Love you, little brother.”
He releases her slowly, and isn’t smiling when he pulls back. “We need to talk. About the investigation.”
Jaina sighs, crosses her arms over her chest and keeps the ring visible. “At my engagement dinner, Anakin? Really?”
He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I have a few things to check on first. But-in a couple days. It might be really important.” He bites his lip and finally smiles. “Hopefully not.”
“Okay.” She can’t keep her smile down for long. “C’mon, broody pants. I’m engaged, you’ve almost figured out the spy’s identity, and you’ll be exploiting your bragging privileges right through my honeymoon.”
“I hope I’m wrong,” he says seriously. The colour is mostly back in his cheeks.
“Wouldn’t be the first time, little brother,” she says cheerfully.
*
Jaina can think, now, sober, about the missions that went wrong. The first one, dealing with drug smugglers; the second with Jacen, the Coruscant crime syndicate, and Charco; three subsequent attempts to fix or at least figure out the disastrous second mission; Kyp’s mess of diplomatic negotiations (although that could have been just Kyp); the backlash against the Jedi; the multitude of Jaina’s team members who ended up in the med-ward, and the two who died. There’s a leak-no, a traitor, Anakin is right about that.
Maybe it’s just as well that Anakin has taken over the investigation like a cocky brat. If Jaina were in charge, she wouldn’t have any mercy. It’s hard to think that three days after her engagement; she wants to ignore the truth as it sits just over the horizon, but she can only do that for so long. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when they have the spy’s identity.
Well, unless they can be saved, she reminds herself, because then it’s just part of the Skywalker-Solo formula; Jaina has the script memorized, just in case.
*
Two days after the engagement dinner, Anakin suffers a hail of blaster fire. He is shot four times, and falls to the landing bay from two floors above-a less than successful Force jump. He is unconscious when found, but looks dead. He will spend nearly two weeks in bacta because of damage to his lungs and head. The assassin was thorough, only unlucky (or Anakin, very lucky).
Jaina only vaguely remembers the distressed Force call she has heard too many times in her life. She was already in a taxi to the Jedi med centre when Kyp called. She doesn’t remember anything of running through the med centre’s corridors, or of finding Jacen and then the surgery room that holds Anakin and three healers.
There are hours of meditating, sustaining Anakin between his family and closest friends. Anakin’s face is whiter than when he found out about Jaina’s engagement-hard contrast with the bruises and dirt. She sees him five years old, crying and snotty after the remarks about their grandfather; seven, watching her fix a hyperdrive, beaming and sprinting for the toolbox whenever she asked for help; ten, curling up against her in her bed in the middle of the night or early morning because he couldn’t sleep, asking what if I’m like him? and what’s a destiny like, Jaya? until she hit him with a pillow and told him the only special thing about him was his abnormal powers of brattiness, so just go to sleep already and he did. Sixteen years old, bossing his older siblings around and floating in a bacta tank. A thousand arguments, embraces, insults, jokes, and now the most serious hospitalization that Jaina has ever seen in her family.
Once Anakin is stable, Jacen and Kyp storm out of the med centre together. Jaina stays knotted up in the chair by Anakin’s bed. Leia and Han sit on the other side; Jaina can’t meet their eyes, only wants Anakin to go back to being too old and young, special and bratty.
She can’t imagine anyone who could do this and be trusted. She can’t imagine what she or Jacen have missed. Whatever it is, Jaina is only just big enough to hope they’re long gone, to wonder what she will do now and if she will care.
*
She wakes up; she is in her own bed. “It’ll be over soon,” he tells her. “Do you know anything more?”
She stares at her ceiling. She is sober, and this has to change, preferably yesterday. “Only that someone is going to pay.”
A hand in her hair; a glass of brandy held above her. “Someone.”
She stops listening.
*
She wears the ring for inside of a week before it’s all over.
Jaina is eighteen, a part-time Jedi Knight and a fiancée-the tabloids, if they knew, would probably think it’s romantic, young and in love with the boy from underground. Jaina doesn’t really care except that it involves running, laughing, being whatever she wants to be. Until it ends, of course.
Jacen and Kyp knock at her apartment door, sit on her couch, then stand again as if important things aren’t discussed every day over Leia’s tea setting. Kyp stays quiet and stormy, pacing the room and keeping a tight grip on his lightsaber. Jacen’s face is flushed and angry; he doesn’t move, but only because he can’t decide where to go or what to do, besides avoiding Jaina’s eyes. He tries to stare down Jaina and Traest’s cloak rack.
Jaina stands too, feels as if they’re facing her down, but Kyp looks too furious to be quiet at the source, and Jacen is horrified and pitying. “You found out who the spy is, didn’t you?” she says. It isn’t a question; her fingers are numb, and her throat is as dry as Tatooine.
Kyp looks at her; she can feel him hovering, ready to lash out at an enemy but holding back to try to comfort. She swallows. “It’s someone I trust.” She pins Jacen with her stare; the waiting is the worst part, he should know that about her by now.
She knows as soon as Jacen looks at her, but she still isn’t ready to hear: “Traest has been working for Brakiss for the past four years. Brakiss-you remember him, the one who started the Second Imperium, went off into organized crime later, he’s been…they’ve been expanding, and….”
Kyp continues when Jacen falters. “Traest has been feeding them information, running some of their jobs-he’s been keeping a low profile for the past six, seven months.” Since Traest started spying on you, Kyp doesn’t say.
She licks her lips, blinks. “Anakin figured it out?”
Jacen and Kyp share a look. “He’s awake now,” Jacen says. “He got the message through a few hours ago, once he could get his thoughts together.”
Jaina doesn’t stop herself to think as something ugly, even dark, grips her tight and she lets it. The truth is starkly obvious now that she has it-he hardly had to lie at all, did he, and Jacen and Kyp wouldn’t tell her this without evidence-but she refuses to dwell on it, on a hundred I love you’s and the Skywalker-Solo tradition. She sees only Anakin, who knotted his five-year-old arms around her and cried miserably into her shoulder when a playmate poked and pushed him.
She clears her throat, looks at Kyp. “He’ll be back in thirty minutes.” She glances at her chrono, then blinks and can read it. “Maybe twenty. We ran out of-” Oh, gods, she thinks suddenly, the mother kriffer drugged me. On the heels of it: Not that he needed to, with my blood-alcohol level. She digs a spare blaster out from the cabinet above their comm station. The weight is solid in her hand, steadies her stomach. Jacen is her twin, but Kyp argued with her voice mail about irresponsibility; her cheeks are aflame, and she can’t look at either of them.
Jacen reaches out. “Jaina-”
“Don’t.”
Her twin retracts as if she pushed him, but stays firm. He clears his throat. “Whatever it started out as, I think he really does-”
“I don’t care,” she snaps.
“Even if you could save him?”
Jaina snorts, fights to contain the hysterical laughter. “You saw Anakin.” She checks the blaster’s power cell.
Kyp rests his right hand at the back of her neck, sympathetic. “Get your lightsaber,” he says. “We’ll do this the right way.”
*
Thirty minutes pass, then an hour. Jaina’s knuckles stay white around her lightsaber’s hilt. When she finally looks in the cooling unit, the milk jug is still half full.
He’s gone. Long gone, long warned.
Another hour goes by; Kyp rumbles into his com-link, Jacen gives up on talking to her, and Jaina disassembles their comm and holo-net console. The console’s cam has hours of footage logged, all recent; everything older than three days has been deleted. The comm is clean.
He’s gone. “I’ll find him if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Find him?” Jacen parrots.
Jaina considers the console, then smashes it cam-first into the wall. “And take care of this.”
*
She doesn’t think of the holo-cams and recordings until she’s forced Jacen and Kyp out of her apartment. She saves that realization until she’s already puking in the ‘fresher.
*
She empties their fridge, breadbox, cupboards, pantry, and liquor cabinet. She wears gloves. She doesn’t bother to analyze their food or drinks, only packs it all into garbage bags; she considers burning it, but doesn’t know if there could be any biohazardous material. Besides, the last thing her family needs is more tabloid fodder: Jaina Solo, pyromaniac. Instead, she drags the bags out to the garbage compactor and lets the drugs leave anonymously. She doesn’t care what they were, or where he left them, only that every last trace is gone.
They never had much need for meds; hangover cures and pain relievers are almost alone in the cabinet above the sink. Jaina flushes what she can, throws out the rest.
The bedroom is stripped, the sheets burned and the mattress thrown away. His clothes-most but not all of his wardrobe-are bagged to be given away. Except for one of his favourite shirts, which she tears apart before she thinks.
Room by room, she clears him away, even if it does mean more hours of cleaning than the apartment has ever seen. Even the first sweep isn’t finished until after two midnights; Jaina has to take breaks when her stomach fails her, or her eyes smart and she has to clean them out with cold water. There isn’t anything left in her stomach, and for obvious reasons nothing is in her kitchen either, so she goes out to buy food. She walks into a supermarket, makes her purchases, walks out, then goes back to return the bottle of brandy because she can’t do that now. She ignores the diners she and Traest frequented on her way back. She’ll cook her own food if it kills her (which it might).
She goes back to the apartment, locks the door behind her, changes the access code, activates lockdown, and shoves their heaviest chair to block the entrance.
The flat is stripped but not empty; there are still bags to incinerate, to throw into the most disgusting undercity heap she can find, or to give away in pieces to a dozen off-world charities so Traest will never be able to put them back together even if he looked for them.
Except the last bag, which she filled with a collection of Traest’s treasures, is not in the ‘fresher closet into which she stuffed it a few hours and a retch ago.
Jaina stares at the empty spot, then stomps to the bedroom. Traest’s maps of the west undercity are arranged on the bare and frighteningly clean floor. Three days ago, she thought these maps were his only outlet for thought and dedication; no one has ever detailed a useful amount of the undercity and its countless levels; Traest enjoyed the work. She shakes her head, reminds herself that it was every bit a lie. He left the maps, every one of the flimsi drafts and even the ten datapads in which he stores his backups and notes. The maps are nothing to him; if she looked properly, they might not even show real coordinates or warnings.
There is a bottle of brandy sitting in the far quadrant of the room, on top of a square of the map. She walks over and sees a bright red dot, and a sticky note: 60 minutes after you read this. I’m leaving at 61 minutes. It’s an hour-and-a-half trip through comm dead zones; she and Traest have been there a half dozen times or more for some of the bars and clubs.
Jaina grabs the map square and her jacket and heads out the door.
*
Uncle Luke told Jaina, once, that trying to save Anakin Skywalker was both as natural and as difficult as anything he had ever done. He said it wasn’t easy even afterwards, but that trying was the only right thing to do. “There are monsters out there,” he told Jaina after the Nightsisters’ attack on the praxeum, “but they are few, and even they rarely started out that way. Everyone can be saved, Jaina, I believe that without reservation.”
Leia overheard and Jaina remembers thinking that her mother was stubborn and at least a little angry. Leia’s movements were stiff and straight; she stood behind Jaina and put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Don’t confuse her, Luke, it isn’t that simple. Jaina, you can’t strongarm someone any day into changing their life. They have to want it, the timing has to be right.” She paused. Jaina turned around to look up at her mother, who gave the Chief of State’s Tough Love Smile. “Some people won’t be saved, no matter how hard you try.”
But Jaina had known that her mother and uncle were really talking about their father, and so she thought, fifteen years old, that of course her mother would say that, but Jaina was going to believe.
*
X marks a club that Jaina and Traest visited once or twice, a true undercity place which the tabloids didn’t consider to be worth their trouble. She remembers it, patchwork, some memories blurring one into the other and others all too vivid. She ignores the entrance and walks into the club’s back alley. She’s seven minutes late, even having broken half the traffic laws and possibly a few laws of physics, but she takes the time to read her surroundings.
Traest, whose Force signature was rarely sought out but still familiar, is probably alone. The club is almost empty at this time of day, but the undercity is loudly alive; it’s impossible to be certain. She keeps her lightsaber in hand and walks into the sickly light.
He joins her. “You’re late.”
She props one fist on her hip. “You’re still here.”
He grins suddenly, like a vibro-shiv in her chest. “Well?” he prompts.
Her hand is slick on her lightsaber’s hilt; she switches hands and wipes the first one dry on her shorts. The undercity is too hot. “You lied to me about everything,” she says, too stiff. Her chest is falling inward; she breathes shallower; it’s too soon.
Traest steps closer, but halts sooner when he sees her shift her grip. “Actually, I got in some trouble for how much I didn’t lie to you.”
“All those times I can’t remember,” she says through gritted teeth, “when my drinks tasted off, you were drugging me. And you-” She swallows, because if she can say this, keeping her self-control for the rest will be a piece of cake. “You tried to kill Anakin.”
“No,” he says immediately, looking angry. “I told them to find out what he knew, throw him off. They weren’t supposed to hurt him.”
“Even if I believed you, it’s still your responsibility. You- Gods. And all this time-”
Traest’s eyebrows dip toward his nose, but his expression begins to close. “You can start any time now, Princess.” He grins suddenly, sharp. “Or am I supposed to go first? This is really more your area.” He waits, but she only stares back. His short temper-and by gods, she thinks, I’ll cut it shorter-flits across his face. “You do know why I picked this spot, don’t you?”
“No comm reception,” she says, clipping his taunt in some last hope that it wasn’t any more personal than his complete betrayal. “Your turf. Too far for me to make it and call for backup. It won’t save you, Traest, I don’t care what kind of training you sold out for. I’m still a Jedi.”
He laughs quickly, though there’s something else at her periphery. “Well, that’s all good, but it’s not what I meant.” He holds his arms out, like he’ll catch her. “This is where you said you loved me. The first time,” he clarifies, obviously smug (and why shouldn’t he be, job well done).
“Why?” she finally manages to say. It doesn’t matter, she doesn’t give two kriffs about his why’s-it’s probably money or free sex, she thinks viciously, or even a sadistic gratification she missed, little blind child. But she opens her mouth and says it anyway: “Why, gods damn you?”
He doesn’t actually, but she’s reading him now and he rolls his eyes before he stops the physical reaction. “Because you made me a promise. It’s like…metaphorical or some shavit, symbolic, whatever.”
“I have a promise to keep?”
His smile starts slow, then stretches wide like he and Jaina are on the same page. She wants to claw it off, except that wouldn’t be control and she will scrap at least that much together. Traest says, “Now that you have the chance.”
She clips her lightsaber to her belt; this isn’t the fight she wants to throw herself into. She imagines her mother to spite both Traest and herself, and crosses her arms over her chest. She’s thinking now, will do if it drives her off the deep end, and Leia told her once-she was dressed up and preparing for a disciplinary hearing-that she’d give them enough silence to hang themselves by.
“It was just work,” Traest says like he’s picked a route through this. “Real work, not just picking pockets, credits to fill my own pockets. I didn’t plan to come back or anything.” He shrugs. “It’s just how things went.”
“So you just thought, hey, why not ruin an old friend’s life,” Jaina snaps, her temper showing before she thinks Leia and Jacen again and closes her eyes to Anakin until later.
“So just come with me if it’s so wrecked. No need to be a drama queen, I thought you’d take it better.”
She blinks, or tries to. “Are you crazy?”
He rolls his eyes again, this time so she can see it with her eyes. “I didn’t give them anything that would get you hurt, did I? Look, are you going to jump in any time soon? What do you even need to save someone?”
It strikes her hard enough to shake loose the numbness and hurtle her into the ugliness from before. Screw control and enough silence to hang himself by, if he’s throwing that in her face. “Is that all you want?” she says, mocking him back. “The script?”
He stands still, almost patient like she never thought he was, and looks-if she didn’t know better, she would think that he looks sincere. “You promised.”
Mired in the ugliness, she sees a thousand times she said I love you, defended Traest to her family and friends, lost herself, and she thinks no. Even if the timing is right, even if he’s genuine and not mocking her (if), even if he isn’t a monster-no. She doesn’t believe him, doesn’t want to. He doesn’t deserve it. “Traest, you can go to-”
“You promised,” he says, furious.
“Anakin’s in a tub of bacta,” she retorts, because that’s true, too.
“That’s not my fault!”
She raises her chin. “I don’t believe you.”
He swallows, his throat working around it and reminding her of a thousand kisses he tricked out of her. “I have information on Brakiss, if you-I could-”
“I don’t believe you,” she interrupts, cold and loathing. “And I don’t care,” she says over his look and the redemption stories she was weaned on. “After what you did-I’ll never take another chance on you again.” She reaches into her jacket, pulls out standard issue cuffs, and begins to feel like the ground is firm enough for walking on again. “You’re under arrest, Traest, and by gods, I hope you put up a fight so I can kick your lying ass,” she says as she steps forward. She reaches for him, but she couldn’t stand close to him before and now he’s too quick to move backwards, giving her a chase, and she hates being so short.
“Then I won’t disappoint you,” he spits over his shoulder before he twists around a corner and darts downward.
*
They run for hours through the undercity, until Jaina is winded and knows that Traest was always pretending when he breathed shortly, until she wonders if he is being chased or if he is getting her lost in the maze of undercity no one has ever completely mapped. She knows some of these places, recognizes most, but Traest is home here and pulls her into his trap. They’re running, but she isn’t laughing anymore.
They run for hours, Traest ahead and Jaina in pursuit, until Traest jumps and Jaina only thinks regular jump until she’s down through a garbage heap hole and flying before she lands hard, slanted the wrong way looking up at where she fell, and gods, her arm hurts, did she imagine the sound of bone snapping? She shudders to a stop, gulps air and the closest thing she has to control, before sliding off her right arm and pulling it loose, and no, she didn’t imagine the snap at all, but she can bite her lip through and not cry. She holds it gingerly, keeps breathing and biting down, looks up and sees Traest staring down at her from the lip of his trap. She can’t see if he’s grinning, wild and smug, but he must be-Jaina thinks he must be, because he tricked her once, but she’s eighteen, a Jedi Knight and an ex-fiancée, and she’ll never believe in him again. He made her a leak, used her and left her a fool, and put Anakin in bacta-that’s the limit of her caring; she sees him gloating, will always see him gloating above her before he darts away.
She stays down until she can roll right-ways and stagger upright, and then she walks home. It’s a long walk back to her family, back to the med centre where Anakin will still be floating and breathing, but she gets there. Traest was a traitor, but Jaina is a Jedi Knight, the daughter of heroes, and by gods she will make it through this; she only has to let the stars pull her forward.
*
Jaina is Han’s daughter in a thousand and one ways. There are stars in her blood and brandy in her eyes; the adrenaline curls slick through her gut; she never goes anywhere without her multi-tool; and she can hide neither the grease stains on her hands nor the heart just under her sleeve. Jaina is her daddy’s girl, and she’s never not known that.
Sometimes, though, she is Leia’s daughter, too.
The truth is, once Kyp and Jacen told her, Jaina never really thought about saving Traest. Not when she confronted him, not when he made his offer, not for years.
Solos make choices, and they stick by them. Traest was an enemy. She never wondered if she could pull him free of Brakiss, or if he loved her enough to let her fix him. She spent months thumbing her nose at her family’s legacy with Traest, but in the end she made the hard choice and didn’t look back. Solos and Skywalkers think a lot about redemption, but Vader’s granddaughter didn’t even consider it when the betrayal stared her in the face.
She didn’t wonder if that was a wrong until she heard another boy’s story and thought about his what-ifs. Even then, though, Traest’s redemption was only academic. She had made her decision, and she never looked back.
That was Jaina’s betrayal.
*
So, I will head out alone and hope for the best
And we can hang our heads down as we skip the goodbyes
You can tell the world what you want them to hear
I've got nothing left to lose, my dear
So, I'm up for the little white lies
But you and I know the reason why
I'm gone, and you're still there
-“The Reason Why” by Rachael Yamagata
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