NaNo Project: The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order: Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
*Title: Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star (*working title only, though it may become the permanent title by default).
First Half of the Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love (This is divided into two parts due to the LJ's word/character limits, which limits the size of postings.)
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . A hard R for this specific part!
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lovely characters from the Star Wars ’verse, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: The future is never a fixed thing. Though certain actions taken at particular possible points of divergence can, seemingly, preclude the possibility of specific future pathways ever coming into existence, other unexpected choices can have extremely powerful repercussions with far-reaching effects upon the possible probable pathways that the future might yet take . . . and sometimes the spreading ripples of those effects can be so powerful that even the present and a part of the past can be altered, if enough raw energy is poured into the process of causing those effects. For Tahiri Veila, the possibility of swaying the current balance of power in the galaxy from darkness and despair back to light and hope seems worth any sacrifice necessary . . . even if she will have to give up her own life and the life of her unborn son to accomplish this. Will her sacrifice be enough to change the shape of the future, though, or will evil yet find a way to triumph, in this the worst and most wide-spread of all galactic wars?
Story/Author's Notes: For general notes on this story and proposed series, please see the entry on this NaNo project, at http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/140023.html
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Notes: Please note that the specific point of divergence for this story (which makes it an AU from the EU Legacy of the Force series) occurs when Jacen/Darth Caedus specificially decides to pursue Tahiri as a possible ally, following the only partially successful attempt made to defuse the Corellian situation by kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo and destroying or at least disabling Centerpoint Station in Betrayal, even before it becomes necessary for him to seek out an alternative to Ben Skywalker for a possible Sith apprentice. Everything in the story that makes it both AU and a true story pretty much flows from that.
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: There is what I think of as a hard R or definitely M for Mature rating for a certain section of the overall preface, due to sexual content, dubious consent, reference to incest, and some violence.
Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love
40:04:21-41:01:06 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,041-1,042 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,042-25,043 After Republic’s Founding)
The dark may be generous, and it may be patient, and it may always win, but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. And love is much more than a candle. Love - protecting, trusting, hoping, preserving, believing, giving, self-sacrificing, unending, unconditional, expecting nothing and offering all - can ignite the stars.
- Jedi Master Revan Maloch, from personal notes after the end of both the Jedi Civil War and the Sith Civil War
The trip back to Coruscant is not one that promises much rest or relaxation, not in the wake of the near-disastrous five-pronged attempt of Luke Skywalker’s New Jedi Order to help diffuse the growing threat of rebellion, succession, and civil war between the Corellian system and the Galactic Alliance by destroying or at the very least thoroughly disabling Centerpoint Station (an artifact of an ancient and presumably extinct civilization within the Corellian system with an apparatus able to focus gravity and, thus, move planets and even affect the orbits of stars, up to the point of inducing their annihilation, not to mention the essential destruction of the solar systems of stars thus targeted) before it could be made functional operational again to the point where it could be used by Corellia against the GA, either as a threat to command obedience or as a weapon to be used against any who might refuse to be cowed by such a threat of violence.
Of the five operations in play, only two met with any success. The usefulness of Operation Slashrat (a two-operative team commanded by Jedi Master Corran Horn meant to observe Coronet’s main starport for significant starfighter launch activities) was largely nullified due to the fact that most of Coronet’s starfighter squadrons had apparently been pulled for Corellia’s fleet action against the GA fleet that had been meant to materialize within Corellian space without warning and cow the system into backing down and behaving like a proper member system of the GA again . . . a task which said fleet had rather spectacularly failed to accomplish (though the fleet in question has, unfortunately, managed to quite successfully occupy Tralus, one of the Five Brothers of the Corellian system) due to what appeared to be foreknowledge of the entire combined Jedi and GA planned action against Corellia.
To add insult to injury, Purella and Tauntaun, respectively commanded by Jaina Solo and Tahiri Veila and assigned the task of kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo from their residences, failed due to that same foreknowledge on Corellia’s part, with Saxan and Sal-Solo both remaining free on Corellia (with the one bright spot being that no one on either team was killed - though Zekk, at least, will be sporting a few more scars - and a member of Tauntaun, Tiu Zax, actually managed to remain in hiding at Sal-Solo’s residence, which should prove handy in the near future, given that Corellia’s current rebelliousness can be largely traced to Sal-Solo’s influence).
Womp Rat did manage to retrieve Tauntaun and Purella (though a shuttle and its two-person crew along with an X-wing and its Jedi pilot were both lost in the process), and Mynock did manage to eliminate the control mechanisms the Corellians had designed to make Centerpoint Station completely operational again. Unfortunately, though, in spite of Mynock’s success, Centerpoint Station itself essentially remains intact, and that means that, with the proper repairs, it could still eventually be used as a threat or a weapon (if not both) against the GA and the rest of the galaxy. And as far as Tahiri Vehila is concerned, that means that the overall purpose of the mission has not been met and that the brewing threat of civil war has probably been escalated rather than staved off or even significantly slowed down. With an occupying force on one of the Corellian system’s five habitable planets, it seems a lot more likely now (at least to Tahiri) that outright battle will break out soon between Corellia and the GA, and the sensation of helplessness, coupled with the sneaking sensation that they have somehow been played, is so hauntingly familiar to her, from the time of the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, that she is sorely tempted to find a dark corner somewhere to curl up in where no one can see her and just cry until no more tears will come.
Tahiri is so caught up in her own thoughts and her own misery, drifting slowly but steadily away from the reunion of teams taking place in the hangar bay of the Mon Calamari star cruiser Organa (the first ship in the chain of command after Admiral Matric Klauskin’s flagship, the Galactic-class battle carrier Dodonna) of the Galactic Alliance Second Fleet, that she doesn’t notice when a toweringly tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark clad, worried looking man about four standard years her elder joins the shifting group (largely composed of Jedi) with a barely teenaged red-headed boy in tow. Her (paradoxically both dark and bright) vivid green eyes are cast downwards, half-lidded in painful remembrance and private thought, and one small, slender, sun-gilded hand is rising up to absently brush loose curls of golden hair back away from her face when the rapidly scanning eyes of the tall, older man finally catch sight of her. The deep lines of worry carved into his brow and the liquid sheen of concern in his dark eyes instantly vanish, replaced by relief and the barest flicker of something else - an emotion both darker and hotter, something that might have been possessiveness, desire, or perhaps a mixture of both - something that flares briefly into life, like sparks of flame glimmering in the darkness of those eyes, threatening to banish their darkness until nothing but that bright fire remains.
The twinned flare of eerie golden light is swiftly swallowed up again by the darkness of his eyes, though, and by the time he cries out her name - “Tahiri ” escaping him in an explosion of relieved happiness that makes his lean, handsomely chiseled features suddenly seem to almost glow with joy - and she looks up, there is nothing to see but Jacen Solo, bearing swiftly down on her with his arms open wide and a genuinely pleased smile on his face that’s so wide and so true that it flashes his white teeth at her, crinkles up the corners of his dark eyes, throws his dimples into prominent relief, and transforms his features so thoroughly that, for a moment, it’s hard to remember that this is the same solemn, brooding young man whose advice in the various Killik conflicts had always seemed so prudent and wise, when he was speaking, but which had somehow always seemed to make matters worse, in the end, when the Jedi listened to him and acted upon his thoughts.
Tahiri is still trying to decide whether or not that’s a good thing (and, more importantly, whether or not the apparent transformation - and therefore Jacen himself - is at all trustworthy) when he shocks her by not just grasping her shoulders or by turning his open arms into some kind of welcoming gesture but by enfolding her in a hug so tight that it presses all of the air out of her in a rush that ends with a muffled, breathless squeak of surprise on her part as he lifts her bodily, crushing her against his chest, his long arms wrapping so tightly around her back and waist that she almost feels as if bands of durasteel are contracting in tight circles about her. He holds her far too securely for her to be at risk of falling, but her hands still instinctively tangle themselves in his tunic and cape anyway, slim fingers grasping tightly at the layers of dark material, startled and unsettled over having been swept up off of her feet (Jacen being so much taller than she is that her boot-clad toes dangle rather uselessly several centimeters above the deck’s floor). His arms are so tight that she has a hard time keeping her face from being mashed against his left shoulder and an even more difficult time drawing in a full breath to replace all the air his sudden hug has squeezed out of her lungs, and she finally has to shove against his chest and wriggle her body slightly in his arms to gain enough leverage to push herself back enough to get the room she needs to draw that breath.
He’s curled himself around her a little, his much taller frame curving around her in an oddly protective manner, enough so that his somewhat shaggy-haired head (the dark brown strands more than long enough to curl, haphazardly, at the tips) is down by hers, his face turning in towards her, pressing against the curtain of her hair, close enough that she can feel the heat of his skin radiating against her cheek and neck and more than close enough to make it awkward enough to be next to impossible for her to look up at him without being in danger of either hitting his nose with her forehead or of smashing her own nose against his chin. His breath stirs her hair, and the whisper of heated movement is . . . strange enough that she finds herself holding very still for several long moments as she hangs in his arms.
After awhile, though, the need for air becomes urgent enough to prompt her to move again, and some more squirming around eventually rolls her upper body until her right hip is nestled firmly up against the side of his waist and her shoulder is wedged in between his shoulder and chest, giving her sufficient room to lean back, roll her head back on her neck, and catch his dark gaze with her bright green one. “Jacen. Not that I’m not glad to see that you’re alright or anything, but what are you doing?” she asks, a little surprised at just how breathy her voice sounds, despite the deep breath she’s finally managed to take.
His face, as he looks down at her, is still oddly soft and bright with relieved joy, though there is something - an odd touch of tightness around his eyes, despite his still softly smiling lips - that speaks of strain in the lines of his face. “Word was that a Jedi had been killed during the extraction. Mom and Dad weren’t involved in the operation, Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara I can always find in the Force, Ben was with me on Centerpoint Station, Jaina I can feel without even trying, but you? You’re the only family I have who I can’t sense clearly enough to always know whether or not you’re alright. I’m just . . . I’m glad to see you, Tahiri. I’m glad you’re alright.”
It always gives her the oddest feeling, to be referred to by one of the Solos as if she were a real member of the family. Intense pain at the loss of Anakin (her best friend and her beloved, the one who would have, perhaps, seen to it that she would become a Solo in name, if only he had lived long enough for them to have a chance to finish falling in love and eventually go on to get married, one day) mixes with unabashed gratitude that the Solos still care so much about her, even without Anakin’s love to anchor her to them, and is joined by an odd, squirmy sensation of embarrassed glee, that it should be Jacen, this time, who’s speaking to her with such conviction and openness about how she is a member of the Solo family. Usually, it’s Jaina or Leia who tells her this, and even Han has referred to her more times as his unofficial second daughter than she can remember Jacen openly naming her a member of his family. He means it, though. Tahiri can feel the depth of his worry and the intensity of his caring for her, reverberating around him in the Force, and it warms her and makes her feel a sense of belonging that she hasn’t experienced since her first early days among the Killiks, before she realized just how truly dangerous it was for Jedi to become Joiners. She can feel heat gathering in her cheeks and the base of her throat, flushing her sun-bronzed skin, and, even though she normally hates to blush - absolutely loathing how the color betrays her emotional state to others - she smiles up at him brightly, not caring how emotional or foolish she might look, and assures him, “I’m fine, Jacen. Truly, I am. Not even so much as a scratch on me. Jaina’s team had a rougher time of it than mine. Zekk’s already been taken away for a bacta immersion, and Kolir Hu’lya has a broken jaw. We lost an X-wing pilot.”
“I could feel that Jaina was alright, though. I wasn’t so sure about you.” A touch of the Force joins the left arm still clamped almost too tightly about her waist, and his right arm slides down across her back and around her side, until he can raise his hand up and brush a loose tendril of hair back away from her face, his long fingers sliding idly down the length of the curl, twining its end around his index and middle fingers.
That . . . strangely intense, unfamiliar feeling comes back, stirring heavily in the pit of her stomach, prompted by the combination of his oddly intent, unwavering dark gaze and those two fingers gliding along and then winding themselves up in that strand of her hair. Something that almost reminds her of her Jedi danger sense whispers to her that she needs to hold very, very still, but then she remembers that this is Jacen, and feels silly for her momentary near fear. With a soft smile that morphs quickly into a wryly impish grin, she tells him, “Well, as you can see - or as you could see, if you’d only put me down - I’m just fine. Thank you for worrying, though.”
“I always worry, Tahiri.” The words are spoken with such utter conviction, such intensity, that she finds herself forced to hold very still, to keep from flinching away from him, especially when his arm tightens around her a fraction. All of the joyful softness has left his face, and there is something about the way his slightly overlong dark hair slides forward to frame his shining eyes that reminds her painfully of Anakin, despite the differences in eye color and hair color and the fact that Anakin’s face was always sharper planed than Jacen’s. Her fingers itch to brush the bangs back, to tuck them safely behind his ears, and color floods her face and throat again, when she realizes her hands have loosened their grip on his tunic and cloak and how close she’s come to acting on the impulse. She’s about to start pushing against his chest in prelude to demanding to being let down when he quietly asks, “Who did we lose?”
Her eyes slip shut in remembered pain over the news of their loss. There are still far too few Jedi for any of them to accept even one death with equanimity, and, in this case, the casualty happens to be an extremely young Knight she personally knows, which only adds to the sense of grief. “Jorallen’s youngest cousin, Janael. He and Danni are going to be devastated. Janael had barely been Knighted, and they didn’t want him to volunteer for this mission.”
“His death won’t be in vain, Tahiri. He died trying to keep this conflict from spreading. We’ll find a way to keep that from happening. Somehow. I know we will. Jedi are the guardians of peace and order and justice in the galaxy, remember? We’ll find a way,” Jacen promises, letting go of the lock of her hair to brush his fingertips lightly along her cheek and then cup the side of her face in his large hand, his thumb tracing lazy arcs along the apple of her cheek.
The gesture feels oddly intimate, even more so than his desperate embrace or the way his fingers played so idly with that stray lock of her hair, and she finds herself giggling nervously - a mannerism she’d thought long lost, in the days before the Yuuzhan Vong War, back when she still had enough of her innocence and idealism to believe that the good guys always won, in the long run, and that hope and belief in the Light and trust in the Force are enough to keep not only yourself but also those you love safe - and fidgeting slightly, squirming a little in his and the Force’s embrace, unwinding her fingers from his clothes and placing her hands flat against his chest so she can try to gain herself a bit more room between them, and eventually ducking her eyes down when his hold on her and the touch of his cupping right hand prove a little too firm, too steady, for her to just push away from or shrug off. “I suppose if we can find a way to save the galaxy from the Yuuzhan Vong, we shouldn’t be so worried about saving the galaxy from the Corellians, right?”
Jacen’s smile makes the breath catch in the back of her throat in a frozen solid mass and her heart stutter to a stop in her chest, and not just because it’s so radiant that it’s like the ghost of Anakin is beaming down at her. There is a flash of something in his eyes, just as the smile begins to spread its way across his face, that feels more like malicious glee than it does real happiness or pleasure, and it makes that thing that feels like her Jedi danger sense but isn’t quite that scream at her with the need to get down and get away from him, before something very bad happens. She instinctively goes completely still, gathering herself for what she knows will have to be a hard and sudden struggle, if she wants to get away, but then the malice in his eyes is swallowed up by sheer luminosity, and she feels bathed in light and warmth, drenched, drowned, like a bug caught in tree sap hardening into amber, unable to move even to draw breath, even if she might want to. Her brain and heart are so clouded with the sudden sensation of home and Anakin and belonging, though, that she’s no longer sure she wants to move or get away from him, even though tingling reverberations from the sudden sense of danger and the absolute necessity of getting away from Jacen still echo at the outermost edges of awareness. His right hand is sliding around the curve of her skull, fingers spreading wide and burying themselves in her hair, cradling her head gently, like something infinitely precious to him, while the arm around her waist shifts, his left hand splaying possessively across the small of her back, shifting her just enough to roll her away from her sideways perch against him and press her flat to him again, hips to hips and chest to chest, something rigidly unyielding that feels like the hilt of his lightsaber trapped in between them, rubbing up against her stomach, and he’s whispering something, murmuring, “Of course, yes, just so, it would be you who understood that, I should have known it would be you, lovely, clever little Tahiri, perfect Solo at heart . . . “
It won’t occur to her until much later (when it’s far too late to do her any good) just how incredibly creepy the words that he’s saying (repeating, actually, over and over and over again, bending fractionally closer to her with every repetition of her name, until their faces are so close that their foreheads are nearly touching) actually are. She’s a little too busy being swamped by that feeling again, the strange heavy, hot one that feels like it’s burning as brightly as a star in the center of her solar plexus, and trying to make her heart and lungs work properly again (instead of just seizing up uselessly in her chest), though, and the words don’t really register. Precious few things properly register, through the haze of heat and weirdly fluttering heaviness in her stomach and his overwhelming nearness. Her hands have just doubled over into tight fists in the material of his dark grey tunic and a fold of his black Jedi cape that’s fallen down over his left shoulder and been trapped between them, inadvertently (or perhaps not so accidentally, after all. Later, when she looks back, she won’t be able to tell for sure, and will torture herself constantly, trying to decide if this is the moment when her body first betrays her) pulling them even closer together, their pelvises grinding together ever so slightly as her body hitches up a little bit closer to him, finally bringing their foreheads together. He leans down a little further, his head resting heavily against hers, his breath washing in a scalding mist down over her slightly (slackly) open mouth, and for several long moments Tahiri just hangs there passively, in his grasp, unmoving, unable to move, lightheaded and dizzy and not at all sure exactly what it is that’s happening and whether or not she should be trying to move or to do or say something.
Ben rescues her. The thirteen-year-old (well muscled and compact, showing signs of an eventual height that will be a little greater than that of his parents’ but likely not by much, with a fine-featured freckled face and bright blue eyes under a mass of flame-red hair threaded here and there with a few random strands of bright, brazen gold) ducks through the edge of the crowd and calls out, “Hey, Jacen Dad wants us to report.” His normally lively cerulean eyes look flat, tired, and oddly old, underscored by circles so dark that he almost looks as if he has two black eyes, his gaze turned inwards, as though pondering on some private, unhappy matter, and, between his preoccupation and the fact that they are standing at an angle to him, with Jacen turned partially away from Ben with most of Tahiri hidden by his larger form, it takes Ben a few moments to realize that Tahiri is even there with Jacen - moments Jacen uses to close his eyes and take a deep breath (obviously meant to provide some measure of calm and equanimity) before reaching to place Tahiri carefully back down, perhaps half an arm’s length away from him. Ben’s shadowed gaze finds her and focuses enough to actually see her only a heartbeat later, and he blinks at her, obviously a little startled to find her there with Jacen, before making himself smile at her, saying, “Oh, hi, Tahiri, I didn’t see you there You alright?”
“As fine as can be expected, all things considered. You?” she asks back after a moment to make sure her voice won’t betray her oddly flustered state either by shaking on her or coming out breathier than normal.
A look of intense unhappiness mixed with something that hovers on the edge between curdling shame and furiously indignant outrage flashes across the freckled face of Luke and Mara Skywalker’s only son. Obviously discomforted about something that happened on his part of the mission and miserable about it, he shrugs a little and then tells her, in a surprisingly adult sounding voice, “The mission . . . wasn’t what I was expecting. But I wasn’t really hurt at all, physically speaking. For the rest . . . I’ll be alright.”
Concerned for the boy, Tahiri starts to take a step towards him, only to be caught up short by the hand that’s slid down from her head to grip her left shoulder. The look she gives Jacen, as he gently but firmly restrains her, is half surprise and half puzzlement. Since his time away, after the war with the Yuuzhan Vong ended, studying with Force organizations and traditions other than the Jedi, and his subsequent falling out with Jaina, during the Killik conflicts, she knows that Jacen has drifted away from much of his family, and that the two closest family members he still has are his young cousin, Ben, and the boy’s mother, Mara Jade Skywalker, Jacen’s aunt by marriage. Since even a non-Force-sensitive would be able to pick up on the teen’s unhappiness, she doesn’t understand why Jacen’s keeping her from trying to comfort Ben. She doesn’t want to seem as if she’s trying to yank herself away from Jacen’s grip, though, or to somehow give Ben the impression that Jacen’s touch or his nearness to her is in any way unwelcome, so she just gives Ben a bright, reassuring smile, and starts to offer, “If you want to talk about it - ”
A look of panicked alarm crosses his face, and he actually starts to fall back a step, as if in preparation of bolting away from her, before he catches himself. “Oh, no! No, thank you! I mean, thank you for the offer, but really, no, it’s not necessary. Dad and I are going to have a talk about it. I’ll be alright. Really, I will!” Ben insists, his voice a little higher than normal.
Tahiri frowns, even more concerned than before, but Jacen’s hand, tightening fractionally around her shoulder and giving her the barest bit of a shake, pulls her up short, before she can try to ask Ben anything else. Her gaze flickers distractedly away from the teen’s far too pale face to Jacen, green eyes narrowing with irritation, and Jacen shifts his head a bit further away from Ben, so that the body can’t possibly see his face, before whispering to her, deliberately pitching his voice so that the words will reach her ears alone and travel no further, “It’s alright. He’s my responsibility. I’ll take care of this. You don’t have to worry about it.”
She turns her head sideways, so that Ben won’t see her lips moving either, and whispers back, “You’d better,” before turning back to the boy with another reassuring smile. “That’s alright, Ben. As long as you’re sure you’re okay.”
“I’m sure!” he insists, nodding his head firmly and giving her a smile that looks like an ill-fitting piece of clothing about to slide off his face and fall away into the floor. “Sorry if I’m interrupting anything, but Dad really does want to talk to us.”
Jacen beats her to a reply, turning his head to give Ben a small but warmly reassuring smile of his own, telling him, “It’s alright. You’re not interrupting. I was just making sure my honorary little sister is okay.” Then, turning his attention back to Tahiri, he asks, in a slightly lower but perfectly polite tone of voice, “May I come see you, later? There’s something I wish to speak to you about.”
She blinks, caught off-guard by the question and surprised by him all over again, having assumed that his concern wouldn’t extend past making sure that she was alright, after a mission as thoroughly botched as this one. “Of course! You can come and visit anytime. And that goes for both of you!” she laughs, turning her head slightly to include Ben in the invitation.
Jacen gives her another one of those soft, sweet, joyful smiles, and squeezes her shoulder in promise. “Then I’ll see you later.”
She nods, smiling, and tries to ignore the feeling of strange heaviness stirring in the pit of her stomach again when the hand on her shoulder slides up the side of her neck, his hand gliding around the column of her throat to lift her chin, nudging it up in a gesture that she can’t, for the life of her, quite get a read on. She’s still trying to figure that out when Jacen falls back a step from her and, with a sharp precision that’s almost militaristic, in an odd way (and which causes his Jedi cloak to snap and billow around him quite dramatically), turns on his heel and strides off towards Ben and the report that’s being requested of them.
She’s still (unsuccessfully) trying to decide whether or not she should be reading more or less into the entire encounter when she finally manages to slip away from the crowd and off to her assigned quarters, on the ship.
*********
Tahiri is curled up on the couch, barefoot but otherwise still fully clothed (if stripped down to her pants and the sleeveless, skintight layer of shirt she always wears under her tunic), deeply asleep, when the door chimes to let her know that someone wants admittance to her quarters. It takes two chimes to rouse her enough to realize what she’s hearing, and a third chime to get her to come, yawning, up off of the surprisingly comfortable cushions and pad her way over to the door, waving at the sensor to make the door slide open. Jacen in standing there, in his near-black tunic and pants and black Jedi cape, and she finds herself blinking up at him dumbly, muzzy-headedly trying to decide if the flare of gold in his dark eyes in the instant after the door first slid open and revealed them to each other had been a trick of the light or just a figment of her imagination. Another yawn overcomes her, though, and when her eyes blink back open, his eyes are as dark as ever (perhaps even a little bit blacker than normal), though the smile he’s giving her is maybe a little bit strained at the edges. “Jacen?” she asks, a little uncertainly, still trying to wake the rest of the way up.
“Tahiri. May I come in?”
“Hmm? Oh! Oh, yes, of course! Sorry! I was just, well . . . “
The strained smile swiftly morphs into a famous Solo smirk, leaving her feeling as if she’s taken an unexpected, quick sucker-punch to the gut. “Sleeping?”
“Yeah.” The agreement is little more than a breath of air, and she staggers a little, shaking her head and squeezing her eyes shut, to close out the sight of that too familiar smirk, as she steps back away from the door, giving him room to come in.
“Tahiri?” The touch of his hand against her face, though gentle and obviously carefully placed, makes her shy awkwardly backwards, nearly tripping over her own feet in her haste to get away; however, evidently afraid that she truly is about to trip and fall, Jacen swiftly reaches out to her, lunging forward to wrap his arms around her waist, pulling her up against him so tightly and so suddenly that, embarrassingly enough, she actually squeaks as she comes to rest solidly against him, nearly treading on his booted toes in the process, before he lifts her entirely clear of the floor. “Are you alright? I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The words strike her as ludicrous, all things considered. She starts to giggle softly, then to laugh a little more loudly, and finally to guffaw helplessly, her small body shaking against him. Jacen holds very still for several moments, as if surprised by her response to the point where he’s not sure what to make of it (or her), and then a sense of sheepishness floods into the Force from him, as he slowly (and, oddly enough, seemingly reluctantly) turns her loose and takes half a step back away from her.
“Alright, alright, already! I get the picture! You can stop laughing at me any time now. It’s not nice to make fun of your elders, you know,” he quips, mock scowling at her and then almost immediately ruining his attempt at appearing serious by smiling and then laughing a little with her, a brief flash of mingled surprise (as though he’s shocked that he can actually remember how to laugh) and awe flickering briefly in the Force as they stand there, laughing together, and it feels so much like old times, back before the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, back when they both still knew how to laugh without being surprised by their own ability to be happy, that she isn’t nearly as surprised by his response to their laughter as she probably would have been under any other set of circumstances.
Eventually, their laughter tapers off into quiet chuckles and then soft, silent smiles, and she leads him over to the couch, offering him a seat and waiting for him to sit before plopping down comfortably next to him, close enough that their shoulders rub together companionably. “You’re not that much older than I am, Jacen, so I don’t really think that applies for us,” she points out, grinning over at him unrepentantly. When he just scrunches his nose up, she bumps her shoulder against his and asks, “Anyway, was there something in particular you wanted?”
At that, Jacen turns towards her on the couch and leans forward, hands clasped between his knees, and regards her with a look of such sincerity and earnest entreaty that, if she were not Force-sensitive (and so able to tell that he’s doing nothing of the sort), she is quite certain she would suspect that he were trying to marshal up the Force and bring it to bear on her in such a manner as to reinforce both his natural charisma and persuasive powers. “You are my sister in everything but name. I knew you, in the Force, almost as well as I knew my own brother, once. I want to be able to do that - to feel that certainty, when I sense you in the Force - again. So I guess . . . I just want to get to know you again, Tahiri. I lost track of you, those five years I was gone, studying with the other Force organizations and learning other traditions and abilities, trying to search out the true nature of the Force, and it is entirely my fault that I haven’t tried to recapture that earlier closeness, before now. I’ve all but lost the connection I had with my own twin - Jaina’s been so angry with me, since the debacle with the Killiks and the Chiss, that I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to bring herself to forgive me - and I find that I don’t wish to simply resign myself to the loss of you, as well. I suppose what I’m trying to say,” he continues, gazing at her with such open pleading in his eyes that Tahiri is entirely sure that any attempt he might have made to call on the Force, to strengthen his position, would have been pure overkill, “is that my family is too small and far too precious to me for me to willingly give anyone up. I want us to truly be friends again, to genuinely be close to one another. I want to be able to reach out to you in the Force and know that you’re alright, no matter how much physical distance might be between us. When I heard that a Jedi had been killed, during the extraction, I tried to feel for you in the Force, to make sure you were okay, and I just - I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to ever feel that helpless again. I know it’s late, to be asking this, but if you’ll let me, I’d like to make it so that we’re like a real family again, like we were . . . before.”
Somehow, after that, not even the terrible implication couched in Jacen’s careful words (the sentiment before Anakin died just as plain as if the words themselves had been spoken) can completely dampen Tahiri’s spirits. Jacen’s words instill in her so much warmth and such a sense of being wanted and needed, of belonging, that she is flooded with joy, a sense of lightness of being filling her until she almost feels as if she might actually float away, if not for the warm and solidly strong hands that grip her hands, as soon as she reaches out to him, anchoring her safely in place. She finds herself beaming at him, blinking back tears, the Force humming around her with the strength of her happiness, knowing that she is all but glowing perceptibly both from the way the Force is reacting and the look of startled joy in Jacen’s eyes, an instant before she can gather together enough thought to nod to him and give him her answer, her voice sounding strangely light (and young. How long has it been, since she’s sounded so young, and so happy, so innocent?) to her own ears as she simply gives him an emphatic and plainly delighted, “Yes!”
Jacen’s smile blankets her with the life-giving warmth and dazzling light of a rising sun, and then he is laughing - throwing back his head and giving voice to full-throated laughter the likes of which she has not heard since the days before Mara first fell ill, back before they knew of the Yuuzhan Vong, before the war started - even as he reaches out to throw his arms about her, in an almost painfully tight embrace, and she finds herself swept up out of her seat and danced around the room, her bare feet swinging freely quite a ways above the floor, laughing with him and for once in her life not caring a whit about how her (relatively) small stature makes it easy for others to manhandle her like this, in fact for once simply rejoicing at the way her slight size makes it feel so effortless, as if she were being flown around the room on nothing but pure joy.
And, like the trusting fool that she is, Tahiri decides, in that moment, that it’s a feeling she can and will gladly get used to.
She quickly gets used to Jacen’s presence in her life, over the following days and weeks. He is often the first thing she is aware of, in the mornings, when she rises, the sense of him in the Force blanketing her with that same powerfully addictive sensation of warmth and belonging as she drifts up through layers of consciousness to surface into waking, and she swiftly comes to expect the same lovely sensation to wrap her about in the blissful sense of complete acceptance and togetherness when she slides back down into sleep at night. Jacen also begins to visit her at odd hours of the day - early in the mornings, off and on throughout the afternoons, and even late in the evenings and into the wee hours of the morning, whenever he can spare the time from Ben and his other duties to slip away and join her and whenever he can sense, through the Force, that she’s still awake or liable to rouse herself enough to welcome a visit - and, when their separate duties eventually see to it that they must part and he is no longer able to physically come and see her, he compensates by reaching out to her through the Force more and more often, the feel of him in the Force and the depth of his caring for her cocooning her as if in armor.
Another person might have found Jacen’s constant presence jarring, unsettling, or even intrusive, unable to adjust to the increasingly regular and then just simply increasingly present sense of him, in the Force, rubbing up against her and wrapping all around her, like someone physically present might have companionably bumped shoulders with her or twined an arm about her waist or enfolded her in warmly welcoming arms. But Tahiri had apparently been far more lonely than she ever quite allowed herself to realize, having grown so used to always having someone (Anakin) with her, as a child growing up in the Jedi Praxeum, that the feel of Jacen all around her, in the Force, feels more like a return to normalcy and a sort of homecoming than it does anything at all intrusive, much less disturbing or dangerous.
By the time it occurs to her to wonder what their increasing closeness might feel like to Jacen, it’s already far too late.
*********
To be continued in the following post http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/140648.html due to the LJ's word/character limits!
First Half of the Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love (This is divided into two parts due to the LJ's word/character limits, which limits the size of postings.)
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . A hard R for this specific part!
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lovely characters from the Star Wars ’verse, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: The future is never a fixed thing. Though certain actions taken at particular possible points of divergence can, seemingly, preclude the possibility of specific future pathways ever coming into existence, other unexpected choices can have extremely powerful repercussions with far-reaching effects upon the possible probable pathways that the future might yet take . . . and sometimes the spreading ripples of those effects can be so powerful that even the present and a part of the past can be altered, if enough raw energy is poured into the process of causing those effects. For Tahiri Veila, the possibility of swaying the current balance of power in the galaxy from darkness and despair back to light and hope seems worth any sacrifice necessary . . . even if she will have to give up her own life and the life of her unborn son to accomplish this. Will her sacrifice be enough to change the shape of the future, though, or will evil yet find a way to triumph, in this the worst and most wide-spread of all galactic wars?
Story/Author's Notes: For general notes on this story and proposed series, please see the entry on this NaNo project, at http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/140023.html
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Notes: Please note that the specific point of divergence for this story (which makes it an AU from the EU Legacy of the Force series) occurs when Jacen/Darth Caedus specificially decides to pursue Tahiri as a possible ally, following the only partially successful attempt made to defuse the Corellian situation by kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo and destroying or at least disabling Centerpoint Station in Betrayal, even before it becomes necessary for him to seek out an alternative to Ben Skywalker for a possible Sith apprentice. Everything in the story that makes it both AU and a true story pretty much flows from that.
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: There is what I think of as a hard R or definitely M for Mature rating for a certain section of the overall preface, due to sexual content, dubious consent, reference to incest, and some violence.
Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love
40:04:21-41:01:06 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,041-1,042 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,042-25,043 After Republic’s Founding)
The dark may be generous, and it may be patient, and it may always win, but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. And love is much more than a candle. Love - protecting, trusting, hoping, preserving, believing, giving, self-sacrificing, unending, unconditional, expecting nothing and offering all - can ignite the stars.
- Jedi Master Revan Maloch, from personal notes after the end of both the Jedi Civil War and the Sith Civil War
The trip back to Coruscant is not one that promises much rest or relaxation, not in the wake of the near-disastrous five-pronged attempt of Luke Skywalker’s New Jedi Order to help diffuse the growing threat of rebellion, succession, and civil war between the Corellian system and the Galactic Alliance by destroying or at the very least thoroughly disabling Centerpoint Station (an artifact of an ancient and presumably extinct civilization within the Corellian system with an apparatus able to focus gravity and, thus, move planets and even affect the orbits of stars, up to the point of inducing their annihilation, not to mention the essential destruction of the solar systems of stars thus targeted) before it could be made functional operational again to the point where it could be used by Corellia against the GA, either as a threat to command obedience or as a weapon to be used against any who might refuse to be cowed by such a threat of violence.
Of the five operations in play, only two met with any success. The usefulness of Operation Slashrat (a two-operative team commanded by Jedi Master Corran Horn meant to observe Coronet’s main starport for significant starfighter launch activities) was largely nullified due to the fact that most of Coronet’s starfighter squadrons had apparently been pulled for Corellia’s fleet action against the GA fleet that had been meant to materialize within Corellian space without warning and cow the system into backing down and behaving like a proper member system of the GA again . . . a task which said fleet had rather spectacularly failed to accomplish (though the fleet in question has, unfortunately, managed to quite successfully occupy Tralus, one of the Five Brothers of the Corellian system) due to what appeared to be foreknowledge of the entire combined Jedi and GA planned action against Corellia.
To add insult to injury, Purella and Tauntaun, respectively commanded by Jaina Solo and Tahiri Veila and assigned the task of kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo from their residences, failed due to that same foreknowledge on Corellia’s part, with Saxan and Sal-Solo both remaining free on Corellia (with the one bright spot being that no one on either team was killed - though Zekk, at least, will be sporting a few more scars - and a member of Tauntaun, Tiu Zax, actually managed to remain in hiding at Sal-Solo’s residence, which should prove handy in the near future, given that Corellia’s current rebelliousness can be largely traced to Sal-Solo’s influence).
Womp Rat did manage to retrieve Tauntaun and Purella (though a shuttle and its two-person crew along with an X-wing and its Jedi pilot were both lost in the process), and Mynock did manage to eliminate the control mechanisms the Corellians had designed to make Centerpoint Station completely operational again. Unfortunately, though, in spite of Mynock’s success, Centerpoint Station itself essentially remains intact, and that means that, with the proper repairs, it could still eventually be used as a threat or a weapon (if not both) against the GA and the rest of the galaxy. And as far as Tahiri Vehila is concerned, that means that the overall purpose of the mission has not been met and that the brewing threat of civil war has probably been escalated rather than staved off or even significantly slowed down. With an occupying force on one of the Corellian system’s five habitable planets, it seems a lot more likely now (at least to Tahiri) that outright battle will break out soon between Corellia and the GA, and the sensation of helplessness, coupled with the sneaking sensation that they have somehow been played, is so hauntingly familiar to her, from the time of the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, that she is sorely tempted to find a dark corner somewhere to curl up in where no one can see her and just cry until no more tears will come.
Tahiri is so caught up in her own thoughts and her own misery, drifting slowly but steadily away from the reunion of teams taking place in the hangar bay of the Mon Calamari star cruiser Organa (the first ship in the chain of command after Admiral Matric Klauskin’s flagship, the Galactic-class battle carrier Dodonna) of the Galactic Alliance Second Fleet, that she doesn’t notice when a toweringly tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark clad, worried looking man about four standard years her elder joins the shifting group (largely composed of Jedi) with a barely teenaged red-headed boy in tow. Her (paradoxically both dark and bright) vivid green eyes are cast downwards, half-lidded in painful remembrance and private thought, and one small, slender, sun-gilded hand is rising up to absently brush loose curls of golden hair back away from her face when the rapidly scanning eyes of the tall, older man finally catch sight of her. The deep lines of worry carved into his brow and the liquid sheen of concern in his dark eyes instantly vanish, replaced by relief and the barest flicker of something else - an emotion both darker and hotter, something that might have been possessiveness, desire, or perhaps a mixture of both - something that flares briefly into life, like sparks of flame glimmering in the darkness of those eyes, threatening to banish their darkness until nothing but that bright fire remains.
The twinned flare of eerie golden light is swiftly swallowed up again by the darkness of his eyes, though, and by the time he cries out her name - “Tahiri ” escaping him in an explosion of relieved happiness that makes his lean, handsomely chiseled features suddenly seem to almost glow with joy - and she looks up, there is nothing to see but Jacen Solo, bearing swiftly down on her with his arms open wide and a genuinely pleased smile on his face that’s so wide and so true that it flashes his white teeth at her, crinkles up the corners of his dark eyes, throws his dimples into prominent relief, and transforms his features so thoroughly that, for a moment, it’s hard to remember that this is the same solemn, brooding young man whose advice in the various Killik conflicts had always seemed so prudent and wise, when he was speaking, but which had somehow always seemed to make matters worse, in the end, when the Jedi listened to him and acted upon his thoughts.
Tahiri is still trying to decide whether or not that’s a good thing (and, more importantly, whether or not the apparent transformation - and therefore Jacen himself - is at all trustworthy) when he shocks her by not just grasping her shoulders or by turning his open arms into some kind of welcoming gesture but by enfolding her in a hug so tight that it presses all of the air out of her in a rush that ends with a muffled, breathless squeak of surprise on her part as he lifts her bodily, crushing her against his chest, his long arms wrapping so tightly around her back and waist that she almost feels as if bands of durasteel are contracting in tight circles about her. He holds her far too securely for her to be at risk of falling, but her hands still instinctively tangle themselves in his tunic and cape anyway, slim fingers grasping tightly at the layers of dark material, startled and unsettled over having been swept up off of her feet (Jacen being so much taller than she is that her boot-clad toes dangle rather uselessly several centimeters above the deck’s floor). His arms are so tight that she has a hard time keeping her face from being mashed against his left shoulder and an even more difficult time drawing in a full breath to replace all the air his sudden hug has squeezed out of her lungs, and she finally has to shove against his chest and wriggle her body slightly in his arms to gain enough leverage to push herself back enough to get the room she needs to draw that breath.
He’s curled himself around her a little, his much taller frame curving around her in an oddly protective manner, enough so that his somewhat shaggy-haired head (the dark brown strands more than long enough to curl, haphazardly, at the tips) is down by hers, his face turning in towards her, pressing against the curtain of her hair, close enough that she can feel the heat of his skin radiating against her cheek and neck and more than close enough to make it awkward enough to be next to impossible for her to look up at him without being in danger of either hitting his nose with her forehead or of smashing her own nose against his chin. His breath stirs her hair, and the whisper of heated movement is . . . strange enough that she finds herself holding very still for several long moments as she hangs in his arms.
After awhile, though, the need for air becomes urgent enough to prompt her to move again, and some more squirming around eventually rolls her upper body until her right hip is nestled firmly up against the side of his waist and her shoulder is wedged in between his shoulder and chest, giving her sufficient room to lean back, roll her head back on her neck, and catch his dark gaze with her bright green one. “Jacen. Not that I’m not glad to see that you’re alright or anything, but what are you doing?” she asks, a little surprised at just how breathy her voice sounds, despite the deep breath she’s finally managed to take.
His face, as he looks down at her, is still oddly soft and bright with relieved joy, though there is something - an odd touch of tightness around his eyes, despite his still softly smiling lips - that speaks of strain in the lines of his face. “Word was that a Jedi had been killed during the extraction. Mom and Dad weren’t involved in the operation, Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara I can always find in the Force, Ben was with me on Centerpoint Station, Jaina I can feel without even trying, but you? You’re the only family I have who I can’t sense clearly enough to always know whether or not you’re alright. I’m just . . . I’m glad to see you, Tahiri. I’m glad you’re alright.”
It always gives her the oddest feeling, to be referred to by one of the Solos as if she were a real member of the family. Intense pain at the loss of Anakin (her best friend and her beloved, the one who would have, perhaps, seen to it that she would become a Solo in name, if only he had lived long enough for them to have a chance to finish falling in love and eventually go on to get married, one day) mixes with unabashed gratitude that the Solos still care so much about her, even without Anakin’s love to anchor her to them, and is joined by an odd, squirmy sensation of embarrassed glee, that it should be Jacen, this time, who’s speaking to her with such conviction and openness about how she is a member of the Solo family. Usually, it’s Jaina or Leia who tells her this, and even Han has referred to her more times as his unofficial second daughter than she can remember Jacen openly naming her a member of his family. He means it, though. Tahiri can feel the depth of his worry and the intensity of his caring for her, reverberating around him in the Force, and it warms her and makes her feel a sense of belonging that she hasn’t experienced since her first early days among the Killiks, before she realized just how truly dangerous it was for Jedi to become Joiners. She can feel heat gathering in her cheeks and the base of her throat, flushing her sun-bronzed skin, and, even though she normally hates to blush - absolutely loathing how the color betrays her emotional state to others - she smiles up at him brightly, not caring how emotional or foolish she might look, and assures him, “I’m fine, Jacen. Truly, I am. Not even so much as a scratch on me. Jaina’s team had a rougher time of it than mine. Zekk’s already been taken away for a bacta immersion, and Kolir Hu’lya has a broken jaw. We lost an X-wing pilot.”
“I could feel that Jaina was alright, though. I wasn’t so sure about you.” A touch of the Force joins the left arm still clamped almost too tightly about her waist, and his right arm slides down across her back and around her side, until he can raise his hand up and brush a loose tendril of hair back away from her face, his long fingers sliding idly down the length of the curl, twining its end around his index and middle fingers.
That . . . strangely intense, unfamiliar feeling comes back, stirring heavily in the pit of her stomach, prompted by the combination of his oddly intent, unwavering dark gaze and those two fingers gliding along and then winding themselves up in that strand of her hair. Something that almost reminds her of her Jedi danger sense whispers to her that she needs to hold very, very still, but then she remembers that this is Jacen, and feels silly for her momentary near fear. With a soft smile that morphs quickly into a wryly impish grin, she tells him, “Well, as you can see - or as you could see, if you’d only put me down - I’m just fine. Thank you for worrying, though.”
“I always worry, Tahiri.” The words are spoken with such utter conviction, such intensity, that she finds herself forced to hold very still, to keep from flinching away from him, especially when his arm tightens around her a fraction. All of the joyful softness has left his face, and there is something about the way his slightly overlong dark hair slides forward to frame his shining eyes that reminds her painfully of Anakin, despite the differences in eye color and hair color and the fact that Anakin’s face was always sharper planed than Jacen’s. Her fingers itch to brush the bangs back, to tuck them safely behind his ears, and color floods her face and throat again, when she realizes her hands have loosened their grip on his tunic and cloak and how close she’s come to acting on the impulse. She’s about to start pushing against his chest in prelude to demanding to being let down when he quietly asks, “Who did we lose?”
Her eyes slip shut in remembered pain over the news of their loss. There are still far too few Jedi for any of them to accept even one death with equanimity, and, in this case, the casualty happens to be an extremely young Knight she personally knows, which only adds to the sense of grief. “Jorallen’s youngest cousin, Janael. He and Danni are going to be devastated. Janael had barely been Knighted, and they didn’t want him to volunteer for this mission.”
“His death won’t be in vain, Tahiri. He died trying to keep this conflict from spreading. We’ll find a way to keep that from happening. Somehow. I know we will. Jedi are the guardians of peace and order and justice in the galaxy, remember? We’ll find a way,” Jacen promises, letting go of the lock of her hair to brush his fingertips lightly along her cheek and then cup the side of her face in his large hand, his thumb tracing lazy arcs along the apple of her cheek.
The gesture feels oddly intimate, even more so than his desperate embrace or the way his fingers played so idly with that stray lock of her hair, and she finds herself giggling nervously - a mannerism she’d thought long lost, in the days before the Yuuzhan Vong War, back when she still had enough of her innocence and idealism to believe that the good guys always won, in the long run, and that hope and belief in the Light and trust in the Force are enough to keep not only yourself but also those you love safe - and fidgeting slightly, squirming a little in his and the Force’s embrace, unwinding her fingers from his clothes and placing her hands flat against his chest so she can try to gain herself a bit more room between them, and eventually ducking her eyes down when his hold on her and the touch of his cupping right hand prove a little too firm, too steady, for her to just push away from or shrug off. “I suppose if we can find a way to save the galaxy from the Yuuzhan Vong, we shouldn’t be so worried about saving the galaxy from the Corellians, right?”
Jacen’s smile makes the breath catch in the back of her throat in a frozen solid mass and her heart stutter to a stop in her chest, and not just because it’s so radiant that it’s like the ghost of Anakin is beaming down at her. There is a flash of something in his eyes, just as the smile begins to spread its way across his face, that feels more like malicious glee than it does real happiness or pleasure, and it makes that thing that feels like her Jedi danger sense but isn’t quite that scream at her with the need to get down and get away from him, before something very bad happens. She instinctively goes completely still, gathering herself for what she knows will have to be a hard and sudden struggle, if she wants to get away, but then the malice in his eyes is swallowed up by sheer luminosity, and she feels bathed in light and warmth, drenched, drowned, like a bug caught in tree sap hardening into amber, unable to move even to draw breath, even if she might want to. Her brain and heart are so clouded with the sudden sensation of home and Anakin and belonging, though, that she’s no longer sure she wants to move or get away from him, even though tingling reverberations from the sudden sense of danger and the absolute necessity of getting away from Jacen still echo at the outermost edges of awareness. His right hand is sliding around the curve of her skull, fingers spreading wide and burying themselves in her hair, cradling her head gently, like something infinitely precious to him, while the arm around her waist shifts, his left hand splaying possessively across the small of her back, shifting her just enough to roll her away from her sideways perch against him and press her flat to him again, hips to hips and chest to chest, something rigidly unyielding that feels like the hilt of his lightsaber trapped in between them, rubbing up against her stomach, and he’s whispering something, murmuring, “Of course, yes, just so, it would be you who understood that, I should have known it would be you, lovely, clever little Tahiri, perfect Solo at heart . . . “
It won’t occur to her until much later (when it’s far too late to do her any good) just how incredibly creepy the words that he’s saying (repeating, actually, over and over and over again, bending fractionally closer to her with every repetition of her name, until their faces are so close that their foreheads are nearly touching) actually are. She’s a little too busy being swamped by that feeling again, the strange heavy, hot one that feels like it’s burning as brightly as a star in the center of her solar plexus, and trying to make her heart and lungs work properly again (instead of just seizing up uselessly in her chest), though, and the words don’t really register. Precious few things properly register, through the haze of heat and weirdly fluttering heaviness in her stomach and his overwhelming nearness. Her hands have just doubled over into tight fists in the material of his dark grey tunic and a fold of his black Jedi cape that’s fallen down over his left shoulder and been trapped between them, inadvertently (or perhaps not so accidentally, after all. Later, when she looks back, she won’t be able to tell for sure, and will torture herself constantly, trying to decide if this is the moment when her body first betrays her) pulling them even closer together, their pelvises grinding together ever so slightly as her body hitches up a little bit closer to him, finally bringing their foreheads together. He leans down a little further, his head resting heavily against hers, his breath washing in a scalding mist down over her slightly (slackly) open mouth, and for several long moments Tahiri just hangs there passively, in his grasp, unmoving, unable to move, lightheaded and dizzy and not at all sure exactly what it is that’s happening and whether or not she should be trying to move or to do or say something.
Ben rescues her. The thirteen-year-old (well muscled and compact, showing signs of an eventual height that will be a little greater than that of his parents’ but likely not by much, with a fine-featured freckled face and bright blue eyes under a mass of flame-red hair threaded here and there with a few random strands of bright, brazen gold) ducks through the edge of the crowd and calls out, “Hey, Jacen Dad wants us to report.” His normally lively cerulean eyes look flat, tired, and oddly old, underscored by circles so dark that he almost looks as if he has two black eyes, his gaze turned inwards, as though pondering on some private, unhappy matter, and, between his preoccupation and the fact that they are standing at an angle to him, with Jacen turned partially away from Ben with most of Tahiri hidden by his larger form, it takes Ben a few moments to realize that Tahiri is even there with Jacen - moments Jacen uses to close his eyes and take a deep breath (obviously meant to provide some measure of calm and equanimity) before reaching to place Tahiri carefully back down, perhaps half an arm’s length away from him. Ben’s shadowed gaze finds her and focuses enough to actually see her only a heartbeat later, and he blinks at her, obviously a little startled to find her there with Jacen, before making himself smile at her, saying, “Oh, hi, Tahiri, I didn’t see you there You alright?”
“As fine as can be expected, all things considered. You?” she asks back after a moment to make sure her voice won’t betray her oddly flustered state either by shaking on her or coming out breathier than normal.
A look of intense unhappiness mixed with something that hovers on the edge between curdling shame and furiously indignant outrage flashes across the freckled face of Luke and Mara Skywalker’s only son. Obviously discomforted about something that happened on his part of the mission and miserable about it, he shrugs a little and then tells her, in a surprisingly adult sounding voice, “The mission . . . wasn’t what I was expecting. But I wasn’t really hurt at all, physically speaking. For the rest . . . I’ll be alright.”
Concerned for the boy, Tahiri starts to take a step towards him, only to be caught up short by the hand that’s slid down from her head to grip her left shoulder. The look she gives Jacen, as he gently but firmly restrains her, is half surprise and half puzzlement. Since his time away, after the war with the Yuuzhan Vong ended, studying with Force organizations and traditions other than the Jedi, and his subsequent falling out with Jaina, during the Killik conflicts, she knows that Jacen has drifted away from much of his family, and that the two closest family members he still has are his young cousin, Ben, and the boy’s mother, Mara Jade Skywalker, Jacen’s aunt by marriage. Since even a non-Force-sensitive would be able to pick up on the teen’s unhappiness, she doesn’t understand why Jacen’s keeping her from trying to comfort Ben. She doesn’t want to seem as if she’s trying to yank herself away from Jacen’s grip, though, or to somehow give Ben the impression that Jacen’s touch or his nearness to her is in any way unwelcome, so she just gives Ben a bright, reassuring smile, and starts to offer, “If you want to talk about it - ”
A look of panicked alarm crosses his face, and he actually starts to fall back a step, as if in preparation of bolting away from her, before he catches himself. “Oh, no! No, thank you! I mean, thank you for the offer, but really, no, it’s not necessary. Dad and I are going to have a talk about it. I’ll be alright. Really, I will!” Ben insists, his voice a little higher than normal.
Tahiri frowns, even more concerned than before, but Jacen’s hand, tightening fractionally around her shoulder and giving her the barest bit of a shake, pulls her up short, before she can try to ask Ben anything else. Her gaze flickers distractedly away from the teen’s far too pale face to Jacen, green eyes narrowing with irritation, and Jacen shifts his head a bit further away from Ben, so that the body can’t possibly see his face, before whispering to her, deliberately pitching his voice so that the words will reach her ears alone and travel no further, “It’s alright. He’s my responsibility. I’ll take care of this. You don’t have to worry about it.”
She turns her head sideways, so that Ben won’t see her lips moving either, and whispers back, “You’d better,” before turning back to the boy with another reassuring smile. “That’s alright, Ben. As long as you’re sure you’re okay.”
“I’m sure!” he insists, nodding his head firmly and giving her a smile that looks like an ill-fitting piece of clothing about to slide off his face and fall away into the floor. “Sorry if I’m interrupting anything, but Dad really does want to talk to us.”
Jacen beats her to a reply, turning his head to give Ben a small but warmly reassuring smile of his own, telling him, “It’s alright. You’re not interrupting. I was just making sure my honorary little sister is okay.” Then, turning his attention back to Tahiri, he asks, in a slightly lower but perfectly polite tone of voice, “May I come see you, later? There’s something I wish to speak to you about.”
She blinks, caught off-guard by the question and surprised by him all over again, having assumed that his concern wouldn’t extend past making sure that she was alright, after a mission as thoroughly botched as this one. “Of course! You can come and visit anytime. And that goes for both of you!” she laughs, turning her head slightly to include Ben in the invitation.
Jacen gives her another one of those soft, sweet, joyful smiles, and squeezes her shoulder in promise. “Then I’ll see you later.”
She nods, smiling, and tries to ignore the feeling of strange heaviness stirring in the pit of her stomach again when the hand on her shoulder slides up the side of her neck, his hand gliding around the column of her throat to lift her chin, nudging it up in a gesture that she can’t, for the life of her, quite get a read on. She’s still trying to figure that out when Jacen falls back a step from her and, with a sharp precision that’s almost militaristic, in an odd way (and which causes his Jedi cloak to snap and billow around him quite dramatically), turns on his heel and strides off towards Ben and the report that’s being requested of them.
She’s still (unsuccessfully) trying to decide whether or not she should be reading more or less into the entire encounter when she finally manages to slip away from the crowd and off to her assigned quarters, on the ship.
*********
Tahiri is curled up on the couch, barefoot but otherwise still fully clothed (if stripped down to her pants and the sleeveless, skintight layer of shirt she always wears under her tunic), deeply asleep, when the door chimes to let her know that someone wants admittance to her quarters. It takes two chimes to rouse her enough to realize what she’s hearing, and a third chime to get her to come, yawning, up off of the surprisingly comfortable cushions and pad her way over to the door, waving at the sensor to make the door slide open. Jacen in standing there, in his near-black tunic and pants and black Jedi cape, and she finds herself blinking up at him dumbly, muzzy-headedly trying to decide if the flare of gold in his dark eyes in the instant after the door first slid open and revealed them to each other had been a trick of the light or just a figment of her imagination. Another yawn overcomes her, though, and when her eyes blink back open, his eyes are as dark as ever (perhaps even a little bit blacker than normal), though the smile he’s giving her is maybe a little bit strained at the edges. “Jacen?” she asks, a little uncertainly, still trying to wake the rest of the way up.
“Tahiri. May I come in?”
“Hmm? Oh! Oh, yes, of course! Sorry! I was just, well . . . “
The strained smile swiftly morphs into a famous Solo smirk, leaving her feeling as if she’s taken an unexpected, quick sucker-punch to the gut. “Sleeping?”
“Yeah.” The agreement is little more than a breath of air, and she staggers a little, shaking her head and squeezing her eyes shut, to close out the sight of that too familiar smirk, as she steps back away from the door, giving him room to come in.
“Tahiri?” The touch of his hand against her face, though gentle and obviously carefully placed, makes her shy awkwardly backwards, nearly tripping over her own feet in her haste to get away; however, evidently afraid that she truly is about to trip and fall, Jacen swiftly reaches out to her, lunging forward to wrap his arms around her waist, pulling her up against him so tightly and so suddenly that, embarrassingly enough, she actually squeaks as she comes to rest solidly against him, nearly treading on his booted toes in the process, before he lifts her entirely clear of the floor. “Are you alright? I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The words strike her as ludicrous, all things considered. She starts to giggle softly, then to laugh a little more loudly, and finally to guffaw helplessly, her small body shaking against him. Jacen holds very still for several moments, as if surprised by her response to the point where he’s not sure what to make of it (or her), and then a sense of sheepishness floods into the Force from him, as he slowly (and, oddly enough, seemingly reluctantly) turns her loose and takes half a step back away from her.
“Alright, alright, already! I get the picture! You can stop laughing at me any time now. It’s not nice to make fun of your elders, you know,” he quips, mock scowling at her and then almost immediately ruining his attempt at appearing serious by smiling and then laughing a little with her, a brief flash of mingled surprise (as though he’s shocked that he can actually remember how to laugh) and awe flickering briefly in the Force as they stand there, laughing together, and it feels so much like old times, back before the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, back when they both still knew how to laugh without being surprised by their own ability to be happy, that she isn’t nearly as surprised by his response to their laughter as she probably would have been under any other set of circumstances.
Eventually, their laughter tapers off into quiet chuckles and then soft, silent smiles, and she leads him over to the couch, offering him a seat and waiting for him to sit before plopping down comfortably next to him, close enough that their shoulders rub together companionably. “You’re not that much older than I am, Jacen, so I don’t really think that applies for us,” she points out, grinning over at him unrepentantly. When he just scrunches his nose up, she bumps her shoulder against his and asks, “Anyway, was there something in particular you wanted?”
At that, Jacen turns towards her on the couch and leans forward, hands clasped between his knees, and regards her with a look of such sincerity and earnest entreaty that, if she were not Force-sensitive (and so able to tell that he’s doing nothing of the sort), she is quite certain she would suspect that he were trying to marshal up the Force and bring it to bear on her in such a manner as to reinforce both his natural charisma and persuasive powers. “You are my sister in everything but name. I knew you, in the Force, almost as well as I knew my own brother, once. I want to be able to do that - to feel that certainty, when I sense you in the Force - again. So I guess . . . I just want to get to know you again, Tahiri. I lost track of you, those five years I was gone, studying with the other Force organizations and learning other traditions and abilities, trying to search out the true nature of the Force, and it is entirely my fault that I haven’t tried to recapture that earlier closeness, before now. I’ve all but lost the connection I had with my own twin - Jaina’s been so angry with me, since the debacle with the Killiks and the Chiss, that I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to bring herself to forgive me - and I find that I don’t wish to simply resign myself to the loss of you, as well. I suppose what I’m trying to say,” he continues, gazing at her with such open pleading in his eyes that Tahiri is entirely sure that any attempt he might have made to call on the Force, to strengthen his position, would have been pure overkill, “is that my family is too small and far too precious to me for me to willingly give anyone up. I want us to truly be friends again, to genuinely be close to one another. I want to be able to reach out to you in the Force and know that you’re alright, no matter how much physical distance might be between us. When I heard that a Jedi had been killed, during the extraction, I tried to feel for you in the Force, to make sure you were okay, and I just - I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to ever feel that helpless again. I know it’s late, to be asking this, but if you’ll let me, I’d like to make it so that we’re like a real family again, like we were . . . before.”
Somehow, after that, not even the terrible implication couched in Jacen’s careful words (the sentiment before Anakin died just as plain as if the words themselves had been spoken) can completely dampen Tahiri’s spirits. Jacen’s words instill in her so much warmth and such a sense of being wanted and needed, of belonging, that she is flooded with joy, a sense of lightness of being filling her until she almost feels as if she might actually float away, if not for the warm and solidly strong hands that grip her hands, as soon as she reaches out to him, anchoring her safely in place. She finds herself beaming at him, blinking back tears, the Force humming around her with the strength of her happiness, knowing that she is all but glowing perceptibly both from the way the Force is reacting and the look of startled joy in Jacen’s eyes, an instant before she can gather together enough thought to nod to him and give him her answer, her voice sounding strangely light (and young. How long has it been, since she’s sounded so young, and so happy, so innocent?) to her own ears as she simply gives him an emphatic and plainly delighted, “Yes!”
Jacen’s smile blankets her with the life-giving warmth and dazzling light of a rising sun, and then he is laughing - throwing back his head and giving voice to full-throated laughter the likes of which she has not heard since the days before Mara first fell ill, back before they knew of the Yuuzhan Vong, before the war started - even as he reaches out to throw his arms about her, in an almost painfully tight embrace, and she finds herself swept up out of her seat and danced around the room, her bare feet swinging freely quite a ways above the floor, laughing with him and for once in her life not caring a whit about how her (relatively) small stature makes it easy for others to manhandle her like this, in fact for once simply rejoicing at the way her slight size makes it feel so effortless, as if she were being flown around the room on nothing but pure joy.
And, like the trusting fool that she is, Tahiri decides, in that moment, that it’s a feeling she can and will gladly get used to.
She quickly gets used to Jacen’s presence in her life, over the following days and weeks. He is often the first thing she is aware of, in the mornings, when she rises, the sense of him in the Force blanketing her with that same powerfully addictive sensation of warmth and belonging as she drifts up through layers of consciousness to surface into waking, and she swiftly comes to expect the same lovely sensation to wrap her about in the blissful sense of complete acceptance and togetherness when she slides back down into sleep at night. Jacen also begins to visit her at odd hours of the day - early in the mornings, off and on throughout the afternoons, and even late in the evenings and into the wee hours of the morning, whenever he can spare the time from Ben and his other duties to slip away and join her and whenever he can sense, through the Force, that she’s still awake or liable to rouse herself enough to welcome a visit - and, when their separate duties eventually see to it that they must part and he is no longer able to physically come and see her, he compensates by reaching out to her through the Force more and more often, the feel of him in the Force and the depth of his caring for her cocooning her as if in armor.
Another person might have found Jacen’s constant presence jarring, unsettling, or even intrusive, unable to adjust to the increasingly regular and then just simply increasingly present sense of him, in the Force, rubbing up against her and wrapping all around her, like someone physically present might have companionably bumped shoulders with her or twined an arm about her waist or enfolded her in warmly welcoming arms. But Tahiri had apparently been far more lonely than she ever quite allowed herself to realize, having grown so used to always having someone (Anakin) with her, as a child growing up in the Jedi Praxeum, that the feel of Jacen all around her, in the Force, feels more like a return to normalcy and a sort of homecoming than it does anything at all intrusive, much less disturbing or dangerous.
By the time it occurs to her to wonder what their increasing closeness might feel like to Jacen, it’s already far too late.
*********
To be continued in the following post http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/140648.html due to the LJ's word/character limits!