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).
Prologue: A Bad Feeling . . .
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . PG-13ish, maybe, for this 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 keep in mind that Old Corellian is to Basic what Old English is to modern English!
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: For the purposes of this story/series, it will be best if folks assume that Han Solo essentially (if unofficially) adopted Kyp Durron, after they escaped from Kessel, and that Kyp is regarded by Luke and the rest of the Solo family basically as if he were Han's foster son. Kyp is therefore considered a member of the combined Skywalker-Solo clan by most folks (hence, Anakin thinking of him as his foster brother).
Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
Prologue: A Bad Feeling . . .
27:05:13 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,028 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,029 After Republic’s Founding)
Enemies are not accidental or unfortunate. We make them, we earn them, and we nurture them, whether we realize it or not. If we can’t find real enemies, we’ll invent them and make them as big as we can. They become our justification for existing, or excuses for our own failings. Many of us would suffer if we didn’t have them - who would need Jedi if there were no dark Force users?
- Lord Gajakur Biul, Kilian Ranger, circa the Clone Wars
Anakin Solo has a bad feeling about this war, about what it’s doing to his family.
Uncle Luke and pflegebróðr Kyp, they talk and they talk and they talk at each other, but they spend so much time talking past each other that neither one of them ever seems to listen or really hear what the other one is saying. And yeah, okay, so he can understand that what they’re both saying - what they’re trying so hard to get each other to understand - is important, and he gets that they’re both extremely passionate about their beliefs, but for pity’s sake! Even Anakin can see that, unless they stop arguing at each other and start actually talking to each other, it’s going to take a disaster to get either one of them to even think about listening to the other, and the longer they argue, the worse the sense of division within the ranks of the New Jedi Order grows. And though Tácennicge Mara seems to be better, since giving birth to Ben, Uncle Luke has been so distracted, worrying about her for basically the entire war, that Anakin hates to think of the kind of disaster it would take to actually let Uncle Luke give his full attention to Kyp.
As for Mom and Dad . . . well, they haven’t really been right since Chewbacca’s death, on Sernpidal, and that’s entirely his own fault, no matter what anyone else says. (If he’d just been faster and less clumsy, or if he would’ve just figured out what was happening a bit earlier - he’s certain he could have overloaded that blasted combination of dovin basals and, if not completely saved the planet, then at least slowed down the collision between the planet and its moon long enough to give people enough time to evacuate properly - then they wouldn’t’ve had to leave Chewie behind like that, and the Wookiee would not have died with that world. And that means it’s Anakin’s fault, at least partially, though the Yuuzhan Vong are, of course, ultimately to blame, for using their damned Yo’Gand’s Core tactic to pull Dobido down into Sernpidal in the first place, in the process destroying both satellite and planet.) They’ve been a lot better, since Jacen stopped being such an incredible wagyx about not using the Force (since he’d somehow gotten it into his head that it’s wrong to use the Force as if it were only a tool and so essentially stopped using it altogether, out of fear of being disrespectful or some such nonsense) and saved Mom’s life, on Duro, and since Dad worked through a lot of his grief and anger, by saving an old friend (Roa) from the Yuuzhan Vong, starting to work with Droma and other members of the Ryn Network against the Peace Brigade, and gaining an antidote (of sorts) to Tácennicge Mara’s illness (the coomb spore disease, given to her by Nom Anor). But they aren’t like they were, before the war, and he worries sometimes that they aren’t ever going to be like that, again.
And speaking of worry, just what in the nine Corellian hells is wrong with his idiot brother, anyway? Jacen used to be someone Anakin looked up to, someone he understood (okay, so maybe not as much as with Jaina, but Jaina is good with machines whereas Jacen is good with animals, and Anakin’s particular talents with the Force mean that he just relates more easily to Jaina than to Jacen), but anymore . . . he just doesn’t know. It’s like, when no one was looking, some stranger did to Jacen what Exar Kun did to Uncle Luke, all those years ago, when the Sith ghost possessed Kyp, except that instead of just casting Jacen’s spirit and mind out of his body, this person replaced Jacen with someone else, somebody completely different. Jacen used to be the one who advocated using the Force for everything - hell, he even got into fights about that with Dad, years ago, after they first joined the Jedi Praxeum on Yavin 4 and got some better fine control with the Force, arguing that he didn’t need to exercise or know how to fight because he could always use the Force to protect himself or to do anything he might’ve done by moving his body around, physically, more easily and more quickly, just by calling on the Force - and he used to be the one who always went around trying to cheer everybody up with his lame jokes and kept them aware of the bigger picture by reminding them of all the good in the galaxy and all of the things worth fighting for, and now . . . Anakin just doesn’t understand. It is literally like his big brother has become a stranger, all but overnight, just in time for this blasted war to start, and the timing is so damned convenient that sometimes he seriously finds himself wondering if Jacen could have possibly come into contact with the angry spirit of an old Sith Lord sometime, in the months just before Sernpidal, without anyone knowing or noticing.
If only to try and appease his own worries and doubts, Anakin would like to ask Jaina if she’s noticed if Jacen started to act . . . peculiarly at any one specific time, sometime after the three of them were all officially promoted to apprentice Jedi Knights but before the war with the Yuuzhan Vong started; Jaina just hasn’t been the same, since the war started and the Senate basically ignored all of their warnings and accused Mom of trying to frighten people with false threats in order to gather power to herself, because she was Vader’s daughter, instead of having the Republic’s best interests at heart, though, and she especially hasn’t been the same since her friend and wingmate, Anni Capstan, was killed during the Battle of Ithor. She’s been shutting herself off so much from everybody and everything and devoting herself with such single-minded fierceness to the battle against the Yuuzhan Vong that he’s almost afraid that if anyone tries to put anything else on her plate she’ll crack clean through from the strain. If he didn’t love Kyp so much, he’d strangle the stupid eharl guerfel, for getting her involved in that attack against the new worldship that the YuuzhanVong were building to house their children and older civilians. Okay, so sure, Kyp was suffering, too, from losing his apprentice, Miko Reglia (and Force, but Jacen is lucky that Kyp didn’t skin him alive, for getting Miko killed like that), and his Dozen-And-Two-Avengers, too, but tricking Jaina into helping him strike back at the Yuuzhan Vong by destroying a mostly finished new worldship that he’d put about was a gravitic superweapon of some kind was probably one of the stupidest, absolute worst possible things he could have done, both for himself and for Jaina, and it’s really no wonder Mom’s furious with Kyp and Jaina seems to have lost her ability to trust him, anymore!
It’s really not like Kyp, to be this blind to how completely he’s alienating so many of the people who’re basically his family. Kyp can be brash and opinionated and he takes his duties as a Jedi protector with deadly seriousness, but Dad and Uncle Luke and the Solos are his family, and he usually does his damnedest to at least try to keep the peace, even when Tácennicge Mara isn’t being all that particularly nice to him. Okay, so technically, Kyp has been . . . increasingly distant from all of them, ever since Mara Jade came back and ended up marrying Uncle Luke, but his pflegebróðr is one of the few people Anakin and his siblings basically grew up trusting and loving unconditionally, who didn’t carry the name of Solo or Skywalker or Celchu, and it just feels wrong, for Kyp to be so much at odds with them, now. It’s like there are these huge gaping chasms that’ve broken open in the bedrock of their family, and Uncle Luke and Tácennicge Mara and Mom and Winter are off on one isolated little island, Dad and Jaina and Tycho are on another (with the rest of the Rogues), Jacen is off all by himself (but is determinedly trying to pull as many of the other Jedi over to his side as he can), Kyp is somewhere close to Dad and Jaina but separated from them by what he did to hurt Jaina (and also trying to pull as many of the other Jedi over to his side as he possibly can), and Anakin is stuck, in the middle, in between all of these little islands of individuals who’re all at odds with each other, when really, now, of all times, is when they need to be standing together and supporting each other and fighting as one!
Uncle Luke’s worried about Kyp and Jacen and Jaina and Mom and Dad, too - Anakin can see this quite plainly, when he looks at him - but he’s also got the whole of the New Jedi Order to worry about, plus his recently very sick wife, plus his new son (who seems determined to cut himself off from the Force entirely, because of all the ugliness that’s constantly flooding the Force, because of the war), and it’s just not fair, to expect him to be able to fix everything for everybody, when most of the sentient beings of the galaxy suddenly seem to prefer to turn their backs on the Jedi and huddle alone in the dark and blindly hope that if they keep their heads down and do whatever the Yuuzhan Vong want them to do that they won’t be turned into slaves implanted with surge-coral or killed outright. The more Anakin sees his poor uncle struggling to try to obey the edicts of the government and see to it that the Jedi can still fulfill their role as the defenders of democracy and freedom and keep his family safe and whole and try to keep the Order from flying apart under all the mounting pressure, as forces from both within and without conspire to tear the extended family that is the New Jedi Order apart, the more he has to fight down the urge to just plant himself in between Uncle Luke and everybody else and declare that the whole blasted galaxy and everyone in it can just back the hell off and go take care of their own skragging problems for once.
Before she died, the Republic co-founder and hero Mon Mothma gave Uncle Luke some very good advice about needing to make sure that the members of his New Jedi Order didn’t ever isolate themselves from the lives of the ordinary peoples of the galaxy - that they would be a part of the Republic’s every day life and live and work and even play out in the open, rather than retreating behind the walls of some Jedi-only Temple - and needing to make sure that he learned enough about politics and honed his ability to lead enough to behave as a real leader to the Order rather than just a figurehead to be used and manipulated by others for their own purposes. Anakin has heard all about this, both from Mom (who didn’t stop smiling for weeks, after the initial talk she had with Uncle Luke about how best to respond to Mon Mothma’s advice) and Uncle Luke (who is constantly quoting Mon Mothma’s advice about the need for Jedi who are willing to get their hands dirty when he sends fully trained Jedi Knights out into the galaxy), and he knows that Uncle Luke has tried to take that advice seriously, by aligning the Order closely with the Senate and trying to present the New Jedi Order as one of the Republic’s main lines of proper defense against all threats, but it’s just not working, anymore. The New Jedi Order has gotten so tangled up with the government - a government largely run by individuals so resentful and so fearful of losing power, so unwilling to listen to reason, that they would rather invent conspiracies and threats amongst the ranks of the galaxy’s staunchest defenders than hear about a real threat, from outside their very galaxy - that the Jedi haven’t been able to respond to the threat posed by the Yuuzhan Vong in anything like an organized or coherent manner, and the galaxy and the Order alike have suffered because of it.
And okay, so, yeah, Kyp and his followers definitely have a point - the New Jedi Order could have done more, earlier, to respond to the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong, and they probably should have all sat down and come up with some proper plans for defense and offense, before it could ever get this bad - but with the government dead set against even believing that there was a threat and then basically turning against them, when the Yuuzhan Vong started up their own little private war against the Jedi (recognizing them for the threat that they are, against them) and the propaganda machines of the war began to try to blame everything on the lawless, bloodthirsty, power-hungry Jeedai, in retrospect, he’s not entirely sure that they could have done anything that wouldn’t have turned so many of the peoples of the galaxy against them even more quickly than they have. He has a sinking suspicion that the Yuuzhan Vong would have gleefully responded to any more organized attempts to defend the galaxy from their invading forces with more planets broken apart by their moons and more worlds with their ecological systems turned upside down and inside out by the biological agents of the Yuuzhan Vong Shapers . . . all of which they would have then found a way to blame, somehow, on the Jedi, thereby turning the opinion of the sentient beings of the galaxy even more firmly against them.
Maybe Uncle Luke’s attempts to explain to people (like Kyp) why the New Jedi Order isn’t taking a quicker, more proactive response to the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong haven’t always been all that logical - that whole “I was young, then” speech came off a bit flat, when taken at face value by those whose lives basically only exist, as such, because Uncle Luke did what he did during the war against the Empire, redeeming Vader and, in the process, defeating the Emperor - but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point, either. As much as Anakin hates to think of it in such terms, the truth is that Uncle Luke had to essentially become a mass murderer in order to do all of that (the likelihood is that he killed at least as many people, with that one shot that took out the first Death Star, than Kyp will probably manage to kill in his entire life, Sun Crusher or no Sun Crusher); he nearly lost himself, in the process of redeeming his father, and he still ended up falling prey to the cloned/reborn Emperor and only by a hairsbreadth managed to avoid a fate that would’ve led to him becoming much worse than the fallen Anakin Skywalker ever was, as Darth Vader; and what, in the end, did he even truly accomplish, after putting himself through such a wringer that he came close to losing all that he is to the Dark Side not once, not twice, but no less than three times (more, if a body wants to split hairs and count things like that whole debacles with Joruus C’baoth debacle)? The Rebels won, sure, but at what cost, and to what effect?
Realistically, it took something like twenty years to get the Imperials to actually stop trying to crush them, and is sure as spitting doesn’t seem like the New Republic is going to last though this new war. In fact, it’s looking more and more like the New Republic, as such - the democracy that Luke and the other Rebels fought so hard for and did such awful things in the name of - no longer really exists, that it folded at the first serious sign of trouble, and is even now in the process of crumbing into anarchy right before their eyes. Uncle Luke’s a smart guy: by this point, Anakin can’t even pretend that it’s possible for him to have missed the conclusion that he and the other Rebels could have and should have done better, given how flimsy the peace and the government they managed to win for themselves at such great cost is currently proving to truly be. It can’t possibly be just the Dark Side that he’s so worried about (though after what he went through to save Tahiri, Anakin really does get that the seductiveness of aggression is certainly a legitimate concern, given how murky and full of pain and anger the Force has been ever since the war started). No, Uncle Luke’s got to be realizing how fragile everything he’s ever fought for actually is and wondering if that fragility may not be due in part to the fact that, in some cases or in some fundamental fashion, he may’ve gone about striving for all of that - the Rebellion, the New Republic - in the wrong way, using the wrong means.
Anakin’s done a lot of research on the history of the Jedi Order, scanty though a lot of the records are, and, more and more, it seems to him as if it’s a question of the ends and the means and justification - that slippery slope that’s so seductive that, the way he understand it, the old Jedi Order basically ended up tumbling down it wholesale, during the Clone Wars, falling so far so fast that the Jedi couldn’t even see they were rushing towards their collective doom. It’s not going to do them any good to win against the Yuuzhan Vong if they have to use the Dark Side to do it, because the truth is that they’ll inevitably end up destroying all that it is that they’re trying to save in the process, just as Revan did so many hundreds of years ago, when he pushed the Jedi into joining the fight in the Mandalorian Wars and then, rather than preserving the Republic and the Order, all but destroyed both when he became in a Sith, in the process of fighting his war . . . and just as, not so very long ago, Anakin Skywalker also did, when he became a Sith Lord in his attempt to win enough power first to preserve the lives of those he loved (planning to later rebel against the Sith Master who’d been manipulating the whole of the Clone Wars from behind the scenes, so that Anakin would be the one to take over the galaxy and, according to his grandiose private plans, rebuild everything in such a way as to insure true peace and prosperity for forever) but instead ended up trapped as Darth Vader, having either aided in the slaughter of or else so wholly alienated the remainder of his former Jedi family and, in the process, been so wounded that he no longer had the raw power or the motivation to simply easily overthrow Darth Sidious, thereby essentially paving the final little bit of the way for Sidious’ creation of his Dark Empire, under the seemingly benevolent rule of former Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.
More and more, Anakin has the feeling that neither Kyp nor Uncle Luke is completely right nor completely wrong, on the matter of the Yuuzhan Vong and the war and the way that the New Jedi Order should be responding to this threat. He thinks that Uncle Luke may actually be sensing an essential problem with the way that he and his have been operating all along - ever since the earliest days of the Rebellion - one that’s so badly snarled up in that old issue of ends and means and justification that he just doesn’t have enough knowledge or eloquence to quickly phrase it in a way that’s easily understandable to others. Kyp, being more well-versed in the reality of politics than Uncle Luke is, likewise seems to be sensing an essential problem in the way that the new Jedi Order has been and continues to look towards the government rather than to either the various sentient beings of the galaxy or themselves, as Jedi, or even the Force itself, for validation and approval of what they are and what they do. Both issues seem tangled up in a problem of balance that he honestly doesn’t think has ever really been solved, either by the pre-Ruusan Jedi Order, the post-Ruusan old Jedi Order, or the New Jedi Order Uncle Luke and Mom have essentially built up all by themselves, and he has a sinking suspicion that if they don’t somehow find out a way to address that lack of balance and soon that the New Jedi Order is going to end up going the way of the old Jedi Order, in the end.
In their devotion to the various sentient beings of the galaxy, Jedi tend to end up ignoring their responsibility to themselves and to each other, as individuals, which makes them vulnerable enough to feelings of either grandiosity or else pure guilt and responsibility for the well-being of everybody else (except themselves) that they tend to fall prey to the slippery slope wherein the ends are seen as justifying the means, regardless of how immoral/amoral those means might be. And, in its devotion to the ideals of democracy and peace, any given version of the Jedi Order automatically unfortunately tends to become caught up in and/or utilized by either the mechanics of government (and individual leaders) or else the government itself, rather than looking to the sentient beings that the government is supposed to be serving/protecting. These are flaws in the way that Jedi function and in the way that the Jedi Order as a whole functions that seem to have been carried over from the old Jedi Order to the New Jedi Order, and, unfortunately, neither one is all that easily solvable - or at least, if they are, then he certainly hasn’t been able to see it, at least not yet (though, to be fair, it’s kind of hard to find time enough to really process this kind of thing in the middle of a galactic war, and he didn’t really start to figure most of this out until after he had to save Tahiri from the Yuuzhan Vong Shapers, so a lot of this is still new to him).
Worse, focusing on any one issue seems to cause people to lose sight of the other, so that Uncle Luke’s concern about the Dark Side and the ability of individual Jedi to remain balanced and in tune with the will of the Force is keeping him from seeing that the New Jedi Order really shouldn’t be a subsidiary of the government, and pflegebróðr Kyp’s concern about the Jedi not doing their job, by either the Force or the sentient beings of the galaxy, in not doing a better job of combating the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong, is keeping him from being able to understand that focusing so much on protecting the Order and the galaxy against the Yuuzhan Vong, by any means necessary, risks plunging the galaxy into another war of Light and Dark, wherein Sith who were once Jedi all but destroy everything that they once held so dear to their hearts. The great pity of it all is that if Uncle Luke and pflegebróðr Kyp would just sit down together alone and have one of their palavers (where no one else is allowed to interrupt and neither one is allowed to leave the room until they both agree that they can understand where the other is coming from) and talk to each other properly about their concerns and frustrations, instead of just talking past each other, towards their audiences, then he suspects that they would end up grasping the real problem - that it’s all a matter of proper balance - and figure out a way for Jedi and the New Jedi Order to find a new way of balancing with the Force and the rest of the galaxy, without either neglecting their duty to themselves or each other, their responsibility to the Force, or their obligation to the sentient beings of the galaxy and/or maybe even their government, if only inasmuch as that government is meant to serve and protect the people, not profit from them.
Anakin really wishes he could talk about this to someone - he thinks that even just a bit of input from someone else might be enough to break whatever barrier it is in his brain that’s keeping him from thinking up a solution to this problem - Mom and Dad are out of the question, though, as fragile as they are; Jacen’s too full of himself and too wary of everybody else to listen; Jaina’s too preoccupied with her own pain; Uncle Luke and pflegebróðr Kyp are both too busy; Tácennicge Mara’s so wrapped up in Ben it’s like nobody else really exist for her, anymore; and Tahiri . . . well, he’s not going to bother Tahiri with this, not when she’s still so shaky over what the Yuuzhan Vong did to her. Corran Horn was good to him and Tahiri, after Yavin 4, but he’s been caught up with worrying about his own family, lately, and honestly, the man just hasn’t been the same since Ithor - and he never really struck Anakin as the most trustworthy of individuals, anyway, to be perfectly honest.
If Anakin were a little bit closer to Tenel Ka or any of the other Jedi closer to his own age, he might risk trying to talk to one of them, but he’s not, and so he can’t quite bring himself to try it, especially not after the disaster that was Centerpoint Station (which, by the way, he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to forgive Jacen for, personal doubts as to whether or not it was the right action to take, to fire on the Yuuzhan Vong fleet like that or not. Maybe Anakin would’ve just been repeating the same mistake Uncle Luke made, in destroying that first Death Star. Maybe not. Either way, it was a risk he’d been willing to take - a sacrifice he’d been willing to make - to win some much-needed precious time and space for the Republic and the New Jedi Order to fall back and regroup and come up with a better, more united line of defense, against whatever of the Yuuzhan Vong threat might’ve survived. Jacen had no right to interfere, and, in doing so, though he may’ve saved Anakin from having to be personally responsible for the deaths of so many Yuuzhan Vong, he in turn made Anakin mostly responsible for the deaths of countless of their own allies, among the Hapans, which is ineffably worse, in Anakin’s not so very humble opinion). Maybe he’s being paranoid - maybe Jacen’s disdain of everybody else is starting to rub off on him - but he’d rather discuss this with somebody he trusts enough to be sure not to try to use any of his ideas about what’s really wrong with the Jedi and the New Jedi Order against them or against him for any reason.
So he does nothing. And he has a bad feeling about all of this - the war; the arguing and division within the Order and his own family; the inherently unstable and selfish nature of the supposedly democratic government of the New Republic; the way the Yuuzhan Vong seem to know enough about them (Senate and supposedly sentient beings of the New Republic and Jedi and his family and all) to know how best to manipulate things so that they all seem to be at odd with one another, everybody pulling his or her or its own way, tearing things apart and making it that much easier for the Yuuzhan Vong to come in behind them and sweep them all away.
He has a bad feeling that things are going to be much worse, before they get any better.
This insane scheme to take out the voxyn queen - and, hopefully, shut down the voxyn cloning once and for all - at Myrkr (partially his own idea or not!) only seems to confirm it.
*********
Prologue: A Bad Feeling . . .
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . PG-13ish, maybe, for this 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 keep in mind that Old Corellian is to Basic what Old English is to modern English!
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: For the purposes of this story/series, it will be best if folks assume that Han Solo essentially (if unofficially) adopted Kyp Durron, after they escaped from Kessel, and that Kyp is regarded by Luke and the rest of the Solo family basically as if he were Han's foster son. Kyp is therefore considered a member of the combined Skywalker-Solo clan by most folks (hence, Anakin thinking of him as his foster brother).
Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
Prologue: A Bad Feeling . . .
27:05:13 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,028 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,029 After Republic’s Founding)
Enemies are not accidental or unfortunate. We make them, we earn them, and we nurture them, whether we realize it or not. If we can’t find real enemies, we’ll invent them and make them as big as we can. They become our justification for existing, or excuses for our own failings. Many of us would suffer if we didn’t have them - who would need Jedi if there were no dark Force users?
- Lord Gajakur Biul, Kilian Ranger, circa the Clone Wars
Anakin Solo has a bad feeling about this war, about what it’s doing to his family.
Uncle Luke and pflegebróðr Kyp, they talk and they talk and they talk at each other, but they spend so much time talking past each other that neither one of them ever seems to listen or really hear what the other one is saying. And yeah, okay, so he can understand that what they’re both saying - what they’re trying so hard to get each other to understand - is important, and he gets that they’re both extremely passionate about their beliefs, but for pity’s sake! Even Anakin can see that, unless they stop arguing at each other and start actually talking to each other, it’s going to take a disaster to get either one of them to even think about listening to the other, and the longer they argue, the worse the sense of division within the ranks of the New Jedi Order grows. And though Tácennicge Mara seems to be better, since giving birth to Ben, Uncle Luke has been so distracted, worrying about her for basically the entire war, that Anakin hates to think of the kind of disaster it would take to actually let Uncle Luke give his full attention to Kyp.
As for Mom and Dad . . . well, they haven’t really been right since Chewbacca’s death, on Sernpidal, and that’s entirely his own fault, no matter what anyone else says. (If he’d just been faster and less clumsy, or if he would’ve just figured out what was happening a bit earlier - he’s certain he could have overloaded that blasted combination of dovin basals and, if not completely saved the planet, then at least slowed down the collision between the planet and its moon long enough to give people enough time to evacuate properly - then they wouldn’t’ve had to leave Chewie behind like that, and the Wookiee would not have died with that world. And that means it’s Anakin’s fault, at least partially, though the Yuuzhan Vong are, of course, ultimately to blame, for using their damned Yo’Gand’s Core tactic to pull Dobido down into Sernpidal in the first place, in the process destroying both satellite and planet.) They’ve been a lot better, since Jacen stopped being such an incredible wagyx about not using the Force (since he’d somehow gotten it into his head that it’s wrong to use the Force as if it were only a tool and so essentially stopped using it altogether, out of fear of being disrespectful or some such nonsense) and saved Mom’s life, on Duro, and since Dad worked through a lot of his grief and anger, by saving an old friend (Roa) from the Yuuzhan Vong, starting to work with Droma and other members of the Ryn Network against the Peace Brigade, and gaining an antidote (of sorts) to Tácennicge Mara’s illness (the coomb spore disease, given to her by Nom Anor). But they aren’t like they were, before the war, and he worries sometimes that they aren’t ever going to be like that, again.
And speaking of worry, just what in the nine Corellian hells is wrong with his idiot brother, anyway? Jacen used to be someone Anakin looked up to, someone he understood (okay, so maybe not as much as with Jaina, but Jaina is good with machines whereas Jacen is good with animals, and Anakin’s particular talents with the Force mean that he just relates more easily to Jaina than to Jacen), but anymore . . . he just doesn’t know. It’s like, when no one was looking, some stranger did to Jacen what Exar Kun did to Uncle Luke, all those years ago, when the Sith ghost possessed Kyp, except that instead of just casting Jacen’s spirit and mind out of his body, this person replaced Jacen with someone else, somebody completely different. Jacen used to be the one who advocated using the Force for everything - hell, he even got into fights about that with Dad, years ago, after they first joined the Jedi Praxeum on Yavin 4 and got some better fine control with the Force, arguing that he didn’t need to exercise or know how to fight because he could always use the Force to protect himself or to do anything he might’ve done by moving his body around, physically, more easily and more quickly, just by calling on the Force - and he used to be the one who always went around trying to cheer everybody up with his lame jokes and kept them aware of the bigger picture by reminding them of all the good in the galaxy and all of the things worth fighting for, and now . . . Anakin just doesn’t understand. It is literally like his big brother has become a stranger, all but overnight, just in time for this blasted war to start, and the timing is so damned convenient that sometimes he seriously finds himself wondering if Jacen could have possibly come into contact with the angry spirit of an old Sith Lord sometime, in the months just before Sernpidal, without anyone knowing or noticing.
If only to try and appease his own worries and doubts, Anakin would like to ask Jaina if she’s noticed if Jacen started to act . . . peculiarly at any one specific time, sometime after the three of them were all officially promoted to apprentice Jedi Knights but before the war with the Yuuzhan Vong started; Jaina just hasn’t been the same, since the war started and the Senate basically ignored all of their warnings and accused Mom of trying to frighten people with false threats in order to gather power to herself, because she was Vader’s daughter, instead of having the Republic’s best interests at heart, though, and she especially hasn’t been the same since her friend and wingmate, Anni Capstan, was killed during the Battle of Ithor. She’s been shutting herself off so much from everybody and everything and devoting herself with such single-minded fierceness to the battle against the Yuuzhan Vong that he’s almost afraid that if anyone tries to put anything else on her plate she’ll crack clean through from the strain. If he didn’t love Kyp so much, he’d strangle the stupid eharl guerfel, for getting her involved in that attack against the new worldship that the YuuzhanVong were building to house their children and older civilians. Okay, so sure, Kyp was suffering, too, from losing his apprentice, Miko Reglia (and Force, but Jacen is lucky that Kyp didn’t skin him alive, for getting Miko killed like that), and his Dozen-And-Two-Avengers, too, but tricking Jaina into helping him strike back at the Yuuzhan Vong by destroying a mostly finished new worldship that he’d put about was a gravitic superweapon of some kind was probably one of the stupidest, absolute worst possible things he could have done, both for himself and for Jaina, and it’s really no wonder Mom’s furious with Kyp and Jaina seems to have lost her ability to trust him, anymore!
It’s really not like Kyp, to be this blind to how completely he’s alienating so many of the people who’re basically his family. Kyp can be brash and opinionated and he takes his duties as a Jedi protector with deadly seriousness, but Dad and Uncle Luke and the Solos are his family, and he usually does his damnedest to at least try to keep the peace, even when Tácennicge Mara isn’t being all that particularly nice to him. Okay, so technically, Kyp has been . . . increasingly distant from all of them, ever since Mara Jade came back and ended up marrying Uncle Luke, but his pflegebróðr is one of the few people Anakin and his siblings basically grew up trusting and loving unconditionally, who didn’t carry the name of Solo or Skywalker or Celchu, and it just feels wrong, for Kyp to be so much at odds with them, now. It’s like there are these huge gaping chasms that’ve broken open in the bedrock of their family, and Uncle Luke and Tácennicge Mara and Mom and Winter are off on one isolated little island, Dad and Jaina and Tycho are on another (with the rest of the Rogues), Jacen is off all by himself (but is determinedly trying to pull as many of the other Jedi over to his side as he can), Kyp is somewhere close to Dad and Jaina but separated from them by what he did to hurt Jaina (and also trying to pull as many of the other Jedi over to his side as he possibly can), and Anakin is stuck, in the middle, in between all of these little islands of individuals who’re all at odds with each other, when really, now, of all times, is when they need to be standing together and supporting each other and fighting as one!
Uncle Luke’s worried about Kyp and Jacen and Jaina and Mom and Dad, too - Anakin can see this quite plainly, when he looks at him - but he’s also got the whole of the New Jedi Order to worry about, plus his recently very sick wife, plus his new son (who seems determined to cut himself off from the Force entirely, because of all the ugliness that’s constantly flooding the Force, because of the war), and it’s just not fair, to expect him to be able to fix everything for everybody, when most of the sentient beings of the galaxy suddenly seem to prefer to turn their backs on the Jedi and huddle alone in the dark and blindly hope that if they keep their heads down and do whatever the Yuuzhan Vong want them to do that they won’t be turned into slaves implanted with surge-coral or killed outright. The more Anakin sees his poor uncle struggling to try to obey the edicts of the government and see to it that the Jedi can still fulfill their role as the defenders of democracy and freedom and keep his family safe and whole and try to keep the Order from flying apart under all the mounting pressure, as forces from both within and without conspire to tear the extended family that is the New Jedi Order apart, the more he has to fight down the urge to just plant himself in between Uncle Luke and everybody else and declare that the whole blasted galaxy and everyone in it can just back the hell off and go take care of their own skragging problems for once.
Before she died, the Republic co-founder and hero Mon Mothma gave Uncle Luke some very good advice about needing to make sure that the members of his New Jedi Order didn’t ever isolate themselves from the lives of the ordinary peoples of the galaxy - that they would be a part of the Republic’s every day life and live and work and even play out in the open, rather than retreating behind the walls of some Jedi-only Temple - and needing to make sure that he learned enough about politics and honed his ability to lead enough to behave as a real leader to the Order rather than just a figurehead to be used and manipulated by others for their own purposes. Anakin has heard all about this, both from Mom (who didn’t stop smiling for weeks, after the initial talk she had with Uncle Luke about how best to respond to Mon Mothma’s advice) and Uncle Luke (who is constantly quoting Mon Mothma’s advice about the need for Jedi who are willing to get their hands dirty when he sends fully trained Jedi Knights out into the galaxy), and he knows that Uncle Luke has tried to take that advice seriously, by aligning the Order closely with the Senate and trying to present the New Jedi Order as one of the Republic’s main lines of proper defense against all threats, but it’s just not working, anymore. The New Jedi Order has gotten so tangled up with the government - a government largely run by individuals so resentful and so fearful of losing power, so unwilling to listen to reason, that they would rather invent conspiracies and threats amongst the ranks of the galaxy’s staunchest defenders than hear about a real threat, from outside their very galaxy - that the Jedi haven’t been able to respond to the threat posed by the Yuuzhan Vong in anything like an organized or coherent manner, and the galaxy and the Order alike have suffered because of it.
And okay, so, yeah, Kyp and his followers definitely have a point - the New Jedi Order could have done more, earlier, to respond to the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong, and they probably should have all sat down and come up with some proper plans for defense and offense, before it could ever get this bad - but with the government dead set against even believing that there was a threat and then basically turning against them, when the Yuuzhan Vong started up their own little private war against the Jedi (recognizing them for the threat that they are, against them) and the propaganda machines of the war began to try to blame everything on the lawless, bloodthirsty, power-hungry Jeedai, in retrospect, he’s not entirely sure that they could have done anything that wouldn’t have turned so many of the peoples of the galaxy against them even more quickly than they have. He has a sinking suspicion that the Yuuzhan Vong would have gleefully responded to any more organized attempts to defend the galaxy from their invading forces with more planets broken apart by their moons and more worlds with their ecological systems turned upside down and inside out by the biological agents of the Yuuzhan Vong Shapers . . . all of which they would have then found a way to blame, somehow, on the Jedi, thereby turning the opinion of the sentient beings of the galaxy even more firmly against them.
Maybe Uncle Luke’s attempts to explain to people (like Kyp) why the New Jedi Order isn’t taking a quicker, more proactive response to the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong haven’t always been all that logical - that whole “I was young, then” speech came off a bit flat, when taken at face value by those whose lives basically only exist, as such, because Uncle Luke did what he did during the war against the Empire, redeeming Vader and, in the process, defeating the Emperor - but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point, either. As much as Anakin hates to think of it in such terms, the truth is that Uncle Luke had to essentially become a mass murderer in order to do all of that (the likelihood is that he killed at least as many people, with that one shot that took out the first Death Star, than Kyp will probably manage to kill in his entire life, Sun Crusher or no Sun Crusher); he nearly lost himself, in the process of redeeming his father, and he still ended up falling prey to the cloned/reborn Emperor and only by a hairsbreadth managed to avoid a fate that would’ve led to him becoming much worse than the fallen Anakin Skywalker ever was, as Darth Vader; and what, in the end, did he even truly accomplish, after putting himself through such a wringer that he came close to losing all that he is to the Dark Side not once, not twice, but no less than three times (more, if a body wants to split hairs and count things like that whole debacles with Joruus C’baoth debacle)? The Rebels won, sure, but at what cost, and to what effect?
Realistically, it took something like twenty years to get the Imperials to actually stop trying to crush them, and is sure as spitting doesn’t seem like the New Republic is going to last though this new war. In fact, it’s looking more and more like the New Republic, as such - the democracy that Luke and the other Rebels fought so hard for and did such awful things in the name of - no longer really exists, that it folded at the first serious sign of trouble, and is even now in the process of crumbing into anarchy right before their eyes. Uncle Luke’s a smart guy: by this point, Anakin can’t even pretend that it’s possible for him to have missed the conclusion that he and the other Rebels could have and should have done better, given how flimsy the peace and the government they managed to win for themselves at such great cost is currently proving to truly be. It can’t possibly be just the Dark Side that he’s so worried about (though after what he went through to save Tahiri, Anakin really does get that the seductiveness of aggression is certainly a legitimate concern, given how murky and full of pain and anger the Force has been ever since the war started). No, Uncle Luke’s got to be realizing how fragile everything he’s ever fought for actually is and wondering if that fragility may not be due in part to the fact that, in some cases or in some fundamental fashion, he may’ve gone about striving for all of that - the Rebellion, the New Republic - in the wrong way, using the wrong means.
Anakin’s done a lot of research on the history of the Jedi Order, scanty though a lot of the records are, and, more and more, it seems to him as if it’s a question of the ends and the means and justification - that slippery slope that’s so seductive that, the way he understand it, the old Jedi Order basically ended up tumbling down it wholesale, during the Clone Wars, falling so far so fast that the Jedi couldn’t even see they were rushing towards their collective doom. It’s not going to do them any good to win against the Yuuzhan Vong if they have to use the Dark Side to do it, because the truth is that they’ll inevitably end up destroying all that it is that they’re trying to save in the process, just as Revan did so many hundreds of years ago, when he pushed the Jedi into joining the fight in the Mandalorian Wars and then, rather than preserving the Republic and the Order, all but destroyed both when he became in a Sith, in the process of fighting his war . . . and just as, not so very long ago, Anakin Skywalker also did, when he became a Sith Lord in his attempt to win enough power first to preserve the lives of those he loved (planning to later rebel against the Sith Master who’d been manipulating the whole of the Clone Wars from behind the scenes, so that Anakin would be the one to take over the galaxy and, according to his grandiose private plans, rebuild everything in such a way as to insure true peace and prosperity for forever) but instead ended up trapped as Darth Vader, having either aided in the slaughter of or else so wholly alienated the remainder of his former Jedi family and, in the process, been so wounded that he no longer had the raw power or the motivation to simply easily overthrow Darth Sidious, thereby essentially paving the final little bit of the way for Sidious’ creation of his Dark Empire, under the seemingly benevolent rule of former Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.
More and more, Anakin has the feeling that neither Kyp nor Uncle Luke is completely right nor completely wrong, on the matter of the Yuuzhan Vong and the war and the way that the New Jedi Order should be responding to this threat. He thinks that Uncle Luke may actually be sensing an essential problem with the way that he and his have been operating all along - ever since the earliest days of the Rebellion - one that’s so badly snarled up in that old issue of ends and means and justification that he just doesn’t have enough knowledge or eloquence to quickly phrase it in a way that’s easily understandable to others. Kyp, being more well-versed in the reality of politics than Uncle Luke is, likewise seems to be sensing an essential problem in the way that the new Jedi Order has been and continues to look towards the government rather than to either the various sentient beings of the galaxy or themselves, as Jedi, or even the Force itself, for validation and approval of what they are and what they do. Both issues seem tangled up in a problem of balance that he honestly doesn’t think has ever really been solved, either by the pre-Ruusan Jedi Order, the post-Ruusan old Jedi Order, or the New Jedi Order Uncle Luke and Mom have essentially built up all by themselves, and he has a sinking suspicion that if they don’t somehow find out a way to address that lack of balance and soon that the New Jedi Order is going to end up going the way of the old Jedi Order, in the end.
In their devotion to the various sentient beings of the galaxy, Jedi tend to end up ignoring their responsibility to themselves and to each other, as individuals, which makes them vulnerable enough to feelings of either grandiosity or else pure guilt and responsibility for the well-being of everybody else (except themselves) that they tend to fall prey to the slippery slope wherein the ends are seen as justifying the means, regardless of how immoral/amoral those means might be. And, in its devotion to the ideals of democracy and peace, any given version of the Jedi Order automatically unfortunately tends to become caught up in and/or utilized by either the mechanics of government (and individual leaders) or else the government itself, rather than looking to the sentient beings that the government is supposed to be serving/protecting. These are flaws in the way that Jedi function and in the way that the Jedi Order as a whole functions that seem to have been carried over from the old Jedi Order to the New Jedi Order, and, unfortunately, neither one is all that easily solvable - or at least, if they are, then he certainly hasn’t been able to see it, at least not yet (though, to be fair, it’s kind of hard to find time enough to really process this kind of thing in the middle of a galactic war, and he didn’t really start to figure most of this out until after he had to save Tahiri from the Yuuzhan Vong Shapers, so a lot of this is still new to him).
Worse, focusing on any one issue seems to cause people to lose sight of the other, so that Uncle Luke’s concern about the Dark Side and the ability of individual Jedi to remain balanced and in tune with the will of the Force is keeping him from seeing that the New Jedi Order really shouldn’t be a subsidiary of the government, and pflegebróðr Kyp’s concern about the Jedi not doing their job, by either the Force or the sentient beings of the galaxy, in not doing a better job of combating the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong, is keeping him from being able to understand that focusing so much on protecting the Order and the galaxy against the Yuuzhan Vong, by any means necessary, risks plunging the galaxy into another war of Light and Dark, wherein Sith who were once Jedi all but destroy everything that they once held so dear to their hearts. The great pity of it all is that if Uncle Luke and pflegebróðr Kyp would just sit down together alone and have one of their palavers (where no one else is allowed to interrupt and neither one is allowed to leave the room until they both agree that they can understand where the other is coming from) and talk to each other properly about their concerns and frustrations, instead of just talking past each other, towards their audiences, then he suspects that they would end up grasping the real problem - that it’s all a matter of proper balance - and figure out a way for Jedi and the New Jedi Order to find a new way of balancing with the Force and the rest of the galaxy, without either neglecting their duty to themselves or each other, their responsibility to the Force, or their obligation to the sentient beings of the galaxy and/or maybe even their government, if only inasmuch as that government is meant to serve and protect the people, not profit from them.
Anakin really wishes he could talk about this to someone - he thinks that even just a bit of input from someone else might be enough to break whatever barrier it is in his brain that’s keeping him from thinking up a solution to this problem - Mom and Dad are out of the question, though, as fragile as they are; Jacen’s too full of himself and too wary of everybody else to listen; Jaina’s too preoccupied with her own pain; Uncle Luke and pflegebróðr Kyp are both too busy; Tácennicge Mara’s so wrapped up in Ben it’s like nobody else really exist for her, anymore; and Tahiri . . . well, he’s not going to bother Tahiri with this, not when she’s still so shaky over what the Yuuzhan Vong did to her. Corran Horn was good to him and Tahiri, after Yavin 4, but he’s been caught up with worrying about his own family, lately, and honestly, the man just hasn’t been the same since Ithor - and he never really struck Anakin as the most trustworthy of individuals, anyway, to be perfectly honest.
If Anakin were a little bit closer to Tenel Ka or any of the other Jedi closer to his own age, he might risk trying to talk to one of them, but he’s not, and so he can’t quite bring himself to try it, especially not after the disaster that was Centerpoint Station (which, by the way, he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to forgive Jacen for, personal doubts as to whether or not it was the right action to take, to fire on the Yuuzhan Vong fleet like that or not. Maybe Anakin would’ve just been repeating the same mistake Uncle Luke made, in destroying that first Death Star. Maybe not. Either way, it was a risk he’d been willing to take - a sacrifice he’d been willing to make - to win some much-needed precious time and space for the Republic and the New Jedi Order to fall back and regroup and come up with a better, more united line of defense, against whatever of the Yuuzhan Vong threat might’ve survived. Jacen had no right to interfere, and, in doing so, though he may’ve saved Anakin from having to be personally responsible for the deaths of so many Yuuzhan Vong, he in turn made Anakin mostly responsible for the deaths of countless of their own allies, among the Hapans, which is ineffably worse, in Anakin’s not so very humble opinion). Maybe he’s being paranoid - maybe Jacen’s disdain of everybody else is starting to rub off on him - but he’d rather discuss this with somebody he trusts enough to be sure not to try to use any of his ideas about what’s really wrong with the Jedi and the New Jedi Order against them or against him for any reason.
So he does nothing. And he has a bad feeling about all of this - the war; the arguing and division within the Order and his own family; the inherently unstable and selfish nature of the supposedly democratic government of the New Republic; the way the Yuuzhan Vong seem to know enough about them (Senate and supposedly sentient beings of the New Republic and Jedi and his family and all) to know how best to manipulate things so that they all seem to be at odd with one another, everybody pulling his or her or its own way, tearing things apart and making it that much easier for the Yuuzhan Vong to come in behind them and sweep them all away.
He has a bad feeling that things are going to be much worse, before they get any better.
This insane scheme to take out the voxyn queen - and, hopefully, shut down the voxyn cloning once and for all - at Myrkr (partially his own idea or not!) only seems to confirm it.
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