Corellian exclusion zone to Coruscant- Monday Fandom time
While it was one of the details she'd learned in Fandom that sort of slipped her mind over time given everything else, Jaina had known that she'd lose her fifteen-year-old military career thanks to Jacen. She just hadn't realized it'd be only a month into rejoining active service.
Things between Jacen and Jaina had only gotten worse when they ended up on the Alliance ship Ocean, where he was able to give her orders on one particular mission. They had the same rank. It wasn't even that Jaina had a problem taking orders. Despite the number of times she'd run off to do what she thought was right as a Jedi, in the military structure she fell in line pretty easily. The problem was that Jacen lacked the experience, yet had no problem giving the orders, and Jaina had serious reason to doubt his judgment and what he was lining her squadron up for.
On the sixth day of the blockade, Jacen had called them to meet at the hangar deck, and as soon as Jaina got the message she'd fallen into a bad mood. That mood was shared by Zekk, who no doubt was catching Jaina's hostility through their bond but who had reasons of his own to not like what Jacen did anymore. It was easy sometimes to almost forget now that the boys had been friends. She'd been talking to Zekk when Jacen arrived late, and it was petty, but she couldn't help it. She had animosity. "Good of you to drop in, Colonel Solo," she greeted him. "Who's minding the shop back at Secret Police HQ?"
Zekk greeted Jacen with a nod. "Now, Jaina. We have a guest star. Be nice."
Jacen ignored it. "Mission brief, people. Some other fleets have fronted up on behalf of Corellia, some of them civilian vessels. They're lined up, daring us to take a crack at them."
"We've been watching the scanner repeater," said Zekk, nodding towards the display visible in the ops room that they'd been watching. "This is going to get tricky. One wrong move-"
"-and we suck in a lot more enemies," Jaina finished. They still did that sometimes. "Do we have orders to engage?"
She wished she didn't feel this way, but she did. The last time she'd followed Jacen's orders into battle she'd been party to starting a war. And that was the second time she'd ever been manipulated by someone like that. And he was turning to the dark side. She had extremely good reasons to not trust him.
"Only if fired upon or placed under serious threat."
"I'm glad we're clear," Jaina said, picking up and donning her helmet, fastening the chin strap. "Are we just going to buzz them, or try to drive them back?"
"Right now none of them are in the exclusion zone. If that changes, we turn them back."
"I love a standoff," said Zekk. "Are they letting supplies through to the shipyard orbiters yet?"
"No. Total exclusion zone means total exclusion zone."
"Even in Corellian space," Zekk noted. They were fighting the Corellians. That meant the Corellians had their own space that the GA shouldn't be able to deem an exclusion zone.
"Not our problem, Zekk," Jacen insisted. "The legality of that is for the Senate to argue later. Okay, time to turn and burn."
They broke off for their own ships, and Jaina settled into the cockpit of hers to prep for their standoff. It was like she had an emotional system for how to do things when she went into battle. She could shut herself off, stay cool and calm, and people had told her that it was almost like she shut herself off. It made perfect sense to her, being a Jedi pilot who'd spent five years fighting in a war where the final battle alone resulted in the death of trillions. Shutting off allowed her to fight objectively.
Then she could feel Jacen at the edge of her mind, almost testing, and the objectivity disappeared for the moment. She didn't know if he was just trying to gauge her mood, or why. Again, she couldn't trust him anymore. She knew what he was becoming, he already had his hooks in Ben, and it worried her to know what part she might play in all this when he'd already apparently messed with her memory. So she shoved him away in the Force as hard as she could, and he didn't try and touch her mind again.
There were times she hated knowing what would happen, and she hated when that made her right.
Things started fine, but it wasn't long before the Corellian ships tried to enter the exclusion zone. Being an exclusion zone, that wasn't allowed, so the GA forces would try to drive them back. Then Jacen teased a lightly armed freighter too far, and when they went to fire on him, Jaina stepped in and took out their cannons. The freighter turned to retreat, and that should have been that.
Except that Jaina could feel the word in the Force that Jacen sent to her as an order. Fire.
Jaina didn't even think about resisting. She just resisted, period. Then her brother opened a comm channel just to her. "Finish it, Jaina."
"I've disabled both aft cannons," she reminded him. "He's heading back."
"He opened fire. Do it."
He opened fire because Jacen had tried to be too daring in driving them off. They'd probably seen him as the threat, and she'd already ended that. This was entirely unnecessary, and she didn't like the feeling she was getting from him. "Jacen, the ship's damaged and he's retreating. I can't continue the attack."
"You know the rules of engagement."
Over the last fifteen years, there had been plenty of times when her military training directly opposed her Jedi training. At those times, she had to look at how a decision presented itself and make a judgment call based on the information she had and what was felt right. There weren't many times she'd been wrong, and this decision-making process meant that even if she was, she could sleep at night. And now she was deciding that this was one of those times she needed to be a Jedi, and not a colonel.
The second she decided that, she knew how this would end for her.
"I won't do it," Jaina said. "It's a civilian vessel and right now he isn't presenting a threat-"
"That's an order."
"It's outside the ROE."
"It's legitimate. I repeat, take him out."
The thing that really got to her was that Jacen's weapons were perfectly fine. There was no reason he couldn't do it, but instead he was trying to force her to do it, like he was trying to make her complicit in something he started.
"Colonel Solo, I'm refusing that order," Jaina said, and closed the channel before swinging her ship back to the picket line. There she watched as Jacen did fire into the side of the freighter, ripping it open and causing several more of the Corellian ships to go to its aid. She kept herself closed off, blinking back tears as she realized that this was where she'd just crossed the personal point of no return with her twin, that the Jacen she'd known never would have done this, that he'd just started a full-on battle in what should have just been a standoff, and that all she had were the very last vestiges of hope left that there was any chance of preventing everything else that came after this.
Her comm clicked on again, Resolute giving orders for Rogue Squadron to get out now because they were opening fire. Zekk and Jaina followed Jacen's ship under Resolute for cover, heading back to Ocean. As they got closer, she heard Zekk's voice over the comm. "Anyone want to tell me what happened back there? Jaina, why did you break off?"
Jaina didn't answer, so Jacen did. "Colonel Solo refused a direct order," he said. "She's now suspended from duty."
*****
Jaina was sent from Ocean straight back to Coruscant. She got back to base and found that she wasn't being placed under arrest, but she essentially wasn't allowed to do anything. It was at that point that she realized she had no idea what her next step was, which was luckily solved when she got word that she already had a visitor.
Luke was already waiting in the wardroom when she arrived and as soon as she saw him, what had happened really hit her. While she knew she'd done the right thing morally and her conscience was clear, she still felt embarrassed and hurt and completely apprehensive of what he might have heard to bring him here, and so it was a little hesitantly that she took the seat next to him. "Thanks for coming, Uncle Luke."
"I wanted to hear your side of it," he told her. "I don't believe Jaina Solo would ever turn tail and run during an engagement."
Was that how they were spinning it? Jaina knew how things tended to spread here. Word couldn't make its way around faster if you broadcast it on radio. She was probably the newest bit of hot gossip, all for supposedly being a coward. "I'm suspended from duty," she said flatly.
"What happened?"
So she told him. He had worked with the military himself, so she was able to go into as much detail as needed for him to understand the situation, and by the look on his face, he was really considering what she was telling him. And that was the thing- it was a dodgy situation and she knew it. From a military standpoint, Jacen was correct. When she was up for court-martial, it wasn't going to go in her favor, because while someone could listen to this and decide that Jacen was right from a military perspective, and Jaina was right from a moral perspective, it was still going to come down to her refusing a direct order.
"It was just wrong, Uncle Luke," she finished. "He wanted destruction. He wanted to teach them a lesson. I felt it."
She wanted him to say something, to assure her that she was right, but he didn't. "Mom and Dad are going to be so ashamed of me," she said miserably. Han hadn't wanted her doing this in the first place, and if she'd messed up already, she worried about how she'd be able to handle everything else. "Please don't tell them. I'll do it myself when I'm ready."
"They know what kind of person you are," he said, reaching over and taking her hands. "But why haven't you defended yourself?"
"Because if I told everyone what happened, they'd think I was whining. You know: everyone else has to do as they're told, but Jaina Solo thinks she's above orders." She'd made things worse for herself, there, too, with her outburst at the mess that day, or the fact that a couple people had at least gotten the impression that she was not okay with Jacen's immediate elevation to her own rank.
"I know you're right, Jaina," Luke told her.
And here came the relief. The worst had been the thought had been that she hadn't been right, that Luke would hear what she had to say and wonder what was wrong with her. "You wouldn't have fired, would you?"
"I meant that I know Jacen is turning to the dark side, and that it's beyond anything that you or I did when we ventured there."
Oh. Well. At least she could feel safe in the knowledge that she didn't follow the orders of someone going dark. She would have preferred being right about the other thing.
Still, she almost opened her mouth to point out that she'd done some pretty horrible things, too. She was realistic about her brief turn, and knew what she'd done and what she would have become if she'd continued that way. But Luke was right on this. He and Jaina had both turned, both started down a path... and then rejected it. Jaina had had a couple times over the last few years where she could have gone that way again, and she just didn't. Jacen had to see where he was headed, had been told that it was a possibility, and he was continuing down that road anyway.
"I don't want to be right," she said quietly.
"Neither do I."
There was something about the way he said it that made her pause. "You're arguing with Mara about it, aren't you?" It would explain why Ben was still hanging out with Jacen. She knew Luke wasn't okay with it after the last time she'd seen him.
"Sometimes," he said vaguely.
"She can't see what he's like these days?"
"She sees, but she had another explanation," Luke said, still vaguely. "And we live in difficult times."
"We always do. That's no excuse."
Obviously that was not something he wanted to discuss anymore. "So what are you going to do now that you're grounded?"
Jaina sighed and sat back in her chair. "Until I face a court-martial... They might allow me to resign instead of going that route. If I'm free to go, I think I'll be in Fandom for a bit," she said, and even managed a tiny smile when she said, "Ben's graduating."
Luke managed one right back, even if he looked a little surprised by actually hearing that. Give it time, his own kid was barely a teenager. "Tell him we said congratulations," he said.
"I will," she said.
"Come on," he prompted. "Come and have lunch with me and Mara. We don't see enough of you these days."
As they got up and started to leave, Jaina realized he hadn't actually said anything about not telling her parents, and she found herself asking, "Do you stay in touch with Mom and Dad?"
"If you mean do we talk... not much," Luke admitted. "But I'm always in contact with Leia. I'm afraid it's your dad I've lost touch with. I miss him."
With the way things were going, that didn't surprise Jaina much. It did make her sad, though. The three of them had been a team her whole life. That shouldn't change now, not when they were all going to end up really needing each other. "I bet he misses you, too."
The trip back to Luke and Mara's took much longer than it should have, thanks to traffic lanes being redirected in order to clean up after a riot. That was probably a sign of things to come. And then on the way, Ben blinked out.
It was something that Jaina had felt before in Fandom, but she'd learned not to freak out by now. Unfortunately she was too slow to say anything before Luke, who had no idea about this little skill, was already calling Mara on the comlink. "Honey, is Ben with you?"
"No," came Mara's voice, already tense. "What's wrong?"
"Can you feel him? Is he okay?"
Jaina tried to get his attention, then gave up and tried to send a little bit of reassurance to him instead.
"I can't feel anything," Mara said. "No sign of him."
Luke caught Jaina's eye, saw her nod calmly, and then he calmed, too. "Okay," he told Mara. "Just checking. I'm on my way home with Jaina."
When he ended the call, Jaina winced and said, "The Ben in Fandom can do that. I'm sorry, I should have warned you, I'm just used to it."
"Just like Jacen," Luke finished.
"You have to get Ben away from him." Even moreso than saving Jacen or not saving Jacen, protecting Ben was high on Jaina's priority list. The problem was that she had little to no control over that.
"I know," he said. "I'm trying to get him to make that choice for himself. If I force it, I'll make Jacen a martyr in his eyes."
Jaina frowned. He had a point there. She didn't necessarily agree with it, but he had a point. It must have been horrible to see that your son was in that situation without even knowing exactly how he'd ended up there and not having an easy answer in fixing it.
Which, really, was how things seemed to be going in genral now. She was just getting the horrible feeling that after years of hoping to avoid this, she might just be a spectator to everything happening anyway. And here she hadn't thought she could feel worse today.
[NFB, NFI, OOC okay. Most dialogue taken from Bloodlines by Karen Traviss, except for the stuff that's probably pretty obvious.]
Things between Jacen and Jaina had only gotten worse when they ended up on the Alliance ship Ocean, where he was able to give her orders on one particular mission. They had the same rank. It wasn't even that Jaina had a problem taking orders. Despite the number of times she'd run off to do what she thought was right as a Jedi, in the military structure she fell in line pretty easily. The problem was that Jacen lacked the experience, yet had no problem giving the orders, and Jaina had serious reason to doubt his judgment and what he was lining her squadron up for.
On the sixth day of the blockade, Jacen had called them to meet at the hangar deck, and as soon as Jaina got the message she'd fallen into a bad mood. That mood was shared by Zekk, who no doubt was catching Jaina's hostility through their bond but who had reasons of his own to not like what Jacen did anymore. It was easy sometimes to almost forget now that the boys had been friends. She'd been talking to Zekk when Jacen arrived late, and it was petty, but she couldn't help it. She had animosity. "Good of you to drop in, Colonel Solo," she greeted him. "Who's minding the shop back at Secret Police HQ?"
Zekk greeted Jacen with a nod. "Now, Jaina. We have a guest star. Be nice."
Jacen ignored it. "Mission brief, people. Some other fleets have fronted up on behalf of Corellia, some of them civilian vessels. They're lined up, daring us to take a crack at them."
"We've been watching the scanner repeater," said Zekk, nodding towards the display visible in the ops room that they'd been watching. "This is going to get tricky. One wrong move-"
"-and we suck in a lot more enemies," Jaina finished. They still did that sometimes. "Do we have orders to engage?"
She wished she didn't feel this way, but she did. The last time she'd followed Jacen's orders into battle she'd been party to starting a war. And that was the second time she'd ever been manipulated by someone like that. And he was turning to the dark side. She had extremely good reasons to not trust him.
"Only if fired upon or placed under serious threat."
"I'm glad we're clear," Jaina said, picking up and donning her helmet, fastening the chin strap. "Are we just going to buzz them, or try to drive them back?"
"Right now none of them are in the exclusion zone. If that changes, we turn them back."
"I love a standoff," said Zekk. "Are they letting supplies through to the shipyard orbiters yet?"
"No. Total exclusion zone means total exclusion zone."
"Even in Corellian space," Zekk noted. They were fighting the Corellians. That meant the Corellians had their own space that the GA shouldn't be able to deem an exclusion zone.
"Not our problem, Zekk," Jacen insisted. "The legality of that is for the Senate to argue later. Okay, time to turn and burn."
They broke off for their own ships, and Jaina settled into the cockpit of hers to prep for their standoff. It was like she had an emotional system for how to do things when she went into battle. She could shut herself off, stay cool and calm, and people had told her that it was almost like she shut herself off. It made perfect sense to her, being a Jedi pilot who'd spent five years fighting in a war where the final battle alone resulted in the death of trillions. Shutting off allowed her to fight objectively.
Then she could feel Jacen at the edge of her mind, almost testing, and the objectivity disappeared for the moment. She didn't know if he was just trying to gauge her mood, or why. Again, she couldn't trust him anymore. She knew what he was becoming, he already had his hooks in Ben, and it worried her to know what part she might play in all this when he'd already apparently messed with her memory. So she shoved him away in the Force as hard as she could, and he didn't try and touch her mind again.
There were times she hated knowing what would happen, and she hated when that made her right.
Things started fine, but it wasn't long before the Corellian ships tried to enter the exclusion zone. Being an exclusion zone, that wasn't allowed, so the GA forces would try to drive them back. Then Jacen teased a lightly armed freighter too far, and when they went to fire on him, Jaina stepped in and took out their cannons. The freighter turned to retreat, and that should have been that.
Except that Jaina could feel the word in the Force that Jacen sent to her as an order. Fire.
Jaina didn't even think about resisting. She just resisted, period. Then her brother opened a comm channel just to her. "Finish it, Jaina."
"I've disabled both aft cannons," she reminded him. "He's heading back."
"He opened fire. Do it."
He opened fire because Jacen had tried to be too daring in driving them off. They'd probably seen him as the threat, and she'd already ended that. This was entirely unnecessary, and she didn't like the feeling she was getting from him. "Jacen, the ship's damaged and he's retreating. I can't continue the attack."
"You know the rules of engagement."
Over the last fifteen years, there had been plenty of times when her military training directly opposed her Jedi training. At those times, she had to look at how a decision presented itself and make a judgment call based on the information she had and what was felt right. There weren't many times she'd been wrong, and this decision-making process meant that even if she was, she could sleep at night. And now she was deciding that this was one of those times she needed to be a Jedi, and not a colonel.
The second she decided that, she knew how this would end for her.
"I won't do it," Jaina said. "It's a civilian vessel and right now he isn't presenting a threat-"
"That's an order."
"It's outside the ROE."
"It's legitimate. I repeat, take him out."
The thing that really got to her was that Jacen's weapons were perfectly fine. There was no reason he couldn't do it, but instead he was trying to force her to do it, like he was trying to make her complicit in something he started.
"Colonel Solo, I'm refusing that order," Jaina said, and closed the channel before swinging her ship back to the picket line. There she watched as Jacen did fire into the side of the freighter, ripping it open and causing several more of the Corellian ships to go to its aid. She kept herself closed off, blinking back tears as she realized that this was where she'd just crossed the personal point of no return with her twin, that the Jacen she'd known never would have done this, that he'd just started a full-on battle in what should have just been a standoff, and that all she had were the very last vestiges of hope left that there was any chance of preventing everything else that came after this.
Her comm clicked on again, Resolute giving orders for Rogue Squadron to get out now because they were opening fire. Zekk and Jaina followed Jacen's ship under Resolute for cover, heading back to Ocean. As they got closer, she heard Zekk's voice over the comm. "Anyone want to tell me what happened back there? Jaina, why did you break off?"
Jaina didn't answer, so Jacen did. "Colonel Solo refused a direct order," he said. "She's now suspended from duty."
*****
Jaina was sent from Ocean straight back to Coruscant. She got back to base and found that she wasn't being placed under arrest, but she essentially wasn't allowed to do anything. It was at that point that she realized she had no idea what her next step was, which was luckily solved when she got word that she already had a visitor.
Luke was already waiting in the wardroom when she arrived and as soon as she saw him, what had happened really hit her. While she knew she'd done the right thing morally and her conscience was clear, she still felt embarrassed and hurt and completely apprehensive of what he might have heard to bring him here, and so it was a little hesitantly that she took the seat next to him. "Thanks for coming, Uncle Luke."
"I wanted to hear your side of it," he told her. "I don't believe Jaina Solo would ever turn tail and run during an engagement."
Was that how they were spinning it? Jaina knew how things tended to spread here. Word couldn't make its way around faster if you broadcast it on radio. She was probably the newest bit of hot gossip, all for supposedly being a coward. "I'm suspended from duty," she said flatly.
"What happened?"
So she told him. He had worked with the military himself, so she was able to go into as much detail as needed for him to understand the situation, and by the look on his face, he was really considering what she was telling him. And that was the thing- it was a dodgy situation and she knew it. From a military standpoint, Jacen was correct. When she was up for court-martial, it wasn't going to go in her favor, because while someone could listen to this and decide that Jacen was right from a military perspective, and Jaina was right from a moral perspective, it was still going to come down to her refusing a direct order.
"It was just wrong, Uncle Luke," she finished. "He wanted destruction. He wanted to teach them a lesson. I felt it."
She wanted him to say something, to assure her that she was right, but he didn't. "Mom and Dad are going to be so ashamed of me," she said miserably. Han hadn't wanted her doing this in the first place, and if she'd messed up already, she worried about how she'd be able to handle everything else. "Please don't tell them. I'll do it myself when I'm ready."
"They know what kind of person you are," he said, reaching over and taking her hands. "But why haven't you defended yourself?"
"Because if I told everyone what happened, they'd think I was whining. You know: everyone else has to do as they're told, but Jaina Solo thinks she's above orders." She'd made things worse for herself, there, too, with her outburst at the mess that day, or the fact that a couple people had at least gotten the impression that she was not okay with Jacen's immediate elevation to her own rank.
"I know you're right, Jaina," Luke told her.
And here came the relief. The worst had been the thought had been that she hadn't been right, that Luke would hear what she had to say and wonder what was wrong with her. "You wouldn't have fired, would you?"
"I meant that I know Jacen is turning to the dark side, and that it's beyond anything that you or I did when we ventured there."
Oh. Well. At least she could feel safe in the knowledge that she didn't follow the orders of someone going dark. She would have preferred being right about the other thing.
Still, she almost opened her mouth to point out that she'd done some pretty horrible things, too. She was realistic about her brief turn, and knew what she'd done and what she would have become if she'd continued that way. But Luke was right on this. He and Jaina had both turned, both started down a path... and then rejected it. Jaina had had a couple times over the last few years where she could have gone that way again, and she just didn't. Jacen had to see where he was headed, had been told that it was a possibility, and he was continuing down that road anyway.
"I don't want to be right," she said quietly.
"Neither do I."
There was something about the way he said it that made her pause. "You're arguing with Mara about it, aren't you?" It would explain why Ben was still hanging out with Jacen. She knew Luke wasn't okay with it after the last time she'd seen him.
"Sometimes," he said vaguely.
"She can't see what he's like these days?"
"She sees, but she had another explanation," Luke said, still vaguely. "And we live in difficult times."
"We always do. That's no excuse."
Obviously that was not something he wanted to discuss anymore. "So what are you going to do now that you're grounded?"
Jaina sighed and sat back in her chair. "Until I face a court-martial... They might allow me to resign instead of going that route. If I'm free to go, I think I'll be in Fandom for a bit," she said, and even managed a tiny smile when she said, "Ben's graduating."
Luke managed one right back, even if he looked a little surprised by actually hearing that. Give it time, his own kid was barely a teenager. "Tell him we said congratulations," he said.
"I will," she said.
"Come on," he prompted. "Come and have lunch with me and Mara. We don't see enough of you these days."
As they got up and started to leave, Jaina realized he hadn't actually said anything about not telling her parents, and she found herself asking, "Do you stay in touch with Mom and Dad?"
"If you mean do we talk... not much," Luke admitted. "But I'm always in contact with Leia. I'm afraid it's your dad I've lost touch with. I miss him."
With the way things were going, that didn't surprise Jaina much. It did make her sad, though. The three of them had been a team her whole life. That shouldn't change now, not when they were all going to end up really needing each other. "I bet he misses you, too."
The trip back to Luke and Mara's took much longer than it should have, thanks to traffic lanes being redirected in order to clean up after a riot. That was probably a sign of things to come. And then on the way, Ben blinked out.
It was something that Jaina had felt before in Fandom, but she'd learned not to freak out by now. Unfortunately she was too slow to say anything before Luke, who had no idea about this little skill, was already calling Mara on the comlink. "Honey, is Ben with you?"
"No," came Mara's voice, already tense. "What's wrong?"
"Can you feel him? Is he okay?"
Jaina tried to get his attention, then gave up and tried to send a little bit of reassurance to him instead.
"I can't feel anything," Mara said. "No sign of him."
Luke caught Jaina's eye, saw her nod calmly, and then he calmed, too. "Okay," he told Mara. "Just checking. I'm on my way home with Jaina."
When he ended the call, Jaina winced and said, "The Ben in Fandom can do that. I'm sorry, I should have warned you, I'm just used to it."
"Just like Jacen," Luke finished.
"You have to get Ben away from him." Even moreso than saving Jacen or not saving Jacen, protecting Ben was high on Jaina's priority list. The problem was that she had little to no control over that.
"I know," he said. "I'm trying to get him to make that choice for himself. If I force it, I'll make Jacen a martyr in his eyes."
Jaina frowned. He had a point there. She didn't necessarily agree with it, but he had a point. It must have been horrible to see that your son was in that situation without even knowing exactly how he'd ended up there and not having an easy answer in fixing it.
Which, really, was how things seemed to be going in genral now. She was just getting the horrible feeling that after years of hoping to avoid this, she might just be a spectator to everything happening anyway. And here she hadn't thought she could feel worse today.
[NFB, NFI, OOC okay. Most dialogue taken from Bloodlines by Karen Traviss, except for the stuff that's probably pretty obvious.]