Fic: SW: "But You And I Know The Reason Why" (AU; Jaina, Jaina/OC, the Solos and Skywalkers) [1/2]
But You And I Know The Reason Why
By moonlightrick
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns all established characters, star systems, concepts; I own Traest, and an ever-aging laptop. I’m not making any money off of this. Cut!lyrics one are from Hero by Chad Kroeger and Wicked Man’s Rest by Passenger. The last lyrics are from The Reason Why by Rachael Yamagata.
Timeframe: Deals with YJK AU, though the actual story goes over 9 years. If it’s easier: Jaina, ages 9-18 in an AU.
Characters: Jaina Solo, Traest (OC), Leia Organa Solo, Anakin Solo, Jacen Solo, Kyp Durron; guest starring (blink and you'll miss him) Zekk
Genre: drama, general
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 16,585
Summary: Once upon a time, a Jedi princess befriended a street rat and saved him from the Darkness. This is not that story.
Author’s Notes: This is the prequel to my fics Fast As I Can and If You Call, but you don’t need to have read those to understand this one. Basically, the AU is that Jaina meets a street boy named Traest instead of Zekk, and things change from there.
Also: Lookit what I finished!
For Lillian.
*
Jaina is Han’s daughter in a thousand and one ways. There are stars in her blood, pulling her to the skies, and brandy in her eyes, drawing her to the hot and dark, the bite and play; the adrenaline curls slick through her gut and whispers freedom and adventure; she never goes anywhere without her multi-tool because her fingers itch and need something to hang onto; and she can hide neither the grease stains on her hands nor the heart just under her sleeve. Jaina is her daddy’s girl, and she has never not known that.
Sometimes, though, she is Leia’s daughter, too.
*
Jaina is, in this moment: alone, in a junkshop, in Coruscant’s undercity, not supposed to be in the undercity, and very pleased with the combination of the above. Even Jacen doesn’t know exactly where she is, because he’s exploring at the zoo, also without a chaperone or permission. Nine years old, Jaina would much rather barter with the one-eyed humanoid who runs her most recently found junkshop than coo at holographic animals.
She’s at the back of the store, just out of the owner’s sight so that she can take apart an ancient hyperdrive. A piece falls and rolls to the wall, prompting Jaina to curse a few times and follow it before the owner can notice anything’s amiss. She crouches down on the metal grating and finds the writing before her wayward screw: The old pirate will cheat you blind.
It is etched into the durasteel wall; Jaina grins and peeks back at the desk, where the eye-patched owner is yelling into a comm. His arm muscles are thin, and he walks soft and lazy; not a real space pirate, she thinks, but the kind from old tales, old enough to be fat and retired.
She tests the etchings with her finger, then digs in her bag. She finds a thick black marker and flips the top. Retired pirates work in junkshops because they’re lazy sell-outs, she writes. Their only joy in life is to cheat people. Who are you?
Coruscant’s best scavenger, ink writing tells her a week later. Are you the one trying to fix the hyperdrive? I brought it in-it’s junk.
She smirks, and writes, I’m a much better mechanic than you are.
When she’s leaving the junk shop later that day, a street boy her age tries to pick her pockets (just like her mother said undercity people would). Han Solo’s daughter snatches her wallet right back by hand, and she and he share a grin.
Jaina knows a kindred spirit when she meets one. She forgets about the writing in favour of her new friend and doesn’t think about that junk shop for well over a month. Years later, she will see the owner again and think pirate with a pension and laugh without remembering why.
*
Leia talked about Jaina’s grandfather exactly once that Jaina can remember as a nine year old. Some of the other boys-not friends, or even “family friends,” who would have known better-said things to Anakin about his name. He was only five. Jaina and Jacen pushed the bullies, one of them even up into the air, and then they brought their little brother back home.
Leia was home for once; Han, who had been the one to tell Jaina and Jacen that Anakin was named after Leia’s “bio” father, was not there to run interference. When they got home, Jaina and Jacen started telling their mother everything the boys said and did, and Leia’s mouth got tight, and that place in the Force that was Leia Solo turned very bright and furious.
“Anakin,” she said to Jaina’s little brother, who was curled up in their mother’s lap and sniffling, “you were named after Anakin Skywalker, who was a great Jedi before he Turned, and who did the right thing for love when anyone else would have been lost.”
“They said-he was-a monster,” Anakin hiccupped.
Leia looked away, and that Force spot drew in like a black hole. “Darth Vader did many terrible things,” Jaina’s mother said after a long moment. “But he was not alone in such acts, which is the galaxy we live in. Anakin Skywalker was a good man once, and I have no doubt that you will keep every promise such a man made.”
Jaina knows that Leia would never have saved Anakin Skywalker, and she doesn’t understand her mother’s reaction, not after Uncle Luke did save his father-not yet, anyway. Not for another decade.
*
Traest is as reckless as Jaina is, wild like Jaina isn’t allowed to be, completely free. He isn’t her best friend, maybe, like Jacen is, or even one of her closest friends, but they spend hours together in the grey undercity, discovering its secrets and its lost.
He never manages to successfully pick her pockets; Jaina is mostly just amused by his attempts. She teaches him a trick she saw her father use, and she and Traest run away laughing from oblivious tourists, gang members, even a few cops. Jaina has heard enough from her parents about corruption in the lower levels that she never thinks twice of it. Besides, they sneer at Traest, and they coo at Jaina if they figure out who she is; they deserve whatever they get, Jaina thinks when she’s ten.
One time, when Jaina is eleven, she falls into a refuse heap while they are running from a less-oblivious gangster who has a blaster. She hardly has time to wrinkle her nose-if adventure has a downside, it’s the smell-when she has to burrow in deep and hold still as blaster fire tries to find her.
She spends twenty minutes in the garbage-half with blaster fire just missing her, half spent counting silently until it is safe, just like she was taught as a five-year-old when one of Leia’s proposed bills was not very popular. Twenty minutes of longing fiercely for her own lightsaber to fight back properly, and for the day when she will be a Jedi Knight who can arrest anyone like the shooter, be the hero, save the galaxy, and never be afraid and helpless and have to just stay still because that’s the only way to be safe. She will be, someday-no, someday soon, she decides; she will learn to fight, and she won’t ever hide, and she’ll make sure no one else has to, either.
When she pulls herself out (after two Force checks, of course; she’s reckless, not stupid), Traest is nowhere to be seen, and her throat clenches. He was ahead of her, and she assumed that if she couldn’t see him then the gangster couldn’t either. She breathes, and checks with the Force, but then she hears him laughing.
“That was so close, can you believe it?” Traest crows, then laughs again when he sees her. “Kriff, did you swim in that? Your parents are going to kill you.”
She makes a face at the oily green goop in her hair, and shoves it out of her eyes. She feels a ripple of anger that he left her alone, that he doesn’t even seem concerned by what happened. “Are you okay?”
He rolls his eyes. “The guy’s chasing another kid who looks like me; he’s long gone. You can get out of that junk pile now. Unless you’re that hooked on the undercity.”
Jaina frowns and wonders about the new target. Another kid, who might not know to count to a thousand and keep still.
Traest only waves a hand and tells her that the guy “had it coming,” and how he can’t wait to see Leia’s reaction when Jaina goes home covered in garbage; it’s an idea that makes Jaina try to grimace and laugh at the same time, but more about Threepio’s reaction than Leia’s (who knows about garbage chutes after all, if she will even get home any time soon after Jaina does).
So Traest is reckless, wild, and free, but he isn’t her best friend, and Jaina only rolls her eyes when Leia looks doubtfully at Traest’s sticky fingers and wonders if Jaina thinks her “adventures” are really wise. Jaina isn’t looking for wisdom, after all.
*
Running with Traest reminds Jaina of flying, but with dark grey and green skies instead of troubleless blue skies and endless stars. Jaina, who loves flying like it’s a person, clips her multi-tool and a pinched army knife to her belt, and keeps up with her street guide, no matter how many times he gives her a look that says slumming, or challengers her princess. She dodges gangs and thieves, explores places no one is supposed to be, keeps all her credits tucked close, learns the undercity hierarchy and how to pick all the locks Han said she has no reason to get past.
When Jaina is thirteen, Leia teaches her how to shoot a small blaster and where she can hide it in her undercity uniform of shorts and tank top. Jaina and Leia spend the senator’s rare day off on target practice, and Jaina feels closer to her mother than she ever thought she could.
At the end of the day, Leia still looks like a lady (but one who can hit a moving target’s heart, which makes Jaina think being a lady might not be completely awful all the time) and she drapes an arm around Jaina’s shoulders. “I’m trusting you with this,” she tells Jaina. They are almost the same height, but Jaina hasn’t grown at all in a year; she might always be looking up at her mother. “Only use it as a last resort.”
Jaina, despite Leia’s concerns, knows what a last-resort situation looks like; her hand shies from the blaster every time she thinks through how she will draw it and take aim. It’s long been habit for her to see exits, shelters, and prime vantage points.
“But, Jaina,” Leia says as they get into the back of the hovercar, “is it really what you want?”
Jaina leaves for the Jedi Academy a few months later. They have ships and skies there, too, where she’ll fly and learn how to fight.
*
Jaina has been back to Coruscant since going to the Academy, but it’s different one time, when she’s fourteen. The undercity is different, or maybe Jaina is, just a year after she chose something else. The world has turned from green to soot grey; she can sense things that she didn’t before. She walks light on her feet, branches her senses, and watches the corners.
She and Traest never really planned their escapades. They ran into each other, or they didn’t. Jaina has run through the undercity alone, or with Jacen instead of Traest, more times than she has with Traest. He hardly ever stays in one spot, has never shown her any kind of permanence in his own life so that she can find or contact him. He doesn’t know when she’s back on Coruscant. But usually, when she tries, eventually she finds him.
This time, she searches for two weeks, increasingly concerned, and she does not find him. Other street kids are missing too-the Lost Ones are completely gone, not that she would have gotten any answers from them.
The police don’t know where he is (they say); the homeless reach at her pockets for “information”; the other kids either shrug or make up stories according to the day-he’s in jail, he’s off-planet, he’s on a long-term theft in another part of the city. No one talks about a gang war or mass arrests, any reason for Traest to disappear into more trouble than he can handle.
Eventually, she goes back to the Academy. She pokes around the undercity a few more times after that, but she doesn’t find him. Street kids disappear by the dozens; she tells herself that Traest has always been good at taking care of himself.
She’s never certain, but without any clues, what else can she do? Traest always said he would leave one day.
*
To be specific, Traest told her-almost as a ritual goodbye-that some day, maybe the very next day, he would be gone, he’d leave to make more money than she had ever seen, and she would look but never find him. He’d disappear, just like that, and she’d never see him on Coruscant again.
Jaina explains it to Jacen, when she is worrying, and he says, “Well, that’s exactly what he did, isn’t it?” because Jacen always knows how to make her feel better. “But I think you will find him someday. We’ll be Jedi, after all.”
Most of all, though Jaina will never admit it to anyone but Jacen when he’s being particularly stupid and needs to hear it, Jacen is almost always right. And one day Jaina will see Traest again, though it will be more because he found her than the other way around. (Jacen isn’t perfect, after all; he’s still her little brother.)
*
Jaina fights Nightsisters, the Diversity Alliance, Black Sun, bounty hunters, and Imperials thugs before she goes on her first real, mostly-solo mission. She thinks that experience (more than most Jedi Masters have) will mean something until it all goes very, very wrong, and her backup ends up in the med ward, and Uncle Luke is telling her that sometimes you do everything right and you still lose.
Leia wants to talk (some time between her already overlapping meetings and hearings, not to mention the sleep that the Chief of State hardly ever gets). Jacen, who hasn’t had a bad mission yet, talks about meditation and speaking with someone; he sticks close, shadowing her like they haven’t done in years. Han takes her to target practice before he has to fly off for trouble on Corellia. Anakin is at the Academy, and Aunt Mara is also off-planet; Jaina can hardly look at Uncle Luke without flushing with shame. Kyp isn’t sure if he’s allowed to be her friend and help her find alcohol, or if he’s still sworn on pain of death to act like a (responsible) role model. Anyway, they aren’t close on their own yet, not like they will be one day, and Kyp Durron has a realm of demons to deal with before he works on anyone else’s.
The thing about being a Skywalker-Solo, for Jaina, has always been that you’re never alone. At seventeen, Jaina is not alone, but it is different now-the before and after, another chapter and fence-and it feels like being lonely.
Lonely, that is, until an (un)familiar arm wraps around her shoulders; she looks up, startled, her elbow lifting; and the worlds narrow down to this moment, not quite flying, where Traest is grinning down at her. “Miss me, Princess?”
She lowers her elbow; a second later, she grins.
*
It will all happen very quickly, but the start isn’t as quick as the parts after it.
*
She’s reviewing the reports in the Solo family apartment when there’s a knock at the door. She looks up and chews on the end of her stylus; everyone important has the access codes, and she doesn’t really want a distraction now. She must have missed something during the mission, and she only just started today’s review. She looks back at the reports.
Kaer GUTHER provided information implying that shipment would arrive at Siersa’s NORTH PIER, 2300 hours the following day. Unbeknownst to our team and informant, Kaer GUTHER had been compromised and the information…
The knocking becomes pounding and shows no sign of stopping. It has even picked up a rhythm: ba-BAM-dada-ba-BAM. Jaina rubs her eyes, then drops the stylus. She leaves the reports, hidden under less important datasheets, on the kitchen table. “What is it?” she asks when her hand is on the door control panel. “If it’s another bureaucratic apocalypse- Oh, hi.”
Traest smirks at her and pushes his way into the apartment. “I knew you’d be in here. Your hostessing sucks, by the way; that droid of yours gone?”
“He’s with my mom,” Jaina says as they wander into the kitchen. Traest doesn’t look twice at the mess of datasheets. “What’s up?” She looks, as she has every time she sees him now, for a physical hint of what he’s gone through in the past three years. She finds only the same grin, and feels it pull at her.
“Haven’t seen you in years, have I? And now you always say you’re working. I swear, Princess, if you’ve turned into some kind of nine-to-seventeen drone…”
Actually, she’s on a kind of recovery leave; standard operating procedure when a team member ends up in that much bacta. “I’m going over some reports,” she says, and sees him glance at them with distaste. “If you want to grab lunch, though-”
Traest insists he has a better idea, which involves an undercity bar and some nasty characters who wear dishcloths on their heads. Jaina, who’s tasted only sawdust in the past few days, agrees after just half an hour of harassment. Three punches and two drinks later, she’s certainly not thinking about compromised informants and traps anymore.
*
From the night that Traest came back, Jaina knows he’s different now. Traest was always reckless; now, he’s far more wild, as much as Jaina has slowed herself to think things through and save people when her instincts aren’t enough (not that she wants to think about that, if she can help it, that’s what a report is for). She’s older, too, so she can take note of Traest’s new way of movement (a fighter, not just a survivor, definitely not strength from a gym), and the haste to excitement of any kind.
Jaina’s seventeen, a Jedi mostly out of training. She isn’t a fool. She just-it’s just nice. Being around an old friend, running with someone who doesn’t worry (or even know to worry) about everything gone wrong.
*
A week after he returns, she becomes impatient. “Where were you?” she asks. She wants to ask what happened to him, but she remembers enough of a post-trauma approach seminar to be passive, to give him room unless he’s not healing at all. And, she reminds herself, she can’t push. Not right away, anyway.
Traest’s gaze cuts, reflexively, to his drink. She can’t feel anything from him in the Force. He looks back at her when he realizes what he’s done, and he scratches at his jaw. He looks uncomfortable, just a bit, and something else that she can’t read. “I always told you I’d leave,” he says only seconds after she asked.
Jaina grew up surrounded by Jedi and people used to Jedi; without thinking, she reaches just a little, as if spreading fingers over his bare skin, just to feel: is he hurt, is he ashamed, can she help him? She isn’t prying, no, it’s just a Jedi’s way of paying attention-what is he saying that she can’t hear?
Except Traest moves, starts to launch himself out of his chair, then stops and squeezes her wrist tight in his fingers. “Don’t,” he snarls, looking mean-a reflex, she thinks, like a wounded animal. No need for simile, Jacen would probably tell her, when humans and animals are not so different. “Don’t you ever do that again, godsdamnit, you’ve no right.”
It’s so unexpected that she has to fight the urge to shrink back and away. She doesn’t, even surprise can’t undo how much mean Jaina has faced down with a grin, but she files it away. She nods; his grip relaxes; her wrist bones slide back to normal. Now, she doesn’t need the Force to read his discomfort. Reflex, she decides. There’s a wound, something, and a warning bruise that’s sensitive to Force use.
Jaina drinks her caf, and Traest finishes his so that he can order another (spiked) cup.
“I got work,” he tells her before they part for the day. “Took the job. That’s all. Nothing worth talking about.”
Maybe, she thinks; he could have only picked up some ability to feel a Force brush against his mind, and doesn’t like the sensation, even thinks it’s an invasion (though it wasn’t, she’d done nothing close to such a breach). But maybe not.
She doesn’t ask him again.
*
And then it starts to go very, very quickly.
*
Jaina hasn’t lived on Coruscant for more than a few weeks at a time in years. She became a teenager on a jungle planet; Traest informs her that she’ll just have to take the crash course.
She’s never really been one for clubs-hard to be, when your mother is Chief of State, the paparazzi follow you if you eat breakfast on the go, and your closest friends are Jedi or at the very least family friends with your parents on speed dial. She hardly even gets the point of clubs. Her experiences of dancing, even if she knows it isn’t the same, have been enough to make her shoulders tighten as soon as she knows what’s coming.
Traest laughs at her and pushes her into the throng while she’s still thinking that she has two hours before she should go home and work on reports before getting some sleep and-
As it turns out, Jaina and Traest don’t leave for hours, and the reports are forgotten-not that Jaina cares, as hungover as she is at the next morning’s briefing.
Clubbing, she decides, with the alcohol, a friend at her back, and the overriding beat so she can’t hear her thoughts…clubbing has its upsides.
*
Jaina can’t see the night sky in the undercity. She doesn’t always think of it, though she feels sometimes as if the stars are tugging her upwards. Barely a month after Traest comes back, while she’s lightly buzzed instead of drunk, she murmurs something of this to him and he laughs at her. “You’re so melodramatic when you’re drunk,” he says, then pushes her against the back entrance of a club and kisses her hard. It’s strange at first, while she’s trying to figure out where to put her hands and if she wants to put them somewhere on a friend, if this is something she wants with Traest. And then it’s anything but weird.
She doesn’t think about the night sky too much after that, just tongue and fingers and the hum of alcohol to smother anything else.
*
Jaina has gotten used to the paparazzi on Coruscant. They watch her family’s windows, follow her, interrogate her friends, and pick the worst pictures they can as proof that she is dying, pregnant, starving, binge eating, and/or doing drugs. Alcohol is a given in the articles, but she’s started keeping a flask on her while off-duty, so she figures that’s fair enough. She used to either ignore the cameras or play along until she could give them the slip (they are trailing a Jedi), but it’s less ridiculous when she notices how Traest acts around them. He turns cold, distant but goading, wondering what her mother would think, who do these people even think they are, don’t they have lives, and even if you gave them something, no one would believe it.
(As it happens, people do start to believe that Jaina Solo got kicked out of a club for drunkenly starting a fight, but there’s always another, cooler club, and that kriffer had it coming.)
Traest is always there, a whisper in her ear as he trades her empty glass for a full one, or a yell across the room, but he’s never there, he hardly ever touches her when the paparazzi are nearby, and he stays away so that no one has her back. “What, you need me to fight your battles for you?” he sneers, once, when she complains as she starts a new drink.
“They don’t matter,” she tells him, “and I haven’t even seen one in here yet.”
“People talk,” he says, dark and clipped. He trades her half-full glass for a new one. “Here, this one’ll be better.”
She eyes it, then him, three (and a half) glasses in but still not convinced by liquid so nefariously pink.
He ducks in quick, kisses her jaw; she can feel his breath on her neck, and thinks that love is very sticky. “Trust me.”
The drink is sour with a sweet aftertaste, but the night gets very cloudy after that.
She wakes up the next morning on Traest’s couch and doesn’t remember much of her night at all. No matter, she thinks; it’s just one night.
She thinks that a lot over the next few months.
*
Jacen doesn’t have much to say about it. Jaina doesn’t think he likes Traest much, but her twin did walk in on a few heated moments, and he hardly ever drinks. Jacen spends a lot of time with Tenel Ka when the princess has any half-free moment; he isn’t always around.
(“Besides,” Traest remarks one day. “He hasn’t had one of those bad missions yet, has he? He’ll be different once someone gets killed.”
Jaina flinches inside, then glares at him, wondering why she likes his kisses. “No one died.”
“No.” He musses her hair. Then, quieter, says, “Not yet.”)
Anakin says, “I don’t like him.” Blunt, firm, right after he’s (re-)met Traest.
(Traest only laughs as his fingers trace her spine. “He’s, what, thirteen?”)
Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara treat her like she’s still nine: they talk about the “path she’s going down,” and the effect of “her company” on her behaviour.
(Traest swings an arm around her shoulders when they’ve lost the paparazzi for five minutes. They’ve only just stopped running and he chuffs against her hair. She grins up at him and sees herself in his eyes. His face stills, and he swallows, but then he whoops, pulls at her hand, and they’re running again through the streets. She thinks: This is where I want to be, just like this.)
Han tells her that no one is good enough for his girl. But, he adds while dodging Leia’s look, he knows a thing or two about taking a risk.
(“Do you ever wonder….” Traest says.
She rolls onto her side, snuggles into his body. On the dresser, the incense sticks are almost burned all the way down. “Hm, what?”
He won’t meet her eyes. “If your father hadn’t married your mother, or if they lived here, the way your dad grew up.”
She feels his heartbeat under her chest, and it’s not just the incense and the contents of the pipe they shared that make her say, “I would have loved you anyway,” but then she freezes because they don’t talk about that whilst sober.
Traest only sighs, though, and runs his fingers through her hair. “Maybe.” His fingers move to the side of her face, along dips and secrets that even she doesn’t know. He won’t say it, but she doesn’t feel so alone.)
Two months after Traest returned, Leia finally sits Jaina down in the living room of the family apartment. Jaina’s mother is dressed for a meeting with New Republic Families, helping salvage families while Jaina moves more of her things (a workout tunic and mat, this time) into Traest’s flat. “Sweetheart,” says the Chief of State. She looks as if she’s losing something unexpectedly. “This isn’t like you,” she continues, when really it’s just not like Leia, which Jaina thinks is the real problem. “The news stories, the clubs, the alcohol on your breath. It’s irresponsible and unbecoming of a young woman. Your father and I raised you to know better than this. I just-” It continues, but Jaina doesn’t say a word because at this point, why bother? Leia, who was late for two meetings the second she sat Jaina down, has to leave five minutes into their “talk.” Leia looks frustrated and a little old as she says, “We’ll talk more later, Jaina. Don’t think for a second we’re finished here,” and then hurries out.
(Traest raises a sleepy eyebrow, watching as Jaina pushes her mat and exercise pulleys against a wall. “She was actually home? Did she need a holo to recognize you?”
Jaina wonders if she should just move in and be done with it.)
*
Jaina’s mission, the first after the one that went wrong, comes on the tail of nearly three months’ leave. She, Jacen and Raynar are assigned to track an organized crime syndicate on the other side of Coruscant. Jacen comes to Traest’s apartment to tell her about it. Jaina’s only a little hungover, but her twin looks at her like he doesn’t get her. He mostly ignores Traest, who is also sitting at the kitchen table. “We leave tomorrow,” Jacen says while Jaina is swallowing a pain reliever. “Deep cover, at least a couple weeks before we get rotated out.” He flicks his eyes between Jaina and Traest, looking more sympathetic. “Hardly any outside contact, so you’ll want to…”
Tie her boyfriend’s wrists to the bedposts? Jaina thinks with a fond smirk. “Departure time?” she asks instead.
Traest only flips open his comm and starts fiddling with it, probably playing a game on the console. Jaina has half a day to give him something to remember, so she soon sends her brother on his way.
*
Jaina and her team leave early the next morning. She’s sober, though not entirely awake, her recent lie-ins overriding her Jedi training’s early mornings). The only sign of anything being different from the last mission is a hungry red mark on her neck (and others, smaller, where no one can see, but which Jaina feels like a brand) and the instinctive double-check of her hidden lightsaber.
She eyes the sky a last time, then grabs one of the team’s speedbikes to go down the rabbit hole.
*
Jaina isn’t drunk when she holds their dying informant (Charco, a street kid, fourteen-going-on-thirty, pickpocket and ex-gang member), because she would never be that stupid, even if she did feel shaky once or twice at the start of the mission. She’s stone sober, but-covered in blood and watching Jacen’s face-she wants a stiff drink (or four) and Traest more than she’s ever wanted anything.
It’s only after three days-five gunfights, countless hours of being pursued through unfamiliar undercity, and oozing grief from her twin as he understands (like she did, the last mission) that Solo luck just isn’t going to cut it anymore-that Jaina will get either of what she wants.
*
They return to the Jedi headquarters two weeks after they left. Jaina only realizes that she’s shaking when she sits down and her chair rattles against the wall.
Raynar is the first to go in. Jacen breathes next to her as they wait for their own briefings; he won’t look at her, but she knows his eyes are red. “How did they find out?” he says, startling her. “We were so careful, I didn’t pick up on anything-I don’t think we missed anything, did we, Jaya? It was just like-”
Jaina grabs his hand and just feels tired. “Uncle Luke will tell you it’s not our fault,” she tells her twin. “That…things went wrong.” Force, she wants a drink. She wants to stop thinking, to wash the kid’s blood out from under her nails or even just out off her knuckles and from her hair, to sleep a week with Traest close under a mountain of blankets. “We can look at the reports later, figure out what went wrong.”
Jacen’s so quiet, she turns to see if he’s fallen asleep after seventy-two hours of being hunted. He’s staring back at her, frowning. “That’s what you did last time,” he says, because Jacen always figures her out whether she wants him to or not. “Did you find anything?”
A vacuum, she thought. Nothing was wrong, and then a cover was blown with no leak, and everything was wrong. “Not yet,” she says. Some day she’ll be able to think about it without wanting to rush headlong into something stupid, and then she’ll be able to deal with the traitor and look her backup, Sariss, in the eye again.
Jacen squeezes her hand, and she leans her head onto his shoulder. Her chest does something she can’t name, so she turns her nose into his shoulder and feels as much of home as she can take.
She wakes, hours later, on a couch in Uncle Luke’s office. She is warm but still exhausted, bleary-eyed with the wire of adrenaline that stays too long after an extended chase. Traest is on the other side of the room, looking at something. Traest, and a drink, and sleep, she thinks, and must make a noise because he turns around very quickly.
He speaks before she can move. “Jacen called me, said things went…” He must see her expression flicker. “Said to come pick you up.”
She rubs her face and stands. “It all went to hell, is where it went.”
“What happened?”
She shakes her head, tries to balance the bone weariness with the shots of energy that pick at the inside of her skin. “Don’t want to talk about it. ’Least, not until I can do something about it. Just…take me home.”
“Jaina-” He sounds frustrated, even to Jaina’s exhausted ears.
She slips under his arm, tries not be obvious about how she is swaying. “I just want to sleep, then drink, then sleep some more.”
He takes her back to his (their) place, but she’s asleep long before they get there.
*
Four days later, she moves in properly. Jacen watches her pack, Han grumbles, and Anakin blinks what the kriff happened while I was at school, anyway?
Leia, who is immersed in negotiations with some Outer Rim planets over their education system, doesn’t even find out until she comes home three days later.
*
She tosses in bed, shrugs off sheets which are too much in the undercity. The world is dark around her except for the faint light coming from a far corner (door, her mind nudges). She reaches to the left side of the bed, finds an indent but no warmth. She frowns, only a fourth awake, then curls around his side of the mattress when she hears him speaking. In another room, she thinks as she snuffles into his pillow, maybe the kitchen.
He sounds upset, though, almost angry, so she wriggles to the end of the bed, blearily boosts her hearing with her oh-so-special Jedi training that sometimes seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
“I’ve got it under control,” he is saying. “There’s no reason for you to- What godsdamn use am I if you don’t listen to me? I can only push so far, or- Well, you want to hang yourself, fine, but…”
Stay awake, she orders herself, and think straight, because her thoughts are trying to slip through her grasp like water in the desert. Traest is angry. He is talking to someone.
But then he snaps, “She’s too valuable, you- That was never part of the plan. Hey, we need- Kriff you, I know my priorities, I don’t need you to remind me. I’m just saying, don’t burn your bridge too quick. She’s no threat.” Traest’s voice drops, lulls her from half-sleep and closer to dreams.
Some time later, the bed dips; she shifts into the weight. There is a soft touch to her cheek and then an arm around her waist, a kiss to her forehead. A murmur, “You asleep, babe?” She moves closer, and sleeps.
In the morning, she doesn’t remember anything that seems more than a dream.
*
One day, she will tell herself that she heard the first part and was too naïve to understand it, and that she dreamed the second part.
*
The next several weeks, there are fewer full nights spent in clubs, though the tabloids are still working overtime on so much as a glimpse. Jaina is tired of the way Traest keeps distant when others are around. Greedy for heady touches, laughter and running through dark streets, Jaina leaves their apartment to see her family, to keep running into the wall that is her and Jacen’s undercity mission, and to see the few friends who are both insistent and on-planet long enough to meet. Otherwise, she fills her world with her lover, his grin, and the tug on her hand as they race into the next adventure.
“Kriff, I missed this place,” he says when they duck around a corner to avoid a security patrol.
“You got slow while you were gone,” she tells him, her breathing the same as always compared to his quick pants. “Or I just got a lot better.”
“I’ll take brains over brawn any day,” he teases her, then jumps out of their hiding place too early.
A guard pulls his blaster practically in Traest’s face, and Jaina laughs as she kicks the weapon loose and the guard to the ground. “Some brains. Did you even look first?”
He grabs her hand and they run. “Why bother, when I have you?”
*
“You can’t tell anyone,” Jacen says. “Not even Traest.”
Jaina’s mouth tightens. She’s eighteen. “I thought you liked him.”
“Not even Traest,” Jacen repeats, implacable. His expression is stern, darker than she’s ever seen it, though there have been hints since Charco’s death. “We have a leak.”
Jaina sits down quickly at Jacen’s kitchen table meant for one Jedi and a mess of reports. She reaches out in the Force, feels around to reassure herself that they are alone.
“I checked, too,” Jacen says, though his voice is lower. “I didn’t find any bugs.” His apartment is a different kind of mess than comes from moving in with plants, not to mention Jacen himself. She tracks his search and stands to take care of the places he missed, like anything mechanical.
They’re silent for thirty minutes, then Jaina says, “Nothing. Unless you got any strange gifts in the past few weeks that we should reconsider.”
Jacen shakes his head: “Dad and Uncle Chewie helped me move. And,” he blushes, “Tenel Ka stopped by once. Or twice.”
Jaina decides to find out if her brother has any embarrassing lovebites that look like royal scandals, but then she refocuses. She’s been playing nicer lately with being a Jedi, but it hasn’t been in her twin brother’s home. “It might not be your flat, or even mine,” she says, her lips a grim line. She’d like a drink, but this is far more important. “It could be an office, or our comms, or-” She flicks her eyes to Jacen’s, and they think it at the same time: Or it could be a spy.
This, Jaina thinks, is why she needs Traest like her mother doesn’t understand. Jaina can trust Traest, and forget the rest of the galaxy for a while with his help.
“We’re going to need help,” Jacen says, pulling out a sheet of flimsi. “Who can we trust, absolutely, who can help us root out a spy?”
*
Jacen and Jaina’s list looks like:
Uncle Luke (too busy)
Dad (off-planet until next month)
Chewie (ditto)
Mom (way too busy
Aunt Mara (except for, when is she even getting back?)
Kyp
Raynar (do you really think he’ll manage to find a spy?)
Tenel Ka (but she’s really busy right now with Gallinore’s gender mess) (right, and how do you know all about that, prince consort?)
Lusa
Anakin (…except for how he’s still training, Jacen)
Jaina does not add Traest’s name because Jacen is right: it’s dangerous, and Traest doesn’t have the training or experience they do. She can keep this to herself (even though the point was always supposed to be no secrets), keep him safe, and tell him when she and Jacen have fixed it.
*
Basically, Jaina and Jacen can rely on Kyp, Anakin (who insists that Tahiri can help; Jaina is beginning to think something very sappy runs in the family), Lusa (who hedges that, perhaps, this would not be Raynar’s strongest point), and the rest of their family as a last resort.
Kyp looks at the two of them more seriously than Jaina is used to-it’s his Jedi Master Face-and tells them that many missions go wrong, so why do they think there’s a leak?
Jaina tore most of her belongings apart looking for bugs, and had Traest looking for the same in his things (he’s very private about his possessions, and Jaina couldn’t be bothered with an argument), though she gave him a non-spy-related reason (something to do with the tabloids, probably). She didn’t find anything. She disassembled all of her family’s comms, and they changed their aliases and mixed up their SOP’s, and then Jacen ducked blaster fire while checking in on a witness no one else knew they were safeguarding. But even more, Jaina can feel it, sense if not see the trap opening wide to swallow them whole.
“There’s something very wrong,” she says finally.
“And I don’t think-” Jacen glances at her; they haven’t said it out loud yet.
“We don’t think it’s just the one investigation, either,” Jaina finishes, because their family never gained anything by underestimating trouble.
Kyp looks at the two of them and then his face turns dark, more like the constant hardest-path-to-redemption and overprotective presence that she grew up with. “Then we’d better get to work.”
*
Her mind is still on work when she gets home that night, which is a first in four months. Traest picks up on it immediately, though she does a kriff job of hiding it with her moody silence.
Finally, he says, “Bad day to be part of a family with saviour complexes?”
She stabs at her take-out food. “I can’t talk about work.”
He blinks at her, rocks back in his chair; in the five months that he’s been back, she’s told him everything, even the ugly things she couldn’t voice to her family. He stares at her as if expecting her to change her mind. She remembers the scorch mark on Jacen’s tunic, and remains quiet.
“I’ll get something stiffer to drink, then,” he says, standing.
“If you’d like, but I can’t.” She scowls at her glass of blue milk. “Things are-bad at work right now. I have to keep a clear head.”
He sits back down and doesn’t say anything more for the rest of the evening.
*
There are a hundred people involved in just the Coruscant mission, Jaina is sure; not even main-liners, but pages, informants, people who could overhear, administrative staff with access, cleaning staff who go anywhere, even droids who could have been reprogrammed. A hundred-more-beings they have to review and discuss, whose records they have to scan and test. Catching spies is extremely tedious, and the lack of visible progress (ten background checks down, an untold many to go, and then people they trust) makes Jaina feel trapped and claustrophobic.
“Why don’t you tell me,” Traest cajoles a week after Kyp joins the investigation. “I can help you sort through it.”
“We’re sorting,” she tries not to snap. Her eyes flick to their well-stocked liquor cabinet, then she sets determinedly to making a mug of hot chocolate.
“Then it’ll help you feel better at least.” He stops her from burning the milk (he knows the warning signs and always stops her; she wonders if she’ll ever have to remember on her own), then takes over the shouldn’t-be-this-complicated process. “Hopeless,” he tsks. “You can trust me,” he says. It’s obviously about her work, though she’s promised him it isn’t at all about trust; but there’s something in the way he says it that makes her look up sharply. He’s still, won’t quite meet her eyes before he meets them for too long, in a way that she always connects to him thinking about the missing years (but he wasn’t missing; he left). They’ve only once spoken about the years he was gone, though she’s been tallying every hint and bruise. “You can trust me.”
He suddenly diverts the conversation. “You’d think a Jedi could handle making her favourite hot chocolate mix,” he says, a touch too loud.
She stops his hands. It’s gone on too long, she thinks, if he can’t completely trust someone who loves him enough to feel it yank her organs inside out and put them in the wrong order. “Whatever happened, those three years, you can tell me. No matter how bad it was, or…” She thinks about survivor’s guilt, and some of the choices she and her family have had to make over the years. “Or even if you did something that you regret, that maybe you don’t think you can tell me about. You can trust me, we can fix it.”
“No, I can’t, and we won’t,” he snaps, wounded again though she can’t see the open sore.
“I love you,” she tells him, seals it with a kiss to his chin. He’s stiff, but relaxes a little when she holds him close. “I promise, whatever it is, we can get through it.”
It’s a long moment, and then he hugs her back, runs a hand up and down her back. “You silly girl,” he says, voice rough. “You’d lose out on regular hot chocolate without me around, anyway.”
“And I wouldn’t leave you alone,” she tells his neck.
His embrace tightens. “Silly, silly girl.” He murmurs something into her hair-three syllables, one of them love. “Going to save me, are you?”
“Family tradition,” she agrees, when her mouth has loosened enough from its grin.
*
One of her mother’s bills, just introduced after dozens of drafts to crack down on organized crime in the NR’s fringe planets, is torn down and undermined in two minutes of discussion. At least four senators who have always opposed each other are in unnatural agreement, even insistence. It isn’t the first or last bill to fail so resoundingly, but even Jaina notices the blank disbelief that still lurks in Leia’s eyes for days afterward.
Three days after the fiasco, Leia’s hovercar’s brakes are tampered with. She is in a head-on collision and is-needless to say-very late for a forum on the Jedi’s role in the New Republic.
Talk is spreading, from whispers to tabloids to respected news commentators, about the Jedi and sometimes even about the Solos and Skywalkers “in a democracy.”
Jaina is having a woefully small glass of brandy-hardly even enough to relax her stomach-and sprawled on their couch. It has been a long day, with hardly any visible progress on the spy, and a Jedi meeting about not giving the public anything to run with-which only made her think about her liquor cabinet and how a Solo is shacked up with a blue-haired ex-street kid, so kriff them, anyway.
She must have said some of the last part out loud, because Traest looks amused. “People getting on your nerves?”
“It’s just the whole-” She waves her hand and swallows more of her brandy. “This is kind of sweet, did you mix it with something?”
“A little fruit juice,” he admits. “So it’s less potent.”
“Mm, I never got adding things to brandy,” she says, peering down at her glass.
“‘It’s just the whole,’ what?” he persists.
She shrugs and drinks the rest. A light, drifty feeling is spreading through her; she’s hardly been drinking at all lately, and apparently she’s turned into a lightweight in the meantime. It’s disgraceful, though a little sleepy.
“Jaina?”
“The whole Solo thing,” she says. “Like, being followed around by the losers who don’t have their own lives, so they have to snap my holo and make it sound like I’m the first person ever to get drunk. But of course, I’m a Solo; I can be perfect and be hiding something, or I can have a drink and be the Devil.”
“Did someone say something?”
“Work. Told us all to be good little children and role models or some kriff. Like I never got enough of that from my mom.”
“What, she has time to lecture you?”
She groans and walks unsteadily to him. “Don’t wanna talk about Leia,” she says. “Room’s spinning. Did you…” She blinks, feeling very sleepy. “Was there something in the brandy?”
He kisses her temple. “You’ve been so tense lately. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
She talks about everything but the investigation (mostly), and Traest was right, it does help to tell him. He stays the whole time, keeps still for once, and they get through it, being a Solo and a Jedi, and all those missions gone wrong. Not much else is clear for that night: just the warmth of his gaze, some kind of silver screen (later, she’ll realize it was a holo-cam), and the vague guilt that she still didn’t tell him about the traitor.
*
“You don’t want to go to a club, or go out at all for that matter, or drink, or anything except work these days,” Traest vents, mostly out of the blue a week after he talked her into that glass of brandy.
“It’s important,” she says, staring down at her datapad without seeing a word. She’s been staring for hours, was even before Traest got home; it’s all beginning to smear into blabber. “What are you- Traest, give that back.”
He raises an eyebrow at her tone, but holds the datapad high over his head. “You’re going to listen to me first.”
She stands, raises one of her own eyebrows. “Sorry I’m busy, but this is important. You can entertain yourself for a while, can’t you?”
“I can- Kriff you, Princess. What am I, a kid? You hardly tell me anything any more, we never talk about anything that you think is so kriffing important.”
She puts her hands on her hips and feels a grudging sympathy for her mother even with their current tenuous-at-best relationship. “I can’t tell people everything about my work, even if they live with me. Even you. Most things, fine, but some parts are dangerous. The fewer people who know, the better.”
His expression becomes cold, something rare from her lover. “So you don’t trust me.”
“That isn’t true. It’s just-”
“It is, though. We live together, sleep in the same bed, but you don’t trust me, and you’ve been getting sick of me.”
She stares at him, bewildered by this outburst; haven’t they been happy? “Traest,” she says, her voice shaking a little, “that isn’t at all true. I’m trying to protect you, that’s all-Jacen and my mom have been shot at three times between the two of them, because of something we’re investigating. It has nothing to do with not trusting you. I love you.”
Traest snorts, looking mean. “Of all the people you could have turned into, I never thought it’d be your mother.”
Thirty minutes later, he storms out of the apartment and leaves her to stare after him; the datapad connects with the wall behind her.
*
Traest stays gone for the rest of the evening, throughout the night, and still isn’t back when Jaina leaves for work the next morning. She is almost in a hovercar accident and can’t blame a double agent for it (though the hangover probably doesn’t help).
*
When she sits down at the table, Jacen takes one look and then drags her out of the café. Little brothers, especially if he’s your twin, are usually right in the brattiest way possible; they don’t even make it to Jacen’s hovercar before her loose hair sticks to tear tracks.
Jacen listens for the two seconds that she lets him, and then he only has no-nonsense to react to; Jaina wants this investigation over al-kriffing-ready.
*
Leia, of all people, calls and leaves a message of comfort. Jaina snorts when she recognizes her mother’s Official Conciliatory Tone, and then deletes the message two sentences in. Jacen probably tattled-he’s always been the one closest to their mother-and the Chief of State scripted something while she had a few moments. Leia’s never been one for just sitting still.
Jaina looks around at her (their) apartment, the cramped kitchen/dining room/front room, the his-and-hers mess of two careless people, and she thinks of the plans Leia probably had for her. They must have all started with the right boy, certainly not a street rat. Maybe not even someone who can make her want to throw things and yell, even if his presence can rid her of care about what everyone else will think.
Traest is just hers, not a part of the media circus and expectations and the shame of you’re better than this that has come with every recent failure.
And she does trust him, so it shouldn’t be hard to convince him of that when he comes home. He has to come back (if only for all his things; Jaina checked, he didn’t take anything or sneak back for so much as a set of spare clothes), and she can make him believe her. If he knows even a little, he’ll understand, and then it will be back to normal. He was right, she’s been wrapped up in work again, proving herself, and being downright boring as a result.
Jaina won’t be her mother. She is going to keep the balance, keep it all. She’ll do whatever it takes; she’s Han Solo’s daughter, after all. She can beat the odds.
*
She wakes up when Traest takes the empty bottle out of her hand. She grimaces into their table, sits up slowly, and pushes away some of the hair that came out of her ponytail. The light is on, but dim; she can only just make him out as he puts the bottle with the other empties.
He sits across from her, slouches away with his eyes on her. His clothes are clean, and he looks only mussed, as if he’s taken breaks between the bouts of partying. Still, there’s something turbulent in him, and Jaina’s drunk enough that she reaches out-just a little-and senses conflict she can’t understand. He came back, though; they can still fix this. She reaches out, and he takes her hand half way.
“Started the party without me, did you?” he teases her and she grins back.
*
She turns her comm off for the next three days, not that she’d be able to hear its ring over the clubs’ music, or answer it while she and Traest are reconciling.
It’s easy to say “I love you” as they kiss in alleys, stumble into their apartment, and even in the minutes that she won’t remember. If she ever felt hesitance at the start, as if he was still just a friend, she is more convinced than ever that it was just her mother’s voice stirring up doubts. It is effortless to run with Traest and ignore everything else, to just want and take until the mess is something to revel in.
This is worth Jacen’s disappointed tone when, hungover, she finally returns his comms and hmms as he talks about the investigations. Her brothers are so painfully good all the time, and Jaina’s just sick enough of it and them to blow off a lunch meeting and let some calls go to voice mail. They don’t understand yet; she doesn’t care if it takes them even more time. She has everything she wants.
Part 2
By moonlightrick
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns all established characters, star systems, concepts; I own Traest, and an ever-aging laptop. I’m not making any money off of this. Cut!lyrics one are from Hero by Chad Kroeger and Wicked Man’s Rest by Passenger. The last lyrics are from The Reason Why by Rachael Yamagata.
Timeframe: Deals with YJK AU, though the actual story goes over 9 years. If it’s easier: Jaina, ages 9-18 in an AU.
Characters: Jaina Solo, Traest (OC), Leia Organa Solo, Anakin Solo, Jacen Solo, Kyp Durron; guest starring (blink and you'll miss him) Zekk
Genre: drama, general
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 16,585
Summary: Once upon a time, a Jedi princess befriended a street rat and saved him from the Darkness. This is not that story.
Author’s Notes: This is the prequel to my fics Fast As I Can and If You Call, but you don’t need to have read those to understand this one. Basically, the AU is that Jaina meets a street boy named Traest instead of Zekk, and things change from there.
Also: Lookit what I finished!
For Lillian.
*
Jaina is Han’s daughter in a thousand and one ways. There are stars in her blood, pulling her to the skies, and brandy in her eyes, drawing her to the hot and dark, the bite and play; the adrenaline curls slick through her gut and whispers freedom and adventure; she never goes anywhere without her multi-tool because her fingers itch and need something to hang onto; and she can hide neither the grease stains on her hands nor the heart just under her sleeve. Jaina is her daddy’s girl, and she has never not known that.
Sometimes, though, she is Leia’s daughter, too.
*
Jaina is, in this moment: alone, in a junkshop, in Coruscant’s undercity, not supposed to be in the undercity, and very pleased with the combination of the above. Even Jacen doesn’t know exactly where she is, because he’s exploring at the zoo, also without a chaperone or permission. Nine years old, Jaina would much rather barter with the one-eyed humanoid who runs her most recently found junkshop than coo at holographic animals.
She’s at the back of the store, just out of the owner’s sight so that she can take apart an ancient hyperdrive. A piece falls and rolls to the wall, prompting Jaina to curse a few times and follow it before the owner can notice anything’s amiss. She crouches down on the metal grating and finds the writing before her wayward screw: The old pirate will cheat you blind.
It is etched into the durasteel wall; Jaina grins and peeks back at the desk, where the eye-patched owner is yelling into a comm. His arm muscles are thin, and he walks soft and lazy; not a real space pirate, she thinks, but the kind from old tales, old enough to be fat and retired.
She tests the etchings with her finger, then digs in her bag. She finds a thick black marker and flips the top. Retired pirates work in junkshops because they’re lazy sell-outs, she writes. Their only joy in life is to cheat people. Who are you?
Coruscant’s best scavenger, ink writing tells her a week later. Are you the one trying to fix the hyperdrive? I brought it in-it’s junk.
She smirks, and writes, I’m a much better mechanic than you are.
When she’s leaving the junk shop later that day, a street boy her age tries to pick her pockets (just like her mother said undercity people would). Han Solo’s daughter snatches her wallet right back by hand, and she and he share a grin.
Jaina knows a kindred spirit when she meets one. She forgets about the writing in favour of her new friend and doesn’t think about that junk shop for well over a month. Years later, she will see the owner again and think pirate with a pension and laugh without remembering why.
*
Leia talked about Jaina’s grandfather exactly once that Jaina can remember as a nine year old. Some of the other boys-not friends, or even “family friends,” who would have known better-said things to Anakin about his name. He was only five. Jaina and Jacen pushed the bullies, one of them even up into the air, and then they brought their little brother back home.
Leia was home for once; Han, who had been the one to tell Jaina and Jacen that Anakin was named after Leia’s “bio” father, was not there to run interference. When they got home, Jaina and Jacen started telling their mother everything the boys said and did, and Leia’s mouth got tight, and that place in the Force that was Leia Solo turned very bright and furious.
“Anakin,” she said to Jaina’s little brother, who was curled up in their mother’s lap and sniffling, “you were named after Anakin Skywalker, who was a great Jedi before he Turned, and who did the right thing for love when anyone else would have been lost.”
“They said-he was-a monster,” Anakin hiccupped.
Leia looked away, and that Force spot drew in like a black hole. “Darth Vader did many terrible things,” Jaina’s mother said after a long moment. “But he was not alone in such acts, which is the galaxy we live in. Anakin Skywalker was a good man once, and I have no doubt that you will keep every promise such a man made.”
Jaina knows that Leia would never have saved Anakin Skywalker, and she doesn’t understand her mother’s reaction, not after Uncle Luke did save his father-not yet, anyway. Not for another decade.
*
Traest is as reckless as Jaina is, wild like Jaina isn’t allowed to be, completely free. He isn’t her best friend, maybe, like Jacen is, or even one of her closest friends, but they spend hours together in the grey undercity, discovering its secrets and its lost.
He never manages to successfully pick her pockets; Jaina is mostly just amused by his attempts. She teaches him a trick she saw her father use, and she and Traest run away laughing from oblivious tourists, gang members, even a few cops. Jaina has heard enough from her parents about corruption in the lower levels that she never thinks twice of it. Besides, they sneer at Traest, and they coo at Jaina if they figure out who she is; they deserve whatever they get, Jaina thinks when she’s ten.
One time, when Jaina is eleven, she falls into a refuse heap while they are running from a less-oblivious gangster who has a blaster. She hardly has time to wrinkle her nose-if adventure has a downside, it’s the smell-when she has to burrow in deep and hold still as blaster fire tries to find her.
She spends twenty minutes in the garbage-half with blaster fire just missing her, half spent counting silently until it is safe, just like she was taught as a five-year-old when one of Leia’s proposed bills was not very popular. Twenty minutes of longing fiercely for her own lightsaber to fight back properly, and for the day when she will be a Jedi Knight who can arrest anyone like the shooter, be the hero, save the galaxy, and never be afraid and helpless and have to just stay still because that’s the only way to be safe. She will be, someday-no, someday soon, she decides; she will learn to fight, and she won’t ever hide, and she’ll make sure no one else has to, either.
When she pulls herself out (after two Force checks, of course; she’s reckless, not stupid), Traest is nowhere to be seen, and her throat clenches. He was ahead of her, and she assumed that if she couldn’t see him then the gangster couldn’t either. She breathes, and checks with the Force, but then she hears him laughing.
“That was so close, can you believe it?” Traest crows, then laughs again when he sees her. “Kriff, did you swim in that? Your parents are going to kill you.”
She makes a face at the oily green goop in her hair, and shoves it out of her eyes. She feels a ripple of anger that he left her alone, that he doesn’t even seem concerned by what happened. “Are you okay?”
He rolls his eyes. “The guy’s chasing another kid who looks like me; he’s long gone. You can get out of that junk pile now. Unless you’re that hooked on the undercity.”
Jaina frowns and wonders about the new target. Another kid, who might not know to count to a thousand and keep still.
Traest only waves a hand and tells her that the guy “had it coming,” and how he can’t wait to see Leia’s reaction when Jaina goes home covered in garbage; it’s an idea that makes Jaina try to grimace and laugh at the same time, but more about Threepio’s reaction than Leia’s (who knows about garbage chutes after all, if she will even get home any time soon after Jaina does).
So Traest is reckless, wild, and free, but he isn’t her best friend, and Jaina only rolls her eyes when Leia looks doubtfully at Traest’s sticky fingers and wonders if Jaina thinks her “adventures” are really wise. Jaina isn’t looking for wisdom, after all.
*
Running with Traest reminds Jaina of flying, but with dark grey and green skies instead of troubleless blue skies and endless stars. Jaina, who loves flying like it’s a person, clips her multi-tool and a pinched army knife to her belt, and keeps up with her street guide, no matter how many times he gives her a look that says slumming, or challengers her princess. She dodges gangs and thieves, explores places no one is supposed to be, keeps all her credits tucked close, learns the undercity hierarchy and how to pick all the locks Han said she has no reason to get past.
When Jaina is thirteen, Leia teaches her how to shoot a small blaster and where she can hide it in her undercity uniform of shorts and tank top. Jaina and Leia spend the senator’s rare day off on target practice, and Jaina feels closer to her mother than she ever thought she could.
At the end of the day, Leia still looks like a lady (but one who can hit a moving target’s heart, which makes Jaina think being a lady might not be completely awful all the time) and she drapes an arm around Jaina’s shoulders. “I’m trusting you with this,” she tells Jaina. They are almost the same height, but Jaina hasn’t grown at all in a year; she might always be looking up at her mother. “Only use it as a last resort.”
Jaina, despite Leia’s concerns, knows what a last-resort situation looks like; her hand shies from the blaster every time she thinks through how she will draw it and take aim. It’s long been habit for her to see exits, shelters, and prime vantage points.
“But, Jaina,” Leia says as they get into the back of the hovercar, “is it really what you want?”
Jaina leaves for the Jedi Academy a few months later. They have ships and skies there, too, where she’ll fly and learn how to fight.
*
Jaina has been back to Coruscant since going to the Academy, but it’s different one time, when she’s fourteen. The undercity is different, or maybe Jaina is, just a year after she chose something else. The world has turned from green to soot grey; she can sense things that she didn’t before. She walks light on her feet, branches her senses, and watches the corners.
She and Traest never really planned their escapades. They ran into each other, or they didn’t. Jaina has run through the undercity alone, or with Jacen instead of Traest, more times than she has with Traest. He hardly ever stays in one spot, has never shown her any kind of permanence in his own life so that she can find or contact him. He doesn’t know when she’s back on Coruscant. But usually, when she tries, eventually she finds him.
This time, she searches for two weeks, increasingly concerned, and she does not find him. Other street kids are missing too-the Lost Ones are completely gone, not that she would have gotten any answers from them.
The police don’t know where he is (they say); the homeless reach at her pockets for “information”; the other kids either shrug or make up stories according to the day-he’s in jail, he’s off-planet, he’s on a long-term theft in another part of the city. No one talks about a gang war or mass arrests, any reason for Traest to disappear into more trouble than he can handle.
Eventually, she goes back to the Academy. She pokes around the undercity a few more times after that, but she doesn’t find him. Street kids disappear by the dozens; she tells herself that Traest has always been good at taking care of himself.
She’s never certain, but without any clues, what else can she do? Traest always said he would leave one day.
*
To be specific, Traest told her-almost as a ritual goodbye-that some day, maybe the very next day, he would be gone, he’d leave to make more money than she had ever seen, and she would look but never find him. He’d disappear, just like that, and she’d never see him on Coruscant again.
Jaina explains it to Jacen, when she is worrying, and he says, “Well, that’s exactly what he did, isn’t it?” because Jacen always knows how to make her feel better. “But I think you will find him someday. We’ll be Jedi, after all.”
Most of all, though Jaina will never admit it to anyone but Jacen when he’s being particularly stupid and needs to hear it, Jacen is almost always right. And one day Jaina will see Traest again, though it will be more because he found her than the other way around. (Jacen isn’t perfect, after all; he’s still her little brother.)
*
Jaina fights Nightsisters, the Diversity Alliance, Black Sun, bounty hunters, and Imperials thugs before she goes on her first real, mostly-solo mission. She thinks that experience (more than most Jedi Masters have) will mean something until it all goes very, very wrong, and her backup ends up in the med ward, and Uncle Luke is telling her that sometimes you do everything right and you still lose.
Leia wants to talk (some time between her already overlapping meetings and hearings, not to mention the sleep that the Chief of State hardly ever gets). Jacen, who hasn’t had a bad mission yet, talks about meditation and speaking with someone; he sticks close, shadowing her like they haven’t done in years. Han takes her to target practice before he has to fly off for trouble on Corellia. Anakin is at the Academy, and Aunt Mara is also off-planet; Jaina can hardly look at Uncle Luke without flushing with shame. Kyp isn’t sure if he’s allowed to be her friend and help her find alcohol, or if he’s still sworn on pain of death to act like a (responsible) role model. Anyway, they aren’t close on their own yet, not like they will be one day, and Kyp Durron has a realm of demons to deal with before he works on anyone else’s.
The thing about being a Skywalker-Solo, for Jaina, has always been that you’re never alone. At seventeen, Jaina is not alone, but it is different now-the before and after, another chapter and fence-and it feels like being lonely.
Lonely, that is, until an (un)familiar arm wraps around her shoulders; she looks up, startled, her elbow lifting; and the worlds narrow down to this moment, not quite flying, where Traest is grinning down at her. “Miss me, Princess?”
She lowers her elbow; a second later, she grins.
*
It will all happen very quickly, but the start isn’t as quick as the parts after it.
*
She’s reviewing the reports in the Solo family apartment when there’s a knock at the door. She looks up and chews on the end of her stylus; everyone important has the access codes, and she doesn’t really want a distraction now. She must have missed something during the mission, and she only just started today’s review. She looks back at the reports.
Kaer GUTHER provided information implying that shipment would arrive at Siersa’s NORTH PIER, 2300 hours the following day. Unbeknownst to our team and informant, Kaer GUTHER had been compromised and the information…
The knocking becomes pounding and shows no sign of stopping. It has even picked up a rhythm: ba-BAM-dada-ba-BAM. Jaina rubs her eyes, then drops the stylus. She leaves the reports, hidden under less important datasheets, on the kitchen table. “What is it?” she asks when her hand is on the door control panel. “If it’s another bureaucratic apocalypse- Oh, hi.”
Traest smirks at her and pushes his way into the apartment. “I knew you’d be in here. Your hostessing sucks, by the way; that droid of yours gone?”
“He’s with my mom,” Jaina says as they wander into the kitchen. Traest doesn’t look twice at the mess of datasheets. “What’s up?” She looks, as she has every time she sees him now, for a physical hint of what he’s gone through in the past three years. She finds only the same grin, and feels it pull at her.
“Haven’t seen you in years, have I? And now you always say you’re working. I swear, Princess, if you’ve turned into some kind of nine-to-seventeen drone…”
Actually, she’s on a kind of recovery leave; standard operating procedure when a team member ends up in that much bacta. “I’m going over some reports,” she says, and sees him glance at them with distaste. “If you want to grab lunch, though-”
Traest insists he has a better idea, which involves an undercity bar and some nasty characters who wear dishcloths on their heads. Jaina, who’s tasted only sawdust in the past few days, agrees after just half an hour of harassment. Three punches and two drinks later, she’s certainly not thinking about compromised informants and traps anymore.
*
From the night that Traest came back, Jaina knows he’s different now. Traest was always reckless; now, he’s far more wild, as much as Jaina has slowed herself to think things through and save people when her instincts aren’t enough (not that she wants to think about that, if she can help it, that’s what a report is for). She’s older, too, so she can take note of Traest’s new way of movement (a fighter, not just a survivor, definitely not strength from a gym), and the haste to excitement of any kind.
Jaina’s seventeen, a Jedi mostly out of training. She isn’t a fool. She just-it’s just nice. Being around an old friend, running with someone who doesn’t worry (or even know to worry) about everything gone wrong.
*
A week after he returns, she becomes impatient. “Where were you?” she asks. She wants to ask what happened to him, but she remembers enough of a post-trauma approach seminar to be passive, to give him room unless he’s not healing at all. And, she reminds herself, she can’t push. Not right away, anyway.
Traest’s gaze cuts, reflexively, to his drink. She can’t feel anything from him in the Force. He looks back at her when he realizes what he’s done, and he scratches at his jaw. He looks uncomfortable, just a bit, and something else that she can’t read. “I always told you I’d leave,” he says only seconds after she asked.
Jaina grew up surrounded by Jedi and people used to Jedi; without thinking, she reaches just a little, as if spreading fingers over his bare skin, just to feel: is he hurt, is he ashamed, can she help him? She isn’t prying, no, it’s just a Jedi’s way of paying attention-what is he saying that she can’t hear?
Except Traest moves, starts to launch himself out of his chair, then stops and squeezes her wrist tight in his fingers. “Don’t,” he snarls, looking mean-a reflex, she thinks, like a wounded animal. No need for simile, Jacen would probably tell her, when humans and animals are not so different. “Don’t you ever do that again, godsdamnit, you’ve no right.”
It’s so unexpected that she has to fight the urge to shrink back and away. She doesn’t, even surprise can’t undo how much mean Jaina has faced down with a grin, but she files it away. She nods; his grip relaxes; her wrist bones slide back to normal. Now, she doesn’t need the Force to read his discomfort. Reflex, she decides. There’s a wound, something, and a warning bruise that’s sensitive to Force use.
Jaina drinks her caf, and Traest finishes his so that he can order another (spiked) cup.
“I got work,” he tells her before they part for the day. “Took the job. That’s all. Nothing worth talking about.”
Maybe, she thinks; he could have only picked up some ability to feel a Force brush against his mind, and doesn’t like the sensation, even thinks it’s an invasion (though it wasn’t, she’d done nothing close to such a breach). But maybe not.
She doesn’t ask him again.
*
And then it starts to go very, very quickly.
*
Jaina hasn’t lived on Coruscant for more than a few weeks at a time in years. She became a teenager on a jungle planet; Traest informs her that she’ll just have to take the crash course.
She’s never really been one for clubs-hard to be, when your mother is Chief of State, the paparazzi follow you if you eat breakfast on the go, and your closest friends are Jedi or at the very least family friends with your parents on speed dial. She hardly even gets the point of clubs. Her experiences of dancing, even if she knows it isn’t the same, have been enough to make her shoulders tighten as soon as she knows what’s coming.
Traest laughs at her and pushes her into the throng while she’s still thinking that she has two hours before she should go home and work on reports before getting some sleep and-
As it turns out, Jaina and Traest don’t leave for hours, and the reports are forgotten-not that Jaina cares, as hungover as she is at the next morning’s briefing.
Clubbing, she decides, with the alcohol, a friend at her back, and the overriding beat so she can’t hear her thoughts…clubbing has its upsides.
*
Jaina can’t see the night sky in the undercity. She doesn’t always think of it, though she feels sometimes as if the stars are tugging her upwards. Barely a month after Traest comes back, while she’s lightly buzzed instead of drunk, she murmurs something of this to him and he laughs at her. “You’re so melodramatic when you’re drunk,” he says, then pushes her against the back entrance of a club and kisses her hard. It’s strange at first, while she’s trying to figure out where to put her hands and if she wants to put them somewhere on a friend, if this is something she wants with Traest. And then it’s anything but weird.
She doesn’t think about the night sky too much after that, just tongue and fingers and the hum of alcohol to smother anything else.
*
Jaina has gotten used to the paparazzi on Coruscant. They watch her family’s windows, follow her, interrogate her friends, and pick the worst pictures they can as proof that she is dying, pregnant, starving, binge eating, and/or doing drugs. Alcohol is a given in the articles, but she’s started keeping a flask on her while off-duty, so she figures that’s fair enough. She used to either ignore the cameras or play along until she could give them the slip (they are trailing a Jedi), but it’s less ridiculous when she notices how Traest acts around them. He turns cold, distant but goading, wondering what her mother would think, who do these people even think they are, don’t they have lives, and even if you gave them something, no one would believe it.
(As it happens, people do start to believe that Jaina Solo got kicked out of a club for drunkenly starting a fight, but there’s always another, cooler club, and that kriffer had it coming.)
Traest is always there, a whisper in her ear as he trades her empty glass for a full one, or a yell across the room, but he’s never there, he hardly ever touches her when the paparazzi are nearby, and he stays away so that no one has her back. “What, you need me to fight your battles for you?” he sneers, once, when she complains as she starts a new drink.
“They don’t matter,” she tells him, “and I haven’t even seen one in here yet.”
“People talk,” he says, dark and clipped. He trades her half-full glass for a new one. “Here, this one’ll be better.”
She eyes it, then him, three (and a half) glasses in but still not convinced by liquid so nefariously pink.
He ducks in quick, kisses her jaw; she can feel his breath on her neck, and thinks that love is very sticky. “Trust me.”
The drink is sour with a sweet aftertaste, but the night gets very cloudy after that.
She wakes up the next morning on Traest’s couch and doesn’t remember much of her night at all. No matter, she thinks; it’s just one night.
She thinks that a lot over the next few months.
*
Jacen doesn’t have much to say about it. Jaina doesn’t think he likes Traest much, but her twin did walk in on a few heated moments, and he hardly ever drinks. Jacen spends a lot of time with Tenel Ka when the princess has any half-free moment; he isn’t always around.
(“Besides,” Traest remarks one day. “He hasn’t had one of those bad missions yet, has he? He’ll be different once someone gets killed.”
Jaina flinches inside, then glares at him, wondering why she likes his kisses. “No one died.”
“No.” He musses her hair. Then, quieter, says, “Not yet.”)
Anakin says, “I don’t like him.” Blunt, firm, right after he’s (re-)met Traest.
(Traest only laughs as his fingers trace her spine. “He’s, what, thirteen?”)
Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara treat her like she’s still nine: they talk about the “path she’s going down,” and the effect of “her company” on her behaviour.
(Traest swings an arm around her shoulders when they’ve lost the paparazzi for five minutes. They’ve only just stopped running and he chuffs against her hair. She grins up at him and sees herself in his eyes. His face stills, and he swallows, but then he whoops, pulls at her hand, and they’re running again through the streets. She thinks: This is where I want to be, just like this.)
Han tells her that no one is good enough for his girl. But, he adds while dodging Leia’s look, he knows a thing or two about taking a risk.
(“Do you ever wonder….” Traest says.
She rolls onto her side, snuggles into his body. On the dresser, the incense sticks are almost burned all the way down. “Hm, what?”
He won’t meet her eyes. “If your father hadn’t married your mother, or if they lived here, the way your dad grew up.”
She feels his heartbeat under her chest, and it’s not just the incense and the contents of the pipe they shared that make her say, “I would have loved you anyway,” but then she freezes because they don’t talk about that whilst sober.
Traest only sighs, though, and runs his fingers through her hair. “Maybe.” His fingers move to the side of her face, along dips and secrets that even she doesn’t know. He won’t say it, but she doesn’t feel so alone.)
Two months after Traest returned, Leia finally sits Jaina down in the living room of the family apartment. Jaina’s mother is dressed for a meeting with New Republic Families, helping salvage families while Jaina moves more of her things (a workout tunic and mat, this time) into Traest’s flat. “Sweetheart,” says the Chief of State. She looks as if she’s losing something unexpectedly. “This isn’t like you,” she continues, when really it’s just not like Leia, which Jaina thinks is the real problem. “The news stories, the clubs, the alcohol on your breath. It’s irresponsible and unbecoming of a young woman. Your father and I raised you to know better than this. I just-” It continues, but Jaina doesn’t say a word because at this point, why bother? Leia, who was late for two meetings the second she sat Jaina down, has to leave five minutes into their “talk.” Leia looks frustrated and a little old as she says, “We’ll talk more later, Jaina. Don’t think for a second we’re finished here,” and then hurries out.
(Traest raises a sleepy eyebrow, watching as Jaina pushes her mat and exercise pulleys against a wall. “She was actually home? Did she need a holo to recognize you?”
Jaina wonders if she should just move in and be done with it.)
*
Jaina’s mission, the first after the one that went wrong, comes on the tail of nearly three months’ leave. She, Jacen and Raynar are assigned to track an organized crime syndicate on the other side of Coruscant. Jacen comes to Traest’s apartment to tell her about it. Jaina’s only a little hungover, but her twin looks at her like he doesn’t get her. He mostly ignores Traest, who is also sitting at the kitchen table. “We leave tomorrow,” Jacen says while Jaina is swallowing a pain reliever. “Deep cover, at least a couple weeks before we get rotated out.” He flicks his eyes between Jaina and Traest, looking more sympathetic. “Hardly any outside contact, so you’ll want to…”
Tie her boyfriend’s wrists to the bedposts? Jaina thinks with a fond smirk. “Departure time?” she asks instead.
Traest only flips open his comm and starts fiddling with it, probably playing a game on the console. Jaina has half a day to give him something to remember, so she soon sends her brother on his way.
*
Jaina and her team leave early the next morning. She’s sober, though not entirely awake, her recent lie-ins overriding her Jedi training’s early mornings). The only sign of anything being different from the last mission is a hungry red mark on her neck (and others, smaller, where no one can see, but which Jaina feels like a brand) and the instinctive double-check of her hidden lightsaber.
She eyes the sky a last time, then grabs one of the team’s speedbikes to go down the rabbit hole.
*
Jaina isn’t drunk when she holds their dying informant (Charco, a street kid, fourteen-going-on-thirty, pickpocket and ex-gang member), because she would never be that stupid, even if she did feel shaky once or twice at the start of the mission. She’s stone sober, but-covered in blood and watching Jacen’s face-she wants a stiff drink (or four) and Traest more than she’s ever wanted anything.
It’s only after three days-five gunfights, countless hours of being pursued through unfamiliar undercity, and oozing grief from her twin as he understands (like she did, the last mission) that Solo luck just isn’t going to cut it anymore-that Jaina will get either of what she wants.
*
They return to the Jedi headquarters two weeks after they left. Jaina only realizes that she’s shaking when she sits down and her chair rattles against the wall.
Raynar is the first to go in. Jacen breathes next to her as they wait for their own briefings; he won’t look at her, but she knows his eyes are red. “How did they find out?” he says, startling her. “We were so careful, I didn’t pick up on anything-I don’t think we missed anything, did we, Jaya? It was just like-”
Jaina grabs his hand and just feels tired. “Uncle Luke will tell you it’s not our fault,” she tells her twin. “That…things went wrong.” Force, she wants a drink. She wants to stop thinking, to wash the kid’s blood out from under her nails or even just out off her knuckles and from her hair, to sleep a week with Traest close under a mountain of blankets. “We can look at the reports later, figure out what went wrong.”
Jacen’s so quiet, she turns to see if he’s fallen asleep after seventy-two hours of being hunted. He’s staring back at her, frowning. “That’s what you did last time,” he says, because Jacen always figures her out whether she wants him to or not. “Did you find anything?”
A vacuum, she thought. Nothing was wrong, and then a cover was blown with no leak, and everything was wrong. “Not yet,” she says. Some day she’ll be able to think about it without wanting to rush headlong into something stupid, and then she’ll be able to deal with the traitor and look her backup, Sariss, in the eye again.
Jacen squeezes her hand, and she leans her head onto his shoulder. Her chest does something she can’t name, so she turns her nose into his shoulder and feels as much of home as she can take.
She wakes, hours later, on a couch in Uncle Luke’s office. She is warm but still exhausted, bleary-eyed with the wire of adrenaline that stays too long after an extended chase. Traest is on the other side of the room, looking at something. Traest, and a drink, and sleep, she thinks, and must make a noise because he turns around very quickly.
He speaks before she can move. “Jacen called me, said things went…” He must see her expression flicker. “Said to come pick you up.”
She rubs her face and stands. “It all went to hell, is where it went.”
“What happened?”
She shakes her head, tries to balance the bone weariness with the shots of energy that pick at the inside of her skin. “Don’t want to talk about it. ’Least, not until I can do something about it. Just…take me home.”
“Jaina-” He sounds frustrated, even to Jaina’s exhausted ears.
She slips under his arm, tries not be obvious about how she is swaying. “I just want to sleep, then drink, then sleep some more.”
He takes her back to his (their) place, but she’s asleep long before they get there.
*
Four days later, she moves in properly. Jacen watches her pack, Han grumbles, and Anakin blinks what the kriff happened while I was at school, anyway?
Leia, who is immersed in negotiations with some Outer Rim planets over their education system, doesn’t even find out until she comes home three days later.
*
She tosses in bed, shrugs off sheets which are too much in the undercity. The world is dark around her except for the faint light coming from a far corner (door, her mind nudges). She reaches to the left side of the bed, finds an indent but no warmth. She frowns, only a fourth awake, then curls around his side of the mattress when she hears him speaking. In another room, she thinks as she snuffles into his pillow, maybe the kitchen.
He sounds upset, though, almost angry, so she wriggles to the end of the bed, blearily boosts her hearing with her oh-so-special Jedi training that sometimes seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
“I’ve got it under control,” he is saying. “There’s no reason for you to- What godsdamn use am I if you don’t listen to me? I can only push so far, or- Well, you want to hang yourself, fine, but…”
Stay awake, she orders herself, and think straight, because her thoughts are trying to slip through her grasp like water in the desert. Traest is angry. He is talking to someone.
But then he snaps, “She’s too valuable, you- That was never part of the plan. Hey, we need- Kriff you, I know my priorities, I don’t need you to remind me. I’m just saying, don’t burn your bridge too quick. She’s no threat.” Traest’s voice drops, lulls her from half-sleep and closer to dreams.
Some time later, the bed dips; she shifts into the weight. There is a soft touch to her cheek and then an arm around her waist, a kiss to her forehead. A murmur, “You asleep, babe?” She moves closer, and sleeps.
In the morning, she doesn’t remember anything that seems more than a dream.
*
One day, she will tell herself that she heard the first part and was too naïve to understand it, and that she dreamed the second part.
*
The next several weeks, there are fewer full nights spent in clubs, though the tabloids are still working overtime on so much as a glimpse. Jaina is tired of the way Traest keeps distant when others are around. Greedy for heady touches, laughter and running through dark streets, Jaina leaves their apartment to see her family, to keep running into the wall that is her and Jacen’s undercity mission, and to see the few friends who are both insistent and on-planet long enough to meet. Otherwise, she fills her world with her lover, his grin, and the tug on her hand as they race into the next adventure.
“Kriff, I missed this place,” he says when they duck around a corner to avoid a security patrol.
“You got slow while you were gone,” she tells him, her breathing the same as always compared to his quick pants. “Or I just got a lot better.”
“I’ll take brains over brawn any day,” he teases her, then jumps out of their hiding place too early.
A guard pulls his blaster practically in Traest’s face, and Jaina laughs as she kicks the weapon loose and the guard to the ground. “Some brains. Did you even look first?”
He grabs her hand and they run. “Why bother, when I have you?”
*
“You can’t tell anyone,” Jacen says. “Not even Traest.”
Jaina’s mouth tightens. She’s eighteen. “I thought you liked him.”
“Not even Traest,” Jacen repeats, implacable. His expression is stern, darker than she’s ever seen it, though there have been hints since Charco’s death. “We have a leak.”
Jaina sits down quickly at Jacen’s kitchen table meant for one Jedi and a mess of reports. She reaches out in the Force, feels around to reassure herself that they are alone.
“I checked, too,” Jacen says, though his voice is lower. “I didn’t find any bugs.” His apartment is a different kind of mess than comes from moving in with plants, not to mention Jacen himself. She tracks his search and stands to take care of the places he missed, like anything mechanical.
They’re silent for thirty minutes, then Jaina says, “Nothing. Unless you got any strange gifts in the past few weeks that we should reconsider.”
Jacen shakes his head: “Dad and Uncle Chewie helped me move. And,” he blushes, “Tenel Ka stopped by once. Or twice.”
Jaina decides to find out if her brother has any embarrassing lovebites that look like royal scandals, but then she refocuses. She’s been playing nicer lately with being a Jedi, but it hasn’t been in her twin brother’s home. “It might not be your flat, or even mine,” she says, her lips a grim line. She’d like a drink, but this is far more important. “It could be an office, or our comms, or-” She flicks her eyes to Jacen’s, and they think it at the same time: Or it could be a spy.
This, Jaina thinks, is why she needs Traest like her mother doesn’t understand. Jaina can trust Traest, and forget the rest of the galaxy for a while with his help.
“We’re going to need help,” Jacen says, pulling out a sheet of flimsi. “Who can we trust, absolutely, who can help us root out a spy?”
*
Jacen and Jaina’s list looks like:
Uncle Luke (too busy)
Dad (off-planet until next month)
Chewie (ditto)
Mom (way too busy
Aunt Mara (except for, when is she even getting back?)
Kyp
Raynar (do you really think he’ll manage to find a spy?)
Tenel Ka (but she’s really busy right now with Gallinore’s gender mess) (right, and how do you know all about that, prince consort?)
Lusa
Anakin (…except for how he’s still training, Jacen)
Jaina does not add Traest’s name because Jacen is right: it’s dangerous, and Traest doesn’t have the training or experience they do. She can keep this to herself (even though the point was always supposed to be no secrets), keep him safe, and tell him when she and Jacen have fixed it.
*
Basically, Jaina and Jacen can rely on Kyp, Anakin (who insists that Tahiri can help; Jaina is beginning to think something very sappy runs in the family), Lusa (who hedges that, perhaps, this would not be Raynar’s strongest point), and the rest of their family as a last resort.
Kyp looks at the two of them more seriously than Jaina is used to-it’s his Jedi Master Face-and tells them that many missions go wrong, so why do they think there’s a leak?
Jaina tore most of her belongings apart looking for bugs, and had Traest looking for the same in his things (he’s very private about his possessions, and Jaina couldn’t be bothered with an argument), though she gave him a non-spy-related reason (something to do with the tabloids, probably). She didn’t find anything. She disassembled all of her family’s comms, and they changed their aliases and mixed up their SOP’s, and then Jacen ducked blaster fire while checking in on a witness no one else knew they were safeguarding. But even more, Jaina can feel it, sense if not see the trap opening wide to swallow them whole.
“There’s something very wrong,” she says finally.
“And I don’t think-” Jacen glances at her; they haven’t said it out loud yet.
“We don’t think it’s just the one investigation, either,” Jaina finishes, because their family never gained anything by underestimating trouble.
Kyp looks at the two of them and then his face turns dark, more like the constant hardest-path-to-redemption and overprotective presence that she grew up with. “Then we’d better get to work.”
*
Her mind is still on work when she gets home that night, which is a first in four months. Traest picks up on it immediately, though she does a kriff job of hiding it with her moody silence.
Finally, he says, “Bad day to be part of a family with saviour complexes?”
She stabs at her take-out food. “I can’t talk about work.”
He blinks at her, rocks back in his chair; in the five months that he’s been back, she’s told him everything, even the ugly things she couldn’t voice to her family. He stares at her as if expecting her to change her mind. She remembers the scorch mark on Jacen’s tunic, and remains quiet.
“I’ll get something stiffer to drink, then,” he says, standing.
“If you’d like, but I can’t.” She scowls at her glass of blue milk. “Things are-bad at work right now. I have to keep a clear head.”
He sits back down and doesn’t say anything more for the rest of the evening.
*
There are a hundred people involved in just the Coruscant mission, Jaina is sure; not even main-liners, but pages, informants, people who could overhear, administrative staff with access, cleaning staff who go anywhere, even droids who could have been reprogrammed. A hundred-more-beings they have to review and discuss, whose records they have to scan and test. Catching spies is extremely tedious, and the lack of visible progress (ten background checks down, an untold many to go, and then people they trust) makes Jaina feel trapped and claustrophobic.
“Why don’t you tell me,” Traest cajoles a week after Kyp joins the investigation. “I can help you sort through it.”
“We’re sorting,” she tries not to snap. Her eyes flick to their well-stocked liquor cabinet, then she sets determinedly to making a mug of hot chocolate.
“Then it’ll help you feel better at least.” He stops her from burning the milk (he knows the warning signs and always stops her; she wonders if she’ll ever have to remember on her own), then takes over the shouldn’t-be-this-complicated process. “Hopeless,” he tsks. “You can trust me,” he says. It’s obviously about her work, though she’s promised him it isn’t at all about trust; but there’s something in the way he says it that makes her look up sharply. He’s still, won’t quite meet her eyes before he meets them for too long, in a way that she always connects to him thinking about the missing years (but he wasn’t missing; he left). They’ve only once spoken about the years he was gone, though she’s been tallying every hint and bruise. “You can trust me.”
He suddenly diverts the conversation. “You’d think a Jedi could handle making her favourite hot chocolate mix,” he says, a touch too loud.
She stops his hands. It’s gone on too long, she thinks, if he can’t completely trust someone who loves him enough to feel it yank her organs inside out and put them in the wrong order. “Whatever happened, those three years, you can tell me. No matter how bad it was, or…” She thinks about survivor’s guilt, and some of the choices she and her family have had to make over the years. “Or even if you did something that you regret, that maybe you don’t think you can tell me about. You can trust me, we can fix it.”
“No, I can’t, and we won’t,” he snaps, wounded again though she can’t see the open sore.
“I love you,” she tells him, seals it with a kiss to his chin. He’s stiff, but relaxes a little when she holds him close. “I promise, whatever it is, we can get through it.”
It’s a long moment, and then he hugs her back, runs a hand up and down her back. “You silly girl,” he says, voice rough. “You’d lose out on regular hot chocolate without me around, anyway.”
“And I wouldn’t leave you alone,” she tells his neck.
His embrace tightens. “Silly, silly girl.” He murmurs something into her hair-three syllables, one of them love. “Going to save me, are you?”
“Family tradition,” she agrees, when her mouth has loosened enough from its grin.
*
One of her mother’s bills, just introduced after dozens of drafts to crack down on organized crime in the NR’s fringe planets, is torn down and undermined in two minutes of discussion. At least four senators who have always opposed each other are in unnatural agreement, even insistence. It isn’t the first or last bill to fail so resoundingly, but even Jaina notices the blank disbelief that still lurks in Leia’s eyes for days afterward.
Three days after the fiasco, Leia’s hovercar’s brakes are tampered with. She is in a head-on collision and is-needless to say-very late for a forum on the Jedi’s role in the New Republic.
Talk is spreading, from whispers to tabloids to respected news commentators, about the Jedi and sometimes even about the Solos and Skywalkers “in a democracy.”
Jaina is having a woefully small glass of brandy-hardly even enough to relax her stomach-and sprawled on their couch. It has been a long day, with hardly any visible progress on the spy, and a Jedi meeting about not giving the public anything to run with-which only made her think about her liquor cabinet and how a Solo is shacked up with a blue-haired ex-street kid, so kriff them, anyway.
She must have said some of the last part out loud, because Traest looks amused. “People getting on your nerves?”
“It’s just the whole-” She waves her hand and swallows more of her brandy. “This is kind of sweet, did you mix it with something?”
“A little fruit juice,” he admits. “So it’s less potent.”
“Mm, I never got adding things to brandy,” she says, peering down at her glass.
“‘It’s just the whole,’ what?” he persists.
She shrugs and drinks the rest. A light, drifty feeling is spreading through her; she’s hardly been drinking at all lately, and apparently she’s turned into a lightweight in the meantime. It’s disgraceful, though a little sleepy.
“Jaina?”
“The whole Solo thing,” she says. “Like, being followed around by the losers who don’t have their own lives, so they have to snap my holo and make it sound like I’m the first person ever to get drunk. But of course, I’m a Solo; I can be perfect and be hiding something, or I can have a drink and be the Devil.”
“Did someone say something?”
“Work. Told us all to be good little children and role models or some kriff. Like I never got enough of that from my mom.”
“What, she has time to lecture you?”
She groans and walks unsteadily to him. “Don’t wanna talk about Leia,” she says. “Room’s spinning. Did you…” She blinks, feeling very sleepy. “Was there something in the brandy?”
He kisses her temple. “You’ve been so tense lately. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
She talks about everything but the investigation (mostly), and Traest was right, it does help to tell him. He stays the whole time, keeps still for once, and they get through it, being a Solo and a Jedi, and all those missions gone wrong. Not much else is clear for that night: just the warmth of his gaze, some kind of silver screen (later, she’ll realize it was a holo-cam), and the vague guilt that she still didn’t tell him about the traitor.
*
“You don’t want to go to a club, or go out at all for that matter, or drink, or anything except work these days,” Traest vents, mostly out of the blue a week after he talked her into that glass of brandy.
“It’s important,” she says, staring down at her datapad without seeing a word. She’s been staring for hours, was even before Traest got home; it’s all beginning to smear into blabber. “What are you- Traest, give that back.”
He raises an eyebrow at her tone, but holds the datapad high over his head. “You’re going to listen to me first.”
She stands, raises one of her own eyebrows. “Sorry I’m busy, but this is important. You can entertain yourself for a while, can’t you?”
“I can- Kriff you, Princess. What am I, a kid? You hardly tell me anything any more, we never talk about anything that you think is so kriffing important.”
She puts her hands on her hips and feels a grudging sympathy for her mother even with their current tenuous-at-best relationship. “I can’t tell people everything about my work, even if they live with me. Even you. Most things, fine, but some parts are dangerous. The fewer people who know, the better.”
His expression becomes cold, something rare from her lover. “So you don’t trust me.”
“That isn’t true. It’s just-”
“It is, though. We live together, sleep in the same bed, but you don’t trust me, and you’ve been getting sick of me.”
She stares at him, bewildered by this outburst; haven’t they been happy? “Traest,” she says, her voice shaking a little, “that isn’t at all true. I’m trying to protect you, that’s all-Jacen and my mom have been shot at three times between the two of them, because of something we’re investigating. It has nothing to do with not trusting you. I love you.”
Traest snorts, looking mean. “Of all the people you could have turned into, I never thought it’d be your mother.”
Thirty minutes later, he storms out of the apartment and leaves her to stare after him; the datapad connects with the wall behind her.
*
Traest stays gone for the rest of the evening, throughout the night, and still isn’t back when Jaina leaves for work the next morning. She is almost in a hovercar accident and can’t blame a double agent for it (though the hangover probably doesn’t help).
*
When she sits down at the table, Jacen takes one look and then drags her out of the café. Little brothers, especially if he’s your twin, are usually right in the brattiest way possible; they don’t even make it to Jacen’s hovercar before her loose hair sticks to tear tracks.
Jacen listens for the two seconds that she lets him, and then he only has no-nonsense to react to; Jaina wants this investigation over al-kriffing-ready.
*
Leia, of all people, calls and leaves a message of comfort. Jaina snorts when she recognizes her mother’s Official Conciliatory Tone, and then deletes the message two sentences in. Jacen probably tattled-he’s always been the one closest to their mother-and the Chief of State scripted something while she had a few moments. Leia’s never been one for just sitting still.
Jaina looks around at her (their) apartment, the cramped kitchen/dining room/front room, the his-and-hers mess of two careless people, and she thinks of the plans Leia probably had for her. They must have all started with the right boy, certainly not a street rat. Maybe not even someone who can make her want to throw things and yell, even if his presence can rid her of care about what everyone else will think.
Traest is just hers, not a part of the media circus and expectations and the shame of you’re better than this that has come with every recent failure.
And she does trust him, so it shouldn’t be hard to convince him of that when he comes home. He has to come back (if only for all his things; Jaina checked, he didn’t take anything or sneak back for so much as a set of spare clothes), and she can make him believe her. If he knows even a little, he’ll understand, and then it will be back to normal. He was right, she’s been wrapped up in work again, proving herself, and being downright boring as a result.
Jaina won’t be her mother. She is going to keep the balance, keep it all. She’ll do whatever it takes; she’s Han Solo’s daughter, after all. She can beat the odds.
*
She wakes up when Traest takes the empty bottle out of her hand. She grimaces into their table, sits up slowly, and pushes away some of the hair that came out of her ponytail. The light is on, but dim; she can only just make him out as he puts the bottle with the other empties.
He sits across from her, slouches away with his eyes on her. His clothes are clean, and he looks only mussed, as if he’s taken breaks between the bouts of partying. Still, there’s something turbulent in him, and Jaina’s drunk enough that she reaches out-just a little-and senses conflict she can’t understand. He came back, though; they can still fix this. She reaches out, and he takes her hand half way.
“Started the party without me, did you?” he teases her and she grins back.
*
She turns her comm off for the next three days, not that she’d be able to hear its ring over the clubs’ music, or answer it while she and Traest are reconciling.
It’s easy to say “I love you” as they kiss in alleys, stumble into their apartment, and even in the minutes that she won’t remember. If she ever felt hesitance at the start, as if he was still just a friend, she is more convinced than ever that it was just her mother’s voice stirring up doubts. It is effortless to run with Traest and ignore everything else, to just want and take until the mess is something to revel in.
This is worth Jacen’s disappointed tone when, hungover, she finally returns his comms and hmms as he talks about the investigations. Her brothers are so painfully good all the time, and Jaina’s just sick enough of it and them to blow off a lunch meeting and let some calls go to voice mail. They don’t understand yet; she doesn’t care if it takes them even more time. She has everything she wants.
Part 2