FicWad

*Title: Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star (*working title only, though it may become the permanent title by default).

First Half of the Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love (This is divided into two parts due to the LJ's word/character limits, which limits the size of postings.)

Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . A hard R for this specific part!

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lovely characters from the Star Wars ’verse, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .

Summary: The future is never a fixed thing. Though certain actions taken at particular possible points of divergence can, seemingly, preclude the possibility of specific future pathways ever coming into existence, other unexpected choices can have extremely powerful repercussions with far-reaching effects upon the possible probable pathways that the future might yet take . . . and sometimes the spreading ripples of those effects can be so powerful that even the present and a part of the past can be altered, if enough raw energy is poured into the process of causing those effects. For Tahiri Veila, the possibility of swaying the current balance of power in the galaxy from darkness and despair back to light and hope seems worth any sacrifice necessary . . . even if she will have to give up her own life and the life of her unborn son to accomplish this. Will her sacrifice be enough to change the shape of the future, though, or will evil yet find a way to triumph, in this the worst and most wide-spread of all galactic wars?

Story/Author's Notes: For general notes on this story and proposed series, please see the information attached to the front of this story or else the entry on this NaNo project, at http://polgarawolf. livejournal.com/140023.html

Specific Chapter/Part-Related Notes: Please note that the specific point of divergence for this story (which makes it an AU from the EU Legacy of the Force series) occurs when Jacen/Darth Caedus specificially decides to pursue Tahiri as a possible ally, following the only partially successful attempt made to defuse the Corellian situation by kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo and destroying or at least disabling Centerpoint Station in /Betrayal/, even before it becomes necessary for him to seek out an alternative to Ben Skywalker for a possible Sith apprentice. Everything in the story that makes it both AU and a true story pretty much flows from that.

Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: There is what I think of as a hard R or definitely M for Mature rating for a certain section of the overall preface, due to sexual content, dubious consent, reference to incest, and some violence.



Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star


Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love

40:04:21-41:01:06 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,041-1,042 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,042-25,043 After Republic’s Founding)

The dark may be generous, and it may be patient, and it may always win, but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. And love is much more than a candle. Love – protecting, trusting, hoping, preserving, believing, giving, self-sacrificing, unending, unconditional, expecting nothing and offering all – can ignite the stars.

– Jedi Master Revan Maloch, from personal notes after the end of both the Jedi Civil War and the Sith Civil War



The trip back to Coruscant is not one that promises much rest or relaxation, not in the wake of the near-disastrous five-pronged attempt of Luke Skywalker’s New Jedi Order to help diffuse the growing threat of rebellion, succession, and civil war between the Corellian system and the Galactic Alliance by destroying or at the very least thoroughly disabling Centerpoint Station (an artifact of an ancient and presumably extinct civilization within the Corellian system with an apparatus able to focus gravity and, thus, move planets and even affect the orbits of stars, up to the point of inducing their annihilation, not to mention the essential destruction of the solar systems of stars thus targeted) before it could be made functional operational again to the point where it could be used by Corellia against the GA, either as a threat to command obedience or as a weapon to be used against any who might refuse to be cowed by such a threat of violence.

Of the five operations in play, only two met with any success. The usefulness of Operation Slashrat (a two-operative team commanded by Jedi Master Corran Horn meant to observe Coronet’s main starport for significant starfighter launch activities) was largely nullified due to the fact that most of Coronet’s starfighter squadrons had apparently been pulled for Corellia’s fleet action against the GA fleet that had been meant to materialize within Corellian space without warning and cow the system into backing down and behaving like a proper member system of the GA again . . . a task which said fleet had rather spectacularly failed to accomplish (though the fleet in question has, unfortunately, managed to quite successfully occupy Tralus, one of the Five Brothers of the Corellian system) due to what appeared to be foreknowledge of the entire combined Jedi and GA planned action against Corellia.

To add insult to injury, Purella and Tauntaun, respectively commanded by Jaina Solo and Tahiri Veila and assigned the task of kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo from their residences, failed due to that same foreknowledge on Corellia’s part, with Saxan and Sal-Solo both remaining free on Corellia (with the one bright spot being that no one on either team was killed – though Zekk, at least, will be sporting a few more scars – and a member of Tauntaun, Tiu Zax, actually managed to remain in hiding at Sal-Solo’s residence, which should prove handy in the near future, given that Corellia’s current rebelliousness can be largely traced to Sal-Solo’s influence).

Womp Rat did manage to retrieve Tauntaun and Purella (though a shuttle and its two-person crew along with an X-wing and its Jedi pilot were both lost in the process), and Mynock /did /manage to eliminate the control mechanisms the Corellians had designed to make Centerpoint Station completely operational again. Unfortunately, though, in spite of Mynock’s success, Centerpoint Station itself essentially remains intact, and that means that, with the proper repairs, it could still eventually be used as a threat or a weapon (if not both) against the GA and the rest of the galaxy. And as far as Tahiri Vehila is concerned, that means that the overall purpose of the mission has not been met and that the brewing threat of civil war has probably been escalated rather than staved off or even significantly slowed down. With an occupying force on one of the Corellian system’s five habitable planets, it seems a lot more likely now (at least to Tahiri) that outright battle will break out soon between Corellia and the GA, and the sensation of helplessness, coupled with the sneaking sensation that they have somehow been played, is so hauntingly familiar to her, from the time of the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, that she is sorely tempted to find a dark corner somewhere to curl up in where no one can see her and just cry until no more tears will come.

Tahiri is so caught up in her own thoughts and her own misery, drifting slowly but steadily away from the reunion of teams taking place in the hangar bay of the Mon Calamari star cruiser/ Organa/ (the first ship in the chain of command after Admiral Matric Klauskin’s flagship, the /Galactic/-class battle carrier /Dodonna/) of the Galactic Alliance Second Fleet, that she doesn’t notice when a toweringly tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark clad, worried looking man about four standard years her elder joins the shifting group (largely composed of Jedi) with a barely teenaged red-headed boy in tow. Her (paradoxically both dark and bright) vivid green eyes are cast downwards, half-lidded in painful remembrance and private thought, and one small, slender, sun-gilded hand is rising up to absently brush loose curls of golden hair back away from her face when the rapidly scanning eyes of the tall, older man finally catch sight of her. The deep lines of worry carved into his brow and the liquid sheen of concern in his dark eyes instantly vanish, replaced by relief and the barest flicker of something else – an emotion both darker and hotter, something that might have been possessiveness, desire, or perhaps a mixture of both – something that flares briefly into life, like sparks of flame glimmering in the darkness of those eyes, threatening to banish their darkness until nothing but that bright fire remains.

The twinned flare of eerie golden light is swiftly swallowed up again by the darkness of his eyes, though, and by the time he cries out her name – “Tahiri ” escaping him in an explosion of relieved happiness that makes his lean, handsomely chiseled features suddenly seem to almost glow with joy – and she looks up, there is nothing to see but Jacen Solo, bearing swiftly down on her with his arms open wide and a genuinely pleased smile on his face that’s so wide and so true that it flashes his white teeth at her, crinkles up the corners of his dark eyes, throws his dimples into prominent relief, and transforms his features so thoroughly that, for a moment, it’s hard to remember that this is the same solemn, brooding young man whose advice in the various Killik conflicts had always seemed so prudent and wise, when he was speaking, but which had somehow always seemed to make matters worse, in the end, when the Jedi listened to him and acted upon his thoughts.

Tahiri is still trying to decide whether or not that’s a good thing (and, more importantly, whether or not the apparent transformation – and therefore Jacen himself – is at all trustworthy) when he shocks her by not just grasping her shoulders or by turning his open arms into some kind of welcoming gesture but by enfolding her in a hug so tight that it presses all of the air out of her in a rush that ends with a muffled, breathless squeak of surprise on her part as he lifts her bodily, crushing her against his chest, his long arms wrapping so tightly around her back and waist that she almost feels as if bands of durasteel are contracting in tight circles about her. He holds her far too securely for her to be at risk of falling, but her hands still instinctively tangle themselves in his tunic and cape anyway, slim fingers grasping tightly at the layers of dark material, startled and unsettled over having been swept up off of her feet (Jacen being so much taller than she is that her boot-clad toes dangle rather uselessly several centimeters above the deck’s floor). His arms are so tight that she has a hard time keeping her face from being mashed against his left shoulder and an even more difficult time drawing in a full breath to replace all the air his sudden hug has squeezed out of her lungs, and she finally has to shove against his chest and wriggle her body slightly in his arms to gain enough leverage to push herself back enough to get the room she needs to draw that breath.

He’s curled himself around her a little, his much taller frame curving around her in an oddly protective manner, enough so that his somewhat shaggy-haired head (the dark brown strands more than long enough to curl, haphazardly, at the tips) is down by hers, his face turning in towards her, pressing against the curtain of her hair, close enough that she can feel the heat of his skin radiating against her cheek and neck and more than close enough to make it awkward enough to be next to impossible for her to look up at him without being in danger of either hitting his nose with her forehead or of smashing her own nose against his chin. His breath stirs her hair, and the whisper of heated movement is . . . strange enough that she finds herself holding very still for several long moments as she hangs in his arms.

After awhile, though, the need for air becomes urgent enough to prompt her to move again, and some more squirming around eventually rolls her upper body until her right hip is nestled firmly up against the side of his waist and her shoulder is wedged in between his shoulder and chest, giving her sufficient room to lean back, roll her head back on her neck, and catch his dark gaze with her bright green one. “Jacen. Not that I’m not glad to see that you’re alright or anything, but what are you doing?” she asks, a little surprised at just how breathy her voice sounds, despite the deep breath she’s finally managed to take.

His face, as he looks down at her, is still oddly soft and bright with relieved joy, though there is something – an odd touch of tightness around his eyes, despite his still softly smiling lips – that speaks of strain in the lines of his face. “Word was that a Jedi had been killed during the extraction. Mom and Dad weren’t involved in the operation, Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara I can always find in the Force, Ben was with me on Centerpoint Station, Jaina I can feel without even trying, but you? You’re the only family I have who I can’t sense clearly enough to always know whether or not you’re alright. I’m just . . . I’m glad to see you, Tahiri. I’m glad you’re alright.”

It always gives her the oddest feeling, to be referred to by one of the Solos as if she were a real member of the family. Intense pain at the loss of Anakin (her best friend and her beloved, the one who would have, perhaps, seen to it that she would become a Solo in name, if only he had lived long enough for them to have a chance to finish falling in love and eventually go on to get married, one day) mixes with unabashed gratitude that the Solos still care so much about her, even without Anakin’s love to anchor her to them, and is joined by an odd, squirmy sensation of embarrassed glee, that it should be Jacen, this time, who’s speaking to her with such conviction and openness about how she is a member of the Solo family. Usually, it’s Jaina or Leia who tells her this, and even Han has referred to her more times as his unofficial second daughter than she can remember Jacen openly naming her a member of his family. He means it, though. Tahiri can feel the depth of his worry and the intensity of his caring for her, reverberating around him in the Force, and it warms her and makes her feel a sense of belonging that she hasn’t experienced since her first early days among the Killiks, before she realized just how truly dangerous it was for Jedi to become Joiners. She can feel heat gathering in her cheeks and the base of her throat, flushing her sun-bronzed skin, and, even though she normally hates to blush – absolutely loathing how the color betrays her emotional state to others – she smiles up at him brightly, not caring how emotional or foolish she might look, and assures him, “I’m fine, Jacen. Truly, I am. Not even so much as a scratch on me. Jaina’s team had a rougher time of it than mine. Zekk’s already been taken away for a bacta immersion, and Kolir Hu’lya has a broken jaw. We lost an X-wing pilot.”

“I could feel that Jaina was alright, though. I wasn’t so sure about you.” A touch of the Force joins the left arm still clamped almost too tightly about her waist, and his right arm slides down across her back and around her side, until he can raise his hand up and brush a loose tendril of hair back away from her face, his long fingers sliding idly down the length of the curl, twining its end around his index and middle fingers.

That . . . strangely intense, unfamiliar feeling comes back, stirring heavily in the pit of her stomach, prompted by the combination of his oddly intent, unwavering dark gaze and those two fingers gliding along and then winding themselves up in that strand of her hair. Something that almost reminds her of her Jedi danger sense whispers to her that she needs to hold very, very still, but then she remembers that this is Jacen, and feels silly for her momentary near fear. With a soft smile that morphs quickly into a wryly impish grin, she tells him, “Well, as you can see – or as you/ could /see, if you’d only put me down – I’m just fine. Thank you for worrying, though.”

“I always worry, Tahiri.” The words are spoken with such utter conviction, such intensity, that she finds herself forced to hold very still, to keep from flinching away from him, especially when his arm tightens around her a fraction. All of the joyful softness has left his face, and there is something about the way his slightly overlong dark hair slides forward to frame his shining eyes that reminds her painfully of Anakin, despite the differences in eye color and hair color and the fact that Anakin’s face was always sharper planed than Jacen’s. Her fingers itch to brush the bangs back, to tuck them safely behind his ears, and color floods her face and throat again, when she realizes her hands have loosened their grip on his tunic and cloak and how close she’s come to acting on the impulse. She’s about to start pushing against his chest in prelude to demanding to being let down when he quietly asks, “Who did we lose?”

Her eyes slip shut in remembered pain over the news of their loss. There are still far too few Jedi for any of them to accept even one death with equanimity, and, in this case, the casualty happens to be an extremely young Knight she personally knows, which only adds to the sense of grief. “Jorallen’s youngest cousin, Janael. He and Danni are going to be devastated. Janael had barely been Knighted, and they didn’t want him to volunteer for this mission.”

“His death won’t be in vain, Tahiri. He died trying to keep this conflict from spreading. We’ll find a way to keep that from happening. Somehow. I know we will. Jedi are the guardians of peace and order and justice in the galaxy, remember? We’ll find a way,” Jacen promises, letting go of the lock of her hair to brush his fingertips lightly along her cheek and then cup the side of her face in his large hand, his thumb tracing lazy arcs along the apple of her cheek.

The gesture feels oddly intimate, even more so than his desperate embrace or the way his fingers played so idly with that stray lock of her hair, and she finds herself giggling nervously – a mannerism she’d thought long lost, in the days before the Yuuzhan Vong War, back when she still had enough of her innocence and idealism to believe that the good guys always won, in the long run, and that hope and belief in the Light and trust in the Force are enough to keep not only yourself but also those you love safe – and fidgeting slightly, squirming a little in his and the Force’s embrace, unwinding her fingers from his clothes and placing her hands flat against his chest so she can try to gain herself a bit more room between them, and eventually ducking her eyes down when his hold on her and the touch of his cupping right hand prove a little too firm, too steady, for her to just push away from or shrug off. “I suppose if we can find a way to save the galaxy from the Yuuzhan Vong, we shouldn’t be so worried about saving the galaxy from the Corellians, right?”

Jacen’s smile makes the breath catch in the back of her throat in a frozen solid mass and her heart stutter to a stop in her chest, and not just because it’s so radiant that it’s like the ghost of Anakin is beaming down at her. There is a flash of something in his eyes, just as the smile begins to spread its way across his face, that feels more like malicious glee than it does real happiness or pleasure, and it makes that thing that feels like her Jedi danger sense but isn’t quite that scream at her with the need to get down and get away from him, before something very bad happens. She instinctively goes completely still, gathering herself for what she knows will have to be a hard and sudden struggle, if she wants to get away, but then the malice in his eyes is swallowed up by sheer luminosity, and she feels bathed in light and warmth, drenched, drowned, like a bug caught in tree sap hardening into amber, unable to move even to draw breath, even if she might want to. Her brain and heart are so clouded with the sudden sensation of home and Anakin and /belonging/, though, that she’s no longer sure she wants to move or get away from him, even though tingling reverberations from the sudden sense of danger and the absolute necessity of getting away from Jacen still echo at the outermost edges of awareness. His right hand is sliding around the curve of her skull, fingers spreading wide and burying themselves in her hair, cradling her head gently, like something infinitely precious to him, while the arm around her waist shifts, his left hand splaying possessively across the small of her back, shifting her just enough to roll her away from her sideways perch against him and press her flat to him again, hips to hips and chest to chest, something rigidly unyielding that feels like the hilt of his lightsaber trapped in between them, rubbing up against her stomach, and he’s whispering something, murmuring, “Of course, yes, just so, it would be you who understood that, I should have known it would be you, lovely, clever little Tahiri, perfect Solo at heart . . . “

It won’t occur to her until much later (when it’s far too late to do her any good) just how incredibly creepy the words that he’s saying (repeating, actually, over and over and over again, bending fractionally closer to her with every repetition of her name, until their faces are so close that their foreheads are nearly touching) actually are. She’s a little too busy being swamped by that feeling again, the strange heavy, hot one that feels like it’s burning as brightly as a star in the center of her solar plexus, and trying to make her heart and lungs work properly again (instead of just seizing up uselessly in her chest), though, and the words don’t really register. Precious few things properly register, through the haze of heat and weirdly fluttering heaviness in her stomach and his overwhelming nearness. Her hands have just doubled over into tight fists in the material of his dark grey tunic and a fold of his black Jedi cape that’s fallen down over his left shoulder and been trapped between them, inadvertently (or perhaps not so accidentally, after all. Later, when she looks back, she won’t be able to tell for sure, and will torture herself constantly, trying to decide if this is the moment when her body first betrays her) pulling them even closer together, their pelvises grinding together ever so slightly as her body hitches up a little bit closer to him, finally bringing their foreheads together. He leans down a little further, his head resting heavily against hers, his breath washing in a scalding mist down over her slightly (slackly) open mouth, and for several long moments Tahiri just hangs there passively, in his grasp, unmoving, unable to move, lightheaded and dizzy and not at all sure exactly what it is that’s happening and whether or not she should be trying to move or to do or say something.

Ben rescues her. The thirteen-year-old (well muscled and compact, showing signs of an eventual height that will be a little greater than that of his parents’ but likely not by much, with a fine-featured freckled face and bright blue eyes under a mass of flame-red hair threaded here and there with a few random strands of bright, brazen gold) ducks through the edge of the crowd and calls out, “Hey, Jacen Dad wants us to report.” His normally lively cerulean eyes look flat, tired, and oddly old, underscored by circles so dark that he almost looks as if he has two black eyes, his gaze turned inwards, as though pondering on some private, unhappy matter, and, between his preoccupation and the fact that they are standing at an angle to him, with Jacen turned partially away from Ben with most of Tahiri hidden by his larger form, it takes Ben a few moments to realize that Tahiri is even there with Jacen – moments Jacen uses to close his eyes and take a deep breath (obviously meant to provide some measure of calm and equanimity) before reaching to place Tahiri carefully back down, perhaps half an arm’s length away from him. Ben’s shadowed gaze finds her and focuses enough to actually see her only a heartbeat later, and he blinks at her, obviously a little startled to find her there with Jacen, before making himself smile at her, saying, “Oh, hi, Tahiri, I didn’t see you there You alright?”

“As fine as can be expected, all things considered. You?” she asks back after a moment to make sure her voice won’t betray her oddly flustered state either by shaking on her or coming out breathier than normal.

A look of intense unhappiness mixed with something that hovers on the edge between curdling shame and furiously indignant outrage flashes across the freckled face of Luke and Mara Skywalker’s only son. Obviously discomforted about something that happened on his part of the mission and miserable about it, he shrugs a little and then tells her, in a surprisingly adult sounding voice, “The mission . . . wasn’t what I was expecting. But I wasn’t really hurt at all, physically speaking. For the rest . . . I’ll be alright.”

Concerned for the boy, Tahiri starts to take a step towards him, only to be caught up short by the hand that’s slid down from her head to grip her left shoulder. The look she gives Jacen, as he gently but firmly restrains her, is half surprise and half puzzlement. Since his time away, after the war with the Yuuzhan Vong ended, studying with Force organizations and traditions other than the Jedi, and his subsequent falling out with Jaina, during the Killik conflicts, she knows that Jacen has drifted away from much of his family, and that the two closest family members he still has are his young cousin, Ben, and the boy’s mother, Mara Jade Skywalker, Jacen’s aunt by marriage. Since even a non-Force-sensitive would be able to pick up on the teen’s unhappiness, she doesn’t understand why Jacen’s keeping her from trying to comfort Ben. She doesn’t want to seem as if she’s trying to yank herself away from Jacen’s grip, though, or to somehow give Ben the impression that Jacen’s touch or his nearness to her is in any way unwelcome, so she just gives Ben a bright, reassuring smile, and starts to offer, “If you want to talk about it – ”

A look of panicked alarm crosses his face, and he actually starts to fall back a step, as if in preparation of bolting away from her, before he catches himself. “Oh, no! No, thank you! I mean, thank you for the offer, but really, no, it’s not necessary. Dad and I are going to have a talk about it. I’ll be alright. Really, I will!” Ben insists, his voice a little higher than normal.

Tahiri frowns, even more concerned than before, but Jacen’s hand, tightening fractionally around her shoulder and giving her the barest bit of a shake, pulls her up short, before she can try to ask Ben anything else. Her gaze flickers distractedly away from the teen’s far too pale face to Jacen, green eyes narrowing with irritation, and Jacen shifts his head a bit further away from Ben, so that the body can’t possibly see his face, before whispering to her, deliberately pitching his voice so that the words will reach her ears alone and travel no further, “It’s alright. He’s my responsibility. I’ll take care of this. You don’t have to worry about it.”

She turns her head sideways, so that Ben won’t see her lips moving either, and whispers back, “You’d better,” before turning back to the boy with another reassuring smile. “That’s alright, Ben. As long as you’re sure you’re okay.”

“I’m sure!” he insists, nodding his head firmly and giving her a smile that looks like an ill-fitting piece of clothing about to slide off his face and fall away into the floor. “Sorry if I’m interrupting anything, but Dad really does want to talk to us.”

Jacen beats her to a reply, turning his head to give Ben a small but warmly reassuring smile of his own, telling him, “It’s alright. You’re not interrupting. I was just making sure my honorary little sister is okay.” Then, turning his attention back to Tahiri, he asks, in a slightly lower but perfectly polite tone of voice, “May I come see you, later? There’s something I wish to speak to you about.”

She blinks, caught off-guard by the question and surprised by him all over again, having assumed that his concern wouldn’t extend past making sure that she was alright, after a mission as thoroughly botched as this one. “Of course! You can come and visit anytime. And that goes for both of you!” she laughs, turning her head slightly to include Ben in the invitation.

Jacen gives her another one of those soft, sweet, joyful smiles, and squeezes her shoulder in promise. “Then I’ll see you later.”

She nods, smiling, and tries to ignore the feeling of strange heaviness stirring in the pit of her stomach again when the hand on her shoulder slides up the side of her neck, his hand gliding around the column of her throat to lift her chin, nudging it up in a gesture that she can’t, for the life of her, quite get a read on. She’s still trying to figure that out when Jacen falls back a step from her and, with a sharp precision that’s almost militaristic, in an odd way (and which causes his Jedi cloak to snap and billow around him quite dramatically), turns on his heel and strides off towards Ben and the report that’s being requested of them.

She’s still (unsuccessfully) trying to decide whether or not she should be reading more or less into the entire encounter when she finally manages to slip away from the crowd and off to her assigned quarters, on the ship.

***

Tahiri is curled up on the couch, barefoot but otherwise still fully clothed (if stripped down to her pants and the sleeveless, skintight layer of shirt she always wears under her tunic), deeply asleep, when the door chimes to let her know that someone wants admittance to her quarters. It takes two chimes to rouse her enough to realize what she’s hearing, and a third chime to get her to come, yawning, up off of the surprisingly comfortable cushions and pad her way over to the door, waving at the sensor to make the door slide open. Jacen in standing there, in his near-black tunic and pants and black Jedi cape, and she finds herself blinking up at him dumbly, muzzy-headedly trying to decide if the flare of gold in his dark eyes in the instant after the door first slid open and revealed them to each other had been a trick of the light or just a figment of her imagination. Another yawn overcomes her, though, and when her eyes blink back open, his eyes are as dark as ever (perhaps even a little bit blacker than normal), though the smile he’s giving her is maybe a little bit strained at the edges. “Jacen?” she asks, a little uncertainly, still trying to wake the rest of the way up.

“Tahiri. May I come in?”

“Hmm? Oh! Oh, yes, of course! Sorry! I was just, well . . . “

The strained smile swiftly morphs into a famous Solo smirk, leaving her feeling as if she’s taken an unexpected, quick sucker-punch to the gut. “Sleeping?”

“Yeah.” The agreement is little more than a breath of air, and she staggers a little, shaking her head and squeezing her eyes shut, to close out the sight of that too familiar smirk, as she steps back away from the door, giving him room to come in.

“Tahiri?” The touch of his hand against her face, though gentle and obviously carefully placed, makes her shy awkwardly backwards, nearly tripping over her own feet in her haste to get away; however, evidently afraid that she truly is about to trip and fall, Jacen swiftly reaches out to her, lunging forward to wrap his arms around her waist, pulling her up against him so tightly and so suddenly that, embarrassingly enough, she actually squeaks as she comes to rest solidly against him, nearly treading on his booted toes in the process, before he lifts her entirely clear of the floor. “Are you alright? I didn’t mean to startle you.”

The words strike her as ludicrous, all things considered. She starts to giggle softly, then to laugh a little more loudly, and finally to guffaw helplessly, her small body shaking against him. Jacen holds very still for several moments, as if surprised by her response to the point where he’s not sure what to make of it (or her), and then a sense of sheepishness floods into the Force from him, as he slowly (and, oddly enough, seemingly reluctantly) turns her loose and takes half a step back away from her.

“Alright, alright, already! I get the picture! You can stop laughing at me any time now. It’s not nice to make fun of your elders, you know,” he quips, mock scowling at her and then almost immediately ruining his attempt at appearing serious by smiling and then laughing a little with her, a brief flash of mingled surprise (as though he’s shocked that he can actually remember how to laugh) and awe flickering briefly in the Force as they stand there, laughing together, and it feels so much like old times, back before the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, back when they both still knew how to laugh without being surprised by their own ability to be happy, that she isn’t nearly as surprised by his response to their laughter as she probably would have been under any other set of circumstances.

Eventually, their laughter tapers off into quiet chuckles and then soft, silent smiles, and she leads him over to the couch, offering him a seat and waiting for him to sit before plopping down comfortably next to him, close enough that their shoulders rub together companionably. “You’re not that much older than I am, Jacen, so I don’t really think that applies for us,” she points out, grinning over at him unrepentantly. When he just scrunches his nose up, she bumps her shoulder against his and asks, “Anyway, was there something in particular you wanted?”

At that, Jacen turns towards her on the couch and leans forward, hands clasped between his knees, and regards her with a look of such sincerity and earnest entreaty that, if she were not Force-sensitive (and so able to tell that he’s doing nothing of the sort), she is quite certain she would suspect that he were trying to marshal up the Force and bring it to bear on her in such a manner as to reinforce both his natural charisma and persuasive powers. “You are my sister in everything but name. I knew you, in the Force, almost as well as I knew my own brother, once. I want to be able to do that – to feel that certainty, when I sense you in the Force – again. So I guess . . . I just want to get to know you again, Tahiri. I lost track of you, those five years I was gone, studying with the other Force organizations and learning other traditions and abilities, trying to search out the true nature of the Force, and it is entirely my fault that I haven’t tried to recapture that earlier closeness, before now. I’ve all but lost the connection I had with my own twin – Jaina’s been so angry with me, since the debacle with the Killiks and the Chiss, that I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to bring herself to forgive me – and I find that I don’t wish to simply resign myself to the loss of you, as well. I suppose what I’m trying to say,” he continues, gazing at her with such open pleading in his eyes that Tahiri is entirely sure that any attempt he might have made to call on the Force, to strengthen his position, would have been pure overkill, “is that my family is too small and far too precious to me for me to willingly give anyone up. I want us to truly be friends again, to genuinely be close to one another. I want to be able to reach out to you in the Force and know that you’re alright, no matter how much physical distance might be between us. When I heard that a Jedi had been killed, during the extraction, I tried to feel for you in the Force, to make sure you were okay, and I just – I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to ever feel that helpless again. I know it’s late, to be asking this, but if you’ll let me, I’d like to make it so that we’re like a real family again, like we were . . . before.”

Somehow, after that, not even the terrible implication couched in Jacen’s careful words (the sentiment before Anakin died just as plain as if the words themselves had been spoken) can completely dampen Tahiri’s spirits. Jacen’s words instill in her so much warmth and such a sense of being wanted and needed, of belonging, that she is flooded with joy, a sense of lightness of being filling her until she almost feels as if she might actually float away, if not for the warm and solidly strong hands that grip her hands, as soon as she reaches out to him, anchoring her safely in place. She finds herself beaming at him, blinking back tears, the Force humming around her with the strength of her happiness, knowing that she is all but glowing perceptibly both from the way the Force is reacting and the look of startled joy in Jacen’s eyes, an instant before she can gather together enough thought to nod to him and give him her answer, her voice sounding strangely light (and young. How long has it been, since she’s sounded so /young/, and so happy, so innocent?) to her own ears as she simply gives him an emphatic and plainly delighted, “/Yes/!”

Jacen’s smile blankets her with the life-giving warmth and dazzling light of a rising sun, and then he is laughing – throwing back his head and giving voice to full-throated laughter the likes of which she has not heard since the days before Mara first fell ill, back before they knew of the Yuuzhan Vong, before the war started – even as he reaches out to throw his arms about her, in an almost painfully tight embrace, and she finds herself swept up out of her seat and danced around the room, her bare feet swinging freely quite a ways above the floor, laughing with him and for once in her life not caring a whit about how her (relatively) small stature makes it easy for others to manhandle her like this, in fact for once simply rejoicing at the way her slight size makes it feel so effortless, as if she were being flown around the room on nothing but pure joy.

And, like the trusting fool that she is, Tahiri decides, in that moment, that it’s a feeling she can and will gladly get used to.

She quickly gets used to Jacen’s presence in her life, over the following days and weeks. He is often the first thing she is aware of, in the mornings, when she rises, the sense of him in the Force blanketing her with that same powerfully addictive sensation of warmth and belonging as she drifts up through layers of consciousness to surface into waking, and she swiftly comes to expect the same lovely sensation to wrap her about in the blissful sense of complete acceptance and togetherness when she slides back down into sleep at night. Jacen also begins to visit her at odd hours of the day – early in the mornings, off and on throughout the afternoons, and even late in the evenings and into the wee hours of the morning, whenever he can spare the time from Ben and his other duties to slip away and join her and whenever he can sense, through the Force, that she’s still awake or liable to rouse herself enough to welcome a visit – and, when their separate duties eventually see to it that they must part and he is no longer able to physically come and see her, he compensates by reaching out to her through the Force more and more often, the feel of him in the Force and the depth of his caring for her cocooning her as if in armor.

Another person might have found Jacen’s constant presence jarring, unsettling, or even intrusive, unable to adjust to the increasingly regular and then just simply increasingly present sense of him, in the Force, rubbing up against her and wrapping all around her, like someone physically present might have companionably bumped shoulders with her or twined an arm about her waist or enfolded her in warmly welcoming arms. But Tahiri had apparently been far more lonely than she ever quite allowed herself to realize, having grown so used to always having someone (/Anakin/) with her, as a child growing up in the Jedi Praxeum, that the feel of Jacen all around her, in the Force, feels more like a return to normalcy and a sort of homecoming than it does anything at all intrusive, much less disturbing or dangerous.

By the time it occurs to her to wonder what their increasing closeness might feel like to/ Jacen/, it’s already far too late.

***

When Tahiri finally understands what it is that Jacen Solo wishes of her, why it is that he has been pursuing her and courting her support, her first anguished thought it so wonder what it is that’s wrong with her, that he could possibly ever think her capable of such an act of treachery.

When the practical warrior side of her psyche has kept her from reacting in such a way as to reveal the truth of her . . . unsuitability to Jacen as a possible replacement apprentice (given Ben Skywalker’s recent proven manifest inappropriateness for such a role) and cat’s paw and spy against the Solos, she realizes that she will be in a position to do far more good, both for her lost love’s parents and the whole of the galaxy, if she can manage to avoid being killed out of hand (as it appears more and more likely to have been the case with Nelani Dinn) or mind-wiped of any incriminating memories (as it has since been revealed has happened – more than once, and probably more often than they will ever know – with Ben), so that she will then be in a position to earn enough of Jacen’s trust to one day be able to betray him to the Skywalkers and Solos.

When she understands at last how he intends to break her and bring her over to his side – by returning with her, again and again and again, to that terrible, fateful, tragic mission to Myrkr and the cloning facility on the Yuuzhan Vong worldship /Baanu Rass/, where her beloved, Anakin Solo, gave his life so that the Jedi-hunting voxyn could be wiped out (by killing the voxyn queen and destroying the material and research that had led to her creation) without the task requiring the whole of the Jedi strike team to die in the process of completing the mission – Tahiri can feel her mind begin to splinter under the weight of her ravaging grief and ravening fury, Riina Kwaad (the Yuuzhan Vong persona placed in her by the heretical Master Shaper Mezhan Kwaad, created from the stored memories of a young Nen Yim) stirring within her, threatening to shake free of the meld formed between the implanted persona and the mind and memories of just Tahiri Veila (the so often barefoot and carefree Jedi child of Tatooine) and so shatter her mind irreparably.

Paradoxically, even though it is her hatred of Jacen that saves her, it is also then, when she understands what it is that has drawn Jacen to her, that she nearly fails and falls prey to him and his Dark Side ways, despite having survived the repeated infliction of the horror of Anakin’s tragically wasteful death. It is her love of Anakin that saves her then, the memory of the calm certainty in his icy pale (but never truly cold, not for her) blue eyes as he gazed upon her and told her, with absolute certainty, that, no matter what he had seen in that vision of the other version of her – the Yuuzhan Vong, extremely adult version her from some awful, alternate timeline where either Mezhan Kwaad succeeded in shaping her into a weapon against the hated Jeedai because Anakin wasn’t able to come rescue her before it was too late or else where the Solos (essentially her semi-adoptive family) weren’t able to help keep her from tearing herself apart, when the two parts of her mind began to war upon one another, trying to kill each other rather than melding, and the Dark Side ending up claiming whatever fragments were left when that terrible interior battle was finally over – he did not believe she could ever hurt him, and that he thought she was far too /Tahiri /to ever give in to either the Yuuzhan Vong shaping or the lure of the Dark Side.

She remembers them pressing their helmets together, so that they could speak privately, without having to worry about Corran Horn overhearing them, and the way that energy jolted into her and her stomach flip-flopped and felt as if a million flare-wings had suddenly been let loose within its cavity when he reached out to take her gloved hand in his, and she remembers the look on his face, the lopsided Solo grin – thought by so many to be arrogant, and thought by her to be one of the most beautiful, infinitely precious things in all the galaxy – when she rose up on her tiptoes in the Yuuzhan Vong cloning lab but ultimately (foolishly ) stopped herself from kissing him on the lips, telling him that he had to come back to her safely if he wanted that, and his determination to save them by sacrificing himself, and she manages to check herself, mid-plummet, at what she will be sure, later on, when she is alone and able to think again, is literally the last possible moment before her own irredeemable fall down into darkness and madness with Jacen Solo.

Anakin Solo gave his life for them. He traded his life willingly (/stupidly!/) for them. He was the one who had been able to intuit and sense, through the Force, the life-threads connecting them and their galaxy to the Yuuzhan Vong and their creations, despite the apparent absence of anything living within the Force where the Yuuzhan Vong and their creations physically existed, long before Luke and the other Jedi ever heard of Zonama Sekot or imagined that there might be such a connection that could account for that apparent lack of living presence within the Force. The war between them and the Yuuzhan Vong was eventually stopped, but it was not won, not by either side. They both lost, that day, when Anakin died, on the worldship over Myrkr. Tahiri has known this for a long, long time. She nearly lost herself, to the darkness of despair and the threat posed from within by Riina Kwaad (who did not then understand that neither her persona nor Tahiri herself could continue to exist long within the same body if they did not cease fighting one another), because she understood so clearly just what it was that both she and the galaxy had lost. When Jaina Solo had her brush with the Dark Side over her despair at losing Anakin and at having her twin, Jacen, taken from her (and presumed killed) by the Yuuzhan Vong, she could bring herself to do nothing, though she cared a great deal about her beloved’s older sister. Tahiri had been in too much pain herself to be of any use to Jaina, and could not rouse herself to more than half-hearted relief when Jaina came away from that temptation with nothing worse than Kyp Durron as her self-appointed keeper and new Master, a few extremely effective new tricks to use against the Yuuzhan Vong up her sleeve, and Yun-Harla (the Cloaked One, the Yuuzhan Vong Trickster goddess) as her new call-sign in Rogue Squadron. There had been some slight measure of peace, when the two minds warring within her finally came to agreement and melded, but it had been no more lasting than the sense of relief she’d experienced when Jacen returned to help them tip the balance away from endless war and into uneasy peace.

It is the memory of Anakin’s trust unwavering in her and the knowledge of the awful use to which the galaxy and one of Anakin’s own siblings has put the salvation, the second chance, bought by his terrible sacrifice that truly saves her. Tahiri can no more prove herself unworthy of that faith now than she can bring herself to ignore the chance she has been given (however slight it might be or however difficult to path to claiming it might prove) to redress the unspeakably awful wrong that has been perpetrated against the galaxy, resulting in a reality where Anakin Solo died so that his older brother Jacen could live to become a Sith Lord and a monster far worse than their grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, ever was or could have dreamed of becoming.

So she bides her time, driving her fingernails into her palms until they leave bloody half-moons across her calloused palms and biting the inside of both of her cheeks raw to keep from screaming herself hoarse at Jacen – no, at Darth Caedus/. There is /nothing left of the innocent young boy Jacen Solo once was in the ruthless, heartless, soulless monster who comes to her and attempts to seduce her to the Dark Side by flow-walking with her over and over and over again to the one time in her life filled with such pain that she had actually wished to die, rather than keep on experiencing it – and she focuses on her memory of Anakin (looking at her with trust, giving her that infinitely precious lopsided smile, moving to take her hand, reaching for her in the Force and saving her from the Yuuzhan Vong) and then calls upon every particle of strength within her (and, in an odd way, it actually helps that he’s waited until Anakin’s anniversary day to arrange another face to face meeting so he can broach the subject with her, as the knowledge of what day it is gives her yet another reason to focus both her mind and her strength on the task at hand) so she can put on a performance that could have given a Sith Master lessons in subtle deception, manipulation, and sheer talent of acting and ability to convince others of the truthfulness of her claims. When she is done with him, the Sith Lord wearing Jacen Solo’s far too familiar form and face is convinced that he has broken her, that she is now and will remain his for all time, and that he has, at last, found a worthy apprentice, one who will, unlike Ben Skywalker ,not fail him or the Sith Order with the Jedi weaknesses of love, self-sacrifice, compassion, and true loyalty to the Force and to life.

It is . . . terrifyingly easy, to fool him. There are days when she doubts herself, fears that she is deceiving herself and not the Sith Lord, and the constant worry and fear quickly begins to show, as she loses weight she can scarcely afford to lose and her sleep cycles become shorter and shorter, truncated by nightmares. Fortunately for her (though not so fortunately for the rest of the galaxy, as she is all too painfully aware), the escalating crisis between the Galactic Alliance and the Corellians (and their ever-growing list of allies, as the military flubs one attempt after another to bring about a peaceful resolution to the problem) keeps everyone too preoccupied to notice, as her weight plummets and her normally brilliant green eyes become sunken and sad shadows of themselves, the dark circles beneath them swiftly darkening to deeply gouged purple crescents that more closely resembles badly applied warrior’s paint than a sign of too little sleep.

As the crisis drags on and continues to worsen and she finds herself with no recourse but to continue on her own, unable even to turn to Master Skywalker for help after his beloved wife is murdered (Tahiri is the only one present in the room who isn’t surprised when Mara’s body doesn’t return to the Force until after Jacen has also entered the chamber. She would love to believe that it was Alema Rar who poisoned Mara, as the evidence so conveniently seems to suggest, but after that moment, she can no longer doubt the truth that’s staring her in the face, and she hates herself so completely for having failed to stop the Sith Lord before he could inflict such a grievous blow on Luke Skywalker, the Jedi, and the galaxy at large, by stealing Mara so untimely away, that only the memory of Anakin’s love and faith keeps her from doing harm to herself, the urge to claw and rend at her own flesh staved off only by the memory of his hand taking hers), she becomes painfully aware of just how far in over her head she’s gotten. But what else can she do, besides carry on? The Sith Lord has to be stopped, and she’s the only one who even knows enough (much less cares enough) about what he is to know that he must be stopped.

Still, the look of pain and heartbroken betrayal that Anakin’s parents turn on her, when she follows them to Hapes to attempt (on the Sith Lord’s orders) to arrest them, nearly cracks her heart in two, and it’s only by forcing herself to remember the Sith that she’s able to summon up enough anger to give a convincing show of a fight when Leia springs at her, her anguish and her anger making her a blinding blaze of knotted pain and fury in the Force. It’s not until afterwards, though, when she’s been presented to Colonel Solo (minus her StealthX) as an Alliance prisoner of war (with Hapes’ compliments and apologies for any misunderstanding – after all, the war has grown so very confusing, with so many desertions and betrayals, that it’s difficult to tell whose side anyone is on at any given moment in time), and the monster wearing Jacen’s body (a body still bearing traces of the battering received at the hands of a furious Luke Skywalker, when he rescued Ben from the Sith Lord’s attempts to break and turn the boy via torture) turns to her, in the aftermath of the loss of Tenel Ka and their (secret) daughter, Allana (a betrayal, in his mind, that has come about only due to the treacherous interference of his parents), and wraps his arms around her, his taller, much bulkier body half collapsing against her slender form, weeping brokenly against her hair, that she understands the true magnitude of the danger she has placed herself in.

Jacen’s hair has darkened, over time, from sun-bleached golden brown to a extremely dark hue, so that it is, now, only a few shades lighter than Anakin’s near-black hair. His grief and his rage over his loss is absolutely /real /– pain like that simply cannot be feigned within the Force – and he clings to her like a child might, whispering her name, brokenly, into her hair when she instinctively moves to hold him, the hand that Anakin once reached to clasp rising to stroke that hair gently, soothingly, reassuringly, as though it were Jacen (or even Anakin) that she were holding, and not a Sith Lord. Her body betrays her. Her heart betrays her. She proves herself weak in a way that it hasn’t even occurred to the Sith to worry about. The man in her arms looks like a Solo, feels like a Solo, and the Force pulses and throbs like a livid open wound with his anguish, his need. Tahiri holds him and she whispers every kind word, every reassuring phrase, that she ever thought or dreamed to say to Anakin, if only things had gone right, on that horrible mission, and he’d come back to her.

She cannot remember, later, why she turns them towards the couch, or quite how he ends up kneeling in the floor before her, his arms clenched almost painfully tight about her waist, his face buried half against her stomach and half in her lap, still sobbing broken-heartedly, all but hysterical with loss and grief and rage. Her slim fingers comb gently through his hair, her small hands shape themselves to his broad shoulders and rub in soothing circles down across his rigidly straining back, and she leans forward into him, against him, whispering soft assurances and words of love and encouragement meant for someone else, until he’s cried himself out, and the nuzzling motion against her has nothing to do with the seeking of comfort and everything to do with a rising hunger. She knows nothing of men but the few brief embraces she shared with Anakin, and it seems natural to her, for him to press close, for his large hands to be firmly clasped about one of her hips and pressed flat to the small of her back, guiding her across the sofa’s cushion towards him.

She doesn’t notice that his movements have become purposeful until after he’s pushed her right knee gently to the side, angling her legs open, allowing him to slip in between them even as he raises himself up from her lap, his eyes dark (all huge pupils and wholly human in a way that shocks her breathless) in the dim lighting, his mouth made like Anakin’s moving to the shape of her name, a sound catching in the back of his throat that she does not understand, until much later, is a noise of desire, of want, of need. He tastes like the Force. He tastes oddly, vibrantly alive, and clean, and powerful, and sorrowful, and in pain, and angry, and aggrieved, and anguished, and in desperate need, and she is so stunned and overwhelmed by the sense of home and/ Anakin/ that her lips have parted and she is kissing him back before her mind has even caught up to the fact that he has fitted that ripe rich Solo mouth to hers and is rising up her body like a clinging vine . . . or the biting, binding tendrils of a Yuuzhan Vong Embrace of Pain.

He does not stop saying her name, murmuring it against the skin of her neck, groaning it against her lips, chanting it like a blessing or a curse against the soft cloud of her golden hair and the sea-shell curve of her left ear. He knows whom he is holding, whom he is kissing, whom he is maneuvering back over onto the cushions so that he can climb up the couch and her body and cover her completely with his taller, heavier form, his hardness trapped between his black-garbed body and her soft belly, the whole of him pushed too solidly into her for her body to betray her by writhing. It does not stop her from wanting to move, though, her hips squirming back against the cushions, her hands grasping helplessly at the hard muscles of his broad shoulders and back, her mouth gaping open for plundering, her gasps of shock inviting him in closer and closer, until she can do nothing, think nothing, feel nothing, but him, all around and above and along and within her, his tongue a wet plunging muscled slide promising things to come that she cannot marshal enough wits even to predict, much less fight against.

He smells like Anakin; he feels like Anakin did, in the Force, like a blazing nova of pure energy, constrained only the barest bit by the flesh; he tastes of the Force and the sweetness of desire and the saltiness of grief and the electric vitality of life itself; the broken whispers and moans and cries that shape themselves to her name sound, to her, like Anakin’s voice; and, in the dimness of the room and the darkness of those clothes, he easily could have been Anakin himself, returned to her, miraculously, panting and sobbing for need of her, those huge hands gentle almost to the point of reverence and yet still somehow purposeful, insistent, like those incredibly full lips covering her mouth and sliding along the thin bare skin of her throat, pressing deliberately and firmly up against the pulse point, sliding apart just enough to capture a taste of her with the tip of a clever tongue and then for teeth to press in all around her jugular, hard and promising of other things to come in much the same way that the rigid length straining against her vulnerable stomach warns and assures the shape of things to come.

The thought of resisting never once crosses her dazed mind.

It is not, precisely, rape. It is a ravaging, but he is so incredibly gentle – plucking her up from the sofa after she has been rendered utterly pliant, her body primed for anything he might choose to do to her, and carrying her (like a stereotypical husband might carry a new bride across the threshold of their new home) from the room, taking hurried, ground-eating strides to cross the suite and make his way into the bedroom with her, kissing her the entire way – and so thorough in the lavishing of his attention upon her body that it feels more like an act of worship, of love, than it does an act of taking, of violence. It isn’t until after she’s crashed back down into herself to find Anakin’s name still reverberating on the air from lips squared to the shape of an orgasmic shriek, blood smeared in between her thighs and pooling on the sheet beneath her, and a Solo – no, Darth Caedus – curling away from her with a cry like a wounded animal, broad, scarred back rigid with hurt and sudden panic, that she begins to understand what’s happened and realizes how badly she’s misjudged her danger.

Tahiri’s first instinct, when her understanding is complete, is to kill herself. Jacen – no, the Sith – fights her with such desperation over the lightsaber that he not only almost instantly skewers himself upon the blade of lambent blue light, but soon after nearly tears himself open, coming within a hairbreadth of gutting himself like a fish. She is keening, her voice working its way up to a painfully ear-splitting pitch, when he finally manages to get the lightsaber away from her by allowing her to spear him cleanly though the side, the energy blade piercing him through just above the right hip, punching effortlessly through his entire body and somehow missing every single organ within the abdominal cavity that should have been at risk of being punctured by such a wound, despite (or perhaps because of) the slight angle of the blade. He makes no more noise when the lightsaber penetrates his side than a nearly inaudible hissing intake of pained breath, and shock over his near-silence makes her hesitate for a fraction of a second, just long enough for him to shut the blade off and begin the motion that will wrench the hilt violently away from her suddenly fumbling, nerveless grasp.

When she recovers sufficiently enough from her shock to try to go after his lightsaber, he follows and catches her up, his arms winding around her from behind and lifting her bodily from the floor, tendrils of the Force wrapping all around her like his arms, restraining her when she would have fought, leaving her able to do little more than hang there, in his desperate embrace, the smallest of tremors wracking her body, making her skin shiver as if from sudden cold.

“Tahiri! Tahiri, stop it! You can’t do this – you mustn’t try to hurt yourself! I’m not him – I’m nowhere near as good as he was, and I know I’ll never be able to replace him – but you’ll hurt our son, if you keep on like this, and I can’t let you do that, not to our boy! He’s Anakin – he’ll be Anakin, Anakin reborn – don’t you understand? I see him and I can’t let you harm him!”

She’s never heard of an ability that allows the sharing of Force-given visions, but when he reaches out to her in the Force, she sees everything that he’s seeing – herself, conceiving his child this night; herself, pregnant, standing at a window overlooking a beautiful garden, bathed in a warm golden fall of sunlight, hands resting lightly on her stomach, eyes shut as though listening intently, turning instinctively to the approach of a tall figure swathed in a voluminous hooded black cloak, face raised for a kiss, body relaxing back into encircling arms, guiding large hands to join her small ones, head resting on his broad chest, tilting back to look up into the dark, utterly awed, and completely besotted /human /eyes of Jacen Solo; her water breaking in what looks like a throne room and being half carried out by her frantic looking husband; a (relatively) short but intense labor in some richly appointed yet ultra modern private medical facility resulting in the live birth of a son, who is given over to her to be proudly offered up to his father, standing by the bed with tears of gratitude and joy openly streaming down his face; a boy at her breast, in her arms, crawling and toddling along in her wake, wobbling unsteadily and then racing like the wind around her, looking eerily like all of the holos and recordings she’s ever seen of Anakin Solo at every age she glimpses this boy, only a few flecks and striations of green in his icy blue eyes and the slightest noticeable wave to his not quite naturally near-black hair (as Anakin’s hair always was, at the roots, a color so dark that it sometimes fooled those who met him first in low lighting into believing his hair was black instead of brown, though this wasn’t often the case after he moved to the academy at Yavin 4 and began to spend so much time outside that the constant exposure to sunlight leached his hair to a lighter shade, closer to a medium hue of glossy nut brown, with ghosts of paler, reddish-golden highlights streaking the uppermost sun-bleached layer) revealing that these aren’t, in fact, visions of her best friend and beloved, as a child.

She’s seen so many pictures and recordings of Anakin and her memories of him are all so clear that the sight of this boy tugs at her heart, making her ache with loss and with wanting in much the same way as the sight of that Coruscanti boy, Dab Hantaq, otherwise known as Tarc – altered at Viqi Shesh’s insistence during the war with the Yuuzhan Vong to a closer than natural resemblance to Anakin Solo, to serve as a distraction to the Solos during a kidnaping attempt on Luke and Mara’s (then) infant son, Ben – always did and still does whenever she receives word from him, telling her about his new life, as a holocam operator and budding holojournalist, with Wolam Tser and Tam Elgrin. Seeing this child – smiling up at her with an infant’s complete trust and uncomplicated happiness; grinning up at her with a young boy’s innocent delight; smirking at her with a teen’s cocky assuredness; smiling down at her sweetly with a young man’s love and respect for a strong and beautiful mother – shatters something inside her.

When the shared vision begins to turn darker, when a young girl with dark red hair (like the sullen glow of embers in a dying fire or a fall of blood on a moonless night) and hazel-grey eyes in a delicately lovely face made almost shockingly beautiful by a lush Solo mouth shows up, lurking at the outskirts of events, watching them from the shadows with an oddly hungry, openly yearning expression, she’s too caught up in her own pain to try to turn away. It isn’t until this girl (and Tahiri knows whose child this is, whose girl this must be, however impossible her presence in their life might seem) has gone from simply shadowing their boy, following him everywhere, to accompanying him openly – tagging along after him with her tiny white feet bare beneath the hems of her gowns and her braided hair constantly windblown and mussed near or to the point of unraveling; with one of her small, slim hands wrapped up in his; with one of her thin arms looped loosely around his shoulders or twined tightly around his waist; with her slender body so close to his that their shadows mingle on the floor, forming but one shape together – that uneasiness begins to intrude.

When she sees them, bodies cinched together, legs entwined, arms holding tightly, hands grasping greedily, mouths locked in a kiss no siblings (half siblings or not) should ever share, she desperately wants to scream. She wants to hate and hurt Allana, for seducing her younger half-brother; she wants to tear Tenel Ka to pieces, for not being sufficiently strong or clever enough to keep her daughter (/their/ daughter), the Chume’da, from Jacen (the girl’s father); and, most of all, she wants to kill Jacen, for allowing this (no, /encouraging/, she can see that, now, looking back. It’s not just a matter of not noticing the danger or of permitting too close an attachment: Jacen actively pushes the two together, deliberately guiding them towards a relationship so close, so intimate, so interdependent, that an obsessive attachment and almost fanatical blind love is all but a foregone conclusion) to happen.

She wants to vomit, to cry, to scream. Despite his power all around her still, restraining her, her hands still manage to curve instinctively, protectively, across her stomach, as though the gesture alone might be enough to ward off the future she sees coming so clearly. His voice, murmuring dreamily against her hair, her ear, about their wonderful son (so powerful in the Force and so strong and beautiful and fundamentally/ good/), about Anakin, about how he and Allana will inherit the order that he, that they, have fought for and will continue to fight so hard and sacrifice so much to bring about, and about how they will then found a dynasty of Emperors and Empresses who will rule over the whole of the known galaxy in glorious peace for thousands of years to come, makes her want to turn about, just twist around in his arms, and claw his eyes out, for seeing that and being able to want it to come true. But the knowledge she gains from one more shared vision – showing herself, beaming happily, radiantly, through joyous tears as her son pledges himself to Tenel Ka’s daughter, wedding her in a garden, beneath a bower that sheds starlike pink and white flowers and vivid crimson and purple petals down upon them both – chokes off the building scream, killing it before it can work its way up and out of her throat.

Luckily for her, Jacen (the Sith Lord, /dammit/, the /Sith/!) mistakes the protective gesture of her cradling hands, the sudden stunned limpness of her (lightheaded and dizzy almost to the point of fainting) body, and the brightly shimmering sheen of unshed tears in her eyes as signs of joy, of shocked but excited acceptance, rejoicing, even desire. The strong arms holding her aloft slide down her body, fitting themselves to her own arms, his hands ghosting up and settling alongside her own, mirroring a pose from the vision, only there is, here, a renewed hardness rising against her, nestling against and slightly between her cheeks, pressing her insistently (raised up as she is, her dangling toes skimming the air somewhere just above his ankles) and guiding her legs further apart, until a blunt roundness slides up along the swollen folds of blood-smeared lips, his dreamy whispers turning to a low, breathy moan, a noise catching in the back of his throat as his body curves around hers, his hips seeking an angle that will allow penetration.

He starts to whisper her name again, groaning against her hair, his face nudging her head to the side, his tongue tracing the curve of her right ear, his teeth closing with gentle violence around the lobe, nibbling and sucking, moist, hot lips leaving a burning trail of kisses down the curved arch of her neck, down to the joint of throat and shoulder, sharp teeth sinking in there ever so slightly, ever so steadily, worrying mercilessly at that jointure, marking it, marking her, and then laving the bruised redness left behind with a gentle/greedy tongue. Calloused fingers twine with hers, cup her flat stomach in a promising, claiming gesture, and then slide her hands up her abdomen, across her ribs, to her breasts, his hands cradling hers, her breasts spilling down into their curved fingers, nothing but the Force keeping her aloft and against him as his hands guide hers to cup and kneed and tweak and play with herself, calloused fingertips circling around and spiraling inwards to pinch with delicious cruelty at her hardened and aching nipples.

His hips rise against her, his body inexorably curving, bending her forward, turning her back to the bed, pressing her down to the mattress, manipulating and guiding her body down, tendrils of the Force like extra hands pressing against the joints of her legs until she is curled forward, on hands and knees, tilted awkwardly, face pressed down against the jumbled covers. The hands at her breasts leave, and a traitorous sound of loss catches in the back of her throat, prompting a rumbling purr of laughter from behind her, and a whisper that she can continue on her own, if she wants, while one of those hands strokes up and down the line of her bowed back and the other grasps and kneads her buttocks, the rigid length of him settling a bit more firmly between the cheeks, the rounded head sliding along and then parting wet folds as battle-hardened fingertips skate across and slightly between the shadowy recess behind, and the breath catches in her throat, half in terror and half in (sick and wrong, dammit, damn her treacherous body, just plain /wrong/!) pulse-pounding anticipation of /something /as two saliva-slick fingers gently but insistently press her cheeks apart, as though searching for something even more vitally important than the mouth being parted by that almost but not quite painfully thick hardness.

Whatever he’s searching for, he seems to have found it soon enough, for as those moistened fingers hold her apart, a softly satisfied sigh sounds from behind her, following by an almost inaudible groan of, “Anakin ” And then his hips are somehow both pressing down on and lifting her up, and he’s sliding within her again in one long, clean thrust, his left hand curving back up and around to join hers, at her breasts, and his right hand snaking down between her legs, calloused fingers stroking and teasing and joining the plunge of hardness within her, making her cry out, making her writhe and arch shamelessly, like an animal in heat, the pleasure so overwhelming that there’s no room for thought or memory or anything but the need for movement and more movement and more and more and faster and more and /O/, Force – !

He rides her until she finally breaks, keening wordlessly in ecstacy, and, afterwards, turns them about on the bed until she’s the one riding him. That time, when orgasm hits, it’s his name she screams, “Jacen!” tearing out of her, leaving such a painfully deep, ragged hole in her soul that a part of her is amazed when her body doesn’t just spilt open and bleed to death on the bed.

When she cries, afterwards, though, curled helplessly in around her stomach, he strokes her bowed back with those huge, gentle hands and gathers her up close to him, a look of such contentment and joy on his face (that full Solo mouth curving to the shape of a soft, self-satisfied smile) that she cannot even summon the will or the strength to push him away, her traitorous body instead curving itself into the warm solidity of him, pressing her tear-streaked face against the muscled bulk of his chest and shutting her eyes tight, /tight/, listening to his low, indistinct voice crooning soothing nonsense (filled with protestations of endless, boundless love and promises to do whatever is necessary to keep her – to keep their son – safe, /always/) into her hair and drifting, too drained to even try to fight against the phantom (unreal, untrue, /deceptive/) sensation of being wrapped, once more, in the natural, easy warmth of Anakin’s love.

It is entirely too easy, to lose herself in that illusion of warmth, caring, /love/.

And she, as it turns out, is so damnably weak that it isn’t until after Jaina has turned to the Mandalorians, for training that give her enough of an edge to take down her brother, and has tried to get to him by going through Tahiri, all but taking her leg off, in an attempt to get at him, that she finally summons enough clarity of thought to realize what’s happening and break the illusion.

Tahiri hates herself, for what she has to do to Ben Skywalker, to gain enough motivation to finish clawing her way out of the shadowy illusion that Jacen (no, /Caedus/, dammit, Darth Caedus!) has woven around her, but there’s no other way. It’s too late to try anything else. The Mandalorians have taught Jaina too well and she is so determined to kill her brother that it’s no use trying to turn her from her chosen path or strike a bargain – or find a way of betraying him that will end with him safely (or at least securely) in custody, rather than spitted on the end of his twin’s violet lightsaber – like Tahiri vaguely remembers she had originally been planning to do, before . . . well, before she gained something capable of giving her stress-starved concave stomach a reason to begin to gain the smallest of convex curves. Despite all that the boy has been through – despite all of the betrayals he has weathered, because of Jacen (Caedus, /Caedus/!) – Ben is still only just barely a teenager, and his instinct is to help, to trust, to forgive, to give second (or third or fourth or a hundredth) chances, not to take advantage of an opponent’s weakness and dive in for the easy kill. It is almost laughably easy, to trigger Ben’s protective tendencies, to use him as a shield against the Hapans and the other Jedi, and then to quietly slip away from him, once he is certain of her willingness to work with him, instead of against him, on some imagined path leading to her redemption.

Tahiri doesn’t need Ben Skywalker to save her or show her a way back to the light. She already knows what needs to be done, what she has to do, to save him and the rest of the galaxy from the darkness that has been plaguing it, and returning to the Jedi fold with her head bowed and eyes meekly downcast as she mouths platitudes about belief and the healing power of love and the Light never even enters her mind as a real possibility.

No. She has to go back, back to Myrkr, and save Anakin, so he can stop this from ever happening to his family, to his brother, to herself. And if it means that she and her child must be wiped from the face of existence itself, to ensure that this horrible future is averted, well . . . no one ever said that doing the right thing would be easy.

If she can save Anakin, save her beloved’s precious life, give her friends, her family, the means to put an end to the Yuuzhan Vong War earlier, to stop the Killiks from ever becoming dangerous enough to spark an all but galactic-wide conflict, to stop Jacen from ever becoming Darth Caedus, then she will consider it a fair trade.

***