this is a disclaimer.
AN: part of the swallows and amazons verse.
like a train on a track
Huttese, Jaina decides, is the worst language ever. It's complicated and it takes forever to spell and the teacher's got no patience: not like Uncle Luke or Tionne or Kam or any of the other Masters.
S'just like Mom to want to bring them along to Coruscant for this three-month anniversary-of-the-Battle-of-Yavin business and then stick them back in their old flippin' school.
Not that Jaina wasn't glad to see all her old friends again, and they had great fun when she first got back and saw them all again, but...
But they're different now, and so is she, and sometimes... well, sometimes she's not really all that sure she knows them at all. Anymore.
She sneaks a glance at Jacen, bent over his datapad with his mouth pursed. He turns his head ever so slightly, doesn't look at her.
I'm bored.
It's a boring class.
It's a boring school.
I don't get why they're having an anniversary for the Battle of Yavin on Coruscant anyway.
I think Dad said Uncle Luke wouldn't let them have it at the Academy.
Good for Uncle Luke! He should've talked Mom into letting us stay home, too.
Well, there's still a –
A hand comes down on Jaina's desk with a thump, interrupting their silent conversation, and she jumps.
Should've sensed that.
"Jaina Solo," the teacher – what's her name again? Wenamar, that's it – says icily. "Has your hearing somehow become impaired since this morning?"
Jaina purses her lips.
No, but my mind likes to wander free and play dominoes with my brother's in boring classes.
"Sorry, ma'am."
"You and your brothers are summoned to the Headmistress," Ms Wenamar says.
Even detention would be better than this. Jaina grabs her stuff and springs to her feet. Jacen's already half-way to the door.
"Nothing's gone wrong, has it?" she asks once they're in the corridor. He's better at reaching for other people's emotions than she is.
"Nope," he says after a minute. "But I think –"
Anakin careens around the corner and almost knocks into them.
"I hate art class," he announces. "They always want you to draw boring stuff like flowers, 'stead of speeders."
"Hate is of the Dark Side," Jaina says with her nose in the air, calculated to annoy.
Anakin's eyes narrow.
"I think," Jacen interrupts, "Uncle Luke is here."
Heartbeat's silence.
Uncle Luke, whom they haven't seen in months, fetching them out of school when there's nothing wrong anywhere in the whole universe...
There's only one explanation.
Jaina stifles a whoop. Anakin's grinning from ear to ear.
"Gotta be careful or they'll notice," he whispers.
They head for the Headmistress' office fast as they can without actually running, and sure enough, there he is, waiting for them with a delighted grin and his hands in his pockets.
Let them notice. Anakin breaks first, dodging past the Headmistress to fling himself into Uncle Luke's arms, and the other two aren't far behind. Uncle Luke drops to his knees and tries to hug them all at once (no easy feat: they're all a lot taller than they used to be), laughing: he smells like worn-soft leather and caf and the old, sun-warmed stone of the Temple at Yavin, and his Force presence is bright and blazing like Mom's but fiercer, bonfire-heat where she's summer sunlight. They burrow into it, that presence, sinking into the Force a little:
You three all right?
Chorus of: Missed you!
Missed you too.
The Headmistress clears her throat.
Uncle Luke looks up and gives her his most charming smile, and that's when they know they were right.
He's taking them to the fair.
Coruscant has over seven thousand parks in all, tiny oases of nature in the midst of the jungle of metal that makes up the city. There's nature preserves as well of course, the icecaps and the Western Sea, but the biggest of all the parks on the planet is the one just outside the Senate District: the Emperor's Gardens, it used to be called, even though Mom says she's positive the Emperor never set foot there in his life. The bloodiest battle of the Coruscanti Uprisings had taken place here when the crowds had toppled the statue of the Emperor that had stood at the crossroads not far from the main gates of the park after word had reached the city of the outcome of the Battle of Endor.
"They found his head in The Works three weeks later, the stone burned black and pitted with blaster bolts," Jaina says with bloodthirsty relish.
There's a memorial on the old plinth now, towering as the statue once was, and the names of thousands of the victims of the Imperial regime are carved into the stone. They have to pass it on the way to the park; Jacen disentangles his hand from Anakin's and runs up the steps to touch the smooth sides reverently: ritual of remembrance. (Dad does it.)
"Jasa," Uncle Luke calls, following him.
Jacen shrugs. "Sorry. I just."
Uncle Luke puts his artificial hand on Jacen's shoulder and his flesh one on the stone, fingers spread wide. Black clouds of sorrow hanging over his Force presence, and Jacen thinks he hears a whisper:
We still remember, we who dwell – I wonder if her name is on here, too...
But who she is, he can't guess, and Uncle Luke doesn't say anything out loud.
They look at each other. Uncle Luke takes his hand gently.
"Come on, then."
They cross the street and dart through the crowds around the open gate, pushing and scrambling to make their way through, and then, with an almost audible pop like the cork coming out of a bottle, they're out of the crowds and standing on a stretch of grass, and the Great Fair opens up in front of them: cheerful trumpet-blasts, a clown on stilts, shouts and laughter, the smell of frying sausages and spilt, sticky soft drinks, roller-coaster rides, a Nexu enclosure, shooting booths, an actual bantha lumbering through the crowds with a gaudily-dressed man on its back; a group of smaller kids gathered round a storyteller on a small dais who's retelling the Battle of Yavin in fine style.
"Well," Uncle Luke says, looking around. "Where'd you guys wanna start?"
It's an awfully good question.
They have dinner at Mestrelli's on the way home, which is their favourite diner, on account of doing the perfectest waffles on this or any other planet in the galaxy.
"Perfectest isn't a word, Jacen."
Jacen sniffs. "Not the point," he says haughtily.
"Some people say it's the oldest diner on the planet," Anakin confides. "Isn't it the oldest diner on the planet, Jex?"
Jex puts his plate of waffles down in front of him and grins at Luke. "It is indeed, kiddo," she says. "That all I can get you, Luke?"
Uncle Luke surveys the laden table with a jaundiced eye. "For now," he says ominously, making her laugh.
Jaina's eyes narrow. Jex is nice and all, but she's not –
Well.
They're halfway through their waffles when Uncle Luke puts his milkshake down with a sigh. "Might as well get to it," he says. "At least if I tell you now you can't run off till you've finished those waffles."
He says it a bit mournfully, but they can all tell he's joking.
"Wait, have you been bribing us all day?" Jaina wants to know.
Uncle Luke grins. "Certainly not. I missed you dreadfully; it was like an actual ache in my chest –"
"Duffer!" they all chorus, scornful.
He laughs out loud.
"Anyway, I bet I can guess," Jaina says. "You're getting tired of this Jedi Master stuff and you've decided to go Dark Side after all and make a bid for Galactic Domination."
"Leia says I'm not allowed," Uncle Luke says glumly, poking disconsolately at his milkshake with his straw.
Anakin snorts. "So would Gr–"
Jacen kicks him under the table.
"You're flying in the races next week," he says to attract attention away from his little brother's glare.
"Same answer!"
"Erm... oh, I know! We're finally getting lightsabres!"
"No sabre training before the age of fourteen, and no live ones before the age of sixteen, and then only if you're good enough," Uncle Luke says firmly. "You're never old enough to learn how to use a deadly weapon, but sometimes you can be too young."
It's the same speech they always get, and the trouble is, it's not just Uncle Luke's law: it's Mom and Dad's as well, and that makes it more absolute than gravity.
(Singly, they each can be reasoned with. All three together are what Aunt Mara usually calls 'the proverbial unstoppable force', and then all four of them have to giggle at the silly pun.)
"You are getting tired of the Jedi Master thing, but you're gonna go and be a pirate with Aunt Mara 'stead of going Dark Side," Anakin says.
Uncle Luke actually chokes on his milkshake. There's a stunned silence.
"You're not!"
"Seriously?"
"No, of course not," he says hurriedly. "It's just that, well, what I've got to tell you does involve Mara. You surprised me, that's all."
Several moments pass before Anakin starts dimly remembering a conversation with Aunt Winter about Tycho a couple years ago that went along suspiciously similar lines to this one.
He gulps down his mouthful of waffle in a hurry, determined to guess first.
"You're getting married!"
Uncle Luke breaks into an even wider smile than the one he wore in the Headmistress's office earlier today: the widest smile, in fact, that Jaina has ever seen him wear at all.
Suddenly she thinks of a long conversation she had with Mom not long after they got here, about The Story and Grandfather and being a Jedi and all kinds of other serious, grown-up things. It'd been just the two of them, alone in the kitchen, and Jaina had felt dreadfully adult. (Mom had even let her sip some caf, but she hadn't liked it much.)
I don't think I saw Luke smile once between Bespin and Endor. I think it was that that made me stop hating him, actually; I mean, I hadn't forgiven him. I didn't want anything to do with him, ever. But... but what he'd done on that battlestation... despite everything, it allowed my brother to start smiling again.
Jaina can't even imagine an Uncle Luke who doesn't smile.
She reaches out and slides her fingers into his gloved right hand, and he looks up at her gravely.
"Jaya?"
"She makes you smile, you know," she says, and has no idea how much she looks like her father at his most perceptive at this moment.
Uncle Luke nods. "Yes," he agrees. "I know she does."
Jaina nods back. "Course you do."
"Permission granted?"
Jaina exchanges looks with her brothers. Jacen purses his mouth. Anakin shovels a forkful of waffle into his mouth, lips smeared with syrup. Jaina grabs a serviette and waves it at him threateningly; he takes it with a frown, cheeks bulging ridiculously as he chews.
Aunt Mara, huh.
"Well, she did help us with the raft," Jacen says, smirking a bit.
Uncle Luke looks like he's never going to stop smiling.
It's relatively late when Han and Leia finally get back to their apartment, and contrary to expectations, it's silent and dark. Threepio is powered off in a corner of the living room when Han goes to check, and there's no question of the kids having fallen asleep sometime in the afternoon: the place has that empty feeling to it, that strange almost-echo rooms get when they're unoccupied.
Han's not worried: if something had happened, Leia would have known.
"So where are they, then?" he calls to her.
Moment's silence. He can almost see her face, wide-open, far-away. Same look she got on Endor, telling him she knew Luke wasn't on the Death Star when it blew.
"Headed back, actually. Thoroughly happy."
Han turns the lights on, drops his uniform jacket into a chair. "Huh. I guess that means -"
"Luke took them out." Leia joins him in the hall to wait for their wayward family. She looks tired, Han thinks, but not in the way she did before they made the move to Yavin, too-pale and worn out. Now she's just... had a long day.
She narrows her eyes at him, and he realises he's been standing there grinning at her like the love-struck fool he is.
He clears his throat and squares his shoulders, looking firmly away. She's still laughing softly when the front door opens and a huge white elephant staggers in, ears flapping, sitting up on its hind legs so that its belly and hind feet are pointed towards them and its front legs are hanging at its sides.
Two brown-sleeved arms are clutching its middle with a death grip.
"I said I'd take it," Jacen's griping from the hallway.
"Shut up, Jasa," come the dulcet tones of their youngest, precious baby from somewhere underneath the elephant. "I won it!"
"You'll trip over something in the living room and break your head on the caf table," Jacen predicts. "Tell him, Uncle Luke!"
The man ultimately responsible for... for whatever this mess is... saunters in with a stick of candy floss in his right hand and a wisp of the stuff wrapped around his left forefinger; he's frowning at it rather dubiously.
"Tell him what, kiddo?" he says. "Jaya, are you sure this is edible?"
"Course it's edible," Jaya says. "I've been scoffing it all day, haven't I?"
"Hmm," Luke says. "I just think –"
"I doubt that," Leia interrupts. "I doubt that very much."
There's a silence. Luke looks up; Jaina clears her throat and tries to hide her own – rather larger – stick of candy floss behind her back; Jacen's carrying some kind of goodie bag and a rainbow-coloured slinky wrapped around his left wrist.
Anakin drops the elephant with a soft thunk. His nose is only barely visible above the top of its head.
Luke clears his throat. "Hey guys," he says cheerfully. "So whaddaya think of Anakin's-"
"You irresponsible little idiot," Leia says dangerously. Han makes a get outta here motion at the kids behind her back, and they scatter, grinning. The elephant gets dragged along behind Anakin by the right ear; come morning it won't look nearly so pristinely snow-white. "I suppose you got them outta school, did you?"
"Uh. Yeah."
"How?"
"Well, I. It turns out being the eminently respectable Grand Master of the Jedi Order has its perks when it comes to shamelessly spoiling your niece and nephews whom you haven't seen for months –"
"I didn't ask you to take that mission, bantha brains. It's your own damn fault you've been gone so long."
"I never said it wasn't!"
"And furthermore, did it not once occur to you I might be worried about them?"
Luke laughs at her. "Hello, little sister, do you by any chance remember that telepathic Force-bond thing that seems to be a Skywalker family trait –"
"Don't you dare," Leia says. "The fact that I could tell, in this specific situation, that nothing was wrong, doesn't make it better that you kidnapped my kids this morning without telling anyone –"
"Mara knew what I was—"
"Oh, well, as long as Mara knew, there was no point informing their parents, was there?" Leia yelled. "Remind me to pull a stunt like this on you when you're –"
"You know what your problem is? You're bored; you've been doing nothing for weeks now but being cooped up with all those politicians all day, trying to get into your good graces and find out if you're standing for Chief of State!"
Leia picks up his cue without missing a beat; Han wants to laugh.
"And that's another thing! You want to know what I've been doing all day? Acting as the official representative of the New Jedi Order at the security conference because my skiving little brother – "
"I did not skive! I told you I wasn't coming!"
"And I told you you had to!"
"Well, tough. When was the last time I took an order from you?"
"Right, that's it," Leia says. "You're banned from these things, Luke. And don't look at me like that. From now on, anything political, anything involving representation of the Order, public appearances and so on and so forth: my responsibility. Exclusively! Since you can't be bothered to show up for it, we'll have to work something else out."
"Oh, for cryin' out loud," Luke says, frustrated. "I'm the Grand Master of the Jedi Order –"
"Then why can't you ever be bothered –"
"Because all it is is sucking up to people and flaunting your connections –"
"And you have the attention span of an Alderaanian gadfly if you're not actually in the cockpit, on a mission, or teaching a class!"
"That's not true, either," Luke says, stung. "Anyway, you can't have my damn position." He glares at her.
"Invent. Me. A. New. One," Leia says flatly. "I don't know how I've managed to summon the self-control to trust you with this stuff for so long as it is!"
And she sweeps out after the kids, exasperated.
Luke's still holding that damn stick of candy-floss.
"Told you she'd go for it," Han says. "Don't see why you couldn't just ask her outright, mind."
"Was going to," Luke says. "I was! Promise. It just all went off on a bit of a tangent."
He gives his candy-floss an experimental lick, and grimaces. "Eurgh."
"It's an acquired taste," Han agrees.
"And anyway," Luke adds, "it's what she gets for manoeuvring me into taking that mission to Collesti, isn't it? She knew perfectly well Mara was gonna be there."
He gives Han a look that dares him to deny it, but he just laughs. "I don't get it," he admits. "All the – the mock-sneaking that you both do. It's like a pretend-version of the fights the kids have."
Luke eats another fingerful of candy-floss, looking thoughtful. "I think," he says slowly, "I think if we didn't, it might one day get too easy to not have boundaries at all. Between each other, I mean."
And then, after a short pause, "I don't think you or Mara would deal with that very well."
Han thinks vaguely that he ought to be worried about what Luke's just said, but somehow he's not, really.
After all: what boundaries? He'd thought they'd abandoned those years ago. Call it unhealthy - and doubtless many would; might even be right - but...
But there it is.
Then he starts to grin. "Mara, huh?"
Han realises he knows that idiot smile his brother's wearing rather intimately. After all, it's only been a few minutes since he wiped it off his own face.
"Yeah," Luke says. "Mara."
Jaina skives off school the next morning and goes to find Aunt Mara at the docks. It's not exactly difficult to climb the fence when you're a Jedi-in-training, and it's equally easy to slip into the docks when you're the daughter of a former Council Member and a General who is probably here already, tinkering with his own ship. Let them think she's here looking for Dad.
She finds Aunt Mara in her cargo hold, head and shoulders under some panelling with wires hanging loose.
"Hello, Jaina," Aunt Mara says. "Do come in."
Jaina grins.
"We need to talk," she announces.
Aunt Mara crawls out to face her. "Now? I'm replacing some wiring."
"I can help after."
"No, sunshine, after I'm taking you back to school."
Jaina sighs. Aunt Mara grins at her.
"I won't even tell your Mom."
"Fair enough."
"So what's the emergency?"
Jaina draws a breath.
"Mom says that after Bespin he didn't smile," she blurts. "Ever. Not for ages, not till after Endor. And I wanted. I wanted to get you to promise that you wouldn't ever do something to make him stop smiling like that."
Aunt Mara looks at her steadily. "You realise of course that I've already had this conversation? With your Mom."
Jaina grins a bit. "Yeah, well."
"Well?"
Suddenly she's squirming under that steady green gaze. Aunt Mara can be distant sometimes, but she's never been stern before.
Clearly, her cousins are not going to be as unconditionally spoilt as Mom would probably think they will be thanks to having Uncle Luke for a Dad.
(It's not till later that she finds herself wondering where that thought about cousins even came from, anyway.)
"I'm eldest," she says, as if that explains everything.
"Ah," Aunt Mara says gently. "Is that how it works?"
Jaina nods, wordless.
Aunt Mara purses her lips. "Even though he's your uncle and not your brother?"
Shrug: helpless, maybe a bit confused herself.
"Still do hugs at your advanced age?"
Jaina nods.
Aunt Mara holds out both arms, and she goes to her, happily snuggling in. Grease, melted plastic, leather pants and cotton shirt that smells of soap. Aunt Mara's thinner than Mom, and harder with it, all muscle.
Her Force presence is fiercer than Mom's as well, but it's a different colour to Uncle Luke's, green-blue where his is red and orange: bright like the sea on a windy, sunny day, that's Aunt Mara. The colour's a bit like Dad's, actually, but Dad's is clearer, taller, reaching up and up, stretching into the light while parts of Aunt Mara are still hidden.
"So. Being eldest."
"Someone has to do it," Jaina says.
It's true and it's not-true at the same time, because it has to be her. Jacen's too open, too quickly hurt. And Anakin's too far the other way, fierce like a – a falcon. There's no give in him: not yet.
In a way, Jaina supposes, she has to be the farmboy-who-dreamed-of-being-a-Knight to their princess-who-became-a-warrior, their smuggler-who'd-forgotten-he-was-a-hero.
"Jaina Solo," Aunt Mara says softly.
"Hmm?"
"You're magnificent."
Jaina goes bright red. Aunt Mara puts her chin on her hair and holds her for a long time: so long, in fact, that school's already out by the time they leave the cargo hold. Aunt Mara tells her she's having lunch at Mestrelli's with Uncle Luke, who does not look surprised to see Jaina with her when they arrive.
"S'why I love him," Jaina confides to her Aunt, who smiles.
"Isn't it, though?"