Author's Note: An extremely short piece written for a fanfiction challenge – the word/prompt was family – and this is what I came up with. It's really angsty and after I finished it I was like, "WHERE DID THIS COME FROM? D:" So yeah, that was my SHORT AND EMO story warning. Written: 10/28/2005.
Undertow
How was he supposed to tell Tenel Ka about this?
It had happened so fast, his mother's political skills had failed him. His father's reflexes had failed him. He had proven so many times before that he had inherited those attributes from his parents. But they escaped him this time. The time when he really needed them.
The time he needed to save his daughter's life.
Her body was sprawled out before him in a flood of water, her rust colored hair in tune with the flow of the water under her lithe form. She had her mother's cheekbones. She had her father's eyes, his smile. She was only fourteen. She had only been fourteen.
The attackers had fled. There had been so many. He wasn't focused. His uncle always told him to focus. He had failed. He was focused now, as he dropped to his knees before her, the rain still drumming down upon them, matting his hair to his face.
Tenel Ka already knew. He could feel it.
Water ran down his set visage, trickles tracing down his father's jawline, drips here and there off of his mother's nose. His hands were shaking as he wrapped his daughter in his arms, shielding her from the storm, from the masses, from the galaxy.
His wife was behind him now, kneeling, and as he looked over to her he couldn't tell which streams were raindrops and which ones were tears. It was then that he realized he had failed. He saw the creases in her face -- the same creases her mother got when she ran into a problem with the Hapans. Her eyebrows furrowed the same way her father's would when her grandmother made an appearance.
Jacen watched as she stared down to their daughter, emotion startlingly apparent on her face. Her narrow eyes shut as he snaked his arm around her -- his daughter in his left arm and his wife in his right.
"You have failed nothing." She whispered under the rain, under the curtain of the tears that seemed to fall from the sky.
No. He had failed. He had failed them all.
His father's pride had failed him now; his mother's strong reserve had failed him too.
And they sat under those heavy clouds for the rest of their lives, failed blood raining down on them and flooding their minds, pulling them into a sea of numbness at the most inopportune times.
I failed at my family.
It was a sentence that repeated itself over and over again in Jacen's mind.