Jaina knew it was back. She had seen it.
Sitting there on her uncle's bedside table, gleaming dully in the dim light of a single, flickering glowpanel (she made a note to replace it), it had been unmistakable.
She had seen him see her see it, seen the way he tensed, as if some shameful secret had been discovered. But she already knew. She knew he hated the thing, although (as he said) hate was of the dark side; hated turning control of his body over to drugs, slipping away each night pulled by a variety of soporifics, but the alternative was the spiked lash of the night-mare - awakening drenched in sweat, ears ringing with silent screams (but she knew, to him, they were deafening).
She had seen it when she was small, the sugar-blue pill bottle with its ice-white label neatly printed, the Aurebesh characters tight and regimented as soldiers at the parade ground. It had invaded their lives after every mission gone wrong, after Belsavis and Almania and Force knew how many others besides (sometimes she doubted even he remembered), when Luke would cry out in the dead silence of the Coruscant night, hoarse screams for mercy from the terror and pain, and her mother would go into his room the next morning (just to talk, she always said) and the next evening it would be there.
She had gone into his quarters once, right before bed, and had seen the pale capsules that tumbled, one by one, from the neck of the bottle, piling in a miniature cairn in the perfect, unmarked palm of his prosthetic hand, and had left before she was discovered, murmuring "good night" to the empty air.
It had been there after Yuuzhan'tar, triclomenoclynol and chordoprane keeping the ghastly specter of Shimrra's staff at bay.
It had been there (though Jaina had not) the nights when he would wake with her name on his lips (a name beginning with M) and call out for her comfort (not Jaina's, never Jaina's) but that was the one thing no one could give (except for her, and she was dead).
Not for the first time, Jaina wondered what Abeloth had done to her uncle, for even her defeat (at his hand) had not freed him from the hooks of her tentacles. She was there still, in his thin frame (though he never missed a meal), in the stumble in his walk, in the hitch in his breathing (it scared her sometimes) and his pain-clouded eyes, in the dark fear-dreams the tiny capsules pushed away each night as he sank again and again into drugged oblivion.
She saw not a bottle of sleeping pills, but a bottle of sorrows.
So she watched, her heart throbbing in sympathy, as her uncle's eyes closed in an artificial sleep, and she stood there, and saw (though it pained her), because that was all she could do.