Talhalla Plains, Jarlath: 19 BBY

A ripple in the Force warned of the incoming detonator with a second to spare.

"Get down!"

Throwing himself forward even as he shouted a warning, Anakin Skywalker fell into a diving roll, letting the Force carry him further than his body's momentum would have on its own.

Instinct told him to stay low to the ground.

A shrill wail filled the air as the detonator erupted, sending a wave of fire, heat and flame careening across the battlefield, swallowing up everything in its path.

The explosion rang in his ears and molten debris from the Republic hovertanks that had been caught in the blast rained down upon him, hot embers dusting across the Jedi robe which protected his back from the heat and catching on the dark material.

Rolling onto his back, Anakin smothered out the searing embers before they could inflame.

"Skywalker?" a familiar voice called.

"Still in one piece, Master Secura," Anakin assured her, pushing to his feet as the Twi'lek Jedi emerged from the smoke billowing from the skeleton of what was once a hovertank. She was favoring her right leg, he noticed the moment he laid eyes on her, but there wasn't any visible sign of injury so he assumed she'd just twisted it during the explosion. "How about you?"

"I'll survive," she replied, eyes scanning the horizon for any sign of the enemy droids.

"How many did we lose?" Anakin asked her, glancing somberly at the charred shell of blackened armor about a dozen yards away.

"Everyone in the hovertanks," Aayla answered grimly. "Bly is regrouping the ground forces."

So, Bly had survived, that was a relief.

During the long, relentless months of war, it had become common for the Jedi commanders and generals to develop battlefield partnerships with a handful of the clonetroopers regularly assigned to their command, and Anakin knew that Aayla and Bly had been working together for quite a while now.

It would have been a pity to lose Bly on this mission.

"I can't sense the droids out there," Aayla announced, frustrated. "Are you picking up on anything, Anakin?"

Reaching out with his senses, Anakin probed the area for any hint of danger. There wasn't much point in trying to sense the droids themselves in the Force, but when there were that many battledroids grouped together, all intent on killing you, it wasn't hard to get a general read on the situation.

"They're pulling back," he concluded after a moment. "Most likely covering Soer's retreat."

"And keeping their weapons trained on us in case we try to follow, no doubt," Aayla sighed, reaching for the comm-link on her belt. "Kit?"

There was a burst of static, and then the voice of Kit Fisto crackled in the air.

"Aayla, we heard the explosion," Kit said without preamble.

"We lost about three dozen clones," Aayla told him, sensing the unspoken question. "But our ground troops are still mostly in tact."

"And you are uninjured?"

"I'm fine," Aayla assured her old friend, a faint trace of a smile gracing her lips. "And you can tell Obi-Wan not to worry, I'm taking good care of his former Padawan- or rather, Anakin is taking good care of me."

Despite himself, Anakin's lips twitched upward even as he rolled his eyes.

It had been nearly five months since his Knighting after Praestilyn, but one wouldn't know that the way that Obi-Wan carried on sometimes. His former Master had relaxed some since then, and was even making an effort to view him as an equal and fellow Jedi instead of the apprentice he'd raised from childhood, but at times Anakin wondered if the man would ever be willing, or prepared, to completely let him go.

A Master's job doesn't end when he cuts the Padawan braid, Obi-Wan was found of spouting irritably these days. You don't have enough sense of self-preservation to worry for yourself, so someone's got to do it.

Anakin refrained from admitting that someone else was worrying about him enough for them both.

It didn't matter that he half-suspected that Obi-Wan was aware of his involvement with a certain young senator, nor that his former Master had vaguely hinted that he knew there was some sort of secret relationship between them, Anakin wasn't going to confirm it either way.

Now that he was out on his own, it seemed that Obi-Wan was relaxing a little and Anakin had high hopes for him yet.

Maybe one day, he'd even sleep without his lightsaber under his pillow.

"It looks like the droid army is pulling back from our point," Aayla said into her comm-link. "Anakin thinks they're covering Soer's retreat."

"Our location is still meeting with heavy opposition," Kit replied, and Anakin could almost hear the frown on his face.

"Anakin's right," the distinctive and familiar voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi came over the comm. "Soer knows that we're closing in on him from all sides, he must be getting desperate by now. Without reinforcements, he's going to either have to surrender or flee."

"He won't surrender," Anakin snorted.

"No, I doubt he will," Obi-Wan replied. "He's probably heading into the mountain pass, hoping to lose us."

"Or he could be doubling back to Geriias," Aayla pointed out.

"He'll make for the pass," Anakin said, shaking his head. "He'd have to cut too close to Major Fellor's volunteer brigade if he tried to make it to Geriias."

"I don't think he'll chance it," Obi-Wan agreed.

"General?"

Both Anakin and Aayla looked up at the sound of Bly's voice, and found the clone commander approaching, his helmet removed and tucked under one arm. It never failed to unsettle Anakin how the hundreds of thousands of clones serving the Republic all bore the face of the bounty hunter who'd been part of the assassination attempts on Padmé, but he'd long since learned to appreciate them as individuals.

He'd even given a few of them names at one point or another, although he suspected Alpha was probably the only one who'd kept his.

"The ground troops are ready to move out," Bly informed them. "We await your orders."

"What do you think, Obi-Wan, Kit?" Aayla asked into the comm-link.

"Pursue the droid army, but keep your distance," Kit replied after a moment of conferring with Obi-Wan. "We'll attempt to cut Soer off on the other side of the pass."

"There's a chance we'll have to fight our way through the droid army," Aayla observed flatly.

"A chance, yes," Obi-Wan responded. "That doesn't mean you should go looking for a fight, however."

The unspoken 'Anakin' at the end of that comment was blaringly obvious.

"Noted," Anakin said shortly, through gritted teeth.

He started to turn away, moving towards the ground troops, when he was suddenly brought to a violent halt, every cell in his body straining, as if listening to something that only they could hear.

Somewhere, systems away, something was shifting.

The Force twisted, bent, convulsed around something abnormal, as if trying to expel it.

For a long moment, stars stretched beyond their limit, space expanded, and he felt himself being pulled outward and along with the rest of the galaxy as the current changed.

And then everything snapped back into place, as if nothing had ever happened in the first place.

"Anakin?"

Slowly, he became aware of his name being called, and he blinked, startled to find Aayla staring at him worriedly, her lips moving, but the voice echoing in his ears was not hers.

"Anakin?" Obi-Wan's gruff voice crackled over the comm-link. "Anakin, are you all right?"

"Yes," Anakin said at last, shaking his head to dispel the lingering fogginess. "Yes, Master, I'm fine. I just... felt something, that's all."

"Something here?" Obi-Wan asked. "On Jarlath?"

"No," Anakin replied. "Something... elsewhere. Something elusive. A disturbance in the Force."

"The Sith?" Kit questioned anxiously.

"Not the Sith," Anakin assured him. "It wasn't dark, it was... I can't describe it."

Frowning, he turned inward, trying to recapture that moment, to analyze what he'd felt in the Force, and he found a faint tendril of the... presence, for a lack of better word, that had burst suddenly into the Force. It was like an echo, but it wasn't out in the vastness of space, it was within his chest, within him.

Whatever that disturbance had been, it had touched him, and he didn't think it had been intentional.

"It was as if the Force suddenly shifted," he found himself murmuring, more to himself than to the others, even Obi-Wan. "And it felt like something in me shifted, as well."

There was silence for a long moment, and Anakin was acutely aware of Obi-Wan's concern on the other side of the mountains.

"We'll have to deal with it later, whatever it was," his former Master declared after a pause. "Right now, we have a job to do. Will you be all right to remain in battle, Anakin?"

"Of course," Anakin retorted indignantly.

"Very well, then," Kit said calmly, probably before Obi-Wan could chastise him for his attitude. "Keep the comms open as you follow Soer's army. We will do the same as we intercept him from the north. May the Force be with you both."

"And with you, Master Fisto."

Securing her comm-link to her belt once more, Aayla gave the order for Bly to pass on the orders to the ground troops, then turned to Anakin with an appraising look in her eyes. "Are you certain you are all right?" she asked.

"I'm fine," Anakin insisted. "It was probably nothing, anyway."

"Perhaps," Aayla murmured, but it was clear she didn't believe that was the case.

Anakin couldn't blame her.

Ossus: 19 BBY

There was no telling how much time had passed.

It could have been merely a moment, or it could have been a year.

But the last thing Jaina Solo remembered was staring out at Danni Quee, feeling the Jedi scientist's fear, and then she was gone, swallowed up by the silver light.

The next thing she knew, there was solid ground beneath her feet.

And then she swayed, overcome with a sudden bought of dizziness, and stumbled over the pack at her feet before she was able to grasp her vertigo and shove it aside with the Force, regaining her balance.

"Jaya?"

Blinking once to let her swimming vision even out, Jaina looked down at her little cousin in her arms and smiled weakly. "The dizziness will pass, Ben," she promised him, and pressed a finger to his forehead for good measure, using the Force to calm his nervous system as she had her own. "All better now?"

"All better," Ben confirmed with a nod, then scrunched his face into a frown. "Where we at?"

"We're on Ossus," Jaina told him, and looked around with a frown. "I think."

Sure enough, after a moment of scrutiny she recognized the crumbling ruins of what was once, thousands of years ago, the Great Jedi Library that her uncle had dreamed of rebuilding one day.

But that dream, like the Jedi Order itself, had been reduced to dust.

We can change that, though, she reminded herself. That's why I came back in the first place, to give the Jedi, and the galaxy, a second chance.

If nothing else, maybe she could make the future a little better.

"Where are the Vong?" Ben asked anxiously.

"There aren't any Vong here, Ben," Jaina assured him with a weary, but relieved smile. "You don't have to worry about them anymore."

At least not for another forty-something years.

Ben looked around suspiciously, as if he expected a band of Yuuzhan Vong to jump out at them from behind the ruins at any moment, and it made Jaina's heart ache. He'd been born into the war, into the slow death of the galaxy, it was all he'd ever known.

To Ben, there had never been a time when they weren't running from the Vong.

He's the real reason for this, Jaina thought sadly, touching a hand to his reddish gold hair tenderly as she indulged in a bit of wistfulness. So that he can grow up in a better galaxy than the one we left behind.

Better than the one that had claimed the lives of their entire family.

To her amusement, and her pride, Jaina felt a small stirring of the Force around Ben as her cousin reached out with the Force to tentatively look for the 'bad empty' that he associated with a Vong presence nearby. As their numbers had dwindled at the hands of the Vong, there had been few Masters to instruct the children, and most of Ben's training, as rudimentary as it was given his age, had been left to Jaina.

Despite Ben's talent and her own aptitude to teach him, due largely in part to their bond, Jaina now appreciated even more the frustrations her uncle must have endured trying to instruct her and her brothers at that age.

"No Vong," Ben declared, sounding a bit bewildered and awed by that fact.

"That's right," Jaina said with a confident nod. "No Vong. They can't find us anymore."

"Good," Ben replied sternly, complete with that trademark Skywalker pout that he, like both of her brothers before him, had inherited from his father. "I don't like the Vong."

"I couldn't agree more, little man," Jaina murmured.

An entire galaxy had fallen to the ruthless might of the alien invaders, dozens of worlds had been destroyed, the rest shaped beyond recognition into some perverted image of the long-lost Yuuzhan Vong homeworld.

Billions of sentient billions had been slain during the Vong's campaign to conquer the galaxy as their own, and billions more had been sacrificed to appease their imaginary gods. Whole populations had been wiped out on some worlds, and the survivors had been enslaved, a fate far worse than death.

The galaxy itself had begun to die.

And an Order that had just begun to take root, reborn from the ashes of thousands of years of tradition, had slowly and methodically been burned to the ground.

Most nights, she went into a Jedi trance instead of sleeping, so that the screams would not linger in her ears.

Stop it, Jaina told herself sharply, and shook her head of such morbid memories. Everything will be different now, and that's what matters.

She could wallow in the past once she secured a better future.

And in order to do that, she needed to focus.

"Let's see," she mused aloud. "If we're where- or should I say when- we're supposed to be, then Ossus has already fallen into Separatist hands."

"Separatist?" Ben echoed, wrinkling his nose at the big word. "They bad?"

"Yeah, they're the bad guys, little man," Jaina confirmed. "Which is why I need you to be on your very best hiding behavior, okay? I'm going to have to steal a ship for us to get out of here on, and we don't want the bad guys to see us, do we?"

"No." Ben shook his head vehemently. "Don't like bad guys."

"Me neither," Jaina said with a faint smile. "So we're going to hide from them, just like we do the Vong, all right?"

Ben nodded, gray eyes serious and somber.

"I'm going to find you the best hiding place we can," Jaina told him, crouching down to his level. "Then I'm going to leave for just a little bit, and you're going to practice using the Force to hide while I'm gone."

"You gonna come back?" Ben asked, biting his lip.

"I always do, don't I?" Jaina responded gently, and he nodded. "This won't be any different, little man. I'm just going to go find us a good ship, and then we'll get out of here and go far away from the bad men, okay?"

"Fast ship?" Ben requested with childlike eagerness.

"Who do you think you're talking to?" Jaina retorted with a teasing grin. "Of course it'll be a fast ship. The fastest ship on the whole planet."

"Can I fly?"

Despite herself, Jaina chuckled. "Maybe next year, Ben," she replied, ruffling his reddish gold hair. "Little boys aren't supposed to pilot starships."

"Five's not little," Ben said with a little scowl.

"No, five isn't little," Jaina corrected amicably, her chest constricting at the thought of the life he'd been denied, the life that he should have had and all the carefree joys he should have known at that age, instead of the nightmare that Danni had helped them escape. "Wow, you're getting big, you know that? Pretty soon you'll be all grown up."

"Soon," Ben agreed, placated.

"It'll be too soon for my tastes, little man," Jaina sighed. Ben gave her a quizzical look, not quite understanding what that meant, and she shook her head. "Never mind, kiddo. Let's just get you hidden, okay?"

It didn't take long to find a good sized niche in the ruins for her to stash Ben in temporarily, and his blanket, which he'd had since he was a baby and she'd stashed in her pack, made the little nook more comfortable. Once she'd made certain that he was ready and that he remembered not to come out for anyone or anything except her, Jaina waited just long enough for him to erect his Force shield around himself before she set out.

Leaving Ben was never easy, whenever he wasn't in her sight she was on edge, but they'd fallen into this routine all too often over the years with the Yuuzhan Vong dogging their every step.

And Ben, while scared, would be fine on his own.

She'd been forced to leave him in hiding under much worse circumstances than this.

I'd take a few thousand Separatist droids over a dozen Vong any day, Jaina thought darkly.

Having an enemy that could be fought with the Force would practically be a vacation after all the years she'd spent combating the Yuuzhan Vong.