~
This fic was originally posted on theforce.net, where I go by the screenname of SaberBlade. If you recognize this, don't worry, it isn't plagiarized; I'm simply reposting it here also.
~
General Disclaimer: Star Wars belongs to George Lucas and the characters belong to their respective authors. Anything you don't recognize is mine; please respect my muse. I don't intend any infringement with this fic; it was created because I have an abiding love for Star Wars and a wish to share my interpretation of it with the world.
~
~
Details:
Name: Miracle
Time Frame: Post-NJO
Pairing: Kyp Durron and Jaina Solo
Summary: A crash landing leaves Jaina lucky to be alive, but she can't remember the last ten years of her life. What will this mean for her and the man she was to marry?
Rating: PG to PG-13.
Post: Chapter 19 of ?
Story Status: Work in Progress.
~
As always, reviews are appreciated.
~
~
SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1 "I don't want to go to sleep," Jaina said stubbornly.
Kyp pressed against her shoulder and forced her to lie back down on the bed. Still, he couldn't keep his lips from curving in a smile. "I don't think you've taken quite that tone with me since you were four or five. You need to sleep, Jaina. You're worn out."
"I'm not." She struggled against his hand for a moment, and finally collapsed back against the pillows. "All right, maybe I am. But it's my first day here. I shouldn't land and then hide away for eight hours."
"Twelve," Kyp corrected her. "You're sleeping for twelve hours if I have to put you into a trance."
She glared up at him and crossed her arms, but remained lying prone when he removed his hand from her shoulder. "It's not polite."
"So?"
A grin twitched across her face for the briefest second, and then was gone again. Seeing her smile die so quickly made something inside him ache. Kyp reached out and brushed her hair away from her temples. "You need to sleep, Goddess. You're worn so thin we can practically see through you. It's not healthy."
"I just want to remember," she whispered, and her eyes slid shut. "I'm tired of wondering what it was like, what I was like, how I felt about things. I don't want to do something without thinking about it and suddenly realize that my body remembers something my mind doesn't." Her eyelids opened partway, and her brown eyes were shining with tears beneath them. "I don't deserve this, Kyp. Do I?"
"No one deserves this," he reassured her, stroking her hair. "And once you've had sleep, we'll go off and see if I can help at all. It'll be three weeks tomorrow, Jaina. Tomorrow I'll try and help you remember."
She shut her eyes. "It seems like it's been longer than three weeks," she said softly. There was a long pause, and then Jaina uncrossed her arms and rolled onto her side facing him. Without opening her eyes, she reached for and found his hand. "We were supposed to be married today, weren't we?" she asked.
A lump rose in his throat. "Yeah," he said. "We were."
Her fingers tightened against his. "I'm sorry," she murmured, and was silent for a long time. Her breathing began to even out, and Kyp was about to release her hand and leave when she spoke again. "Kyp?"
"Yeah?"
"What was it supposed to be like?" she asked, and her voice was beginning to slur with exhaustion.
Carefully, Kyp eased himself down to sit beside her on the bed, letting her keep his hand in hers. "Small, all things considered," he said after a moment. "Your mother planned it. Your uncle was going to preform the ceremony– it was going to be the Jedi ceremony that he and Mara had all those years ago, remember?"
"Mm-hm. With the rocks."
"Yeah," he agreed. "With the rocks. You wanted General Darklighter to officiate the legal part of it, so we were going to do both ceremonies at the same time. Your whole family would be there– even Tahiri was planning on coming out to see it, and that's a long trip, remember?" His voice had softened, quieted, and he wondered if she was really listening to his words.
"Yeah."
"You wanted Han to give you away, and he kept threatening that he wouldn't be able to do it. You kept teasing him about that." He couldn't stop from smiling, and he brushed his thumb across the skin of her hand. "Mara kept joking that the reception was going to be the worst part– Jedi and pilots and Chiss and politicians all in the same room. She was going to speak for you at the wedding."
"Who was going to speak for you?" Jaina wondered.
"Kam Solusar," Kyp told her. "And Han and Leia. And you asked Mara and Lowie and Jag to speak for you."
A slow smiled spread across her face, and stayed. "Jag must have been thrilled," she murmured.
"That's one word for it." She was nearly asleep. "Everyone wondered what you were going to wear," he continued, hoping that she would drop off soon. "Han wanted you to wear something Corellian, and Leia was hoping you'd wear something Alderaanian. You got fed up with everything and went off on your own and came back saying you'd taken care of it, but you never told us what you were going to wear."
"No?" The word was more of an exhalation than an actual statement.
"No. You didn't even tell me. Leia's given up asking you about it because you always are so secretive about it. She's worried you're going to show up to your own wedding wearing black."
Her eyes fluttered open and gazed directly into his for a long moment. "Blue," she said clearly, and then her eyes drifted shut and her breathing evened out.
Kyp stared down at her for a moment. Blue? Had she somehow remembered that on her own? Had her exhaustion broken down some of the barriers that kept her memories from her? He couldn't even tell if the memory was a true one– he hadn't lied to her; he had no idea what she had planned to wear on her wedding. But if she had remembered...
Kyp sternly pushed the thought of Jaina radiant in a blue dress to the back of his mind, and pulled his hand away from hers. He brought it up to her forehead, smoothed back the loose strands of brown hair he found there, and hesitated. She wouldn't thank him for it– she'd most likely be furious with him for it– but she needed her rest.
Twelve hours, Kyp thought, and rested his fingertips against her right temple. Reaching out through the Force, he easily sent her into a healing trance. Her mind had been open to his, unguarded and unshielded from him, and it was all to easy for him to slip inside and order her thoughts together to send her deeper into sleep. Twelve hours, and she would wake up and be furious with him for forcing her to rest– but she would be rested.
He bent and kissed her forehead, then heaved himself to his feet. He made his way to the window and pulled curtains across it, blocking the light. Of course, the curtains appeared to be moving on their own, and the window itself seemed like very thinly stretched skin, but Kyp had flown Stubborn for years now, and Sekotian– or Vong– biotechnology no longer startled him. He stepped through the door and shut it behind him, then turned to the guard standing beside it.
"Jaina's going to be sleeping for a while," he said, and the male– Avaan, Kyp thought– nodded and moved to stand before the door.
"She shall not be disturbed. I will await your return."
"Thank you," Kyp said, and quickly turned away and moved toward the conference area. Jaina never seemed to have any problem dealing with the Vong, and if doing so had ever given her an odd moment, she hadn't shown it. Kyp, on the other hand, felt distinctly uneasy each time he remembered that he had spent the better part of five years trying to kill– and not be killed by– members of the same species.
The conference area was a small ring of trees encircling an open, grassy flat with a jumble of rocks and gnarled stumps haphazardly strewn about it. Tahiri sat on one of the stumps, arms around her knees and bare feet neatly tucked together. Danni had chosen a high flat rock for her perch, and was dangling her legs from her vantage point. Jag, unsurprisingly, stood rather stiffly to the side, obviously part of the group and just as obviously uncomfortable.
They had been talking, but as he approached, the speech broke off.
"She's sleeping," he said, knowing that their talk had been of Jaina. "I've put her in a trance. She needs to rest."
Tahiri's lips twitched. "She won't like that when she wakes up."
"She needs to rest," Kyp repeated, and chose a tall rock between Jag and Danni to lean against. He waited a moment, but when no one else said anything, he continued, "I promised her that we'd try to find some of her memories tomorrow. I don't know how that's going to work, but I promised her, and she needs to be doing something or she'll get worse."
"It's eating her up," Danni said quietly, pulling her legs up onto the rock and rolling onto her stomach. Her feet crossed in the air behind her, and she propped her head onto one of her hands to look down at him. "How bad is it?"
Kyp sighed and leaned back until the back of his head touched the rock. "She doesn't remember anything beyond a few days after her sixteenth birthday," he said. "But what's worse is that she knows she should. She says it's like having a bunch of flitters constantly dancing around her head, but every time she reaches out to swat one, it's gone. You can tell she's trying. You'll say something or do something, and her eyes will light up and she'll know that it's somehow connected together, but she won't be able to plot the course to find it."
"Has she remembered anything since she woke up?" Tahiri asked, the girl uncharacteristically quiet.
He sighed. "Bits and pieces of things. She's still got a strong physical memory– she entered the code for our door without me telling her, but when I sat her down in front of it and tried to get her to do it again, she couldn't. Stuff like that. Nothing that she considers important." The sun was slowly dying, setting the clouds around it aflame. "Sometimes she'll remember little things, like that Ben has red hair or that Jag doesn't like caf, but most of the time, that's without trying."
"It's driving her mad," Jag said softly. "She never gets something by trying for it– only sometimes, when she doesn't try to remember."
Kyp shut his eyes against the bright colors of the sunset. "I'll try to help her tomorrow," he said. "But I don't know if it'll do any good. She's hanging so much hope on me being able to help her, and if I can't..."
The silence stretched on, and then Danni sighed and rolled over, slid off her rock, and came up to him. "Come on, Kyp," she said firmly. "You're not doing her any good sitting her and worrying about this. You're going to eat something and then go to sleep."
He opened his eyes and glared mildly at her. Her blonde hair was tousled from the light wind; she was still slim and tall. It was easy to see why Jacen had fallen for her; in her own way, she was as practical as he was. "Danni," he began, but she held up a hand.
"No arguments," she said, and she reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him away from his rock and his contemplations. "You're going to eat and then you're going to sleep. You may be a high and mighty Jedi Master, but even you need some sense drilled into you. And since Jaina's currently out of it, I'll take my big-sisterly prerogative and drill some sense into you for her. Coming?"
"I thought Tahiri was Jaina's claimed-sister." But still, Kyp allowed himself to be pulled forward. He had been a bit skeptical of the three when, years earlier, they had declared themselves claimed-sisters –whatever that was– after spending two weeks alone with each other on the far side of Sekot. Whatever experience they'd gone through– and Kyp considered it some kind of female bonding experience better left unknown– they'd emerged filthy, laughing, stronger in the Force and the best of friends, and had promptly declared that they had claimed each other as sisters. Thus, claimed-sisters.
Kyp had long since given up trying to figure them out. Danni had helped Jaina grow up a bit; he knew that much. Tahiri had nudged Jaina closer to her mother. Whatever the original idea, Kyp figured that Danni was going to marry Jacen and Tahiri would have married Anakin, so claimed-sisters, he figured, was close enough to sisters-in-law.
Danni tugged again. "Tahiri is Jaina's little claimed-sister. I'm her big claimed-sister. That means I get to boss you around and Tahiri gets to sympathize."
"Is that how it works, then?" Kyp asked, turning to Tahiri.
Her grin was infectious and somehow reassuring. "That's how it works. Poor Kyp, being bossed around by Danni. See, I'm sympathizing."
He laughed and left Tahiri with Jag and followed Danni.
Danni led him into a brightly lit room filled with something sweet-smelling and the strange chatter of Sekotans, and forced him to fill his plate and sit down at one of the tables.
"Eat," she ordered. "Or Jaina will kill me for letting you run yourself ragged worrying over her."
She turned to leave, and Kyp reached out quickly and grabbed her hand. "Hey," he said, and waited to meet her eyes. "Thanks."
She only grinned at him. "You're welcome," she said. "Stop stalling. Eat and then go back to Jaina. And you better sleep, or I'll have Tahiri put you into a trance yourself."
He only grinned. "Jacen doesn't know what he's getting into, does he?" he asked.
Her smile stretched wider. "That's the general idea." She slid into the seat across from him. "I hope you don't mind. I'm going to hide in here until Tahiri and Jag actually talk."
Kyp swallowed something best left unidentified. "Tahiri and Jag? Why do they need to talk?"
Danni looked pityingly at him. "Oh yes, I forgot. You're a man and therefore blind to this sort of thing."
Kyp nearly choked. "'This sort of thing'?" he repeated incredulously. "Between Tahiri and Jag?"
Danni's eyes were dancing. "Does that explain a few things?" she asked mischievously.
"You," Kyp said, pointing a finger at her. "Explain. Now."
~~
Reviews make my day! Tell me what you think I did well or horribly. I appreciate constructive criticism and honest appraisals…
Thanks!
-Keth
~
