Part 1 of 3, Sanctuary
By Ketharil, who is really SaberBlade on tf.n, so don't worry, this isn't plagiarized.
Disclaimer: Star Wars isn't mine, just this little piece of it that I'm creating. Making no money, intending no harm, hoping to explore a bit of the world I love.
Description: Sanctuaries are personal. Understanding sanctuaries helps in understanding the person. Jaina looks back on the sanctuaries she's had.
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You find sanctuary in the strangest places. But strange or not, the places where you find sanctuary become the places where you can truly be yourself, and after a while, you no longer see the strangeness- only the sanctuary.
I've had lots of sanctuaries.
One of my first sanctuaries was my dad's ship, and those of you that don't consider that a strange sanctuary never met my dad... or his ship. When I was little, that ship was a whole world for me. I could race my brothers in the small corridors, running up and down and tagging each wall before spinning around to beat them to the next dead end. The three of us would cram ourselves around the dejarik table, and beg Mom and Dad until they came and squeezed themselves in on the edges, like bookends on a shelf full of kids. I used to have to sit on my dad's lap to be able to lean across the table and direct my dejarik pieces, and Jacen would sit in Mom's lap, and the two of us would play dejarik and ignore any advice from our parents. He won, of course, always– he was more patient than me, and he would set traps up and down the board. I'd see the traps and not care, and eventually I'd lose too many points, if not pieces, and I'd lose. But Dad always would laugh each time I'd send my holo pieces bravely marching through Jacen's plots, and so would I.
I could survive anything then.
But eventually, I outgrew that sanctuary. Oh, it's still a sanctuary of sorts for me still, but it's not the same. The same hallways I raced in seem smaller now– six steps running and I'm from one end to the other, and I've had to dash down the corridors in the panic of an emergency too many times for me to consider running in them a game. The dejarik table seems battered and old, and the holo pieces flicker and fuzz with static on the rare occasion that they deign to work. I can no longer crouch underneath the display in the gun turrets to hide from angry or annoyed friends and family; I don't fit in the special smuggling container Dad built for me to hide in when I was six. The Falcon is no longer a whole world to me. She is an aging, battered freighter that's seen better days, a ship that is so heavily modified it's a wonder any of her systems still run. Dad used to joke that she belonged in a museum... but the truth is that nowadays she'd fit in better in a scrap heap.
It's an odd kind of pain, to look back on an old sanctuary. The Falcon hurts too, on another level. She was Dad's first love. It hurt to see her after Chewie died, but it hurts worse now that Dad's gone too. It's a strange type of loss, attached to the loss of Dad, but separate. I've mourned Dad, and I'll miss him for the rest of my life. The Falcon is a barely-living reminder of him. At first, I could barely look at her without seeming to see my Dad tinkering with some jury-rigged system. I'd stand still, hoping that this time he'd turn toward me and give me that grin of his and wave me over to explain some obscure engine part to me, but the memories would fade and I'd be left standing alone in some empty hanger bay, staring at the Falcon with tears running down my cheeks.
And it hurts, because I'll step into the cockpit and see a loose wire and think, "Dad would have had that fixed days ago." Or I'll see the burn marks on the outside of her, and think, "Dad would never have let her get this scraped up."
I'm almost afraid that as the Falcon deteriorates, so do my memories of Dad. I know that's not the case, but still, it hurts to see something he loved begin to show age and wear and tear. And I do try to keep her together. She is my home, after all. But the engine and the shields have first priority, and then come the guns and life support. I haven't had time to work on the purely cosmetic, on the basic comfort of the ship. Not for years. And it hurts to look and somehow feel that I'm not taking good enough care of something my dad loved.
I said as much to Jacen, a year or so after Dad died, and all he did was look at me with that serious sad expression on his face and say quietly, "Dad loved you more, Jaina. He understands."
Jacen died only four days later, so I guess Jacen explained it to Dad in whatever world waits for us after death.
Jacen understood. Jacen always understood. He was the one who found my third sanctuary, the one on Yavin 4. But I'm getting ahead of myself; I should explain my second sanctuary next.
It was when I was in one of my pre-adolescent "I-really-am-an-adult" stages. I was mad at Anakin for something or another– I think it was jealously that he had completed some puzzle before me– and so to prove how much more grown-up and mature I was, I left in a huff. I was all of ten years old and I was lost in Coruscant. Well, I suppose I should clarify. I was lost in pre-Vong Coruscant. The planet-wide city Coruscant.
Not a good place for a ten year old girl to get lost.
But instead of getting kidnapped, sold into slavery, recognized and escorted home, or killed (all things which people have attempted to do to me on Coruscant, incidently), I ran into Zekk. And since to a ten year old girl a twelve year old boy is infinitely wiser and more experienced, I explained everything. It wasn't the first time I had met him, but it was the first time I had run into him without previously arranging to do so. And Zekk understood enough to know that I was lost and didn't want to admit it, and that I wanted to be somewhere that was my own and not my family's.
He was the one who found my second sanctuary. Looking back on it, I really think that it had been one of his sanctuaries, and that he had either grown out of it or moved on, because he led me straight to it without any detours and seemed to know exactly where it was.
It was a small abandoned caf shop in the lower levels of the city, almost two kilometers down from my family's quarters at the time. It was tucked up against the building's shadow, and the doors and windows had all been boarded up and sealed with some type of melted plastic. How long ago it had been abandoned was anyone's guess, but I remember that the broken pieces of the menu had advertised a cup of caf at half a credit... and I know that Dad had complained only a few days after I got that sanctuary that six credits for a cup of caf was exorbitant.
It was dark, filled with dead spinners and living ones and their webs, and if you stayed still for too long, some of the bigger spinners would start creeping around again. I'm still not afraid of spinners because of that sanctuary. I had been, when Zekk first helped me crawl through a thin opening at the top of one of the windows. But he had followed me in, and when I screamed and shrank back against him when a spinner the size of my foot scampered across the floor, he only laughed and picked it up. I was sure he was going to die– only Jacen, in my mind, could touch anything animalistic and creepy-crawly and live– but he held the spinner still and showed me the six sets of spinneretts, and even let the spinner bite him to show me how harmless it was. When he didn't die, and when the bite only bruised a bit, he had convinced me both that the sanctuary was safe despite the spinners and that he was my best friend.
I had that little abandoned room as my sanctuary until I left for the Academy on Yavin 4. I cleaned it up a bit, got rid of some of the dust and old webs, but mostly I left it the way it was. I wound up there at least once a week– more, if I was going through the same "I-am-an-adult" mood that had led me to the room in the first place. It was where I went to cry after being told that I was a cute little girl by some well-meaning dignitary when I was sure I was really a beautiful adult woman; it was where I wondered what it would be like if Zekk actually kissed me, and if we had kids would they have his green eyes or my brown ones? But it was also the place that I kept all the broken oily engine pieces that Mom wouldn't let me keep in my room, the place where I managed to make my first small shielding module actually fire up and start. It was the closest place I had to the average teenage girl's haven, and it was filled with spinners and dust and broken glass.
I suppose that explains a lot about why I am the way I am.
I left that sanctuary when I left Coruscant for Yavin 4 and my uncle's Jedi Academy. I despaired of finding a sanctuary on Yavin 4... there were less people than Coruscant, true, but these people were all Jedi or Jedi apprentices, and rather hard to lie to. Lying was a skill I learned much later in life; at fourteen, I hadn't quite learned how to believably lie, and so every time I tried to sneak out, I was caught by someone– usually Uncle Luke, sometimes by Kam Solusar or Tionne, three times by Streen, twice by Kyp Durron, and on one memorable occasion, by a Shistavanen Wolfman Jedi whose name I didn't catch, but proved quite capable of scaring me to death, lecturing me on curfew hours, and presenting my back to my uncle.
After that particularly disastrous attempt, Jacen confronted me about everything and I finally told him that I just wanted a place to go where I wouldn't have to worry about anything. And in that strange, absolutely clarity of understanding that the two of us sometimes achieved, he knew exactly what I wanted. A few days later, he showed me an abandoned storage room in the very base of the Temple, underground and safely away from prying eyes. He mentioned that he had found some sort of escaped creature down there a few days earlier, but thought I might like it anyways. He even promised that he'd try to keep most of the pesky animals away from the room for me.
Jacen had been stunned when I had found a spinner in the room and simply laughed and reached for it, rather than screamed and stumbled away. I kept the lone spinner with me in the room, and sometimes late at night I'd go down into the room to work on whatever mechanical problem I'd have. I'd always bring the spinner something to eat, and it grew to be nearly the size of my head. Raynar found the room once, back when he was still someone I considered my rival, and ran off screaming when my spinner dropped down from the doorway right into his face. I was rather pleased and gave my spinner a treat that night.
I built part of my lightsaber casing in that sanctuary, me hunched over a crate I used as a desk and my spinner clacking and clicking his first four legs together and madly spinning his web with his last six sets of legs. I never named my spinner; I simply called him "Spinner", and while he never acknowledged the name, he did learn to acknowledge me.
My sanctuary survived the destruction of the Temple, but my spinner didn't. I don't know if he died in the blast, if he evacuated before the Temple blew (a fancy of mine, that he knew something was wrong and that he had escaped), or if he lived through the explosion and simply chose never to return. Probably died. And I cried over a spinner, when I wouldn't let myself cry over Zekk or the Academy or any of the friends that I had so nearly lost or the innocence that I had surrendered by fighting for what I thought was right.
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