Part 2 of 3, Sanctuary
By Ketharil, who is the same as SaberBlade on tf.n, so don't panic, this isn't plagiarized. And let's see, still don't own Star Wars, still only out to have fun, still exploring the possibilities inherent in this world I love playing with….
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I kept that third sanctuary until Aunt Mara became my mentor. For such a brief time, I had a fourth sanctuary: the Crystal, a Headhunter... my Headhunter. My own ship. She was my fourth sanctuary. I could climb into her and force myself out of Yavin's greedy gravity and up into the stars, where I could plot an orbit and simply sit and look out over the black space and the silver stars and the glowing golden orb of Yavin. Or I could grip the controls and send the Crystal dancing and weaving across the night sky, so much like flying the Rock Dragon or the Falcon but so much smaller, so much sleeker, more responsive, tighter turns, faster spins.
But so soon after I gained that sanctuary, I lost it. The First War started when I was only sixteen and ended just after I turned twenty-one. I think I had something like ten different retreats in those brief and chaotic five years. A quiet room off the Council's chambers, an empty board room on a transport ship, a field near one of the bases, a hanger bay supply shed, a windswept rooftop, that rock on Hapes that Tenel Ka and Lowie and I shared, even a beach on Mon Cal for a few glorious days.
But none of these were true sanctuaries. Havens, certainly, places I could retreat to and let everything and nothing sink in. But not mine, not truly sanctuaries.
Jag helped me find my next sanctuary, oddly enough. My fifth sanctuary was a small Corellian restaurant, a little hole in the wall in a littler city on a small, unknown moon of an insignificant planet. The fact that I can't remember the names of the city, moon, or planet attests to their unimportance. But the restaurant was The Diamond, and Jag and I went there once and loved it for the simpleness and peace– things both of us sought after that final chaotic battle.
It was my sanctuary for maybe a year before it was destroyed. Jag and I met there occasionally, but more often I would go there by myself, order a table and simply sit and watch the locals laugh and talk and live unencumbered lives. I went there to cry when Jag died in that first surprise attack, but found that I couldn't mourn him. He had died the way he had wanted to, in battle fighting for something he had believed in. He had told me during the First War that if he died, he wanted to die well. So instead of crying, I ordered Corellian whiskey like he preferred and drank to his memory. I'm glad I did, because in two more months The Diamond was destroyed in another of the attacks.
So the Second War started when I was twenty-three, and it's been years since then and there's finally an end in sight. Not much of an end, since they're going to win, but it will soon be over simply because there will be no more of us left to fight.
It's going to be hardest for those who survive, I think. Because as our numbers dwindle down, it grows more and more risky to attack ourselves. We're forced to turn into fugitives and cowards, fleeing away when we want to fight, knowing that it's better off that we survive to teach the next generation rather than getting everyone who knows how it once was killed off in some futile show of resistance.
Kyp gave me my next sanctuary, my sixth. Dad died early on, just a few months after Jag, and Mom didn't last more than a few weeks after him. She simply fought and fought and fought, and refused to stop until she had no energy left. Jacen said that she died of a broken heart; I think I agree with him, as melodramatic as it sounds.
Kyp's always been the one to force me to mourn. I tend to bottle emotions up; I barely attended Anakin's funeral in the First War because I just couldn't face all my emotions. Kyp marched me to Anakin's cremation, and he was the one who dragged me to the ceremony where we launched Dad's casket into Corellia's star, when Jacen was the only support Mom had because I was in no shape to help anyone. But when Mom died, we had to evacuate the base and leave her body behind. There was no funeral ceremony, no ashes to inter. Kyp had nothing to badger me into, and there were no closing rites that I sought to avoid. So instead, I finally sought him out and cried on his shoulder, and he said nothing.
But the next day, just before I shipped out with Jacen on the Falcon, he tossed me a datapad with a single point highlighted against a star chart. It took me a few weeks before I found time to go there, and when I did, I discovered a small grassy planet, unpopulated and with no real life-forms inhabiting it. It was windy, with heavy gravity and long-stalked waving blue grasses spreading from horizon to horizon.
Jacen and I spent two days there, the first time, and kept returning there between missions. I had never really shared a sanctuary before, but it was no hardship to share with Jacen. I had almost lost him more times than I believed possible, and after losing our parents and younger brother, I think both of us were afraid to let each other out of our sight. We clung tight together as we hadn't done in years: we were the twins again, Jacen-and-Jaina, Jaina-and-Jacen, the same being split into two. We went on missions together, we watched each other's backs, we saved each other's lives, we ate each other's cooking, we shared the same risks, we slept in the same room, we laughed at the same jokes.
He understood me better than I think I understood myself.
The year I had with Jacen was both the best and the worst year I had gone through during the war. The start of it was marked with the death of our parents, and midway through it, Aunt Mara died. Mara had always been invincible to me– even with the First War and her disease, I'd never actually believed that she was mortal. But like everyone else, she couldn't escape death when it came for her in the form of a poisoned amphistaff.
Wedge died that year too, and so did Gavin. It hit Uncle Luke hardest, I think, but the impact on me wasn't little either. That year saw the death of Rogue Squadron, something that had weathered the Emperor, the Remnant, and the First War. Watching the Rogues die hurt, that same ache that watching the Falcon grow shabby produced.
But during that year, I had Jacen. I was never alone, something that I'd feared all throughout the First War. And we had Kyp's planet, that tiny ball of soil and grass and wind and rain, and we had each other. And it was somehow enough to give us hope and strength and courage enough to continue onward. So we did continue onward, mission after suicidal mission, barely escaping with our lives but giddy with the relief that both of us had survived.
And then came the disastrous final attack on Coruscant, when our numbers where cut in half on the planet before we could escape. The half that remained alive to escape lost a third of the survivors on the way out. And that left us with only a third of us left alive after the entire fiasco.
Jacen was part of that first half. I'm still surprised that I wasn't– I think I went into some form of shock when he died. I felt that briefest second of agony from him before he was gone forever, and after that I don't remember feeling much of anything. I remember vague snippets of fighting: hundreds of Vong, everywhere I looked; fallen Jedi that I had trained with; fallen soldiers who had died fighting those that had taken their homes; wreckage of landing craft; smoke belching out into the already-polluted air; vegetation– dangerous vegetation– absolutely everywhere; allies and friends absolutely nowhere. I remember the call of the Dark Side, and how hard that was to resist.
But I was part of the lucky third who survived Coruscant. I think I'm doomed to survive. I was one of the least injured, since I had escaped with only a broken collarbone and a dislocated shoulder. One of the medics set me straight, and I remember hearing my shoulder grind back into place with that strange grainy noise of scraping bone. All I remember thinking is, "That's not a good noise," and then blackness. I passed out, I'm told. I call it fainting, but I guess it's all the same, though "passed out" makes it sound a bit less delicate and a bit more noble.
I woke up and found myself bandaged and lying on the floor of the medical bay, an anonymous fallen fighter squashed between two more badly wounded soldiers. No one stopped me from getting up, though my top left half hurt like the Corellian nine hells, and no one cared when I left to find out what was going on– there were too many desperate cases, too many lives hanging by threads, for them to care about a patient who checked herself out a week before she should have.
I don't think I stopped moving for a day and half after I left the Med Center. Kyp found me towards the end, when I was starting to see blackness at the edge of my vision, and I remember being surprised that he had Ben with him, of all people. But one look at Kyp's eyes told me why, and so I said nothing when Ben ran to me and flung his arms around me and began to cry. He jarred my shoulder and I nearly passed out again, but Kyp had stepped up and reached around Ben to support me.
I suppose that we made a strange picture, the three of us, hugging each other in the middle of the ship's hanger bay, but everyone else seemed to ignore us and walked by without breaking stride.
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