Part 3 of 3, Sanctuary
By Ketharil, who is really SaberBlade from tf.n, so don't worry, I didn't copy this. It's mine, all mine. Except for the fact that Star Wars doesn't belong to me in the first place. ::sigh:: details.
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The three of us went back to the Falcon together that night, where Kyp and I sat with Ben in the main hold, the two of us sitting on either side of him at the dejarik table, and we made him eat something. Kyp carried him to the crew's room, the one with three beds, one pushed against each wall. Anakin had slept in the middle one, and Jacen had the one on the left and I had always had the one of the right. Kyp put Ben down in my old bed, and I got the extra blankets out of the storage bin and made sure he would be warm. And while he cried himself to sleep, the two of us sat on the edge of the bed together in the darkness, stroking his hair and holding his hand and saying nothing.
We shut the door and went back to the main hold, and that was when Kyp and I could finally sit down and talk.
I didn't have to tell him that Jacen was gone; he knew that already. Whether he had learned that from the list of casualties or from a fellow survivor or if he just guessed it from my eyes, I'm still not sure. But whatever it was, I'm grateful he already knew. It made things easier.
He told me who hadn't made it. So many people– friends– missing forever. And Uncle Luke was gone. His words sounded hollow when he said that; even thinking about it now, years later, I still find it hard to believe that Uncle Luke– Luke Skywalker, savior of the galaxy– is gone.
That night I discovered my last sanctuary– the only sanctuary that I've ever found for myself.
It's funny, really, when I think about it. My father gave me one sanctuary, Zekk the next, my brother the third, my father again for the fourth, Jag for the fifth, and Kyp for the sixth. My sanctuaries have all been gifts, of a sort, from the men in my life. And granted, I have more male friends than female, and I seem to get along better with men than women, but it's kind of a strange coincidence.
And then I go and find a sanctuary all by myself, and of all the places I pick to go and feel safe, I pick the least likely.
Since that night, Kyp Durron has been my sanctuary.
He was definitely the least likely person for me to feel safe around. We had mended our differences in the First War, and granted, he understood what I had gone through when I had fallen to darkness then, but I never considered him as someone who would make me feel calm and peaceful. Being around Kyp usually made me jumpy– gave me that adrenaline rush where I knew we would start to banter back and forth. I used to get more alert around him, wound tighter and tighter for no good reason. I understand why now, but it was still a bit of a shock for me to discover that when Kyp holds me, I find the peace and acceptance of myself that all my sanctuaries gave me.
It started when we put a weeping Ben to sleep together, when I finally broke down sitting at the same dejarik table my whole family used to crowd around. He didn't have to say anything. All he did was slide around to my side of the table, put his arms around me, and let me cry.
I'm pretty sure I fell asleep against him that night, because the next I remember I'm waking up in the main quarters of the Falcon. I'd never slept in that bed before, and I know I wouldn't have picked that bed to sleep in even had I been exhausted. It belonged to my parents. Not me. Even when Jacen and I went on missions, even when the Falcon had been completely cleaned out after that mess on Ettniv VI, both of us still slept in our childhood beds in the crew quarters: him on the left, and me on the right.
I suppose when I woke up, that was when it finally hit me. I'd been clinging so hard to the past, and it had slipped completely through my fingers. Kyp, being Kyp, had cut clean through to the center of the problem and solved it in his direct way. Ben was in the child's bed, and I was in the adult, the way it should have been. Kyp, of course, was sleeping out in the hold, unwilling to disturb either of us, but then he tends to be rather stupid when it comes to himself.
The conversation the two of us had that morning was among the strangest I'd ever had.
"You're the last member of the Jedi Council left, you realize," I'd pointed out.
He had only shrugged. "And you're the last Rogue. We'll learn to live with it."
"I'm the only family Ben has left. I'm not letting go of him."
"No. You shouldn't," he'd agreed. "I don't think anyone will try to take him from you. We're probably not going to be able to mount another attack anytime soon as it is."
"No, I didn't think so." I'd paused, and then I remember speaking before I realized what I was saying. "You're going to stay, aren't you?"
He had glanced up at me, gaze sharp and dark. "Do you want me to?"
"Yeah. Do you want to stay?"
"Yeah."
I don't think he quite knew what he was in for, agreeing to stay. But there weren't that many of us Jedi left, and in all likelihood we would have wound up close anyways because of that. But having him near me was reassuring. He was my sanctuary. I could go to him and wrap my arms around him and shut my eyes and rest my head on his chest and feel all the horror and fear drain completely out of me. The first few times I did that, I don't think he knew quite how to respond. His hands would come up to awkwardly lie on my back, and I don't think he understood. But soon he would reach for me as often as I would reach for him, and one day we reached for each other at the same time, and I wondered if perhaps I had become his sanctuary, or if sanctuaries could work two ways. And in a few weeks I'd moved him out from the main hold and into the main quarters with me. We'd sleep together– just sleep, nothing more intimate– in the same bed, and just knowing that there was someone less than a meter away who would be there for me if I needed him was able to keep me from completely breaking down.
Three years after the three of us started our odd family on the Falcon, Zekk died. He'd stayed with us once or twice and had usually been sectors away from us, but he was the last link to my childhood, and I remember crying by myself down in the aft gun turret. Ben found me, and he was alarmed and tried to cheer me up. And I looked at him and finally realized that he was ten, and when I was ten, Zekk had given me my second sanctuary since I had outgrown the Falcon.
I told Kyp about the sanctuaries that night, and he understood and told me about his own havens. And the next morning, we landed in a refugee city and Kyp took Ben into the city and I stayed behind and created a sanctuary out of the old smuggling compartments that had saved five lives so long ago on the first Death Star. And Kyp and Ben came back, bringing a meal that none of us had cooked and we had a small celebration for no reason other than cheering me up. Ben had even brought me back a small bag of sugared candies.
And after dinner, I told him that I was upset because Zekk had died, and I explained that when I was ten Zekk had given me a sanctuary on Coruscant. And I gave him the pitiful sanctuary I'd made out of the smuggling compartment: I'd piled it high with our spare blankets and pillows, and given him the extra datapad and the few droid parts he'd been randomly tinkering with. Not much, compared with what I'd had, but all I had to give him. And Ben had understood, and had thanked me with a hug and a kiss on my cheek.
It's hard to explain what Ben is to me. More than a cousin and less than a son; not quite a nephew, though that's closer, but not a little brother either. It's harder to define his relationship with Kyp, who seems to be some combination of brother and friend and uncle. But Ben's family, the only real blood family that I had left, and knowing that he had understood what I had tried to give him comforted me.
He'd slept in the compartment that night, and I had gone to my bed silently, sat on the edge, curled up and cried again. Kyp had reached over and pulled me against him and let me cry, and when I had finished he bent his head and kissed me. And that was the first night when I lay quietly in the dark, happily in my sanctuary– Kyp's arms securely around me, even in his sleep– and wondered if our children would inherit his eyes or mine.
It took us half a year after that before we were married.
When we celebrated Ben's twelfth birthday, there were four of us. Our daughter wound up with Kyp's eyes and my hair, and I can't say I'm disappointed, since when she turned three her brother was able to open vibrant green eyes and coo delightedly at her.
We decided not to name them after the dead. There were too many dead to honor, too much for our children to live up to, so we gave them new names, names neither of our families had used before. Ben helped us pick Shesha's name. We overheard it in a market in Kerish and learned that it meant "pretty", and Ben was quite adamant that his first sibling– for he declared that any child of ours would be his sibling– would be a girl and she would be beautiful, so he picked the name Shesha if the child was a girl. And she was, and so Shesha she is. None of us are quite sure where Mitkal's name came from, but Kyp was the one to settle on it, and it fits our son. Shesha calls him Mit, for short.
And it's strange, so strange, for me to sit and watch Ben humoring Shesha and Mitkal by letting them race up and down the Falcon's halls. And occasionally the three will be playing dejarik and they'll call for Kyp and I to come in and sit with them, and it will be the five of us squished in around the table in the main hold, Kyp and I on the ends like bookends on a shelf full of children... just like my parents used to do for me. And sometimes everything will catch up with me, and I'll have to swallow past the lump in my throat and seek my sanctuary, and Kyp will open his arms and pull me close, and I'll be able to blink away the tears and breathe past the tightness in my chest.
He does the same with me, sometimes, which is why I think I might be his sanctuary as well. Once Shesha was playing with his hair, tugging on the strands of it falling over his shoulders, laughing and giggling and tangling her small hands in his hair. And she said something like Daddy's hair was a different color than Ben's– Ben having decided to grow his own hair out like Kyp's, something that both Kyp and I wondered what Luke and Mara would say about if they could inform us of their feelings on the matter.
And he had gotten an odd look on his face, and later that night, once we had tucked everyone into the crew quarters and shut the door so that Ben could read his brother and sister a night story, Kyp had turned to me and kissed me and held me and wondered aloud what he had ever done to deserve a little girl who looked up at him with my beautiful eyes and called him "Daddy".
And I didn't really have a reply for that.
But I let him hold me, and reveled in knowing that I was in my sanctuary.
Ben's eighteen now, and every time I look at him, I can see bits of Mara and bits of Luke. He's learning to fly a Minnishan fighter, and I tell him stories of Rogue Squadron and know he dreams of rebuilding it. But there's still not enough of us in the resistance to chance that, and so I feel relieved that his dreams are simply dreams, and the battle won't start and take him from me just yet. Shesha's six, and sometimes reminds me so much of Jacen that it hurts. She's much the same as him, strong in the Force and uncannily good at communication and melds. She's her daddy's little girl, much like I was, and if Kyp ever doubts his worth, all he has to do is look at his adoring daughter to know that he's helped create something to be proud of. Mitkal is almost four, and sometimes Kyp will look at him and get that faraway look on his face that means he's thinking of the past, so I think that he looks like someone from Kyp's side of the family. He's inquisitive and reckless, and I swear that it's his fault that the hair at my temples is grey. I can't decide if he takes after my father or his, but I'm already certain that the galaxy will be faced with another heartbreakingly handsome scoundrel in another two decades.
Ben's bequeathed his smuggling compartment sanctuary to Shesha, because his fighter is his sanctuary now. It's strange to think of how old my children are getting.
Three days ago, when we were on Ord Mandell, in the ruins of a hanger, Shesha found a spinner industrially building it's web in a corner. She came for her daddy to come and kill the monster, but I went with her instead and found a tiny little spinner, barely the length of my finger but fighting so hard to create a web. And I picked it up, and showed Shesha and Mitkal the four front legs and the six spinneretts, and let it bite my finger– a mere pinch, it was so small– and showed them the harmless bruise that it made. And now we have a little spinner building harmless webs in our smuggling compartment, trapping the little insects that live on the Falcon and growing larger on the sneaked treats I pretend not to see Shesha and Mitkal taking down to him.
Kyp tells me I'm sentimental and soft, and I point out that he's the one who lets his children clamber onto his lap and play at steering the ship when we're in hyperspace and there's no need to even be the cockpit.
And he just laughs and pulls me close and tells me that he loves me, and I smile back and tell him that I love him too, and I don't think about how strange it is that he's my favorite sanctuary of all the ones I've known.
And even though we hide in remote corners of space and make dozens of hyperspace jumps before landing on an inhabited planet, even though we teach our children the Jedi Code when they've met only six other Jedi in their lives, even though I sometimes wonder how my children can be so happy with such a strange existence... even though all of this gets in the way...
I have my family, and I have Kyp, and he's my sanctuary.
And I find that I'm happy.
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Congratulations, you've reached the end! Thanks for sticking it out through all the bad times I put our characters through.
I wrote this as a challenge to myself: I normally hate first-person-narration fics, so I decided to try and make myself write in first-person. This is the result. I also usually rely on dialogue to carry the story, and so I wanted to try something with less dialogue… and wound up with almost none! (strange…)
Please, tell me what you think. I really do appreciate constructive criticism, favorite lines, parts you think didn't flow… anything to help me improve my writing.
And yes, I know I have a problem- I seem to enjoy killing characters off a little too much. My apologies for the vast number of casualties produced in this fic.