Anakin scowled at his brother. Great.

Jaina was looking a little worried, as if what Jacen had just said was undermining whatever stability her Imperial conditioning had brought to her fragged psyche.

Stepping back, he glanced at Tahiri, and she nodded.

"Okay, yeah," he said, "we've been slipping over the battle-plane a lot, but that's what you do when your girlfriend's closely involved as a go-between in clandestine peace negotiations. Honestly, I thought you'd approve?"

"They use me as the only person in this kriffed-up mess who can be on both sides simultaneously," Tahiri added. "According to the counsellor droid Admiral Scaur insists on assigning to monitor my behaviour, I'm a clinical schitzophrenic who refuses to admit the extent of her own brainwashing, suffering from severe Starhome Syndrome. According to High Priestess Ngaaluh, I'm a heresy-tainted religious convert who needs purified by a lot of masochistic bondage rituals." She flashed a grin. "I'm sure both sides would love me to be a bit closer to their idea of normal, but unfortunately for them, I'm stuck in the middle. With this idiot here, which helps. A lot."

Jaina and Jacen both frowned at that.

"Peace?" Alema Rar asked, with a suspicious curling of her lekku. "With the Vong?"

"The New Republic doesn't know how to beat them. They never did. They kriffed this up from the start. Jace has always been the one who's talked about not fighting. And he was right."

Now it was Jacen's turn to look confused. "So, she's talked you into being okay with leaving half the Galaxy in the hands of monsters?"

"They're not monsters when you get to know them. I'm practically married to one." Though Tahiri's grin reminded him that from the Yuuzhan Vong perspective, Jacen's reading of their relationship had been pretty accurate. Her own interpretation of her identity was a lot closer to the Yuuzhan Vong version, or a bloody-minded Tusken Raider, than anything Admiral Scaur or Uncle Luke would be comfortable with. Even when she was being human, as she put it, she had no more time for the Defence Force than she did for the Peace Brigade - she'd somehow become a militant Borsk Fey'lya supporter in her politics. But that didn't change the fact that she was who she'd always been. "There's a lot I can't really talk about - I mean, in terms of what I can tell you about the classified, clandestine stuff we do, not about my private life."

"I get the kinky sex bit," Alema Rar shrugged, flashing a teasing grin at Jacen, and trying to annoy the rest of them. Then her expression grew serious, and dubious. "But what exactly do you think the way forward is? How can we reach any kind of settlement with monsters like the Vong?"

"The starting point is trying to work that out, which makes a little more sense these days than Supreme Commander Sovv's attempts to fight them. Did you know that the Defence Force had a whole propaganda show going on, to encourage greater support for large-scale conscription? I've spent the past three years being reminded over and over again how right you were about the way we should approach this. We let them beat us, by fighting them the way we did."

Jacen frowned at that. "So who else knows about this?!"

Jaina cleared her throat. She was standing there with folded arms, trying to stop a cocky half-grin playing on her lips. "Me, for one. Just so you know, I'm not the complete idiot some people seem to think - I'm well aware of what you two have been up to, Little Brother."

Now it was Anakin's turn to feel idiotic. Tahiri just laughed, and slipped closer to him.

"I told you so," she murmured.

Jacen looked at Jaina in narrow-eyed disbelief. "You knew?!"

"Of course I did." She exhaled. "If nothing else, I no longer have to pretend to look the other way. So, yes, she's at least half-Vong, and yes, their relationship does my head in sometimes, but they're still exactly who they used to be..."

She seemed to pause, as if she'd just realised that that hadn't ever stopped Anakin and Jacen fighting before now.

Jacen looked like he might want to prove his point by winning yet another sparring match.

Why is that so important to you? Anakin wondered, fetching his lightsaber from its hiding-place inside its jacket.

"Listen," Jaina interjected, standing physically between the two of them, arms out so both of them were confronted by a raised palm, glaring at Anakin and then at Jacen. "Both of you," she growled. "I am still the eldest, and I am not gong to waste my lunchtime refereeing another of your lightsaber-measuring games."

Jacen gave a tut of disapproval, trying to gesture her aside. "Whatever Thrawn did to you, my fight isn't with you."

She gave him a funny frown, half-mom, half stormtrooper head-tilt. "I joined the Empire all by myself," she insisted. "Anakin understands that, so I'm not sure why you don't."

"Can we not just stop the Peace brigade here?" Tahiri asked.

Jacen gave a short, sad laugh. "You actually think I'm trying to do anything more than fix the timeline? You two are charging around here, getting in the way, when all we have to do is stop the Vong from kidnapping Lee and me… you were so determined to get back to your timeline that you never once thought that maybe I can't stand mine…"

Anakin frowned. "Why didn't you just say?"

"You never gave me a chance, did you? You only ever understood how to communicate with a lightsaber."

"Well," Alema Rar said, stepping forward suddenly to tap Jacen's blade aside with her own. "Why don't we all go and stop the Vong?"

Before anyone could come up with an answer to that one, the sound of footsteps interrupted them.

A lean young man was jogging down the street, followed by a muscular young alien girl with purple-and-grey striped fur. Both of them had lightsabers on their belt.

"Hey, hey, wait up."

The man was a few years older than them, his appearance showing no obvious hints of his Twi'lek ancestry, but his curving smile and athletic confidence left no doubt whose son he was.

"You're Jacen Syndulla, right?"

"That's me," Lothal's Jedi guardian agreed, his gaze flicking between the two Solo brothers. "Which of you is Jacen Solo?"

"This is getting out of hand," Alema Rar laughed. She leaned on Jacen's shoulder and gave him a friendly squeeze. "This one's your namesake. The idiot over there with the blonde girl holding his leash is Anakin."

"Come on," Jaina said, wrapping an arm around both her brothers' shoulders, leading them all off with Tahiri and Alema Rar on either wing. "Let's go and get some lunch. And we can fill in Captain Syndulla and his apprentice about this potential Peace Brigade ambush, and discuss how we're going to handle it..."