-Stars-
Keeping their relationship hidden means they can't have a normal courtship... not that they ever have, anyway. It becomes their custom to wait until everyone else has retired before they meet. Jaina feels a bit like a teenager again, the teenager she never really got to be. While not being able to talk about it is a strain, the sneaking around part is actually kind of fun.
Tonight, Kyp has found a secluded spot outside the Temple, and he's brought along a crate and a blanket. Jaina aims her glowlamp at the ground so they don't trip as they make their way through the dark.
It's a clearing, with a gorgeous view of the night sky, where Kyp declares they'll have their picnic.
"A picnic, huh?" she asks.
"We've only ever had one, and it was horrible," he says. "I demand a do-over."
Jaina laughs. "Okay. I'll agree to that. As long as the alcohol is better."
"Of course it is."
Kyp spreads the blanket out, pulls a bottle of wine and two glasses from the crate. The moonlight and stars are bright enough to light the clearing almost to dusk levels, plenty of light by which to crack open the bottle and see to pour.
Jaina settles on the blanket and accepts the glass he hands her. "Since this is a do-over, I propose the following: No secrets between us. No lies. We're both on the Council, so we don't need to keep any of that away from each other. We're partners, and whatever else comes after that. No one gets between us."
He holds his glass up. "No agendas we don't share. With the exception of lifeday surprises and the like."
She grins. "Okay, I'll give you that one."
"Partners," he agrees. "Together, or not at all."
They clink glasses, and sip at the wine. Kyp puts the opened bottle back in the crate so it doesn't get knocked over, and pulls Jaina into his lap. She leans back against his chest and looks up at the sky. The Hapes Consortium exists in the Transitory Mists, so the night sky isn't black with white specks of starlight. It's dark, certainly, but the sky above them has faint blues, purples, greens, and reds: distant gases of a long-vanished nebula, not dense enough to harm the inhabitants, but enough to cloak the Consortium from the rest of the galaxy.
"That one right there," Kyp says, pointing to a bright object just above the trees, "is Gallinore. And the reddish one over there is Hapes."
Technically, it's their stars, not the planets themselves, but Jaina knows what he means. "You study astronomy or something?" she asks.
"Nah. I looked it up on my datapad before we came out here."
She snickers.
"You can't see the core from here," he says, "the Mists are too dense for the light to make it."
"Mm. I've been to so many planets. Sometimes I forget to appreciate the galaxy for itself. Can't see the forest for the trees, and all that."
She turns her head a little, studying his profile against the night sky. "When I was younger..."
"Hmm?"
"I was convinced I was going to die. I wasn't going to make it through the war with the Yuuzhan Vong. I told myself that I couldn't get involved with you because my death would hurt you."
He turns to look at her, her face faintly illuminated by one of Shedu Maad's three moons. Only one is up, the other two won't rise until after dawn. "Is that why?"
"And then, when I survived, Jacen asked me what I planned to do about you now that I wasn't dead. I don't know how he knew what I'd been thinking. I never told him. I said I didn't know, and then said that I'd thought about falling for you, but it wasn't a bright idea to fall in love with your mentor. I kept telling myself, over and over, that I didn't want this. Even up to when I married Jag, I was telling myself you were just my friend."
Kyp brings a hand up, strokes the side of her face. "I kept telling myself I'd only wanted you because I was lonely. I told myself that for thirteen years. I finally accepted it when I broke things off with Thelia, but I figured you'd never be mine."
"Is that why you shaved your head?" she asks with a snicker.
His grin is a flash of teeth in the moonlight. "One of them."
Jaina twists to straddle his lap, then sits between his legs with her own around him. She threads her fingers through his hair. "Your hair has always reminded me of starlight," she says after a minute. "Bits of light in the dark."
"So you don't mind the grey?"
"Please. My ex has white in his. Why would I mind? It's hair."
"Good to hear, because it's only going to get worse."
"Wanna hear a secret?"
"What?"
"I've got a few of my own. They appeared after . . . after Jacen. I just pull them out when I find them."
He snickers. "Really? That means you started going grey at thirty-three, too!"
"It's only two, and they're on my left temple."
Jaina rubs his cheek with the pad of her thumb, wanting to memorise his face by feel, since she knows the look of him by heart. She wants to say the words, but she isn't quite ready yet. This isn't the right time.
"Oh, look!"
Kyp points up, and Jaina cranes her neck to watch a meteor shower blaze overhead.
"I know it's debris burning up in the atmosphere," she says, "but it's so pretty."
"You're supposed to wish on those," he tells her.
"What would I wish for? I have everything I want."
He pulls her close, and his mouth finds hers in the dark. As he kisses her, she amends, Almost everything. But soon.
