An hour into the Solo Quest's first jump into hyperspace from Csilla, Jacen sensed Jaina's awakening in the ship's medbay. Seeing that his vessel had another half an hour or so before it had to drop back out for a course correction, he left the cockpit and trotted to the medbay, where his confused sister was sitting up on the bed that Jacen placed her on.

When she looked at him, her confused expression became even more confused. "Jacen? Where am I? And why do you look like you're twenty years older?"

"Jaina," Jacen said, "I know this is going to sound unbelievable to you, so I'll try to be as slow in my explanation as possible."

"Start talking then," Jaina said.

And then Jacen began his explanation, starting all the way back to when they, their mother, Uncle Luke, and Aunt Mara all received the news of Chewbacca's death on Sernpidal. From there, Jaina grew more and more horrified as Jacen continued to relate the horrors of the Yuuzhan Vong War, which included the destruction of the Yavin 4 Jedi Academy, Anakin's death, Jaina's brief turn to her inner darkness in the Hapes Consortium, Jacen's own torture among the Yuuzhan Vong, and so much more. Even with the more positive aspects that sprung from the war, like Jaina's relationship to Jag and the Jedi's new philosophy in the Unifying Force, left her completely scared.

In between his extensive explanations, he would go back to the cockpit to make hyperspace dropouts, new course calculations, and renewed hyperspace jumps as the Solo Quest continued its destination for Denon.

When Jacen was finally done, after two hours of explanation, during which Jaina asked no questions nor did she interrupt otherwise, she was left with only one question:

"Can I have those positive memories back, Jacen?"

Jacen shook his head regrettably. "I can't give them back to you without all of the horrifying memories. Otherwise, the happy memories will collapse due to the horrifying memories that I retained for you being unable to fill in the gaps in your recall. From what Master Taru Durn told me back on Nam Chorios, when he answered a question similar to yours when I was almost finished training in mnemotherapy, the results could either lead to the following: One, the happy memories will simply fade away into non-existence, as if I myself led the memories to dissipate on their own when I committed the vein-routing technique.

"Or two: It could cause a new psychological breakdown in you, one that could be possibly worse than the one that you were just suffering from back on Csilla."

"But people have gaps in their memories all the time, Jacen," Jaina pointed out. "They're called suppressed memories. Just because someone may not be able to remember them, that doesn't mean that it'll collapse the rest of their memory of the time before that."

"Perhaps not," Jacen agreed. "But they can be stimulated by the senses, such as touch, taste, smell, a sight, a sound, and the memory can return. With what I did, I took those memories away from you so that nothing can return them to you, except for me.

"But even if a suppressed memory could not be stimulated, you're right, it still wouldn't cause any side effects in most beings who suffer from it. However, if I attempt to return these positive memories to you using a Force-technique, it would have disastrous results for your mind that even I cannot control, or even more well-practiced masters such as Taru Durn would be able to mitigate. Like the Unifying Force, in which a Jedi must maintain balance between their own inner light and darkness, so, too, must all memories be returned, good and bad alike, even if there's more bad than good, as it is in your case; that, of course, is where the comparison between the Unifying Force ends.

"Otherwise, the mind will collapse left by the unfilled gaps; right now, those gaps don't exist in your head because you didn't even know about the time that passed from the time we left for Dubrillion to now. Once I open the room up in your mind, where I give you only the good memories, your mind will not be able to handle it, even with all that I told you and everything else I could tell you that would make the positive memories make the remotest sense, never mind making your mind go insane again just from the emptiness in memory. What I have in me right now are your personal life experiences, which you have experienced firsthand, and even I can't fully understand the depth that they had on you. Only you can, which is why I can't simply tell you like I did; you need to have all of your memories back."

Jaina was left speechless again, and looked to the floor in contemplation. As Jacen looked at her, not knowing what to say to her, he saw that she was, indeed, no longer the woman she had grown into because of how the war had shaped her; she was that same bright teenager with a cheery, youthful optimism whose passion for technology was untainted by attempts to distance herself away from her friends and family for fear that they would one day die on her because of the Yuuzhan Vong.

Now, to Jaina, the Yuuzhan Vong were nothing more than a name to her, no different than that of the Killiks - which Jacen didn't bother to bring up the fact that he actually encountered some of them - or that of their mother's homeplanet of Alderaan. To her, the alien invaders were more like a ghost tale than an enemy that she had fought against for too many times to count.

And the reality that Chewie, Anakin, and so many of their friends had died had not really settled into the mind of this teenager trapped in a woman's body.

"Wait," Jaina said. "What if you give me all the memories back, but suppress the bad ones?"

Jacen shook his head. "That may possibly work on someone else, but not in your case. There are too many negative memories, Jaina, and the gaps between the positive ones would be too wide for your mind to either collapse from the emptiness, or simply reawakening the memories that I could suppress. And then you could fall back into the insanity that I helped you from."

Once more, Jaina fell into silence for a moment before she said, "Jacen... ten years of my life are gone because of you. Even if I pleaded for you to take them away for my mental health, over two-fifths of my life have essentially passed me by now. I can't relive that; even if I could begin to rebuild my life, I'll still have had a decade that I can never get back."

Jacen sighed before he walked over to Jaina and sat next to her on the medical bed. "Jaina, I'm sorry. If there had been another way, I would have taken it. But you were so insane back on Csilla that-"

"Why didn't you try to share this pain with me, instead of outright taking it from me, Jacen?" Jaina asked. "Our twin bond is what makes us stronger than when we're apart. I want those memories back, Jacen, but I want you to support me through them. Can we do that?"

Jacen thought about what Jaina said for a few moments. "Yes. I think we can. But we must begin that when we get back to Denon; this kind of process will obviously take some time, and I don't want us to be too distracted that I can't jump us out of hyperspace in time and stuff like that."

"How much longer will it be?" Jaina asked.

"Maybe another day or two," Jacen said.

"I can wait."