Beyond - Legends Shadowmoth (AU, Jacen Solo, OCs, Enter!verse, Angstember 2024)

Title: Shadowmoth
Author: ViariSkywalker

Timeframe: 43-51 ABY
Characters: Jacen Solo, OCs, possible EC cameos
Genre: AU, angst, drama, introspection

Summary: No one can be anyone but who they are. (Or, Jacen Solo's metamorphoses.)

Notes: This is my response to the 2024 Angstember challenge, taking place entirely in my Enter!verse AU, which began many years ago with Enter the Foreign. There will be major spoilers for EtF in this collection, as well as spoilers for the rest of the 'verse.

Spoiler: Jacen in the Enter!verse...

For more of Jacen in this AU, check out:

• Sacrifice – Jacen and Jaina's final confrontation (43 ABY; vignette)
• The Lands of the Dead – 8 years before the events of EtF, the Starskip twins are captured by the Sith and must fight to survive (43-49 ABY; short story)
  
• Here There Be Monsters – Jacen saves a Sith initiate from a monster and tries his hand at mentorship (47 ABY; vignette)
  
• Metamorphosis – Jacen thinks about being a shadowmoth (47 ABY; vignette)
  
• Enter the Foreign – in which Anakin Skywalker winds up in Ben Skywalker’s crapsack future and joins his fight against the Sith Empire; also featuring Allana Djo Solo, Tahiri Veila, and many more (51 ABY; epic)
• Enter the Drabble – a series of drabbles set (mostly) in the Enter!verse, featuring an array of characters (drabble collection; in-progress)

Disclaimer: Jacen doesn't belong to me. If he did, I would have treated him a lot better than I have in this 'verse. The title is a reference to Matthew Stover's The New Jedi Order: Traitor.

Enjoy!

---

“We are playing the same game we have been playing ever since Myrkr:
we are playing ‘Who is Jacen Solo?’ ”

—Vergere, The New Jedi Order: Traitor


Index:​

Ashes to Ashes | 43 ABY | His sister is dead, and he’s still here
(prompt #30)

Beyond Repair | 43 ABY | Jacen tries to heal
(prompt #7; prompt #14)



*Angstember 2024 prompts in green
*Angstober 2023 prompts in purple

~~

 

Title: Ashes to Ashes
Timeframe: 43 ABY

Summary: His sister is dead, and he’s still here

Notes: Takes place right after Sacrifice

Prompts Used:
- No. 30: All we are is dust in the wind | Wasteland | Left for Dead | “You’re finally awake.”

---

Ashes to Ashes


The escape pod had left a gruesome scar in its wake, burning a wide swath through the field as it tore up crops and blackened the soil beneath. Even if his rescuers could afford the cost of removing the wreckage, the fuel and solvents leaking from the pod had already done their damage. Restoring the land would require a herculean effort, and credits. Far too many credits.

“You’re finally awake.”

Jacen turned to look over his shoulder. The voice belonged to the older woman, the one who’d found him first. Her dark brown skin was weathered from long days spent under her world’s sun, toiling alongside her spouse and their agro-droids, and her steel-gray curls were arranged in a tightly braided crown not unlike the one his mother sometimes wore. That thought brought with it a flash of bitter regret, one that sat in his chest like a breath he couldn’t expel.

“Wasn’t sure if you’d make it,” the farmer continued, stopping next to him to gaze out at the destruction his vessel had wrought on her land. “You were in and out for a few days, but I guess you’re made of stronger stuff than you look.”

“Maybe,” he said in a hoarse voice. All he’d had to drink since the crash was the glass of water left at his bedside, and whatever else the farmers had managed to get into him while he was flirting with consciousness. “I’m sorry about your field.”

“You’re alive,” the farmer said, his sense of her resigned but grateful. “Crops can be resown, and the land will heal in time, but you’ve only got one life.”

His eyes drifted from the melted slag of his pod to the ashes scattered across the charred ground. Without meaning to, he touched his fingers to the slim silver cylinder hanging from his belt, and this time the regret was a wave swelling around him, rendering him powerless as it crested overhead and dragged him under.

Burning was so permanent; he should have buried her instead. How could he have let her disappear forever? How could he stand here now, watching what was left of her smolder, accepting kindness from strangers whose lives he’d probably ruined? It was a mockery of everything she’d stood for, everything she’d bled and died for. It was a mockery of his own past self. She’d tried to tell him that, hadn’t she?

Force, it should have been him in there, cremated in the inferno and scattered on the wind, his remains poisoning the farmer’s field while his sister lived on.

“One life,” he murmured, unable to break contact with Jaina’s lightsaber. Even without looking, he could tell the farmer was glancing down at the weapon on his belt, but there was no apprehension in her presence. “It isn’t worth much.”

“I don’t know about that,” she replied, and he turned just enough to see her lips crack a faint smile. “Every life has its worth. And like I said, you’re made of stronger stuff, to survive what you did.” She lowered her chin, clearly indicating the wound in his side, the one she’d helped bandage. “You’re like this land. You’ll heal in time. Won’t be easy, but few things worth doing are.”

He turned fully to face her, and though they couldn’t be more different in appearance or life experience, he was reminded of another old woman he’d known. He could almost see her sharp, soulful gaze, the feathered crest on her head ruffling gently as a genuine smile lit her avian face. “That’s an awful lot of sage wisdom to pass along to the stranger who destroyed your crops and ruined your livelihood,” he said wryly.

“Would it appeal more to your guilty conscience if I broke down weeping instead? Or would you prefer accusations and empty threats?”

He almost smiled despite himself. “Something tells me a threat from you would hardly be empty.”

“Please.” She gestured casually at his hip. “As if I don’t recognize a lightsaber when I see one.” Her brow furrowed deeply as she regarded him. “You said you’re sorry, and I can tell you mean it. That’s enough for me, Jedi.”

His skin prickled at her words. “I’m not a Jedi anymore.”

The farmer shrugged and let out a sigh as she looked out over her land. “Well whatever you are, it’s past time for you to eat something. Come on back to the house; Bray’s fixed you breakfast.”

She held out her arm to him – sturdy, dependable, no-nonsense – and after a last look at the blackened carcass of his escape pod, he took her arm and allowed her to bear some of his weight as she led him away from his sister’s grave.


~~

 

That\s a different Jacen with Jaina in that grave being led away by the woman who rescued him. I like to see where you take him on this adventure

 

Replies while I have some free time! Still working on my next entry, hopefully I'll have something for you by the end of this week!


@Mira_Jade

Eeee, I'm always excited to hear that one of my fics merits a reread! I reread it myself before writing this to get into the right mood and mindset and it was a little rough, emotionally.

A lot of the time I'll start writing a story somewhere in the middle, just going off vibes until I find the narrative thread I want to follow, but what's great about doing these shorter ficlets is that I don't feel as much of a need to "properly" set the scene, I guess? So this beginning was the first thing I wrote, and then I more or less wrote the whole thing in order (again, not how I usually operate ), and I was really just working off of the vibes and this image I had in my head of Jacen staring out at the wreckage as it smolders in the field, and how it would impact the farmers who rescued him. And it really is like his whole life in microcosm, with the destruction he left behind him as Darth Caedus (in this 'verse, anyway)... and we know the consequences from those actions are going to continue to ripple well into the future.

This makes me so happy to hear! I can't always spend tons of time developing them all, but I do my best to make each OC feel as real as the canon characters, as well as making them feel like they belong in the GFFA.

It does indeed

Another reread! Hmm, now I wonder if we'll need to see that story from Jacen's POV...

As soon as she started talking to Jacen, she just sort of popped into my head fully formed, it was great.

I couldn't resist

I love everything about this, Mira.

Hee, I'm looking forward to it, too.

The Vergere connection cropped up as I was writing, without my planning for it, but it felt completely right.

lolll fair

RIGHT?

No use trying to fix anything on an empty stomach.

lol yeah, I thought maybe I'd eased off the angst a little too much, so I had to bring it full circle.

I'm really glad you're enjoying it! And I'm thrilled to be writing again after how relentless DRL has been and how empty my creative well has been because of it. I think having that time off actually ended up helping me more than if I'd tried to write every day. Whatever it was, I'm excited to be back at it, and I have so many little stories I want to tell for these Angstember prompts (and maybe some of last year's Angstober prompts as well), so stay tuned!




@earlybird-obi-wan

The destination may be set already, but I hope the journey to get there will have a few surprises. Thanks for reading!



Like I said above, no new story for now, but I'm working on it and hope to having something finished soon!

 

Yaaasss!!! I hope you enjoy!

(I have seven partially written ficlets for this thread already, plus like seven or eight ideas for additional ficlets... now if I can just get them all written! )

 

How utterly poignant! His reflexive comparison to Leia and memories of Jaina fuel his regret/guilt etc. The farmer's kindness coupled with the fact he's going to be there for a while may lay the groundwork for 'starting over', as much as he can.

 

I always show up eventually, right?

LOL supposedly

I just love this opening. It sets the scene - tells us the setting and what effect Jacen has had on it and its inhabitants - and gives us an insight into what still matters to Jacen, deep down, or he wouldn't even be noticing these things. I think that's something you do superlatively in this 'verse: your Enter!verse!Jacen may be a Sith, but he's still recognizably himself every step of the way. I honestly would have thought such a thing was impossible after LotF, but even though I don't think canon!Jacen ever would have turned to the dark side, you make that possibility - well, possible, and actually believable. This is the sort of Sith Jacen would be if he ever did choose that path.

Such excellent imagery *chef kiss* And as an asthmatic myself, yeah, that's really an appropriate physical parallel for that emotion.

She's right, and yet it's a generosity that not everyone would extend, and it tells us so much about her in so few words that she is that sort of person.

You can just feel the bone-deep regret here, and the immense loss of Jaina not only for Jacen, but for the galaxy

I love this, I love comparing the farmer to Vergere, and I also love that so many of Jacen's mentors and people he held in the highest esteem, as those who had qualities worth emulating, have been women. And that last line is another whisper of who Jacen was, and still isn't done being, deep down; so much more organic and convincing than that awful prefacing of chapters with old jokes in Invincible that it's almost damning you with faint praise to mention that in the same breath as your writing. Suffice it to say that you maintain Jacen's sense of humor without either being jarring or freezing him in amber at 13, and I love it; whether dark or light, this is the adult Jacen we should have gotten in the profic and didn't.

He's not wrong He's also still insightful and respectful; I am just so impressed with how incredibly well you balance all the conflicting elements this version of Jacen embodies.

She's so practical, I love it Although of course there's that shiver of emotional turmoil and foreboding in Jacen's reaction. Gotta get a bit more angst in

Oh, wait, here's the angst

But seriously, you know how much I love well drawn, complex, in-character angst that doesn't take the easy way out, and precious few writers manage that as well as you do. Is it weird to say that your angst brings me joy? Because it does; no matter how dark the story may be, it's so artistically done, and so insightful, and so poetic, that I hold it close to my heart and come back to it over and over again. Can't wait for the next installment here, babe (get back to work! )

 

@Findswoman

I really enjoyed playing with the irony of the situation, that the farmer doesn't know who Jacen really is and has no idea of the true import of that crashed escape pod and what it means to him, how much loss it represents for him. I can tell you that this is set in the prime Enter!verse, so this is the Jacen we will eventually meet again in EtF, which made this all the more interesting and heartbreaking to write. The farmer isn't Vergere, but she shares a similar pragmatic, no-nonsense outlook I think. Certainly enough to remind Jacen of his old mentor. But we'll get to see more of the farmer in the next story, which I've finally finished! I definitely didn't mean to take eight months to do so, but hopefully it will be a good expansion of this first vignette! Thank you so much for this lovely review, and I hope you continue to enjoy the series!




@WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

I didn't realize it at the time, but this little one-shot really ended up being the prelude to a much longer one-shot that I'm finally ready to share, so we'll get to see Jacen explore his grief further, as well as the idea of starting over. Thanks so much for reading!




@Gabri_Jade

At risk of repeating comments I've made on every other Jacen story I've written: I am always very happy to hear this. Which sometimes feels like a weird thing to feel when I disagreed so strongly with the official narrative, but you and I have already talked about this at length. If my version of Jacen comes across as in-character despite the path he's taken, I definitely consider that a win.

Why thank you

I'm honestly still kind of amazed at how quickly and clearly this farmer manifested in my head as I started writing her. Isn't writing awesome?

Not an easy loss to recover from

You know my take on Vergere (obviously colored by the fact that I only read the NJO through in its entirety exactly once, twenty years ago): I don't think everything she did was necessarily good or right, and I think Luke and the others were wise to be wary of her after she and Jacen escaped the Yuuzhan Vong, but she was never meant to be a secret Sith Lord, and even if you could find ways to retcon her backstory to make her one (as Denning did), that doesn't mean it was the right move from a storytelling POV. So yeah, I don't think Vergere is some unfailingly wise and untouchable paragon of virtue, but I want to stay true to the character I knew from the NJO and Rogue Planet, not the version of her that later authors tried to sell us. And that means I'm going to try to show her in a better light, or at least not a Sithly one.

I'm really glad that last line stood out to you for the humor; that was exactly what I was going for with it, trying to show Jacen's believably aged-up sense of humor. I wish we could have seen more of this Jacen in the profic, versus the one we got.

And YES to so many of Jacen's mentors/role models being women. I just love that for him.

Aw, thanks

lol, I figured she would be right up your alley as a character. And yep, always gotta get a bit more angst in!

This comment made my day when I first read it, and I've been back to it many times since, whenever I need a boost. Thank you so much for this awesome feedback and for always being there to encourage my angsty tendencies!




Okay, guys! It took me eight months, but I finally have the next story ready!

 

The Skywalker-Solo's cant get a break in any continuity.
Jacen's reaction is devastating, doubly so knowing his fate in legends.

 

Ah, the perils of being the central characters in a series called "Star Wars". And yeah, the Enter!verse was born in large part from my own dissatisfaction with Legacy of the Force and Jacen's fate in that series. I'm perversely pleased to know my version of events is devastating. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy the next story as well!

 

Title: Beyond Repair
Timeframe: 43 ABY

Summary: Jacen tries to heal

Notes: Takes place right after Ashes to Ashes; I also added some prompts from Angstober 2023 for flavor. Thanks to @Gabri_Jade for the beta!

2024 Prompts Used:
- No. 7: The universe swallowed every single thing he loved; And the planets don’t know, oh, why he’s holding on | Constellation | Journey’s End | “This can’t be it.”

2023 Prompts Used:
- No. 14: “But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.” | Stand | Day In, Day Out | “Do me a favor.”

---

Beyond Repair


The moment the farmer’s calloused hands touched the bandages on his back, Jaina’s face flashed before his eyes: intense, focused, full throttle, never letting up for an instant. He could barely recall the sensation of durasteel tearing through flesh as she slammed him into the bulkhead and dragged him along its sharp, raised edge; but her expression, her eyes, trying to reach him, trying to be the sword their uncle had named her… those refused to fade.

“Relax your shoulders.”

Jacen closed his eyes and exhaled, releasing the tension from his muscles. He wasn’t wholly successful, but it must have been enough because the farmer set to work changing the dressing without further reproof.

“Still looks a bit inflamed. I’ll clean it again and apply an antibiotic.”

He shrugged, which elicited a disgruntled huff from the farmer. “Do what you need to,” he said, unbothered by the scraping of cloth or the sting of cold cream against his stitches. “I never asked your name.”

The farmer’s fingers moved in steady strokes across his back. “Must’ve given it while you were still delirious. I’m Sebele.”

This was where he was supposed to offer his own name in turn. He took a breath and bought himself a few seconds by pretending to wince from Sebele’s medical care. “You can call me Ganner,” he said before the silence could stretch on too long. He wasn’t sure where that had come from; he hadn’t thought about Ganner Rhysode in a long time.

If Sebele noticed his fleeting hesitance, she didn’t say anything. “Good name.” She smoothed the bandage into place and turned her attention to his abdomen, where Jaina’s lightsaber had pierced him clean through. “You’re lucky to be alive after this one.”

“Yeah.” Jacen opened his eyes, fixing his gaze on the window opposite him, where the dawn’s golden glow was giving way to a bone-bleaching white. “Lucky.”

Sebele checked the dressing, hesitated, then taped it back into place. “Still needs a few more days to properly close. I’ll leave it alone until then.” She stepped out from behind him to gather her medkit. “All finished. Sorry it’s not bacta. We usually have to make due with the basics out here.”

“It’s fine,” Jacen assured her as he pulled his shirt back on. “And thank you.”

The old farmer nodded. “Now take it easy, you hear? No sense in pushing yourself too hard and ripping those stitches before you’re healed. You’re welcome here as long as you need.”

Jacen thanked her again as she departed for the fields. Her husband had already finished cleaning up breakfast and left to tend to his garden, and by now the droids were either helping him or hard at work in the fields. The house was quiet, and Jacen stood slowly, one hand braced against the wooden table. He walked to the door and waited for it to slide open, then stepped out into the sunlight.

The farm lay in a valley surrounded by gently rolling hills; the field he’d torn up was several kilometers out, near the edge of the property, but closer to the house there was a pasture for longhair shaak and a boghouse for nuna, as well as a large barn and two silos. Bray’s garden butted up to the house, and in it Jacen made out at least a dozen varieties of fruits and vegetables, some arranged in neat rows in the soil, others climbing trellises and hanging from wired arches over cobblestone pathways. Nearly everywhere he looked, he saw flowers and shrubs and grasses filling the otherwise empty spaces, giving the garden an untamed air that belied its careful cultivation.

Despite that small bit of wildness, there was a calm, steady energy to the farm and its occupants, a sense of stability and purpose that bound Sebele and her family and the land together. It reminded Jacen of his time on Zonama Sekot, when he’d lived in perfect harmony with the rogue planet’s flora and fauna, and its people as well. There’d been a time when he’d imagined he might stay there forever, if he let himself. It was an inviting thought, that maybe he could surrender himself once more to that feeling, be part of something bigger without trying to enforce his own will or fix all the problems. Somewhere along the way he’d lost sight of the young man who’d done exactly that, who had met the cold certainties and uncertainties of this universe with love and compassion, who had accepted that the only choices he could make were his own, and that had to be enough.

Maybe this was what he needed. Maybe this was the penance he owed for his sins, for causing Jaina’s death, and his father’s and Uncle Luke’s, and all the others. For being the fool who had unleashed the One Sith upon the galaxy. He would recover his strength in this place, break himself of the flawed patterns that had come to define his time as Darth Caedus, fashion himself once more into the shadowmoth Vergere had always believed he would become. He might not be a Jedi anymore, would never dare to call himself such, but he could still be a force for good. He could— no, he would fix what he had broken.


~~


He tries to heal.

Every day, he walks out beyond the crash site, passing through a field of gently swaying barley, until he reaches the low hills that border Sebele’s land. He sits in their shadow and listens to the world, reaching into the vast energy that surrounds him. There’s so much life here, creating a tapestry of light that joins others from across the stars, threading through hyperspace lanes, weaving in and out of nebulae, binding the universe as one. It’s beautiful; he’s always thought so. Even in his darkest moments, he could always see that beauty, even when he was too damaged and raw to look at it for long. But his eyes are open now, and if any place can help him heal, surely it’s this place, among these good people.


~~


The long gash on his back healed fairly quickly, and when Sebele finally removed the stitches and Jacen flexed and stretched those muscles, he didn’t feel even the slightest twinge of pain.

The wound in his abdomen was a different story.

“You can’t rush healing,” the old farmer admonished him with that tough but motherly air he’d grown accustomed to. She stopped for a moment to look up from the housekeeper droid she’d been oiling. “It just needs more time, is all.”

It was a truth he already knew well, and he accepted the wisdom of her words without complaint. The harvest season would be upon them soon, and he intended to help as much as he was able, to repay his hosts for their kindness, and for the damage he’d done to their field. Beyond that…

“I think I’ll take a walk, if you don’t mind,” he said with all the serenity his years of training had imparted upon him.

“Go wherever you like, son.” Sebele tossed him a smile as she went back to work on the droid. “We’re having a family dinner tonight, if you feel up to joining.”

“Of course.” Jacen opened the door and left the house, and he tried not to focus on the fractional hitch in his step, or of the momentary pang in his heart at how casually Sebele had called him “son”.


~~


He draws on the life energy around him, uses it to buoy his own as he gently probes the lightsaber wound, searching out the severed connections and prodding his tissue to initiate new growth. If he weren’t in such a weakened state, he might be able to manipulate his cells at the molecular level, or maybe create a salve stronger than the ones Sebele has been applying. But even an experienced Jedi healer can’t replicate the effects of bacta without talent and practice and time, and he is neither a Jedi nor a healer. Not anymore.

The wound eludes him, despite his efforts. No matter how he tries to coax it, his body resists healing. When he closes his eyes, it appears as a mass shadow to his senses, a void left in the wake of some bright star, devouring new cells and repaired nerve endings. Its presence is a constant reminder of his most terrible loss, of the barriers he erected around himself to keep his beloved sister out, and how he only had her back for mere moments before the universe ripped her away forever.

The universe? No, that’s wrong. He loves the universe as he loves himself. They’re one and the same, after all. He loves the universe, even at its coldest, even at its most uncaring, unfeeling, unsympathetic. There’s a bigger picture here, one that encompasses everything and everyone, and it’s so much larger than his own life or his own pain. He can’t lose sight of that again.

He has to heal. He has to get stronger.

He has to fix what he broke.


~~


The meal Sebele’s husband prepared looked like something befitting a holiday or celebration, but it made sense once Jacen realized how big their family actually was. More than a dozen people filled the kitchen and dining room, and Jacen was introduced to Sebele and Bray’s three adult children and several grandchildren of varying ages. The youngest was a little girl with frizzy red curls and brown skin a few shades lighter than her grandmother’s. She looked about three or four years old, but she clung to her father, who held her in one arm with practiced ease as he reached out to shake Jacen’s hand.

“Starfall Vind, I’m married to Efia over there.” He nodded toward the kitchen where a woman about Jacen’s own age was helping Bray remove a large dish from the oven. “Nice to meet you.”

Jacen cracked a polite but friendly smile, his newly-assumed identity rolling easily off the tongue. “Ganner Lars. It’s nice to meet you, too.” He turned his attention to the child. “And who is this?”

“This here is Mayseh. Can you say hello, Mayseh?” The girl shook her head and buried her face in her father’s shirt; he rubbed her back in slow circles as he looked up at Jacen. “She’s always a little shy when we go to other people’s homes, even ones she’s used to. You know how kids are.”

Jacen glanced at the back of little Mayseh’s head. He used to know what kids were like – after all, he’d been one once. But it was a far cry from being around them as an adult and seeing them through older eyes. It was worlds apart from being a father himself, knowing the feel of his daughter’s slender arms around his neck as he carried her to bed, being the one she clung to when she wanted to feel safe.

“Yeah,” he said with another smile. “I know.”

The meal carried a sense of casual formality that he found comforting; everyone sat around one very large table and said a prayer of thanks, but after that the food was passed around in multiple directions, without regard for any system that Jacen could discern. Clearly this family knew one another’s particularities as well as their own, and they took care of each other without being asked. Throughout it all, conversation continued to flow easily, despite the stranger in their midst. As far as he knew, Sebele hadn’t told her children or their families where exactly Jacen had come from, only that he’d had to make an emergency landing in their field. None of them prodded him for personal details, making him wonder if Sebele and Bray had warned them not to pry or if that was just how they were.

After dinner ended and Sebele’s children said their goodbyes, Jacen returned to the small bedroom upstairs, the one he’d woken to find himself in that first morning and had insisted on staying in ever since, despite the farmers’ attempts to convince him to take a larger bedroom on the ground floor. He sat on the bed, which creaked under him, and stared out the window at the moon-soaked garden below, and thought of little Mayseh’s coppery curls, and how she’d fallen asleep on her father’s shoulder as he carried her out the door.

That night, he dreamed he was standing along a familiar stretch of beach, one he hadn’t seen since before the war, his back to the sea. Allana sat next to Ganner Rhysode on the white sand, carefully stacking seashells into two small pillars.

When will my daddy come back? Allana asked as she lowered an iridescent shell into place.

Soon, Ganner answered. He took one of Allana’s bright copper braids between his fingers and tickled her nose with the end of it. When the suns rise.

Jacen turned to look back at the line between sky and sea, where two red-orange suns were already setting, each of them sunk exactly halfway below the horizon. When he turned around again, Allana was all alone, still stacking her little shells.


~~


He reaches for her in his meditations, following many long, winding paths through the stars, chasing after the smallest hint of her presence. The task is time-consuming, and it draws his concentration away from the slow business of healing, but he refuses to give up, even if it is frustrating, even if it reminds him of how far he has fallen and how drastically his abilities have atrophied, even if he has to sit here all day and all night.

He remembers how it felt to touch everything, remembers pouring himself across the entirety of existence, becoming one with the Force and one with reality, to the point where anything was possible if he chose to make it so. He hadn’t wanted that, had instead purged himself of ego and selfish desire in that blissful moment, allowing himself to become a vessel of light, a conduit for the exquisite balance of the universe. He had known even then that he would never attain that exalted state again… but perhaps that was only a limit placed by a mind unequal to the task of comprehending the infinite or seeing beyond so broad a horizon.

He wonders, not for the first time, what he was truly capable of in that moment. If he hadn’t been facing Onimi, if he’d had all the time in the world to assess and plan and act… what could he have changed?

What could he change now?


~~


The weather cooled as the harvest approached, and Jacen started adding a series of basic katas to his meditations. Nothing elaborate or intense, certainly nothing that the students in his uncle’s Praxeum hadn’t mastered very early on, but just enough to ease his stagnant body back into use, to trigger muscle memory and reawaken pathways in his brain. The lightsaber wound still wasn’t healing properly, but it was better than it had been, and for the most part he was able to ignore it. He tried to ignore the shadowy mark it left in the Force as well, focusing his attention outward on his movements, on the world around him, on the way he interacted with that world and flowed through it and became one with it. It would take time to return to peak condition, but he knew he could accomplish it. He had nothing if not time.

In the evenings he returned to the farmhouse and ate dinner with Sebele and her family, and he listened as they discussed everything from farm business to social obligations to local politics to who had won the secondary school grav-ball tournament. Whenever Sebele’s youngest son, Makim, was there, he updated them on the situation with the war, though he couldn’t give them very much detail. Whether out of consideration for her guest or because she didn’t like hearing such things herself, Sebele was usually quick to shift the conversation back toward local events. The older grandchildren liked to engage Jacen in conversation, but whenever little Mayseh was there, she shyly clung to her father or mother and hardly said more than two words to him. He understood, of course; she was young and he was very much a stranger. But he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she sensed – on an instinctive level most adults learned to ignore – that his presence here was wrong, that the hospitality her grandparents had extended to him was a burden rather than a kindness.

Or maybe he was just projecting his own doubts onto her. He tended to do that.

After another dinner with the entire Kuwima family, Jacen retired early to his room, and as he climbed the stairs, he heard Makim say in a grave tone: “Did you know the GA’s been blocked off from the Perlemian past Vadrisian? It’s all over the planetary feed… they say the leadership is in shambles after that last big battle, don’t know what they’re doing anymore.”

“The Galactic Alliance isn’t going anywhere soon,” Sebele replied as Jacen reached the top of the stairs. “Now who wants dessert? Or am I going to have to eat this pie all by myself?”


~~


Sebele’s son continues to bring news of the war. Each time Jacen feigns the same distant yet concerned interest he’s noticed in the others, pressing Makim for just enough details to get a picture of what’s happening in the wider galaxy, but not enough to arouse suspicion.

The Perlemian Trade Route isn’t the only major hyperspace route affected by the Sith’s unanticipated advance. Parts of the Hydian Way are cut off as well, and there’s talk of an alliance between Darth Krayt and the Five Worlds’ more vehemently anti-GA factions. The general feeling is that once the Alliance leadership regroups from their losses at Vadrisian, they’ll be able to deal with the One Sith threat head-on, even without help from the Jedi, or from the Hapes Consortium and their new Queen Mother.

There’s little news about the Jedi, who have become pariahs on both sides of the conflict, and even less about the former Chume’da, the Hapan princess-in-exile who was ousted before she could take the throne. Probably dead, Makim guesses, like her mother. It’s not like the Hapans to suffer a pretender, after all.

It takes every ounce of Jacen’s considerable will not to shut Makim’s mouth for him.


~~


He awakes in the Embrace of Pain, cradled by a dozen branchlike arms, and knows that he is home.

The organism’s branch-grips lower him enough that his toes touch the floor. It’s slick and smooth and warm, like it’s just been sani-steamed, and he can almost smell the citrus scent his family’s cleaning droids used to use. As Coruscant’s star sets outside, deep orange sunlight streams into the room through the meters-long hole in the outer wall, suffusing the apartment with a strangely tranquil air.

Allana picks her way across the living room, balancing nimbly on the thick vines crisscrossing the floor. She walks right up to the opening in the wall and peers over the edge.

“Careful, little one,” Jacen admonishes. “It’s a long way down.”

She looks at him, confusion warring with concern in her gray eyes. “You never came back for me,” she says. “Do you like it better here? Is that why?”

His skin burns as one of the Embrace’s long appendages drags across his shoulders and twines around his neck. “Of course not. There’s nowhere I’d rather be than with you.”

Those eyes fill with tears. “I waited for you. And you didn’t come back.”


~~


Why didn’t you come back?


~~


It’s only a dream, of course, but it stays with him long after he rises, hovers over his shoulder to remind him of his loss at odd moments throughout the day: when the irrigation system kicks on in the garden, revealing a misty rainbow; when a frightened nuna chick scurries under its mother’s legs to escape the braying shaak in the next pasture; when the setting sun glances off the distant, rolling hills, bathing the world in vermilion light.

He knows why they kept her away from him, but that betrayal still stings. To have missed so much of her life already, and then not be allowed to see her or speak to her or even know if she was safe, or if she missed him as much as he missed her? How could they have thought he wouldn’t try to find her? How could they have imagined anything might keep him from her?

He abandons those thoughts with a heavy heart. It does no good to dwell on them; to do so is to remain shackled to his hubris, to the old ways he’s determined to shed. In the end, he has only himself to blame.


~~


I never wanted to be apart from you. I wanted to come back.

Someday, I will.

I promise.


~~


“Blast! Not again!”

Jacen looked up from the heads of lettuce he was sorting and raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. Sebele sat atop an old combine, elbow deep in the rusty machine’s droid brain as smoke billowed around her. One of the smaller agro-droids buzzed around her head, its prehensile attachments clicking in a worried manner; Sebele shooed the droid away and wiped sweat from her deeply furrowed brow.

“Need a hand?” Jacen called out to her.

“A few hands, probably.” She withdrew from the open compartment with a weary, frustrated sigh. “The motivator’s been acting up for a few years now, but we’ve always managed to make it through.”

Jacen set the lettuce aside and crossed the field to stand in the combine’s shadow. “Any hope of finding replacement parts around here?”

“Oh, there’s always hope. Not that it often reflects reality.” Sebele waved away the last puffs of smoke and closed the compartment. She climbed down from the machine and took off her hat. The bright yellow bandana underneath was soaked with sweat. “Fixed or not, we have to get the barley harvested by week’s end. We can’t afford any other delays.”

“How can I help?”

Sebele considered him for a moment. “You got any experience with heavy machinery?”

Jacen shrugged, thoughts flitting to the various starfighters he’d flown, and to his years traversing the galaxy in the Falcon. “Some. And I’ve worked on droids here and there.” He didn’t have nearly the talent for the mechanical that Jaina and Anakin had possessed, but that didn’t mean he was without skill. “I can take a look if you’d like.”

Sebele waved a hand at the combine. “She’s all yours. Guess I’ll head to town and see if I can scrounge up the parts we need. Let Bray know if you do manage to fix it; he’ll comm me.”

Jacen watched the old farmer go, her shoulders slightly stooped and her gait slower than usual. Once she was out of sight, he used the Force to buoy him, ignoring the sharp, insistent twinge in his abdomen as he vaulted into the air and landed on top of the broken combine. He opened the panel to find a cloud of lingering smoke and a mess of burnt and melted circuits. It wasn’t just the motivator that had been fried; the entire fuel delivery system was shot as well, which meant that even if Sebele managed to find a replacement motivator, it wouldn’t have any energy to convert. In fact, it looked as though the relevant circuits had been badly corroded.

He spent the afternoon attempting to clear out the mess and clean the corroded parts, in case there was anything worth salvaging. It was slow going, and he was pretty sure the harvester droid was a lost cause. An inspection of its engine revealed that it, too, was heavily corroded. From everything Jacen knew about engines, it was a miracle the combine had lasted this long. Bray came out a few times, first to check on his progress, then to bring him a tall glass of muja juice, then to tell him to take a break and have something to eat for the stars’ sake. Jacen reluctantly obliged, closing up the combine’s various panels before climbing down from his perch. He ate a quiet dinner with the older man; Bray wasn’t much of a conversationalist on his own, but Jacen hardly minded the silence. They were just cleaning up when Sebele returned from town.

“Any luck?” Bray asked as he pulled Sebele’s dinner out of the warmer and set it on the table.

The old farmer finished washing her hands in the kitchen sink and dried them on a towel embroidered with little yellow flowers. “Didn’t have the parts I need, but he said if I want to purchase a new harvester, he’s more than happy to arrange it. Bah!” She dropped into the chair closest to her and propped her chin on one hand. “As if I could afford such a thing, especially now.”

Jacen stepped around Bray to head for the side door. “I’ll get out of your hair,” he said as unobtrusively as possible, offering Sebele and her husband a quick nod each. “Dinner was delicious, thank you.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Bray replied as Jacen slipped out the door.

The sun had already set, leaving behind a trace of flame-orange in the darkening sky. Stars began to wink into existence over the opposite horizon, forming unfamiliar constellations, and as Jacen looked up at them, he wondered if he was seeing any systems that he knew, or had been to, even. It was still a strange feeling, being here on this small, unassuming world, where the concerns of the wider galaxy went mostly unnoticed and uncommented on, where not once had any of these kind, generous, hardworking people looked at him with even the slightest hint of recognition or fear. Stranger still was his own sense of detachment as he gazed up at those distant stars and tried to picture what was happening out there, with the Alliance, with the Five Worlds and the One Sith, with the Jedi.

With his family, or what was left of it.

Voices floated from the house through an open window, and Jacen turned down the path to the garden, listening to a chorus of chirping insects nearby.

“And you’re sure we can’t afford the new one?” Bray was saying.

“We’d have to take out another loan,” Sebele replied. “And I’m not sure we’d get it this time. We’ve just had too many things…” There was an uncharacteristic resignation in the soft sigh that followed. “We’ll never make it in time without that harvester.”

Jacen stood still, one hand on the garden gate as he listened.

Bray’s voice, slow and careful. “It’s possible… the Vinds might have a combine we could borrow.”

“No,” Sebele said. “They have their own fields to tend to. Besides, I don’t want to be beholden to Vesper Vind.”

“She’s family,” her husband continued gently. “And we do need the help.”

“I said no. We’ve managed this place for over fifty years on our own, through drought and pestilence and war, and that’s not going to change because of one blasted motivator.”

There was a long silence, pregnant with the memory of those fifty years, filled with struggles and heartaches and joys and dreams that Jacen knew nothing of, that he could only begin to imagine in all their complexity. His thoughts turned to the burned carcass of his escape pod and the destruction left in its wake. As if I could afford such a thing, Sebele had said. Especially now.

The silence lasted a while longer before Bray’s soft tenor finally broke it.

“Lei-lei.” Jacen recognized the endearment Bray reserved exclusively for his wife. “Efia and Starfall already arranged it. Unless we tell them different, they’re bringing it over in the morning.”

Another long pause, and then a deeply weary and resentful sigh. “Fine.” Chair legs scraped against the floor. “Did you take care of the shaak?”

“I did, they’re just waiting for you to tuck them in.”

Golden light sliced through the darkness as the door slid open, and Jacen watched Sebele head for the barn, the usual surety of her stride tempered no doubt by the burdens piling up on her shoulders. He lowered his hand from the garden gate and turned to follow after her. The insects’ chorus reached a fever pitch before suddenly dissipating, and in the absence of their music, he heard the crunching of gravel under his boots, too loud, echoing off the high barn wall.

Sebele wasn’t surprised to see him when he entered, he could already tell from his sense of her, before she said a word. She sat on a stool in front of a partially open stall, hands stroking the head of a sleepy shaak. She half turned, not enough to make eye contact, but enough to indicate a brush lying on the ground near her, just out of reach.

“Mind handing that to me?”

Jacen crossed to the stall and called the brush into his hand without thinking, only realizing what he’d done when Sebele looked up at him with mild amusement.

“It’s good to see you improving.” She took the brush from his hand and slipped the strap onto her own. The shaak uttered a drowsy but surprisingly high-pitched yip as Sebele ran the soft bristles along its neck.

Jacen watched them both, a nebulous sense of dread squeezing his chest. “There has to be something I can do to help you.”

“Sure.” She stood from her chair, much to the chagrin of the shaak, and motioned for Jacen to sit. “You can take over for me.”

He swallowed the protest that bubbled in his throat – that isn’t what I meant and you know it – and took her place without argument, accepting the brush she offered him. The shaak opened its big brown eyes to regard him; uncertainty and a small degree of discontent muddied the creature’s presence, but Jacen reached out with both hands and began to stroke his fingers gently along its long snout.

It’s okay, he told the uneasy shaak. I’m here. I’m here.

The shaak’s head grew heavy as he worked his fingers up across its brow and behind its ears, and by the time he reached its neck, the creature had fallen asleep in his hands. Sebele took the forgotten brush as Jacen slowly lowered the shaak’s head to the bed of straw. Satisfied that it wouldn’t wake, he stepped back from the stall and allowed Sebele to close the door.

“You’ve got a way with animals,” she said, a knowing glint in her tired eyes.

Jacen kept his voice low as they walked past the other stalls. “I used to keep all kinds of creatures as pets. Nothing as big as these, though.” The bittersweet memory of his childhood menagerie loomed large in his thoughts just then, as did the memory of his parents, who’d patiently indulged his love of animals, even when it was impractical. “Not that I didn’t try to smuggle a few larger animals into my room from time to time.”

“I can just imagine.” Sebele slid the barn door open when they reached it, and Jacen followed her out into the night. They ambled side-by-side down the gravel path, their way lit by a few lights from the house and the moon and stars overhead. In that faint light, he saw Sebele smile sideways at him and aim a finger at Bray’s garden. “Jubal, my oldest grandson? When he was little, he used to collect these little snakes we sometimes find in the garden, and he’d stuff them in his pockets to sneak them into the house.”

“A boy after my own heart.” Jacen stopped in the middle of the path and waited for Sebele to do the same. “This is a good place,” he said as she faced him. “You made it that way. You and Bray. Your family.”

There was no mistaking the affection in her eyes, or the hint of pride. “We’ve done our best. Hasn’t been the easiest life, but I wouldn’t have chosen anything else.”

Jacen contemplated her words as he turned his gaze to the stars above. “My uncle grew up on a farm. He used to tell us stories about it. I loved listening to them, but I could never quite understand why anyone would want to tie themselves down to one place when there were so many other worlds to see, so many cultures and people and lifeforms to learn from. And then I went to war.”

It was an old, deep wound, the memory of all those worlds, all those cultures and people and lifeforms lost, and the ones forever changed. Even though good had eventually prevailed – for a time, at least – it didn’t erase the wound itself, or ease the lingering ache. He knew nothing ever would.

“And after that, I understood the farmer’s point of view, in my own way. I found a place where I could have stayed, if I’d chosen to. I think I could have been happy spending the rest of my life there.”

Sebele didn’t ask why he’d chosen not to stay. She merely nodded gravely, allowing a quiet chorus of nighttime sounds to fill that space instead. Jacen exhaled and looked her in the eyes.

“This is my fault,” he said firmly, holding her gaze. “You wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for me.”

Sebele heaved a long, motherly sigh and shook her head. “Son, you didn’t break my harvester. Don’t lay troubles on your shoulders that don’t belong there.”

He opened his mouth, and it nearly came out. Who he was, what he’d done, why he’d done it… every crime, every terrible, unforgivable detail. His full confession sat stubbornly and precariously perched on the end of his tongue, and for a moment he thought she might guess it without his help, might recognize it in his eyes, or in his silence, or in the tight press of his lips as he finally snapped them shut.

“I already told you,” Sebele continued. “I know you’re sorry, and that’s enough for me.”

Jacen took a step toward her. “Being sorry doesn’t fix what I did.”

“It was an accident. You only sped up a change that was bound to happen anyway. Maybe that’s a good thing.”

Jacen thought of the ashes in the field, and his sister’s face as she lay dying in his arms, and he couldn’t help the frustrated breath that slipped loose. “I’ve wronged you. Why won’t you hold me accountable?”

“Because I don’t see it that way,” she said, with a sudden weariness that made him instantly regret pushing the issue. “You aren’t responsible for me or my farm, or for the decisions I made long before you ever showed up here. If I’m paying the price now, it’s through no one’s fault but my own.”

It had been a long time since a conversation left him feeling not only thoroughly chastened, but as impotent and unreasonable as a child. He stood there, shoulders slumped, his guilt and grief momentarily robbed of their power. “I just wish there was more I could do to help,” he said.

Sebele regarded him with a parental air for several seconds before nodding toward the house. “Well, if you really want to help, why don’t you come inside and have a cup of caf with me, and tell me some of your uncle’s stories? After the day I’ve had, I could use a good story or two.”

Jacen reeled in his guilty conscience and gave her a half-hearted smile. “Yes, ma’am.”


~~


He stays up late that night, telling Sebele about his uncle the farmer, and his mother the diplomat, and his father the starpilot. He talks about the creatures he collected and cared for, and the ones he met in the wild, and how he spent his youth exploring untamed jungles and jetting from one star system to the next. He tells her about his sister and brother, how they loved tinkering, how they probably would have fixed her combine in a single afternoon between them. How he was always a little in awe of them both, and still wasn’t sure he could have ever measured up. He tells her they both died in battle, and leaves it at that.

One by one, he unpacks cherished childhood memories and stolen fragments of happiness, things he hasn’t thought about in years, things he didn’t allow himself to think of, whether because they weakened his resolve or sowed doubts in his mind about whether his path was truly the right one, or because it was easier not to feel anything than to feel everything. He walks the disordered garden of his past with cautious steps, selecting memories here and there like flowers, careful not to reveal too much – but even so, he gazes upon the chaos with new eyes, and appreciates it all the more for its imperfection.

Sebele listens, and she laughs, and she tells him she’d love to meet his parents someday, and trade farming stories with his uncle. She tells him his siblings were no doubt just as in awe of him as he was of them, and that his love for them is a testament to their character. Says she would have been honored to know them.

She tells stories of her own, too. About her children and grandchildren, about how she and Bray settled this land when they were hardly more than children themselves, about her rivalry with the Vinds. About tough times and bountiful harvests, miracles great and small, all centered around the family and the farm she so loves.

Jacen returns to his small room at the top of the stairs long after midnight, and he stands at the window, looking out once again at the moonlit garden below.

You only sped up a change that was bound to happen anyway. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Tomorrow, Sebele will have the combine she needs, and the harvest will go on, and Jacen will help wherever they need him, because change is inevitable and necessary for growth, and not something to be feared. He won’t blame himself for being the unexpected catalyst for that change, and he won’t think about the burnt-out husk in the barley field, or Jaina’s ashes scattered by an autumn breeze, or how Sebele will never, ever meet his father, or trade farming tales with Uncle Luke. And no matter what, he won’t envision the galaxy his daughter and Sebele’s grandchildren will soon inherit, one where the forces of darkness march endlessly onward because he did nothing to stop it.


~~


Sunlight spills through the hole in the wall, casting a red-orange glow over the entire room, and he wonders distantly if this is what it would be like to hang inside the rim of a volcano, warmed and threatened by a rising sea of molten lava. He leans forward, and the Embrace indulges him, allowing him enough freedom to place his feet on the floor and take a step forward. Across the room, Allana folds her arms on the dining room table and rests her head on them, gazing into a little cage made of translucent polymesh. Jacen smiles at the sight.

“What do you think of your new friends?” he asks.

A small crease forms between her eyes as she studies the two dark cocoons inside. “What are they—?”

An agonized shriek pierces their shared mental space, and then another as the cocoons begin to tremble. Allana’s hands fly to her ears, then to her mouth when she realizes the frantic, desperate screams aren’t manifesting audibly at all, but in the Force itself.

“What’s happening?” she cries.

Jacen closes his eyes, traveling light years and eons in an instant, bending time and space within himself, and he is both teacher and student, gardener and flower, weed, soil, air, or maybe a speck of dust caught in the gravity of a newly forming star, bound under pressure, but destined to be part of something brilliant. What’s happening? The answer is an easy one, because it’s already happened before, and it will happen again, forever and ever.

“Metamorphosis,” he tells her upon opening his eyes, a lifetime later, a thousand lifetimes later. “Radical transformation. It’s how shadowmoths grow.”

Allana lowers her hands from her mouth to her chin, clasping them in prayer as she leans her face close to the polymesh. “Daddy,” she breathes, transfixed. “I don’t like this. They’re scared. We have to help them.”

“We can’t, sweetheart.” The Embrace tugs at him, its appendages twisting his limbs in their sockets. It wants him to return, but this is important, he needs to finish. “If you help them now, they’ll never fly. Do you understand?”

She nods her head, but he can see in her eyes that she doesn’t understand, not truly. Not yet. It’s a hard lesson, one that took time for him to learn, but when he did…

“It’s so sad,” Allana whispers, touching her fingers to the mesh. She looks up at him over the cage, her gray eyes brimming with tears. “Isn’t there something we can do?”

A rush of air beats against his face, and he looks up in time to see a giant hawk-bat, larger than all the rest, land in the opening to the apartment, flapping its great leathery wings one last time before tucking them in against its sides. More hawk-bats circle in the fire-orange sky behind it, their screeching cries echoing off the buildings. Jacen frowns at the creature before returning his attention to his daughter.

“We can stay with them,” he tells her softly. “And keep the predators at bay.”

“You promise?”

“I do. I promise.”

“Allana!” His mother’s voice drifts into the room as if on a breeze. “Allana, we’re all waiting!”

Allana wraps her slender little arms around the cage and glances in the direction of the voice, shaking her head.

“It’s okay,” he tells her. “It’s okay, Allana, you can go. I’ll watch over them.”

She nods and puts on a brave smile, withdrawing slowly from the cage. “Okay, Daddy. Be careful.”

“Don’t worry, baby.” Jacen turns his gaze to the massive hawk-bat looming over them, noting with a surge of some darker, primal emotion the way its greedy eyes follow his daughter’s every step. “I will.”


~~


Jacen stayed out of the way when the Vinds brought the combine over the next morning. He didn’t want to interfere in family matters any more than he already had, especially with Sebele so reluctant to accept the help her in-laws were providing. Efia and Starfall stayed to get the harvester running and to help Sebele with the fields closest to the house, while Jacen tended to the garden with Bray. The Vinds left after lunch, and Jacen didn’t see Sebele again until late afternoon when she returned from the barley field. He and Bray had taken up seats outside the barn and were shucking corn for the evening meal, and they both stopped to take in the sight.

Next to the Kuwimas’ old harvester droid, the Vinds’ was a thing of beauty, with gleaming silver accents and bright yellow paint the same color as Sebele’s bandana, and not a speck of rust to be found. The old farmer cut an imposing figure as she steered it to the edge of the field, trailing the day’s haul behind her. The combine uttered a cheery rumble before powering down, and the smaller agro-droids buzzing around it dispersed with an air of satisfaction.

“I think that might have been a new record,” Bray said to Jacen with a grin. He stripped the husk off an ear of corn, dropped it in the bin beside him, and reached for another. “Though she might not be happy to admit it.”

Jacen rose to his feet and stretched his back, twisting from side to side. “I don’t know, she might surprise you.”

Bray set the corn in his lap and called out to his wife. “What do you think, Sebele? Should we convince Vesper to let us keep it?”

Sebele didn’t answer. Jacen turned to see her standing atop the combine, one hand shielding her eyes as she looked in their direction. Then, as if she were a puppet whose strings had suddenly snapped, she swayed and tipped sideways, and fell.

Jacen flung one hand out, catching her just before she hit the ground. He was dimly aware that Bray had screamed his wife’s name, that the agro-droids had halted mid-air and spun around to fly to their master’s aid. Jacen reached her before any of them, lowering her gently to the ground so he could examine her.

“Sebele.” He removed the bandana from her head, checking for blood, for an injury that could explain her sudden fall. “Sebele, can you hear me? Sebele?”

Her eyelids fluttered rapidly; she winced as she cracked them open. “Ganner?”

Bray finally reached them, out of breath from running all the way from the barn. He placed a hand on Jacen’s shoulder for support as he dropped to his knees beside him. He leaned over his wife and touched her face. “Lei-lei? Are you hurt?”

Sebele tried to lift a hand to her husband, but she couldn’t raise it more than a few centimeters before it dropped to the ground again. “Not from the fall,” she said with great effort. “It came on so fast… this time.”

Jacen blinked and glanced back and forth between the old farmer and her husband. This time?

“Don’t try to get up,” Bray was saying as he stroked Sebele’s hair. He turned to Jacen, his mouth set in a grim line. “I need you to take her into the house.”

Jacen obeyed without question, scooping Sebele up in his arms and following Bray to the couple’s bedroom on the ground floor, the one they’d tried to get him to take while he convalesced. He was even more thankful now that he’d refused their offer. Sebele was conscious and lucid, but she was also sweat-soaked and shivering, and he could sense how quickly her pulse raced. He laid her out on her bed and took a step back to give Bray room. The old man set to work at once, removing Sebele’s boots and overshirt and tucking her under the blankets. He sent Jacen for a glass of water, but Sebele could only manage a small sip before she waved it away.

“Shouldn’t we send for a doctor?” Jacen asked as a creeping sense of dread stole over him.

Sebele sighed. “There’s no point.” The words were for Jacen, but her eyes were on her husband, and they softened as she gazed up at him. “The doctor won’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”

Jacen’s breath shook as he exhaled. This wasn’t right. After all the things he’d lived through and all the people he’d lost, he was just supposed to watch helplessly as another good person died? No, he couldn’t do that again. He should have died over Vadrisian, or in the crash, but he was still here, dammit, and if he was still here after losing Jaina forever, then it had to be for a reason.

Sebele reached out to lightly touch her husband’s hand. “Bray,” she said, nodding toward Jacen. “Give us a minute.”

Bray leaned down and cupped his wife’s face in both hands to kiss her before turning to leave the room. He touched Jacen’s shoulder on the way out, long enough to give it a gentle squeeze. Once the door was closed, Sebele looked up at him.

“Well, speak your piece.”

Jacen crossed the room and kneeled at her side, and he took her hand in his. “I can help you. Whatever this sickness is, I can heal it. I’ve done it before.”

She chuckled weakly. “Have you now?”

“Yes,” he murmured, gripping her hand more firmly between his. “Once, a long time ago. My uncle was gravely injured. He’d been poisoned, and he was dying, and I healed him. The Force healed him.”

Sebele’s dark eyes studied him, as if committing every detail to memory. “Your uncle the farmer?” He nodded, and she closed her eyes. “You can try, Jedi, but I think it might be too late for me.”

“It’s never too late.” Jacen stretched one hand out over her torso and opened himself wholly to the Force, allowing his perception to expand past the visible world to the currents that flowed beneath, bonds of life energy that were sometimes as wide and deep as rivers, other times as delicate and imperceptible as spider’s silk. He found them all as he dipped into that current. He found Sebele, with her keen mind and her strong heart, and he reached further, looking for the source of her ailment. “Where is—?”

But before he could finish asking his question, he had his answer, first in the strangling, virulent sepsis that suddenly pervaded his entire sense of her, and then in her own absurdly steady reply.

“Everywhere.” She sighed, and Jacen opened his eyes to see a grim smile twisting her weathered lips. “It’s everywhere, son. You still going to tell me it’s not too late?”

There was a time in his life when he wouldn’t have hesitated to answer, to reassure her that nothing was too great for the Force to accomplish. Now, though… now, he couldn’t find the resolve to counter her. It wasn’t his faith in the Force that had diminished, he realized, but in himself. No matter how badly he wanted to be the man who’d befriended the World Brain and saved the slaves on the seedship, who’d faced Onimi in the Citadel and stood firm, who’d saved Uncle Luke from Shimrra’s poison, he wasn’t that person anymore. He still remembered how it felt to be him. He still believed in all the same things and loved the same people, but something had changed, some part of him he couldn’t readily identify, something he couldn’t just fix to make it all better, go back to the way he was before, the best version of himself.

No, this version of Jacen was no healer. This version of Jacen couldn’t even heal himself. This Jacen had used the trace faultlines of his beloved uncle’s old wound to tear him down, to weaken him just enough that he couldn’t defend against a fatal blow. This Jacen had killed his own twin sister. How could someone like that heal anyone? How could someone like that fix anything?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, releasing her hand and sinking back on his heels. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. There’s nothing you could’ve done. It’s been a long time coming, and… and there’s no use wallowing, or pretending everything’s rosy either. I mean to live until I can’t anymore, and that’s that. So don’t pity me.”

Jacen wiped at his eyes, suddenly moist with unshed tears. “I wouldn’t dare.”

Sebele snorted and extended a hand to him. “Why don’t you help me up since you’re sitting there anyway?”

Jacen stood and took her hand, allowing her to lean on him as she slowly rose from the bed. “Are you sure you shouldn’t rest a little longer?”

She shook her head and arched one eyebrow at him. “Plenty of time for that when I’m gone.”


~~


Jacen woke early the next morning, rising before the sun touched the tops of the hills. The air was brisk as he set out; a light breeze nipped at his face, reminding him of the night he’d landed here, how he’d lain broken and freezing in that field until Sebele found him. He should have died that night, but Sebele hadn’t given up. She deserved so much better.

He wasn’t sure if it was because he was truly healing or if his intense fixation on a singular goal had given him wings, but the trek to the hills went by more quickly than usual. Sunlight danced across the valley, and Jacen looked back at the fields he’d crossed, imagining the Kuwimas’ farmhouse in the distance. Then he began to climb.

It didn’t take long to reach his usual training grounds: the grassy slope where he practiced his katas, the weathered old log he often sat upon to meditate. He climbed onto that log and crossed his legs under him, resting his wrists atop his knees as he closed his eyes. The breeze was more insistent up here; it tugged at his hair, blowing several loose strands across the bridge of his nose. He ignored it, settling deep into the current of the Force, emptying himself of thought, of ego, of pain. He simply was, and for a time he relished the weightless freedom of being, of knowing the universe and being known in return.

And then, like a candle flame guttering in its socket, the connection withered, and he was pulled back into himself, into this one form, this one place, this one moment. Far from achieving perfect unity with the Force, he felt more bereft than ever for how close he’d come. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and unfurled his limbs, and as his gaze settled on the continuing slope of the hill, he took a deep breath and stood.

He couldn’t give up. Not now, not after everything. He wasn’t made for quitting. He pressed on, up the hill, until those familiar training grounds and his own failures were far behind him.

He’d never traveled this far into the hills; the incline was steeper here, and rockier, and he had to tap into reserves of strength that had only recently begun to return to him in order to keep going. The muscles in his legs and back burned from the effort, though he paid little attention to such minor inconveniences. He needed to reach the top; he needed to find a way back to himself, before it was too late.

Rather than thinning out, the air grew thick as he climbed – sweltering, even, and little white lights crackled around the edges of his vision. He slowed down, took deep, cleansing breaths, waited for his head to clear. The ground was dark beneath him, but it wasn’t the dark of rocks and wild grass. No, it was liquid, glassy and opaque, pooling around his legs. A slow, relentless tide trying to carry him away. He reached down to touch the liquid – water, judging by its density and texture. He could no longer hear the wind rustling through the trees or the sound of birds calling to one another, or even the chatter of insects hidden in the grass. The dark pool had swallowed them all whole, and the world was stillness and silence, and he couldn’t remember, or he didn’t want to—

—DADDY!—

The scream tears through him, shattering the brittle calm.

DADDY, HELP! DADDY!

He sweeps his gaze over his surroundings: an endless wheel of bogs and mist and damp farmland, all circling a murky lake, and at the very center of that lake, an island of sand and coral, calcified around hexagonal wax chambers, home to the most precious and vital of resources. Beneath the nursery’s fusion furnace star, Yuuzhan Vong warriors hold back hordes of slaves along the beach, trying in vain to protect the infant dhuryams, the only hope of their people for a new Yuuzhan’tar. The waters of the lake run with the mingled blood of dozens of species, and still they fight on, driven to madness by the coral implants slaving them to the dhuryams’ will.

Jacen sprints toward the beach, the rhythmic sloshing of each watery footstep joining with the roar of battle around him to beat relentlessly against his eardrums. He has no weapon, but he can snap necks easily enough, and he does. Yun-Yammka, the warriors on the beach chant in their own language as he looks into their eyes. Mighty Slayer, accept my sacrifice.

He steps over the bodies, racing up the sloping sand toward the rocky hills where the dhuryams are ensconced. Allana’s presence sings to him from the center of the island, a song rife with wrenching, gut-deep terror: DADDY! DADDY, WHERE ARE YOU?

He propels himself up the hill with one powerful leap, sailing over the last of the dhuryams’ defenders to land at the very heart of the nursery. The scene is one of familiar carnage; eleven dhuryams lie dead in their birth chambers, the milky blue blood from their prematurely ruptured mucus plugs sprayed across the seal to their remaining sibling’s chamber.

Allana’s mental screams intensify as Jacen falls to his knees above the final dhuryam.

HELP! DADDY, PLEASE!

He presses both hands to the translucent membrane of the birth chamber. The dhuryam roils within, clearly as terrified as the girl sharing its home, but each frantic movement of its bulbous body pushes Allana under. Her mouth moves wordlessly, filling with the fluid inside the chamber.

“No, wait!” Jacen pounds his fists against the membrane. “Stop!” But his panic bleeds into the dhuryam through their mental link, which only makes its thrashing worse.

DADDY!

He tamps down his wilder emotions, tries to project calm and reassurance in their place. Footsteps echo behind him, and he glances back to see a lieutenant of the Galactic Alliance Guard climbing up the hill, followed by another guardsman holding a comlink in one hand.

“Lieutenant!” Jacen barks, once more donning the mantle of command. “Help me get her out!” He doesn’t wait for the lieutenant to respond, returning his attention to his daughter. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay, I’m going to get you out.”

“Colonel Solo, we have Lieutenant Skywalker on the comm—”

“Never mind that, just help me!”

“He needs a response. What are your orders, sir?”

“Help me!” Jacen’s fingernails rake uselessly at the waxy mucus plug as Allana’s desperate, panicked face swims beneath. He looks around for something, anything he can use to break the seal. If only he had his lightsaber, or something sharp enough to cut…

His eyes land on an amphistaff lying inert on the shore, and he summons it to him with a single gesture. The creature obeys instantly, slithering into his waiting hands, where it goes rigid on command and assumes its lethal, razor-sharp edge. Jacen rises to his feet amid the blood and fluid, adjusting his grip on the staff as he lines up to deliver the blow.

“Wait, Jacen,” he hears a familiar voice say. “That one’s your friend, remember?”

He raises the staff over his right shoulder and heaves a deep breath before looking back to see his little brother standing on the shore. “I know,” he tells him, the words tight in his throat. “But that’s my daughter down there. My baby.” My light.

Anakin shakes his head, ice-blue eyes full of knowledge and sorrow as he taps the fingers of one hand to his chest. “Your light’s in here, Jacen. Everything you’re looking for is right here.”

“It’s not enough,” he chokes out. The amphistaff is warm in his hands, waiting anxiously to fulfill its purpose, and a part of him wishes he could lose himself in a brain-blistering red tide, just ride that wave until there’s nothing left. “I’m not enough.”

A sad smile melts the frozen youth of his brother’s face. “Jace. You’ve already faced this test.”

Jacen looks away from Anakin, searching for Allana beneath the seal. “You’re right. I have.”

“So what are you still doing here?”

He lifts the amphistaff higher, unable to look away from his daughter’s wide, terrified eyes. “I don’t know.”

He drives the living blade down through the warm wax, and the seal ruptures, oozing amniotic fluid as the dhuryam’s psychic screams beat against his brain. Jacen peels back the lips of the wound and reaches into the pod, but instead of Allana, he finds his twin sister inside, her skin pale and eyes closed.

“Jaina!” He wraps his arms around her torso and hauls her out of the mire, checking for signs of life. “No, no, no, come on, Jaina, wake up.”

Her eyes flutter open for only the briefest instant before closing again. “Sorry, Jace,” she whispers. “Guess I keep dying on you, huh?”

He sees the circle of blood on her shirt, right over her abdomen, like a terrible flower in bloom. Her head rolls back as she goes limp in his arms, the dhuryam’s mental cries filling the void where her presence should be before it, too, joins her in deathly silence.

“You killed her,” Anakin whispers behind him.

Jacen runs a shaking hand across his sister’s brow. “I know.”

“Bring her back.”

Those words drive under his ribs like a bone hook, curving up to stab the center of his chest. Sharp agony followed by unbearable pressure. And yet he does bear it. He will bear it forever.

“I wish I could bring her back,” he whispers through tears. “You know I would do it if I could.” But dead is dead. It’s an immutable fact of existence, one that has been drummed into him more times than he can count, from the first time he tried to wake a fallen sparrow, to the last time he felt his little brother’s presence burning in the Force, burning so hot and so bright, and then burning out forever. It didn’t end there, though, because death is a natural part of life, no matter how unnatural the means, and he has continued to watch them march to the grave, some dead by his own hand, others as good as. The gardener and his wretched garden.

Had he ever truly understood Vergere’s teachings? Had he understood Uncle Luke’s? Could he have, really, if it was so easy to turn his back on them, and on everyone he ever claimed to love? He’d torn through too much, ripped his family apart at the roots, taken a blade to flower and weed alike. It isn’t just he who will pay the price, but the entire galaxy.

—Daddy—

He turns toward the sound of Allana’s voice and finds himself bound in place, thick branch-grips wrapped around his limbs, forcing him to bear witness to this new hell. No longer a damp, stinking, inside out world of blood and violence, but an arid, empty wasteland, where soil and sky alike are painted in shades of rust. The desolate plain stretches all the way to the horizon and beyond, nothing but parched, crumbling earth and a sea of slender black stones sprouting from the ground like stunted saplings. The perfectly spaced rows, the identical obsidian markers… he has seen places like this before, on more than one world.

A land for the dead.

Allana stands among the obsidian headstones, her fingers lightly brushing the one closest to her. Behind her, a black storm cloud rumbles angrily as it approaches, casting a deeper shadow over the world. She glances over her shoulder at the storm, then turns to face him.

“It’s coming,” she says, eyes wide with fear. “We can’t get away this time.”

He reaches his arms out as far as the Embrace will allow him. “Don’t worry, little one. I’ll protect you.”

She runs to him, arms outstretched, fear turning to panic as the storm bears down on them both. She throws herself into his open arms. “Don’t let go of me!” she shouts above the roaring of the wind.

The darkness that surrounds them is fluid and fathomless, less a cloud than it is a shifting, oily shroud. From within, he senses not only the formless void of the dark that has existed for eons, not only the malice that festers within sentient hearts, but a distinct flavor of death, a promise of certain and utter destruction. A poisonous goodbye kiss to all life. This he knows with certainty: it cares not for sides or creeds or nomenclature. It is coming for everything, and everyone.

He holds Allana as tight as he can, fighting the darkness and the Embrace and the forces of radical change. “Daddy,” she pleads, her little voice breaking. “I’m scared.”

“It’s okay, I’m right here, I won’t let you go—”

She gasps as the shroud envelops her and rips her from his arms. His fingertips catch hers for one last instant, and then she’s gone, swept away by the shadows, too far away for him to reach. Her last word still whispering in his ears.

—daddy—

“Allana!”

Jacen opened his eyes and rocked forward on his knees, fingers digging into the grass on either side of him. He forced his breathing to slow as the world returned to him, its quiet cadence disrupting the dissonance of his vision. Dark, rocky soil and patches of long, wild grass and slender, ash-white tree trunks scattered across a steep hillside. Birdsong filling the air, and tiny insects leaping against the exposed skin of his hands and arms. He leaned back on his heels and stared down at the two handfuls of grass he’d unwittingly torn from the earth. Such casual, thoughtless violence. Even here, he couldn’t escape it.

He relaxed his fingers and watched the blades of grass slip between them to fall to the ground. The dark shroud from his vision had felt eerily similar to that strange chasm in the Force that prevented his injury from healing – as if it, too, were a mass shadow left in the wake of an imploding star, or an imploding relationship, or an imploding soul. He touched a hand to his abdomen, right over the knotted scar tissue, and nearly buckled from the mental anguish that swept through him: his and Jaina’s both, and not just from their own battle, but from so many others, across so many years, pain and guilt and despair and rage and fear, and longing, too, the interminable and hopeless longing of day after day without their brother’s unwavering light, stars, he’d almost forgotten the intensity of it, the vibrant spectrum of suffering he’d endured, how fragile their lives were in the end, really, and how little chance they stood of pushing back the darkness now that he was gone, now that she was gone, now that their brightest lights were dead, dead, dead.

He couldn’t touch the entirety of existence anymore, but he came close, and he knew – he understood – there was no going back for anyone now, no hope for some nebulous, brighter future. The end was coming, and the only ones who could stop it were dead by his own traitorous hand.

“This can’t be it,” he pleaded with the air. “Tell me this isn’t it. Tell me I can still fix this.”

Tell me I can bring them back.

He made no effort to banish that thought from his head. He allowed it to linger, didn’t tell himself how impossible or selfish or insane it was as he turned it over and over in his mind. The Force was too immense for mortal minds to fully comprehend, and yet for one impossible moment, he had become the Force, able to impose his will upon the whole galaxy, if he so chose. Size, distance, time… what were these, to the Force? Mere words that failed to capture the truth. A limit placed by minds unable or unwilling to see.

Vergere had told him to leave his limits behind, and for a time, he’d done so. What he hadn’t realized was that a person’s limits weren’t something to overcome only once in their life, and achieving perfect unity with the Force didn’t forever shield him from falling back into old patterns or succumbing to the doubts and hubris that had shaped his youth. His time as Darth Caedus was proof enough of that. But his eyes were wide open now, and this time he would get it right.

Jacen, he could almost hear his old mentor whisper, a breath of doubt. Is this truly your dream?

He stood and faced the valley, eyes sweeping over a calm blue sky and endless golden fields to land on the dark scar left behind by his escape pod.

His dream… the hopes of an idealistic young knight for a better future… they no longer mattered. They had been replaced with a nightmare, a cruel, twisted reality born from his own sins. A relentless tide of death and destruction that would rip his daughter away forever.

But not if he acted first.


~~


Jacen sensed Sebele’s presence before he was out of the hills. She shone in the Force with the steadiness and dependability of a signal light; even now, her strength and warmth were such that they made her illness difficult to discern. In some ways, it was hard to believe this was the same woman who’d collapsed like a rag doll only yesterday. But in the ways that mattered, he could honestly say he wasn’t surprised in the least. Sebele was exactly the sort of person who would eschew a day in bed and march across kilometers of farmland, just to check on someone in her care.

As he reached the stretch of scorched earth leading to the downed escape pod, he realized she was standing in the same place they had both stood that first lucid morning after the crash, when his wounds were still blisteringly raw and his grief even more so, when the twisted metal carcass marking his sister’s grave might as well have been a cage around his soul. He joined her without a word, and together they gazed out over the melted remains of his past life.

“We’ll be okay.” She spoke a bit distantly, but with the quiet confidence of a woman who had survived every hill and valley life could throw at her. “We’ll finish the harvest in time, make a nice little profit. Enough to get us through to next year.”

Jacen thought of the chemicals that still poisoned this field, the damage that might take years to recover from. He swallowed hard. “I’ll help in any way I can.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw her look down at the ground. “You know, I said you were welcome here as long as you needed, and I meant it.”

He turned to her, sensing she’d left that thought unfinished. “But?”

Her eyes rose to meet his. “But I think we both know you’ve done all you can here.”

He found himself unable to deny the truth of her words. “I will repay you someday. For your kindness, and your generosity. For everything.”

Sebele pursed her lips, and he thought she might try to argue, but the moment passed, and she let out a long breath. “Do me a favor, Jedi. Don’t stay so mired in the past that you forget to look forward.” She lifted a hand to his abdomen, fingers grazing the fabric of his shirt. “Don’t let whatever happened that day define you. It doesn’t.”

He looked down at his stomach, at her fingers still hovering close to his wound. “I’m not a Jedi, Sebele.”

“So you say.” She withdrew her hand and waited for him to meet her gaze. “I don’t think it matters much what you call yourself. As long as you do right by others, and yourself.”

He nodded slowly. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all you can do.” She faced the sunset and smiled. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The way the sun paints the hills as it goes down? Best way to end the day, looking at those hills.”

He had seen sunsets on more worlds than he could hope to count and witnessed the full spectrum of color and radiance and grandeur. There was little a backwater moon could offer that he hadn’t already experienced long ago, to far greater degrees. And yet, as he beheld the scene that Sebele so loved, he was reminded of the way the sunlight had hit the treetops on Yavin, and how he and Jaina used to sit outside the temple together and watch, and what he would give to live every one of those moments all over again.

“Yes,” he murmured as he watched the sun slowly dip below the hills. “Beautiful.”


~~


He doesn’t have much to take with him. Just the clothes on his back, the ones Sebele gave him, plus an extra set she won’t let him refuse. A week’s worth of meals, dehydrated and sealed for the journey. Enough credits to buy passage offworld. And Jaina’s lightsaber.

His wound still hasn’t healed completely. There’s a part of him that suspects it never will. But every day he gets stronger, and who knows? Maybe one day he’ll wake up, and the pain will be gone.

Maybe one day he’ll wake up, and Jaina will be there, and so will Tenel Ka, and Dad, and Uncle Luke, and Chewie, and Anakin.

It sounds impossible, but what is a Jedi Knight if not someone who makes the impossible possible? It won’t be easy, but few things worth doing are. And even if he isn’t a Jedi anymore, even if he has to descend into the depths of every hell to find the way forward, he can still be a force for good. He has to try.

He has to fix what he broke.

Whatever it takes, he will make things right.


~~

 

A beautiful story about Jacen and being cared for by this generous farmer family. Sebele finding out what ails him and giving him the advice to do right for others and for himself.

 

An absolutely wonderful piece of introspection, blazing regret, and realization that he cannot undo what he did or reclaim what was lost or broken. But he can try to forge ahead and make a difference and prevent further harm.

I love Sebele and her family. Her empathy and resolve, generosity and unwavering courage.



She has accepted the fact of her illness but has also chosen to embrace and bask in every moment she has.