NaNo Project: The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order: Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
*Title: Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star (*working title only, though it may become the permanent title by default).
Second Half of the Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love (This is divided into two parts due to the LJ's word/character limits, which limits the size of postings.)
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . A hard R for this specific part!
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lovely characters from the Star Wars ’verse, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: The future is never a fixed thing. Though certain actions taken at particular possible points of divergence can, seemingly, preclude the possibility of specific future pathways ever coming into existence, other unexpected choices can have extremely powerful repercussions with far-reaching effects upon the possible probable pathways that the future might yet take . . . and sometimes the spreading ripples of those effects can be so powerful that even the present and a part of the past can be altered, if enough raw energy is poured into the process of causing those effects. For Tahiri Veila, the possibility of swaying the current balance of power in the galaxy from darkness and despair back to light and hope seems worth any sacrifice necessary . . . even if she will have to give up her own life and the life of her unborn son to accomplish this. Will her sacrifice be enough to change the shape of the future, though, or will evil yet find a way to triumph, in this the worst and most wide-spread of all galactic wars?
Story/Author's Notes: For general notes on this story and proposed series, please see the entry on this NaNo project, at http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/140023.html
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Notes: Please note that the specific point of divergence for this story (which makes it an AU from the EU Legacy of the Force series) occurs when Jacen/Darth Caedus specificially decides to pursue Tahiri as a possible ally, following the only partially successful attempt made to defuse the Corellian situation by kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo and destroying or at least disabling Centerpoint Station in Betrayal, even before it becomes necessary for him to seek out an alternative to Ben Skywalker for a possible Sith apprentice. Everything in the story that makes it both AU and a true story pretty much flows from that.
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: There is what I think of as a hard R or definitely M for Mature rating for a certain section of the overall preface, due to sexual content, dubious consent, reference to incest, and some violence.
Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love
40:04:21-41:01:06 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,041-1,042 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,042-25,043 After Republic’s Founding)
The dark may be generous, and it may be patient, and it may always win, but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. And love is much more than a candle. Love - protecting, trusting, hoping, preserving, believing, giving, self-sacrificing, unending, unconditional, expecting nothing and offering all - can ignite the stars.
- Jedi Master Revan Maloch, from personal notes after the end of both the Jedi Civil War and the Sith Civil War
When Tahiri finally understands what it is that Jacen Solo wishes of her, why it is that he has been pursuing her and courting her support, her first anguished thought it so wonder what it is that’s wrong with her, that he could possibly ever think her capable of such an act of treachery.
When the practical warrior side of her psyche has kept her from reacting in such a way as to reveal the truth of her . . . unsuitability to Jacen as a possible replacement apprentice (given Ben Skywalker’s recent proven manifest inappropriateness for such a role) and cat’s paw and spy against the Solos, she realizes that she will be in a position to do far more good, both for her lost love’s parents and the whole of the galaxy, if she can manage to avoid being killed out of hand (as it appears more and more likely to have been the case with Nelani Dinn) or mind-wiped of any incriminating memories (as it has since been revealed has happened - more than once, and probably more often than they will ever know - with Ben), so that she will then be in a position to earn enough of Jacen’s trust to one day be able to betray him to the Skywalkers and Solos.
When she understands at last how he intends to break her and bring her over to his side - by returning with her, again and again and again, to that terrible, fateful, tragic mission to Myrkr and the cloning facility on the Yuuzhan Vong worldship Baanu Rass, where her beloved, Anakin Solo, gave his life so that the Jedi-hunting voxyn could be wiped out (by killing the voxyn queen and destroying the material and research that had led to her creation) without the task requiring the whole of the Jedi strike team to die in the process of completing the mission - Tahiri can feel her mind begin to splinter under the weight of her ravaging grief and ravening fury, Riina Kwaad (the Yuuzhan Vong persona placed in her by the heretical Master Shaper Mezhan Kwaad, created from the stored memories of a young Nen Yim) stirring within her, threatening to shake free of the meld formed between the implanted persona and the mind and memories of just Tahiri Veila (the so often barefoot and carefree Jedi child of Tatooine) and so shatter her mind irreparably.
Paradoxically, even though it is her hatred of Jacen that saves her, it is also then, when she understands what it is that has drawn Jacen to her, that she nearly fails and falls prey to him and his Dark Side ways, despite having survived the repeated infliction of the horror of Anakin’s tragically wasteful death. It is her love of Anakin that saves her then, the memory of the calm certainty in his icy pale (but never truly cold, not for her) blue eyes as he gazed upon her and told her, with absolute certainty, that, no matter what he had seen in that vision of the other version of her - the Yuuzhan Vong, extremely adult version her from some awful, alternate timeline where either Mezhan Kwaad succeeded in shaping her into a weapon against the hated Jeedai because Anakin wasn’t able to come rescue her before it was too late or else where the Solos (essentially her semi-adoptive family) weren’t able to help keep her from tearing herself apart, when the two parts of her mind began to war upon one another, trying to kill each other rather than melding, and the Dark Side ending up claiming whatever fragments were left when that terrible interior battle was finally over - he did not believe she could ever hurt him, and that he thought she was far too Tahiri to ever give in to either the Yuuzhan Vong shaping or the lure of the Dark Side.
She remembers them pressing their helmets together, so that they could speak privately, without having to worry about Corran Horn overhearing them, and the way that energy jolted into her and her stomach flip-flopped and felt as if a million flare-wings had suddenly been let loose within its cavity when he reached out to take her gloved hand in his, and she remembers the look on his face, the lopsided Solo grin - thought by so many to be arrogant, and thought by her to be one of the most beautiful, infinitely precious things in all the galaxy - when she rose up on her tiptoes in the Yuuzhan Vong cloning lab but ultimately (foolishly ) stopped herself from kissing him on the lips, telling him that he had to come back to her safely if he wanted that, and his determination to save them by sacrificing himself, and she manages to check herself, mid-plummet, at what she will be sure, later on, when she is alone and able to think again, is literally the last possible moment before her own irredeemable fall down into darkness and madness with Jacen Solo.
Anakin Solo gave his life for them. He traded his life willingly (stupidly!) for them. He was the one who had been able to intuit and sense, through the Force, the life-threads connecting them and their galaxy to the Yuuzhan Vong and their creations, despite the apparent absence of anything living within the Force where the Yuuzhan Vong and their creations physically existed, long before Luke and the other Jedi ever heard of Zonama Sekot or imagined that there might be such a connection that could account for that apparent lack of living presence within the Force. The war between them and the Yuuzhan Vong was eventually stopped, but it was not won, not by either side. They both lost, that day, when Anakin died, on the worldship over Myrkr. Tahiri has known this for a long, long time. She nearly lost herself, to the darkness of despair and the threat posed from within by Riina Kwaad (who did not then understand that neither her persona nor Tahiri herself could continue to exist long within the same body if they did not cease fighting one another), because she understood so clearly just what it was that both she and the galaxy had lost. When Jaina Solo had her brush with the Dark Side over her despair at losing Anakin and at having her twin, Jacen, taken from her (and presumed killed) by the Yuuzhan Vong, she could bring herself to do nothing, though she cared a great deal about her beloved’s older sister. Tahiri had been in too much pain herself to be of any use to Jaina, and could not rouse herself to more than half-hearted relief when Jaina came away from that temptation with nothing worse than Kyp Durron as her self-appointed keeper and new Master, a few extremely effective new tricks to use against the Yuuzhan Vong up her sleeve, and Yun-Harla (the Cloaked One, the Yuuzhan Vong Trickster goddess) as her new call-sign in Rogue Squadron. There had been some slight measure of peace, when the two minds warring within her finally came to agreement and melded, but it had been no more lasting than the sense of relief she’d experienced when Jacen returned to help them tip the balance away from endless war and into uneasy peace.
It is the memory of Anakin’s trust unwavering in her and the knowledge of the awful use to which the galaxy and one of Anakin’s own siblings has put the salvation, the second chance, bought by his terrible sacrifice that truly saves her. Tahiri can no more prove herself unworthy of that faith now than she can bring herself to ignore the chance she has been given (however slight it might be or however difficult to path to claiming it might prove) to redress the unspeakably awful wrong that has been perpetrated against the galaxy, resulting in a reality where Anakin Solo died so that his older brother Jacen could live to become a Sith Lord and a monster far worse than their grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, ever was or could have dreamed of becoming.
So she bides her time, driving her fingernails into her palms until they leave bloody half-moons across her calloused palms and biting the inside of both of her cheeks raw to keep from screaming herself hoarse at Jacen - no, at Darth Caedus. There is nothing left of the innocent young boy Jacen Solo once was in the ruthless, heartless, soulless monster who comes to her and attempts to seduce her to the Dark Side by flow-walking with her over and over and over again to the one time in her life filled with such pain that she had actually wished to die, rather than keep on experiencing it - and she focuses on her memory of Anakin (looking at her with trust, giving her that infinitely precious lopsided smile, moving to take her hand, reaching for her in the Force and saving her from the Yuuzhan Vong) and then calls upon every particle of strength within her (and, in an odd way, it actually helps that he’s waited until Anakin’s anniversary day to arrange another face to face meeting so he can broach the subject with her, as the knowledge of what day it is gives her yet another reason to focus both her mind and her strength on the task at hand) so she can put on a performance that could have given a Sith Master lessons in subtle deception, manipulation, and sheer talent of acting and ability to convince others of the truthfulness of her claims. When she is done with him, the Sith Lord wearing Jacen Solo’s far too familiar form and face is convinced that he has broken her, that she is now and will remain his for all time, and that he has, at last, found a worthy apprentice, one who will, unlike Ben Skywalker ,not fail him or the Sith Order with the Jedi weaknesses of love, self-sacrifice, compassion, and true loyalty to the Force and to life.
It is . . . terrifyingly easy, to fool him. There are days when she doubts herself, fears that she is deceiving herself and not the Sith Lord, and the constant worry and fear quickly begins to show, as she loses weight she can scarcely afford to lose and her sleep cycles become shorter and shorter, truncated by nightmares. Fortunately for her (though not so fortunately for the rest of the galaxy, as she is all too painfully aware), the escalating crisis between the Galactic Alliance and the Corellians (and their ever-growing list of allies, as the military flubs one attempt after another to bring about a peaceful resolution to the problem) keeps everyone too preoccupied to notice, as her weight plummets and her normally brilliant green eyes become sunken and sad shadows of themselves, the dark circles beneath them swiftly darkening to deeply gouged purple crescents that more closely resembles badly applied warrior’s paint than a sign of too little sleep.
As the crisis drags on and continues to worsen and she finds herself with no recourse but to continue on her own, unable even to turn to Master Skywalker for help after his beloved wife is murdered (Tahiri is the only one present in the room who isn’t surprised when Mara’s body doesn’t return to the Force until after Jacen has also entered the chamber. She would love to believe that it was Alema Rar who poisoned Mara, as the evidence so conveniently seems to suggest, but after that moment, she can no longer doubt the truth that’s staring her in the face, and she hates herself so completely for having failed to stop the Sith Lord before he could inflict such a grievous blow on Luke Skywalker, the Jedi, and the galaxy at large, by stealing Mara so untimely away, that only the memory of Anakin’s love and faith keeps her from doing harm to herself, the urge to claw and rend at her own flesh staved off only by the memory of his hand taking hers), she becomes painfully aware of just how far in over her head she’s gotten. But what else can she do, besides carry on? The Sith Lord has to be stopped, and she’s the only one who even knows enough (much less cares enough) about what he is to know that he must be stopped.
Still, the look of pain and heartbroken betrayal that Anakin’s parents turn on her, when she follows them to Hapes to attempt (on the Sith Lord’s orders) to arrest them, nearly cracks her heart in two, and it’s only by forcing herself to remember the Sith that she’s able to summon up enough anger to give a convincing show of a fight when Leia springs at her, her anguish and her anger making her a blinding blaze of knotted pain and fury in the Force. It’s not until afterwards, though, when she’s been presented to Colonel Solo (minus her StealthX) as an Alliance prisoner of war (with Hapes’ compliments and apologies for any misunderstanding - after all, the war has grown so very confusing, with so many desertions and betrayals, that it’s difficult to tell whose side anyone is on at any given moment in time), and the monster wearing Jacen’s body (a body still bearing traces of the battering received at the hands of a furious Luke Skywalker, when he rescued Ben from the Sith Lord’s attempts to break and turn the boy via torture) turns to her, in the aftermath of the loss of Tenel Ka and their (secret) daughter, Allana (a betrayal, in his mind, that has come about only due to the treacherous interference of his parents), and wraps his arms around her, his taller, much bulkier body half collapsing against her slender form, weeping brokenly against her hair, that she understands the true magnitude of the danger she has placed herself in.
Jacen’s hair has darkened, over time, from sun-bleached golden brown to a extremely dark hue, so that it is, now, only a few shades lighter than Anakin’s near-black hair. His grief and his rage over his loss is absolutely real - pain like that simply cannot be feigned within the Force - and he clings to her like a child might, whispering her name, brokenly, into her hair when she instinctively moves to hold him, the hand that Anakin once reached to clasp rising to stroke that hair gently, soothingly, reassuringly, as though it were Jacen (or even Anakin) that she were holding, and not a Sith Lord. Her body betrays her. Her heart betrays her. She proves herself weak in a way that it hasn’t even occurred to the Sith to worry about. The man in her arms looks like a Solo, feels like a Solo, and the Force pulses and throbs like a livid open wound with his anguish, his need. Tahiri holds him and she whispers every kind word, every reassuring phrase, that she ever thought or dreamed to say to Anakin, if only things had gone right, on that horrible mission, and he’d come back to her.
She cannot remember, later, why she turns them towards the couch, or quite how he ends up kneeling in the floor before her, his arms clenched almost painfully tight about her waist, his face buried half against her stomach and half in her lap, still sobbing broken-heartedly, all but hysterical with loss and grief and rage. Her slim fingers comb gently through his hair, her small hands shape themselves to his broad shoulders and rub in soothing circles down across his rigidly straining back, and she leans forward into him, against him, whispering soft assurances and words of love and encouragement meant for someone else, until he’s cried himself out, and the nuzzling motion against her has nothing to do with the seeking of comfort and everything to do with a rising hunger. She knows nothing of men but the few brief embraces she shared with Anakin, and it seems natural to her, for him to press close, for his large hands to be firmly clasped about one of her hips and pressed flat to the small of her back, guiding her across the sofa’s cushion towards him.
She doesn’t notice that his movements have become purposeful until after he’s pushed her right knee gently to the side, angling her legs open, allowing him to slip in between them even as he raises himself up from her lap, his eyes dark (all huge pupils and wholly human in a way that shocks her breathless) in the dim lighting, his mouth made like Anakin’s moving to the shape of her name, a sound catching in the back of his throat that she does not understand, until much later, is a noise of desire, of want, of need. He tastes like the Force. He tastes oddly, vibrantly alive, and clean, and powerful, and sorrowful, and in pain, and angry, and aggrieved, and anguished, and in desperate need, and she is so stunned and overwhelmed by the sense of home and Anakin that her lips have parted and she is kissing him back before her mind has even caught up to the fact that he has fitted that ripe rich Solo mouth to hers and is rising up her body like a clinging vine . . . or the biting, binding tendrils of a Yuuzhan Vong Embrace of Pain.
He does not stop saying her name, murmuring it against the skin of her neck, groaning it against her lips, chanting it like a blessing or a curse against the soft cloud of her golden hair and the sea-shell curve of her left ear. He knows whom he is holding, whom he is kissing, whom he is maneuvering back over onto the cushions so that he can climb up the couch and her body and cover her completely with his taller, heavier form, his hardness trapped between his black-garbed body and her soft belly, the whole of him pushed too solidly into her for her body to betray her by writhing. It does not stop her from wanting to move, though, her hips squirming back against the cushions, her hands grasping helplessly at the hard muscles of his broad shoulders and back, her mouth gaping open for plundering, her gasps of shock inviting him in closer and closer, until she can do nothing, think nothing, feel nothing, but him, all around and above and along and within her, his tongue a wet plunging muscled slide promising things to come that she cannot marshal enough wits even to predict, much less fight against.
He smells like Anakin; he feels like Anakin did, in the Force, like a blazing nova of pure energy, constrained only the barest bit by the flesh; he tastes of the Force and the sweetness of desire and the saltiness of grief and the electric vitality of life itself; the broken whispers and moans and cries that shape themselves to her name sound, to her, like Anakin’s voice; and, in the dimness of the room and the darkness of those clothes, he easily could have been Anakin himself, returned to her, miraculously, panting and sobbing for need of her, those huge hands gentle almost to the point of reverence and yet still somehow purposeful, insistent, like those incredibly full lips covering her mouth and sliding along the thin bare skin of her throat, pressing deliberately and firmly up against the pulse point, sliding apart just enough to capture a taste of her with the tip of a clever tongue and then for teeth to press in all around her jugular, hard and promising of other things to come in much the same way that the rigid length straining against her vulnerable stomach warns and assures the shape of things to come.
The thought of resisting never once crosses her dazed mind.
It is not, precisely, rape. It is a ravaging, but he is so incredibly gentle - plucking her up from the sofa after she has been rendered utterly pliant, her body primed for anything he might choose to do to her, and carrying her (like a stereotypical husband might carry a new bride across the threshold of their new home) from the room, taking hurried, ground-eating strides to cross the suite and make his way into the bedroom with her, kissing her the entire way - and so thorough in the lavishing of his attention upon her body that it feels more like an act of worship, of love, than it does an act of taking, of violence. It isn’t until after she’s crashed back down into herself to find Anakin’s name still reverberating on the air from lips squared to the shape of an orgasmic shriek, blood smeared in between her thighs and pooling on the sheet beneath her, and a Solo - no, Darth Caedus - curling away from her with a cry like a wounded animal, broad, scarred back rigid with hurt and sudden panic, that she begins to understand what’s happened and realizes how badly she’s misjudged her danger.
Tahiri’s first instinct, when her understanding is complete, is to kill herself. Jacen - no, the Sith - fights her with such desperation over the lightsaber that he not only almost instantly skewers himself upon the blade of lambent blue light, but soon after nearly tears himself open, coming within a hairbreadth of gutting himself like a fish. She is keening, her voice working its way up to a painfully ear-splitting pitch, when he finally manages to get the lightsaber away from her by allowing her to spear him cleanly though the side, the energy blade piercing him through just above the right hip, punching effortlessly through his entire body and somehow missing every single organ within the abdominal cavity that should have been at risk of being punctured by such a wound, despite (or perhaps because of) the slight angle of the blade. He makes no more noise when the lightsaber penetrates his side than a nearly inaudible hissing intake of pained breath, and shock over his near-silence makes her hesitate for a fraction of a second, just long enough for him to shut the blade off and begin the motion that will wrench the hilt violently away from her suddenly fumbling, nerveless grasp.
When she recovers sufficiently enough from her shock to try to go after his lightsaber, he follows and catches her up, his arms winding around her from behind and lifting her bodily from the floor, tendrils of the Force wrapping all around her like his arms, restraining her when she would have fought, leaving her able to do little more than hang there, in his desperate embrace, the smallest of tremors wracking her body, making her skin shiver as if from sudden cold.
“Tahiri! Tahiri, stop it! You can’t do this - you mustn’t try to hurt yourself! I’m not him - I’m nowhere near as good as he was, and I know I’ll never be able to replace him - but you’ll hurt our son, if you keep on like this, and I can’t let you do that, not to our boy! He’s Anakin - he’ll be Anakin, Anakin reborn - don’t you understand? I see him and I can’t let you harm him!”
She’s never heard of an ability that allows the sharing of Force-given visions, but when he reaches out to her in the Force, she sees everything that he’s seeing - herself, conceiving his child this night; herself, pregnant, standing at a window overlooking a beautiful garden, bathed in a warm golden fall of sunlight, hands resting lightly on her stomach, eyes shut as though listening intently, turning instinctively to the approach of a tall figure swathed in a voluminous hooded black cloak, face raised for a kiss, body relaxing back into encircling arms, guiding large hands to join her small ones, head resting on his broad chest, tilting back to look up into the dark, utterly awed, and completely besotted human eyes of Jacen Solo; her water breaking in what looks like a throne room and being half carried out by her frantic looking husband; a (relatively) short but intense labor in some richly appointed yet ultra modern private medical facility resulting in the live birth of a son, who is given over to her to be proudly offered up to his father, standing by the bed with tears of gratitude and joy openly streaming down his face; a boy at her breast, in her arms, crawling and toddling along in her wake, wobbling unsteadily and then racing like the wind around her, looking eerily like all of the holos and recordings she’s ever seen of Anakin Solo at every age she glimpses this boy, only a few flecks and striations of green in his icy blue eyes and the slightest noticeable wave to his not quite naturally near-black hair (as Anakin’s hair always was, at the roots, a color so dark that it sometimes fooled those who met him first in low lighting into believing his hair was black instead of brown, though this wasn’t often the case after he moved to the academy at Yavin 4 and began to spend so much time outside that the constant exposure to sunlight leached his hair to a lighter shade, closer to a medium hue of glossy nut brown, with ghosts of paler, reddish-golden highlights streaking the uppermost sun-bleached layer) revealing that these aren’t, in fact, visions of her best friend and beloved, as a child.
She’s seen so many pictures and recordings of Anakin and her memories of him are all so clear that the sight of this boy tugs at her heart, making her ache with loss and with wanting in much the same way as the sight of that Coruscanti boy, Dab Hantaq, otherwise known as Tarc - altered at Viqi Shesh’s insistence during the war with the Yuuzhan Vong to a closer than natural resemblance to Anakin Solo, to serve as a distraction to the Solos during a kidnaping attempt on Luke and Mara’s (then) infant son, Ben - always did and still does whenever she receives word from him, telling her about his new life, as a holocam operator and budding holojournalist, with Wolam Tser and Tam Elgrin. Seeing this child - smiling up at her with an infant’s complete trust and uncomplicated happiness; grinning up at her with a young boy’s innocent delight; smirking at her with a teen’s cocky assuredness; smiling down at her sweetly with a young man’s love and respect for a strong and beautiful mother - shatters something inside her.
When the shared vision begins to turn darker, when a young girl with dark red hair (like the sullen glow of embers in a dying fire or a fall of blood on a moonless night) and hazel-grey eyes in a delicately lovely face made almost shockingly beautiful by a lush Solo mouth shows up, lurking at the outskirts of events, watching them from the shadows with an oddly hungry, openly yearning expression, she’s too caught up in her own pain to try to turn away. It isn’t until this girl (and Tahiri knows whose child this is, whose girl this must be, however impossible her presence in their life might seem) has gone from simply shadowing their boy, following him everywhere, to accompanying him openly - tagging along after him with her tiny white feet bare beneath the hems of her gowns and her braided hair constantly windblown and mussed near or to the point of unraveling; with one of her small, slim hands wrapped up in his; with one of her thin arms looped loosely around his shoulders or twined tightly around his waist; with her slender body so close to his that their shadows mingle on the floor, forming but one shape together - that uneasiness begins to intrude.
When she sees them, bodies cinched together, legs entwined, arms holding tightly, hands grasping greedily, mouths locked in a kiss no siblings (half siblings or not) should ever share, she desperately wants to scream. She wants to hate and hurt Allana, for seducing her younger half-brother; she wants to tear Tenel Ka to pieces, for not being sufficiently strong or clever enough to keep her daughter (their daughter), the Chume’da, from Jacen (the girl’s father); and, most of all, she wants to kill Jacen, for allowing this (no, encouraging, she can see that, now, looking back. It’s not just a matter of not noticing the danger or of permitting too close an attachment: Jacen actively pushes the two together, deliberately guiding them towards a relationship so close, so intimate, so interdependent, that an obsessive attachment and almost fanatical blind love is all but a foregone conclusion) to happen.
She wants to vomit, to cry, to scream. Despite his power all around her still, restraining her, her hands still manage to curve instinctively, protectively, across her stomach, as though the gesture alone might be enough to ward off the future she sees coming so clearly. His voice, murmuring dreamily against her hair, her ear, about their wonderful son (so powerful in the Force and so strong and beautiful and fundamentally good), about Anakin, about how he and Allana will inherit the order that he, that they, have fought for and will continue to fight so hard and sacrifice so much to bring about, and about how they will then found a dynasty of Emperors and Empresses who will rule over the whole of the known galaxy in glorious peace for thousands of years to come, makes her want to turn about, just twist around in his arms, and claw his eyes out, for seeing that and being able to want it to come true. But the knowledge she gains from one more shared vision - showing herself, beaming happily, radiantly, through joyous tears as her son pledges himself to Tenel Ka’s daughter, wedding her in a garden, beneath a bower that sheds starlike pink and white flowers and vivid crimson and purple petals down upon them both - chokes off the building scream, killing it before it can work its way up and out of her throat.
Luckily for her, Jacen (the Sith Lord, dammit, the Sith!) mistakes the protective gesture of her cradling hands, the sudden stunned limpness of her (lightheaded and dizzy almost to the point of fainting) body, and the brightly shimmering sheen of unshed tears in her eyes as signs of joy, of shocked but excited acceptance, rejoicing, even desire. The strong arms holding her aloft slide down her body, fitting themselves to her own arms, his hands ghosting up and settling alongside her own, mirroring a pose from the vision, only there is, here, a renewed hardness rising against her, nestling against and slightly between her cheeks, pressing her insistently (raised up as she is, her dangling toes skimming the air somewhere just above his ankles) and guiding her legs further apart, until a blunt roundness slides up along the swollen folds of blood-smeared lips, his dreamy whispers turning to a low, breathy moan, a noise catching in the back of his throat as his body curves around hers, his hips seeking an angle that will allow penetration.
He starts to whisper her name again, groaning against her hair, his face nudging her head to the side, his tongue tracing the curve of her right ear, his teeth closing with gentle violence around the lobe, nibbling and sucking, moist, hot lips leaving a burning trail of kisses down the curved arch of her neck, down to the joint of throat and shoulder, sharp teeth sinking in there ever so slightly, ever so steadily, worrying mercilessly at that jointure, marking it, marking her, and then laving the bruised redness left behind with a gentle/greedy tongue. Calloused fingers twine with hers, cup her flat stomach in a promising, claiming gesture, and then slide her hands up her abdomen, across her ribs, to her breasts, his hands cradling hers, her breasts spilling down into their curved fingers, nothing but the Force keeping her aloft and against him as his hands guide hers to cup and kneed and tweak and play with herself, calloused fingertips circling around and spiraling inwards to pinch with delicious cruelty at her hardened and aching nipples.
His hips rise against her, his body inexorably curving, bending her forward, turning her back to the bed, pressing her down to the mattress, manipulating and guiding her body down, tendrils of the Force like extra hands pressing against the joints of her legs until she is curled forward, on hands and knees, tilted awkwardly, face pressed down against the jumbled covers. The hands at her breasts leave, and a traitorous sound of loss catches in the back of her throat, prompting a rumbling purr of laughter from behind her, and a whisper that she can continue on her own, if she wants, while one of those hands strokes up and down the line of her bowed back and the other grasps and kneads her buttocks, the rigid length of him settling a bit more firmly between the cheeks, the rounded head sliding along and then parting wet folds as battle-hardened fingertips skate across and slightly between the shadowy recess behind, and the breath catches in her throat, half in terror and half in (sick and wrong, dammit, damn her treacherous body, just plain wrong!) pulse-pounding anticipation of something as two saliva-slick fingers gently but insistently press her cheeks apart, as though searching for something even more vitally important than the mouth being parted by that almost but not quite painfully thick hardness.
Whatever he’s searching for, he seems to have found it soon enough, for as those moistened fingers hold her apart, a softly satisfied sigh sounds from behind her, following by an almost inaudible groan of, “Anakin ” And then his hips are somehow both pressing down on and lifting her up, and he’s sliding within her again in one long, clean thrust, his left hand curving back up and around to join hers, at her breasts, and his right hand snaking down between her legs, calloused fingers stroking and teasing and joining the plunge of hardness within her, making her cry out, making her writhe and arch shamelessly, like an animal in heat, the pleasure so overwhelming that there’s no room for thought or memory or anything but the need for movement and more movement and more and more and faster and more and O, Force - !
He rides her until she finally breaks, keening wordlessly in ecstacy, and, afterwards, turns them about on the bed until she’s the one riding him. That time, when orgasm hits, it’s his name she screams, “Jacen!” tearing out of her, leaving such a painfully deep, ragged hole in her soul that a part of her is amazed when her body doesn’t just spilt open and bleed to death on the bed.
When she cries, afterwards, though, curled helplessly in around her stomach, he strokes her bowed back with those huge, gentle hands and gathers her up close to him, a look of such contentment and joy on his face (that full Solo mouth curving to the shape of a soft, self-satisfied smile) that she cannot even summon the will or the strength to push him away, her traitorous body instead curving itself into the warm solidity of him, pressing her tear-streaked face against the muscled bulk of his chest and shutting her eyes tight, tight, listening to his low, indistinct voice crooning soothing nonsense (filled with protestations of endless, boundless love and promises to do whatever is necessary to keep her - to keep their son - safe, always) into her hair and drifting, too drained to even try to fight against the phantom (unreal, untrue, deceptive) sensation of being wrapped, once more, in the natural, easy warmth of Anakin’s love.
It is entirely too easy, to lose herself in that illusion of warmth, caring, love.
And she, as it turns out, is so damnably weak that it isn’t until after Jaina has turned to the Mandalorians, for training that give her enough of an edge to take down her brother, and has tried to get to him by going through Tahiri, all but taking her leg off, in an attempt to get at him, that she finally summons enough clarity of thought to realize what’s happening and break the illusion.
Tahiri hates herself, for what she has to do to Ben Skywalker, to gain enough motivation to finish clawing her way out of the shadowy illusion that Jacen (no, Caedus, dammit, Darth Caedus!) has woven around her, but there’s no other way. It’s too late to try anything else. The Mandalorians have taught Jaina too well and she is so determined to kill her brother that it’s no use trying to turn her from her chosen path or strike a bargain - or find a way of betraying him that will end with him safely (or at least securely) in custody, rather than spitted on the end of his twin’s violet lightsaber - like Tahiri vaguely remembers she had originally been planning to do, before . . . well, before she gained something capable of giving her stress-starved concave stomach a reason to begin to gain the smallest of convex curves. Despite all that the boy has been through - despite all of the betrayals he has weathered, because of Jacen (Caedus, Caedus!) - Ben is still only just barely a teenager, and his instinct is to help, to trust, to forgive, to give second (or third or fourth or a hundredth) chances, not to take advantage of an opponent’s weakness and dive in for the easy kill. It is almost laughably easy, to trigger Ben’s protective tendencies, to use him as a shield against the Hapans and the other Jedi, and then to quietly slip away from him, once he is certain of her willingness to work with him, instead of against him, on some imagined path leading to her redemption.
Tahiri doesn’t need Ben Skywalker to save her or show her a way back to the light. She already knows what needs to be done, what she has to do, to save him and the rest of the galaxy from the darkness that has been plaguing it, and returning to the Jedi fold with her head bowed and eyes meekly downcast as she mouths platitudes about belief and the healing power of love and the Light never even enters her mind as a real possibility.
No. She has to go back, back to Myrkr, and save Anakin, so he can stop this from ever happening to his family, to his brother, to herself. And if it means that she and her child must be wiped from the face of existence itself, to ensure that this horrible future is averted, well . . . no one ever said that doing the right thing would be easy.
If she can save Anakin, save her beloved’s precious life, give her friends, her family, the means to put an end to the Yuuzhan Vong War earlier, to stop the Killiks from ever becoming dangerous enough to spark an all but galactic-wide conflict, to stop Jacen from ever becoming Darth Caedus, then she will consider it a fair trade.
*********
Second Half of the Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love (This is divided into two parts due to the LJ's word/character limits, which limits the size of postings.)
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . A hard R for this specific part!
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lovely characters from the Star Wars ’verse, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: The future is never a fixed thing. Though certain actions taken at particular possible points of divergence can, seemingly, preclude the possibility of specific future pathways ever coming into existence, other unexpected choices can have extremely powerful repercussions with far-reaching effects upon the possible probable pathways that the future might yet take . . . and sometimes the spreading ripples of those effects can be so powerful that even the present and a part of the past can be altered, if enough raw energy is poured into the process of causing those effects. For Tahiri Veila, the possibility of swaying the current balance of power in the galaxy from darkness and despair back to light and hope seems worth any sacrifice necessary . . . even if she will have to give up her own life and the life of her unborn son to accomplish this. Will her sacrifice be enough to change the shape of the future, though, or will evil yet find a way to triumph, in this the worst and most wide-spread of all galactic wars?
Story/Author's Notes: For general notes on this story and proposed series, please see the entry on this NaNo project, at http://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/140023.html
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Notes: Please note that the specific point of divergence for this story (which makes it an AU from the EU Legacy of the Force series) occurs when Jacen/Darth Caedus specificially decides to pursue Tahiri as a possible ally, following the only partially successful attempt made to defuse the Corellian situation by kidnapping Prime Minister Aidel Saxan and Chief of State Thrackan Sal-Solo and destroying or at least disabling Centerpoint Station in Betrayal, even before it becomes necessary for him to seek out an alternative to Ben Skywalker for a possible Sith apprentice. Everything in the story that makes it both AU and a true story pretty much flows from that.
Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: There is what I think of as a hard R or definitely M for Mature rating for a certain section of the overall preface, due to sexual content, dubious consent, reference to incest, and some violence.
Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star
Preface: Sanctifying, Sacrificial Love
40:04:21-41:01:06 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,041-1,042 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,042-25,043 After Republic’s Founding)
The dark may be generous, and it may be patient, and it may always win, but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. And love is much more than a candle. Love - protecting, trusting, hoping, preserving, believing, giving, self-sacrificing, unending, unconditional, expecting nothing and offering all - can ignite the stars.
- Jedi Master Revan Maloch, from personal notes after the end of both the Jedi Civil War and the Sith Civil War
When Tahiri finally understands what it is that Jacen Solo wishes of her, why it is that he has been pursuing her and courting her support, her first anguished thought it so wonder what it is that’s wrong with her, that he could possibly ever think her capable of such an act of treachery.
When the practical warrior side of her psyche has kept her from reacting in such a way as to reveal the truth of her . . . unsuitability to Jacen as a possible replacement apprentice (given Ben Skywalker’s recent proven manifest inappropriateness for such a role) and cat’s paw and spy against the Solos, she realizes that she will be in a position to do far more good, both for her lost love’s parents and the whole of the galaxy, if she can manage to avoid being killed out of hand (as it appears more and more likely to have been the case with Nelani Dinn) or mind-wiped of any incriminating memories (as it has since been revealed has happened - more than once, and probably more often than they will ever know - with Ben), so that she will then be in a position to earn enough of Jacen’s trust to one day be able to betray him to the Skywalkers and Solos.
When she understands at last how he intends to break her and bring her over to his side - by returning with her, again and again and again, to that terrible, fateful, tragic mission to Myrkr and the cloning facility on the Yuuzhan Vong worldship Baanu Rass, where her beloved, Anakin Solo, gave his life so that the Jedi-hunting voxyn could be wiped out (by killing the voxyn queen and destroying the material and research that had led to her creation) without the task requiring the whole of the Jedi strike team to die in the process of completing the mission - Tahiri can feel her mind begin to splinter under the weight of her ravaging grief and ravening fury, Riina Kwaad (the Yuuzhan Vong persona placed in her by the heretical Master Shaper Mezhan Kwaad, created from the stored memories of a young Nen Yim) stirring within her, threatening to shake free of the meld formed between the implanted persona and the mind and memories of just Tahiri Veila (the so often barefoot and carefree Jedi child of Tatooine) and so shatter her mind irreparably.
Paradoxically, even though it is her hatred of Jacen that saves her, it is also then, when she understands what it is that has drawn Jacen to her, that she nearly fails and falls prey to him and his Dark Side ways, despite having survived the repeated infliction of the horror of Anakin’s tragically wasteful death. It is her love of Anakin that saves her then, the memory of the calm certainty in his icy pale (but never truly cold, not for her) blue eyes as he gazed upon her and told her, with absolute certainty, that, no matter what he had seen in that vision of the other version of her - the Yuuzhan Vong, extremely adult version her from some awful, alternate timeline where either Mezhan Kwaad succeeded in shaping her into a weapon against the hated Jeedai because Anakin wasn’t able to come rescue her before it was too late or else where the Solos (essentially her semi-adoptive family) weren’t able to help keep her from tearing herself apart, when the two parts of her mind began to war upon one another, trying to kill each other rather than melding, and the Dark Side ending up claiming whatever fragments were left when that terrible interior battle was finally over - he did not believe she could ever hurt him, and that he thought she was far too Tahiri to ever give in to either the Yuuzhan Vong shaping or the lure of the Dark Side.
She remembers them pressing their helmets together, so that they could speak privately, without having to worry about Corran Horn overhearing them, and the way that energy jolted into her and her stomach flip-flopped and felt as if a million flare-wings had suddenly been let loose within its cavity when he reached out to take her gloved hand in his, and she remembers the look on his face, the lopsided Solo grin - thought by so many to be arrogant, and thought by her to be one of the most beautiful, infinitely precious things in all the galaxy - when she rose up on her tiptoes in the Yuuzhan Vong cloning lab but ultimately (foolishly ) stopped herself from kissing him on the lips, telling him that he had to come back to her safely if he wanted that, and his determination to save them by sacrificing himself, and she manages to check herself, mid-plummet, at what she will be sure, later on, when she is alone and able to think again, is literally the last possible moment before her own irredeemable fall down into darkness and madness with Jacen Solo.
Anakin Solo gave his life for them. He traded his life willingly (stupidly!) for them. He was the one who had been able to intuit and sense, through the Force, the life-threads connecting them and their galaxy to the Yuuzhan Vong and their creations, despite the apparent absence of anything living within the Force where the Yuuzhan Vong and their creations physically existed, long before Luke and the other Jedi ever heard of Zonama Sekot or imagined that there might be such a connection that could account for that apparent lack of living presence within the Force. The war between them and the Yuuzhan Vong was eventually stopped, but it was not won, not by either side. They both lost, that day, when Anakin died, on the worldship over Myrkr. Tahiri has known this for a long, long time. She nearly lost herself, to the darkness of despair and the threat posed from within by Riina Kwaad (who did not then understand that neither her persona nor Tahiri herself could continue to exist long within the same body if they did not cease fighting one another), because she understood so clearly just what it was that both she and the galaxy had lost. When Jaina Solo had her brush with the Dark Side over her despair at losing Anakin and at having her twin, Jacen, taken from her (and presumed killed) by the Yuuzhan Vong, she could bring herself to do nothing, though she cared a great deal about her beloved’s older sister. Tahiri had been in too much pain herself to be of any use to Jaina, and could not rouse herself to more than half-hearted relief when Jaina came away from that temptation with nothing worse than Kyp Durron as her self-appointed keeper and new Master, a few extremely effective new tricks to use against the Yuuzhan Vong up her sleeve, and Yun-Harla (the Cloaked One, the Yuuzhan Vong Trickster goddess) as her new call-sign in Rogue Squadron. There had been some slight measure of peace, when the two minds warring within her finally came to agreement and melded, but it had been no more lasting than the sense of relief she’d experienced when Jacen returned to help them tip the balance away from endless war and into uneasy peace.
It is the memory of Anakin’s trust unwavering in her and the knowledge of the awful use to which the galaxy and one of Anakin’s own siblings has put the salvation, the second chance, bought by his terrible sacrifice that truly saves her. Tahiri can no more prove herself unworthy of that faith now than she can bring herself to ignore the chance she has been given (however slight it might be or however difficult to path to claiming it might prove) to redress the unspeakably awful wrong that has been perpetrated against the galaxy, resulting in a reality where Anakin Solo died so that his older brother Jacen could live to become a Sith Lord and a monster far worse than their grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, ever was or could have dreamed of becoming.
So she bides her time, driving her fingernails into her palms until they leave bloody half-moons across her calloused palms and biting the inside of both of her cheeks raw to keep from screaming herself hoarse at Jacen - no, at Darth Caedus. There is nothing left of the innocent young boy Jacen Solo once was in the ruthless, heartless, soulless monster who comes to her and attempts to seduce her to the Dark Side by flow-walking with her over and over and over again to the one time in her life filled with such pain that she had actually wished to die, rather than keep on experiencing it - and she focuses on her memory of Anakin (looking at her with trust, giving her that infinitely precious lopsided smile, moving to take her hand, reaching for her in the Force and saving her from the Yuuzhan Vong) and then calls upon every particle of strength within her (and, in an odd way, it actually helps that he’s waited until Anakin’s anniversary day to arrange another face to face meeting so he can broach the subject with her, as the knowledge of what day it is gives her yet another reason to focus both her mind and her strength on the task at hand) so she can put on a performance that could have given a Sith Master lessons in subtle deception, manipulation, and sheer talent of acting and ability to convince others of the truthfulness of her claims. When she is done with him, the Sith Lord wearing Jacen Solo’s far too familiar form and face is convinced that he has broken her, that she is now and will remain his for all time, and that he has, at last, found a worthy apprentice, one who will, unlike Ben Skywalker ,not fail him or the Sith Order with the Jedi weaknesses of love, self-sacrifice, compassion, and true loyalty to the Force and to life.
It is . . . terrifyingly easy, to fool him. There are days when she doubts herself, fears that she is deceiving herself and not the Sith Lord, and the constant worry and fear quickly begins to show, as she loses weight she can scarcely afford to lose and her sleep cycles become shorter and shorter, truncated by nightmares. Fortunately for her (though not so fortunately for the rest of the galaxy, as she is all too painfully aware), the escalating crisis between the Galactic Alliance and the Corellians (and their ever-growing list of allies, as the military flubs one attempt after another to bring about a peaceful resolution to the problem) keeps everyone too preoccupied to notice, as her weight plummets and her normally brilliant green eyes become sunken and sad shadows of themselves, the dark circles beneath them swiftly darkening to deeply gouged purple crescents that more closely resembles badly applied warrior’s paint than a sign of too little sleep.
As the crisis drags on and continues to worsen and she finds herself with no recourse but to continue on her own, unable even to turn to Master Skywalker for help after his beloved wife is murdered (Tahiri is the only one present in the room who isn’t surprised when Mara’s body doesn’t return to the Force until after Jacen has also entered the chamber. She would love to believe that it was Alema Rar who poisoned Mara, as the evidence so conveniently seems to suggest, but after that moment, she can no longer doubt the truth that’s staring her in the face, and she hates herself so completely for having failed to stop the Sith Lord before he could inflict such a grievous blow on Luke Skywalker, the Jedi, and the galaxy at large, by stealing Mara so untimely away, that only the memory of Anakin’s love and faith keeps her from doing harm to herself, the urge to claw and rend at her own flesh staved off only by the memory of his hand taking hers), she becomes painfully aware of just how far in over her head she’s gotten. But what else can she do, besides carry on? The Sith Lord has to be stopped, and she’s the only one who even knows enough (much less cares enough) about what he is to know that he must be stopped.
Still, the look of pain and heartbroken betrayal that Anakin’s parents turn on her, when she follows them to Hapes to attempt (on the Sith Lord’s orders) to arrest them, nearly cracks her heart in two, and it’s only by forcing herself to remember the Sith that she’s able to summon up enough anger to give a convincing show of a fight when Leia springs at her, her anguish and her anger making her a blinding blaze of knotted pain and fury in the Force. It’s not until afterwards, though, when she’s been presented to Colonel Solo (minus her StealthX) as an Alliance prisoner of war (with Hapes’ compliments and apologies for any misunderstanding - after all, the war has grown so very confusing, with so many desertions and betrayals, that it’s difficult to tell whose side anyone is on at any given moment in time), and the monster wearing Jacen’s body (a body still bearing traces of the battering received at the hands of a furious Luke Skywalker, when he rescued Ben from the Sith Lord’s attempts to break and turn the boy via torture) turns to her, in the aftermath of the loss of Tenel Ka and their (secret) daughter, Allana (a betrayal, in his mind, that has come about only due to the treacherous interference of his parents), and wraps his arms around her, his taller, much bulkier body half collapsing against her slender form, weeping brokenly against her hair, that she understands the true magnitude of the danger she has placed herself in.
Jacen’s hair has darkened, over time, from sun-bleached golden brown to a extremely dark hue, so that it is, now, only a few shades lighter than Anakin’s near-black hair. His grief and his rage over his loss is absolutely real - pain like that simply cannot be feigned within the Force - and he clings to her like a child might, whispering her name, brokenly, into her hair when she instinctively moves to hold him, the hand that Anakin once reached to clasp rising to stroke that hair gently, soothingly, reassuringly, as though it were Jacen (or even Anakin) that she were holding, and not a Sith Lord. Her body betrays her. Her heart betrays her. She proves herself weak in a way that it hasn’t even occurred to the Sith to worry about. The man in her arms looks like a Solo, feels like a Solo, and the Force pulses and throbs like a livid open wound with his anguish, his need. Tahiri holds him and she whispers every kind word, every reassuring phrase, that she ever thought or dreamed to say to Anakin, if only things had gone right, on that horrible mission, and he’d come back to her.
She cannot remember, later, why she turns them towards the couch, or quite how he ends up kneeling in the floor before her, his arms clenched almost painfully tight about her waist, his face buried half against her stomach and half in her lap, still sobbing broken-heartedly, all but hysterical with loss and grief and rage. Her slim fingers comb gently through his hair, her small hands shape themselves to his broad shoulders and rub in soothing circles down across his rigidly straining back, and she leans forward into him, against him, whispering soft assurances and words of love and encouragement meant for someone else, until he’s cried himself out, and the nuzzling motion against her has nothing to do with the seeking of comfort and everything to do with a rising hunger. She knows nothing of men but the few brief embraces she shared with Anakin, and it seems natural to her, for him to press close, for his large hands to be firmly clasped about one of her hips and pressed flat to the small of her back, guiding her across the sofa’s cushion towards him.
She doesn’t notice that his movements have become purposeful until after he’s pushed her right knee gently to the side, angling her legs open, allowing him to slip in between them even as he raises himself up from her lap, his eyes dark (all huge pupils and wholly human in a way that shocks her breathless) in the dim lighting, his mouth made like Anakin’s moving to the shape of her name, a sound catching in the back of his throat that she does not understand, until much later, is a noise of desire, of want, of need. He tastes like the Force. He tastes oddly, vibrantly alive, and clean, and powerful, and sorrowful, and in pain, and angry, and aggrieved, and anguished, and in desperate need, and she is so stunned and overwhelmed by the sense of home and Anakin that her lips have parted and she is kissing him back before her mind has even caught up to the fact that he has fitted that ripe rich Solo mouth to hers and is rising up her body like a clinging vine . . . or the biting, binding tendrils of a Yuuzhan Vong Embrace of Pain.
He does not stop saying her name, murmuring it against the skin of her neck, groaning it against her lips, chanting it like a blessing or a curse against the soft cloud of her golden hair and the sea-shell curve of her left ear. He knows whom he is holding, whom he is kissing, whom he is maneuvering back over onto the cushions so that he can climb up the couch and her body and cover her completely with his taller, heavier form, his hardness trapped between his black-garbed body and her soft belly, the whole of him pushed too solidly into her for her body to betray her by writhing. It does not stop her from wanting to move, though, her hips squirming back against the cushions, her hands grasping helplessly at the hard muscles of his broad shoulders and back, her mouth gaping open for plundering, her gasps of shock inviting him in closer and closer, until she can do nothing, think nothing, feel nothing, but him, all around and above and along and within her, his tongue a wet plunging muscled slide promising things to come that she cannot marshal enough wits even to predict, much less fight against.
He smells like Anakin; he feels like Anakin did, in the Force, like a blazing nova of pure energy, constrained only the barest bit by the flesh; he tastes of the Force and the sweetness of desire and the saltiness of grief and the electric vitality of life itself; the broken whispers and moans and cries that shape themselves to her name sound, to her, like Anakin’s voice; and, in the dimness of the room and the darkness of those clothes, he easily could have been Anakin himself, returned to her, miraculously, panting and sobbing for need of her, those huge hands gentle almost to the point of reverence and yet still somehow purposeful, insistent, like those incredibly full lips covering her mouth and sliding along the thin bare skin of her throat, pressing deliberately and firmly up against the pulse point, sliding apart just enough to capture a taste of her with the tip of a clever tongue and then for teeth to press in all around her jugular, hard and promising of other things to come in much the same way that the rigid length straining against her vulnerable stomach warns and assures the shape of things to come.
The thought of resisting never once crosses her dazed mind.
It is not, precisely, rape. It is a ravaging, but he is so incredibly gentle - plucking her up from the sofa after she has been rendered utterly pliant, her body primed for anything he might choose to do to her, and carrying her (like a stereotypical husband might carry a new bride across the threshold of their new home) from the room, taking hurried, ground-eating strides to cross the suite and make his way into the bedroom with her, kissing her the entire way - and so thorough in the lavishing of his attention upon her body that it feels more like an act of worship, of love, than it does an act of taking, of violence. It isn’t until after she’s crashed back down into herself to find Anakin’s name still reverberating on the air from lips squared to the shape of an orgasmic shriek, blood smeared in between her thighs and pooling on the sheet beneath her, and a Solo - no, Darth Caedus - curling away from her with a cry like a wounded animal, broad, scarred back rigid with hurt and sudden panic, that she begins to understand what’s happened and realizes how badly she’s misjudged her danger.
Tahiri’s first instinct, when her understanding is complete, is to kill herself. Jacen - no, the Sith - fights her with such desperation over the lightsaber that he not only almost instantly skewers himself upon the blade of lambent blue light, but soon after nearly tears himself open, coming within a hairbreadth of gutting himself like a fish. She is keening, her voice working its way up to a painfully ear-splitting pitch, when he finally manages to get the lightsaber away from her by allowing her to spear him cleanly though the side, the energy blade piercing him through just above the right hip, punching effortlessly through his entire body and somehow missing every single organ within the abdominal cavity that should have been at risk of being punctured by such a wound, despite (or perhaps because of) the slight angle of the blade. He makes no more noise when the lightsaber penetrates his side than a nearly inaudible hissing intake of pained breath, and shock over his near-silence makes her hesitate for a fraction of a second, just long enough for him to shut the blade off and begin the motion that will wrench the hilt violently away from her suddenly fumbling, nerveless grasp.
When she recovers sufficiently enough from her shock to try to go after his lightsaber, he follows and catches her up, his arms winding around her from behind and lifting her bodily from the floor, tendrils of the Force wrapping all around her like his arms, restraining her when she would have fought, leaving her able to do little more than hang there, in his desperate embrace, the smallest of tremors wracking her body, making her skin shiver as if from sudden cold.
“Tahiri! Tahiri, stop it! You can’t do this - you mustn’t try to hurt yourself! I’m not him - I’m nowhere near as good as he was, and I know I’ll never be able to replace him - but you’ll hurt our son, if you keep on like this, and I can’t let you do that, not to our boy! He’s Anakin - he’ll be Anakin, Anakin reborn - don’t you understand? I see him and I can’t let you harm him!”
She’s never heard of an ability that allows the sharing of Force-given visions, but when he reaches out to her in the Force, she sees everything that he’s seeing - herself, conceiving his child this night; herself, pregnant, standing at a window overlooking a beautiful garden, bathed in a warm golden fall of sunlight, hands resting lightly on her stomach, eyes shut as though listening intently, turning instinctively to the approach of a tall figure swathed in a voluminous hooded black cloak, face raised for a kiss, body relaxing back into encircling arms, guiding large hands to join her small ones, head resting on his broad chest, tilting back to look up into the dark, utterly awed, and completely besotted human eyes of Jacen Solo; her water breaking in what looks like a throne room and being half carried out by her frantic looking husband; a (relatively) short but intense labor in some richly appointed yet ultra modern private medical facility resulting in the live birth of a son, who is given over to her to be proudly offered up to his father, standing by the bed with tears of gratitude and joy openly streaming down his face; a boy at her breast, in her arms, crawling and toddling along in her wake, wobbling unsteadily and then racing like the wind around her, looking eerily like all of the holos and recordings she’s ever seen of Anakin Solo at every age she glimpses this boy, only a few flecks and striations of green in his icy blue eyes and the slightest noticeable wave to his not quite naturally near-black hair (as Anakin’s hair always was, at the roots, a color so dark that it sometimes fooled those who met him first in low lighting into believing his hair was black instead of brown, though this wasn’t often the case after he moved to the academy at Yavin 4 and began to spend so much time outside that the constant exposure to sunlight leached his hair to a lighter shade, closer to a medium hue of glossy nut brown, with ghosts of paler, reddish-golden highlights streaking the uppermost sun-bleached layer) revealing that these aren’t, in fact, visions of her best friend and beloved, as a child.
She’s seen so many pictures and recordings of Anakin and her memories of him are all so clear that the sight of this boy tugs at her heart, making her ache with loss and with wanting in much the same way as the sight of that Coruscanti boy, Dab Hantaq, otherwise known as Tarc - altered at Viqi Shesh’s insistence during the war with the Yuuzhan Vong to a closer than natural resemblance to Anakin Solo, to serve as a distraction to the Solos during a kidnaping attempt on Luke and Mara’s (then) infant son, Ben - always did and still does whenever she receives word from him, telling her about his new life, as a holocam operator and budding holojournalist, with Wolam Tser and Tam Elgrin. Seeing this child - smiling up at her with an infant’s complete trust and uncomplicated happiness; grinning up at her with a young boy’s innocent delight; smirking at her with a teen’s cocky assuredness; smiling down at her sweetly with a young man’s love and respect for a strong and beautiful mother - shatters something inside her.
When the shared vision begins to turn darker, when a young girl with dark red hair (like the sullen glow of embers in a dying fire or a fall of blood on a moonless night) and hazel-grey eyes in a delicately lovely face made almost shockingly beautiful by a lush Solo mouth shows up, lurking at the outskirts of events, watching them from the shadows with an oddly hungry, openly yearning expression, she’s too caught up in her own pain to try to turn away. It isn’t until this girl (and Tahiri knows whose child this is, whose girl this must be, however impossible her presence in their life might seem) has gone from simply shadowing their boy, following him everywhere, to accompanying him openly - tagging along after him with her tiny white feet bare beneath the hems of her gowns and her braided hair constantly windblown and mussed near or to the point of unraveling; with one of her small, slim hands wrapped up in his; with one of her thin arms looped loosely around his shoulders or twined tightly around his waist; with her slender body so close to his that their shadows mingle on the floor, forming but one shape together - that uneasiness begins to intrude.
When she sees them, bodies cinched together, legs entwined, arms holding tightly, hands grasping greedily, mouths locked in a kiss no siblings (half siblings or not) should ever share, she desperately wants to scream. She wants to hate and hurt Allana, for seducing her younger half-brother; she wants to tear Tenel Ka to pieces, for not being sufficiently strong or clever enough to keep her daughter (their daughter), the Chume’da, from Jacen (the girl’s father); and, most of all, she wants to kill Jacen, for allowing this (no, encouraging, she can see that, now, looking back. It’s not just a matter of not noticing the danger or of permitting too close an attachment: Jacen actively pushes the two together, deliberately guiding them towards a relationship so close, so intimate, so interdependent, that an obsessive attachment and almost fanatical blind love is all but a foregone conclusion) to happen.
She wants to vomit, to cry, to scream. Despite his power all around her still, restraining her, her hands still manage to curve instinctively, protectively, across her stomach, as though the gesture alone might be enough to ward off the future she sees coming so clearly. His voice, murmuring dreamily against her hair, her ear, about their wonderful son (so powerful in the Force and so strong and beautiful and fundamentally good), about Anakin, about how he and Allana will inherit the order that he, that they, have fought for and will continue to fight so hard and sacrifice so much to bring about, and about how they will then found a dynasty of Emperors and Empresses who will rule over the whole of the known galaxy in glorious peace for thousands of years to come, makes her want to turn about, just twist around in his arms, and claw his eyes out, for seeing that and being able to want it to come true. But the knowledge she gains from one more shared vision - showing herself, beaming happily, radiantly, through joyous tears as her son pledges himself to Tenel Ka’s daughter, wedding her in a garden, beneath a bower that sheds starlike pink and white flowers and vivid crimson and purple petals down upon them both - chokes off the building scream, killing it before it can work its way up and out of her throat.
Luckily for her, Jacen (the Sith Lord, dammit, the Sith!) mistakes the protective gesture of her cradling hands, the sudden stunned limpness of her (lightheaded and dizzy almost to the point of fainting) body, and the brightly shimmering sheen of unshed tears in her eyes as signs of joy, of shocked but excited acceptance, rejoicing, even desire. The strong arms holding her aloft slide down her body, fitting themselves to her own arms, his hands ghosting up and settling alongside her own, mirroring a pose from the vision, only there is, here, a renewed hardness rising against her, nestling against and slightly between her cheeks, pressing her insistently (raised up as she is, her dangling toes skimming the air somewhere just above his ankles) and guiding her legs further apart, until a blunt roundness slides up along the swollen folds of blood-smeared lips, his dreamy whispers turning to a low, breathy moan, a noise catching in the back of his throat as his body curves around hers, his hips seeking an angle that will allow penetration.
He starts to whisper her name again, groaning against her hair, his face nudging her head to the side, his tongue tracing the curve of her right ear, his teeth closing with gentle violence around the lobe, nibbling and sucking, moist, hot lips leaving a burning trail of kisses down the curved arch of her neck, down to the joint of throat and shoulder, sharp teeth sinking in there ever so slightly, ever so steadily, worrying mercilessly at that jointure, marking it, marking her, and then laving the bruised redness left behind with a gentle/greedy tongue. Calloused fingers twine with hers, cup her flat stomach in a promising, claiming gesture, and then slide her hands up her abdomen, across her ribs, to her breasts, his hands cradling hers, her breasts spilling down into their curved fingers, nothing but the Force keeping her aloft and against him as his hands guide hers to cup and kneed and tweak and play with herself, calloused fingertips circling around and spiraling inwards to pinch with delicious cruelty at her hardened and aching nipples.
His hips rise against her, his body inexorably curving, bending her forward, turning her back to the bed, pressing her down to the mattress, manipulating and guiding her body down, tendrils of the Force like extra hands pressing against the joints of her legs until she is curled forward, on hands and knees, tilted awkwardly, face pressed down against the jumbled covers. The hands at her breasts leave, and a traitorous sound of loss catches in the back of her throat, prompting a rumbling purr of laughter from behind her, and a whisper that she can continue on her own, if she wants, while one of those hands strokes up and down the line of her bowed back and the other grasps and kneads her buttocks, the rigid length of him settling a bit more firmly between the cheeks, the rounded head sliding along and then parting wet folds as battle-hardened fingertips skate across and slightly between the shadowy recess behind, and the breath catches in her throat, half in terror and half in (sick and wrong, dammit, damn her treacherous body, just plain wrong!) pulse-pounding anticipation of something as two saliva-slick fingers gently but insistently press her cheeks apart, as though searching for something even more vitally important than the mouth being parted by that almost but not quite painfully thick hardness.
Whatever he’s searching for, he seems to have found it soon enough, for as those moistened fingers hold her apart, a softly satisfied sigh sounds from behind her, following by an almost inaudible groan of, “Anakin ” And then his hips are somehow both pressing down on and lifting her up, and he’s sliding within her again in one long, clean thrust, his left hand curving back up and around to join hers, at her breasts, and his right hand snaking down between her legs, calloused fingers stroking and teasing and joining the plunge of hardness within her, making her cry out, making her writhe and arch shamelessly, like an animal in heat, the pleasure so overwhelming that there’s no room for thought or memory or anything but the need for movement and more movement and more and more and faster and more and O, Force - !
He rides her until she finally breaks, keening wordlessly in ecstacy, and, afterwards, turns them about on the bed until she’s the one riding him. That time, when orgasm hits, it’s his name she screams, “Jacen!” tearing out of her, leaving such a painfully deep, ragged hole in her soul that a part of her is amazed when her body doesn’t just spilt open and bleed to death on the bed.
When she cries, afterwards, though, curled helplessly in around her stomach, he strokes her bowed back with those huge, gentle hands and gathers her up close to him, a look of such contentment and joy on his face (that full Solo mouth curving to the shape of a soft, self-satisfied smile) that she cannot even summon the will or the strength to push him away, her traitorous body instead curving itself into the warm solidity of him, pressing her tear-streaked face against the muscled bulk of his chest and shutting her eyes tight, tight, listening to his low, indistinct voice crooning soothing nonsense (filled with protestations of endless, boundless love and promises to do whatever is necessary to keep her - to keep their son - safe, always) into her hair and drifting, too drained to even try to fight against the phantom (unreal, untrue, deceptive) sensation of being wrapped, once more, in the natural, easy warmth of Anakin’s love.
It is entirely too easy, to lose herself in that illusion of warmth, caring, love.
And she, as it turns out, is so damnably weak that it isn’t until after Jaina has turned to the Mandalorians, for training that give her enough of an edge to take down her brother, and has tried to get to him by going through Tahiri, all but taking her leg off, in an attempt to get at him, that she finally summons enough clarity of thought to realize what’s happening and break the illusion.
Tahiri hates herself, for what she has to do to Ben Skywalker, to gain enough motivation to finish clawing her way out of the shadowy illusion that Jacen (no, Caedus, dammit, Darth Caedus!) has woven around her, but there’s no other way. It’s too late to try anything else. The Mandalorians have taught Jaina too well and she is so determined to kill her brother that it’s no use trying to turn her from her chosen path or strike a bargain - or find a way of betraying him that will end with him safely (or at least securely) in custody, rather than spitted on the end of his twin’s violet lightsaber - like Tahiri vaguely remembers she had originally been planning to do, before . . . well, before she gained something capable of giving her stress-starved concave stomach a reason to begin to gain the smallest of convex curves. Despite all that the boy has been through - despite all of the betrayals he has weathered, because of Jacen (Caedus, Caedus!) - Ben is still only just barely a teenager, and his instinct is to help, to trust, to forgive, to give second (or third or fourth or a hundredth) chances, not to take advantage of an opponent’s weakness and dive in for the easy kill. It is almost laughably easy, to trigger Ben’s protective tendencies, to use him as a shield against the Hapans and the other Jedi, and then to quietly slip away from him, once he is certain of her willingness to work with him, instead of against him, on some imagined path leading to her redemption.
Tahiri doesn’t need Ben Skywalker to save her or show her a way back to the light. She already knows what needs to be done, what she has to do, to save him and the rest of the galaxy from the darkness that has been plaguing it, and returning to the Jedi fold with her head bowed and eyes meekly downcast as she mouths platitudes about belief and the healing power of love and the Light never even enters her mind as a real possibility.
No. She has to go back, back to Myrkr, and save Anakin, so he can stop this from ever happening to his family, to his brother, to herself. And if it means that she and her child must be wiped from the face of existence itself, to ensure that this horrible future is averted, well . . . no one ever said that doing the right thing would be easy.
If she can save Anakin, save her beloved’s precious life, give her friends, her family, the means to put an end to the Yuuzhan Vong War earlier, to stop the Killiks from ever becoming dangerous enough to spark an all but galactic-wide conflict, to stop Jacen from ever becoming Darth Caedus, then she will consider it a fair trade.
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