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He’s not sure how they got here.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. He knows how they got here – the escape pod bay in the aft of the ship, by way of the turbolaser battery two levels up, where he found her planting a whole skiff load of thermal detonators like shiny, murderous seeds – but he still isn’t sure how they got here, to the point where she’s ready to watch those seeds bloom in flame and take him with them, to the point where he’s ready to stop her by any means necessary, even if that means ending her life.
They’ve battled their way across multiple decks without either gaining the advantage. Sometimes he presses his attack, leveraging height and weight and superior swordsmanship to put her on the defensive. Sometimes she slips past his blade, a shadow bomb made flesh, focused and tenacious and never to be underestimated. Two sides of the same deadly coin: the Slayer and the Trickster. Somewhere in the distant past, he imagines he can hear Nom Anor’s smug laughter.
She tries to sway him from his path, using the same arguments he has heard over and over again, that this isn’t what Anakin would have wanted, or Vergere, or Tenel Ka. She recites a litany of their dead, as if he hasn’t already seen each and every one of their faces in the lives he’s destroyed, as if he doesn’t know what he’s doing, as if he’s blind. In the privacy of his own thoughts – there’s nothing but privacy these days – he can admit that that last one really chafes. He thought she knew him better than to think he’d set forward on any course without thinking it through. Unlike some people, he’s actually learned something from the wars they fought.
The wounds she manages to inflict are superficial: small singes here and there across his arms and legs, a jagged, bloody tear across his back where she slammed him into the bulkhead. Nothing he can’t take completely in stride. The battle outside rages on, and he can feel it reaching a violent boil, vessels spitting fire back and forth across the cold black expanse, spears of plasma shredding through his ship’s shields. He can sense the grim resolve of his loyal bridge crew as they defy their Jedi captors, and then their confusion…
Two things happen nearly at once.
First, Jaina anticipates his perfectly executed feint and lands a searing strike left of center that pierces him from front to back; the violet blade sizzles as it burns through layers of flesh and muscle, and despite his usual resistance to the effects of pain, he staggers backward, reaching down in disbelief to touch the wound.
Second, the bulkhead behind him explodes.
He raises a hand at the last second, using the Force to throw up a shield of energy around him, deflecting the worst of the explosion. He falls to one knee under the onslaught, gritting his teeth against the lancing pain in his stomach, and when the fire finally abates, he looks up, raising his lightsaber in front of him for her next attack—
—and he sees Jaina’s weapon deactivate and tumble from her grasp as she stares down at the long shard of twisted durasteel piercing her abdomen.
“Shavit,” she whispers, knees buckling beneath her.
He lunges forward without thinking and catches her in his arms; her weight and his own injuries send them both crashing hard to the deck, and he ignores the pain that wrenches through him as he drags himself to sit upright, pulling her closer and laying her across his lap.
He remembers the last time he held her like this, after the battle with Onimi, when his heart clenched to see her so weak, and he was struck by the strangeness of being the strong one, the protector, the one to cradle her and take on her burdens. He remembers how the distance the war had wedged between them finally seemed to fade, the cracks in their bond filled in and smoothed over; and if he was reminded in that moment of her very human frailty, that she was just as impermanent as the rest of the universe, well, it was only a whisper, and he was no longer afraid of the dark.
She looks up into his eyes, studying him, and frowns. “You haven’t been sleeping.”
That statement, uttered without condescension or judgment, drives a stake through his carefully-constructed defenses. This close, he notices the dark, sunken rings under her eyes. “Neither have you.”
She snorts, loose dark hair cascading across her face as her head rolls toward him. “Haven’t slept in months… maybe years, I don’t know.”
His gaze drifts to the metal embedded in her abdomen and the blood staining her shirt in an ever-expanding circle. “Too many years,” he agrees quietly.
She smiles, just a little smile, but one that he knows intimately, though it carries a sorrow he’s never seen in her before.
“I’m a mom now,” she says weakly. “Did I tell you that?”
His eyes burn with unshed tears; he can barely see through them. “No,” he replies, reaching out to sweep her hair back from her face, “you didn’t.”
She winces and drags in a labored breath. “Sorry, Jace. Guess I’ve been distracted.”
He bites his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood and forces a lopsided smile. “I don’t blame you. A duel to the death is pretty distracting.”
She closes her eyes and groans. “You’re not funny.”
He hesitates for half a heartbeat, then leans down to touch his forehead to hers. “I know.”
That contact floods him with warmth and yearning and guilt and pain, and it’s as if a part of his soul that has lain dormant for too long is finally waking up, scrabbling desperately for purchase, reaching for its other half.
(not two sides of the same coin, but two halves of the same whole, and how did he ever think he could exist in this universe without her)
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, tears rolling off his cheeks to splash against hers. “I’m sorry, Jaina, I didn’t— I didn’t mean for—”
Jacen.
He feels the touch of her mind, really feels it, for the first time in he’s not even sure how long. He hears everything she doesn’t have time to say, all the things she’s sorry for, her regret at not being there for him, at growing up and growing apart and being so wrapped up in the ways her own life was changing that she didn’t see how much he still needed her.
He tries to tell her that this isn’t her fault, that she’s not the one who broke this; he tries to send every iota of love and reassurance, to let her know he’s still here, he can fix it, they can fix it, together…
Her presence has always felt to him like the pulse of a starfighter’s engines, wild waves of energy held in check by steel and circuitry and a steady hand, oscillating from one extreme to the other without ever tipping over the edge. That thrum of life – that spark that has always been his twin sister – sputters and fades and vanishes completely, and he is left grasping in the dark for some trace of her light.
“Jaina?” He brushes his thumb across her cheek, shaking. The ship groans as another explosion tears through it. “No…”
His fingers fall away from her face, and he hugs her lifeless body to his chest, struggling to breathe past the tears and the weight of everything he’s done. Gods, what has he done? She’s gone. Jaina is dead, because of him.
(please, please just give her back, he’ll do anything)
Klaxons continue to blare as fire sweeps into the corridor, and he raises a hand over his shoulder, parting the sea of flames around him. The heat blisters his skin, but he hardly notices. He drags Jaina toward the closest escape pod, crossing the threshold as another salvo hits. The fire beats against his Force shield, and he knows he only has a few more seconds until it overwhelms him. Straining to hold back the roaring, ravenous flames, he reaches out and calls his lightsaber to him. As soon as the cool cylinder connects with his hand, he closes the door and launches the pod, collapsing in a heap next to the body of his twin.
He's not sure how long he lies there. Even though he can sense the battle still raging around him, he feels distant and unreachable here, and he wonders absently if this is anything like a womb, or maybe a cocoon.
My little shadowmoth, he thinks he hears a voice whisper, echo of a past he can never return to. Why are you crying?
He laughs and swipes a hand across his eyes, unable to stem the rush of those tears, and he rolls his head to one side, watching the world slant and tumble around him before settling his gaze on Jaina’s face. The lightsaber is still clutched tight in his hand, and as he rubs his fingers across the grip, he realizes it isn’t his lightsaber at all. It’s hers.
The pod crash lands a few hours later, on some backwater moon in the next system over. He survives – he wonders at this point if it’s even possible for him to die – and crawls from the flaming wreckage, leaving her in there to burn.
(he can’t watch her disappear slowly beneath dark and unfamiliar soil, burying was never an option)
He watches the fire climb higher and higher, watches until the ship is nothing but slag and the last embers flicker and vanish against the twilit sky. He watches until he can’t watch anymore, and finally collapses to the ground, fingers digging into the earth. When two farmers come across him hours later, his hands and body are frozen, and his blood stains their field. They lift him up and carry him to their speeder, and he lets them. Some of their words are muffled, spoken in hushed tones that aren’t meant for him; but one thing he hears clearly:
“How in the worlds did you get here?”
He stares up at the black sky, at the sea of stars strewn across it, and draws an icy breath past frozen lips, and fills his dead lungs with the cold reality of everything he has ruined and everything he has lost; and when he releases that breath, he reaches once more into the place inside him where Jaina should be, where she would be if he hadn’t been so blind, and he answers in a hollow whisper:
“I wish I knew.”
Fin