Embers: Sequel to Crash and Burn

Jacen wasn’t nearly ready to wake up yet when his trained Jedi senses picked up the pitter-patter of socked feet coming down the hallway, with a gait too short and too light to be Anakin. “Daddy, I’m up. I want breakfast.”

He rubbed the fatigue out of his eyes, with minimal noticeable effect, and untwisted himself from the thin coral-colored blanket he’d wrapped himself in the night before. For a moment he was disoriented, and thought he might have been on Hapes, or that somebody was playing a trick on him, but then he remembered where he was and more importantly that Allana was there. “All right, all right,” he said, and switched on the lamp.

Allana looked serene now, although she, too, was tired, and that might have explained her vacant expression. “First, there are a few things we have to do,” he started to tell her.

“No. I want breakfast now.”

“Do you want toast?”

“I can have toast and jam.”

“Well, that’s the problem. I don’t have any jam. You’re going to have to wait. You go get dressed, and I’ll get dressed too, and then we can go down to the shopping center and get breakfast there.”

“And get a bed,” Allana added.

“Yes, I’ll get a bed for you.” The last thing he wanted was to start an argument with her, and it was partially because he wasn’t sure he would win. It occurred to him that he hardly knew the little auburn-haired girl, even though she was his own daughter; they had been separated by too much time and distance since she was two months old. And he was stuck in the untenable position of doing something wrong no matter what, then and now; damned if he had stayed with Tenel Ka, and damned if he left, and in the current situation, whether he accepted Allana into his home or not, there was trouble. The trouble incurred from frustrating Anakin was a lot less serious than the trouble that there would be if he’d turned Allana back out and sent her home with Isolder – it was his brother’s annoyance versus his daughter’s possible death.

He told himself that he wasn’t really choosing one other the other; he was just making a decision based on need instead of desire. He might not have been able to do that ten years earlier, but he wasn’t a little boy, and he liked to think that he had the wisdom he needed to make that kind of decision. Still, if he was worried about a six-year-old beating him in a battle of wills, he couldn’t be too sure.

Jacen left Allana with Deedee and instructed the droid to make sure to pick something out of Allana’s trunks that wouldn’t announce to everybody at the shopping center that she was a princess in a not-so-good disguise. Then he padded quietly into his own room, which wasn’t entirely his own anymore, and pulled out a pair of pants and a shirt. Most of them looked the same, and it wasn’t a difficult matter to choose something that vaguely matched without seeing in color. The light streaming through the blinds from the skylights outside was too dim to see colors, and just bright enough that he didn’t bump into things.

He could barely see Anakin in the bed, sound asleep, but he made his way to the bedside anyway, and leaned over it to kiss him. Anakin stirred, but didn’t wake up, and turned his face with eyes still closed in Jacen’s direction. Jacen brushed his lips against Anakin’s, and Anakin moaned softly in his sleep.

“Ew,” someone said.

“Allana, get out of here,” Jacen hissed.

“You kissed him on the lips,” Allana accused.

“It was an accident. He turned his head and I didn’t think he would. Now, come on.”

Allana now wore a simple yellow traveling gown, one that she didn’t seem very pleased with, but she contained her displeasure to a pout instead of a full-out whine as Jacen led her out of the apartment and locked the door behind him. “It smells better in the hall,” Allana said. “You should clean up more often. I don’t think you cleaned yesterday.”

“No, I don’t do it every day. Maybe once a week.” The truth was a little worse than that, but it was something he wouldn’t admit to his mother, let alone his daughter.

“Well, it’s icky and sweaty in there. If your servants won’t clean up then you should fire them and buy a droid.”

“Hey, now there’s an idea.” It wasn’t one that hadn’t come to him before, but he never really wanted to spend the money on a cleaning droid. He had the money in a savings account, though, and he didn’t think that it would be a terrible sum to lay down if it would make her stop complaining. “We’ll look at cleaning droids, too.”

Allana was very quiet when they went down the outside stairs to the covered car park, and she sat obediently – too obediently – in the passenger seat of his small speeder car. Jacen showed her how to close the seat belt buckle, and then carefully backed out of his parking space and drove out at a slow speed into a side sky lane.

“Daddy?”

“What?”

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t leave. I was at the apartment the whole time you were there.”

“No. I meant before.”

“Because I had to come back to Coruscant. I don’t live on Hapes and just go there on vacation. When the vacation is over I have to go home.”

“NO! When I was little.”

“Oh.” That was the question that he had been dreading, and he didn’t know exactly how to answer her. The full explanation was not really known even to him, and the parts that he did know were things that he wouldn’t talk about to an adult he knew well, except possibly Anakin. Allana didn’t need to know the real story. That would be that from the moment he’d proposed to Tenel Ka – and, in fact, from the moment the thought first came to him that he might do it – that it wasn’t a smart thing to do, and he, looking back, understood his reasons for it a little bit better, and the things that led up to that decision. And why it fell apart afterwards.

After leaving G0-CVII, he and Anakin had continued their relationship in secret for three months. It was always well-hidden, and they were careful not to get caught. Jaina was aware of what was going on, and carefully avoided the topic, to the point that if Jacen asked her to run an errand when she, he, and Anakin were home alone, she would do it without another word and stay away a lot longer than would normally be expected for a simple run to the nearest store or the downstairs laundromat. She might sigh and shake her head, but she never questioned them, because she already knew the explanation for why she was being asked to leave and she really didn’t want to hear it. But Leia had absolutely no idea what was going on, other than her sons had grown closer through their ordeals near death, and she never thought anything of it, although she occasionally probed a little bit about why they weren’t spending as much time as they could be with their old friends. In Anakin’s case it made sense; Valin and Tahiri were a couple, and Sannah was rarely at the Academy or even on Coruscant, choosing to stay with her own people for awhile after her catastrophic but not fatal injuries incurred during the war.

And then it fell apart.

Jacen and Anakin were wrapped up in the moment, and neither of them were paying much attention to what was going on around them – the sounds of doors opening and closing and of voices, of subtle patterns in the outside lights changing in ways that weren’t quite natural. And even though they remembered to lock Jacen’s bedroom door, the walls weren’t completely soundproof, and Leia heard them.

The next thing Jacen knew, she was banging on the door and shouting for them to open it up. Anakin pulled himself off of and out of Jacen quickly and threw his pants on, and Jacen hastily half-dressed before opening the door. “Everything’s fine,” he’d said, heart pounding, palms even sweatier than they’d been a few moments earlier.

Fine, maybe, but Leia, even without the Force, knew exactly what she had walked in on, and this was made painfully clear when her face crumpled and she lifted her hand to her mouth. Anakin looked desperately at Jacen, and he did the only thing he knew to do to keep the situation from exploding: he put his hands on his mother’s skull, and used the Force to wipe her memory of the last two minutes. It never would have worked if she hadn’t still had her Force strength impaired, and it almost didn’t work anyway, as she was not of a weak will or weak mind. But in her temporarily shocked state, and with Anakin helping Jacen, they were able to remove what she saw and heard from her mind, and gently place her into a sound sleep while they cleaned up the evidence.

She never found out why she took a nap in the middle of the day, and neither of them ever told her – it was passed off as a lingering effect of illness or a simple ripple in the Force from something that might have affected her deeply and long ago. But the shared knowledge of what they had done to protect their secret made it a lot less of a sweet one, and shortly thereafter, wracked with guilt, Jacen declared that he wouldn’t be a part of it any more. Anakin pleaded and threatened and sulked, but it didn’t take long for him to throw himself into the arms of the next man who would take him. Jacen at first didn’t realize that Anakin was wounded a lot deeper than they had initially thought during their semi-captivity – that he wasn’t yet self-confident enough to go out on his own, and that Jacen probably should have broken it off more slowly and gently and made sure that he had a better support network set up first. Instead, he just turned his back on Anakin, and they hardly ever talked for a long time afterwards.

Even though Jacen still thought about Anakin all the time, and after initial resentment over the necessity of tricking their mother passed a part of him wanted to try again, he wouldn’t. He felt too guilty, too ashamed, and too intimidated by the fact that Anakin seemed happy with someone else.

He was just fooling himself, too, Jacen now realized.

After Jaina’s wedding – Jaina, after all, had done exactly what was expected of her – and seeing Anakin with Dyar, Jacen couldn’t stand it any more. He made a chancy move to put his life back on the track that other people had expected him to follow, and he thought, naively, that after a short initial adjustment period, he would find that it suited him just fine. He proposed to Tenel Ka, and never admitted the real truth about why he hadn’t done it yet. He was still in love with Anakin. Yes, he loved Tenel Ka as well, and yes, it was a real love, but the way he felt about Tenel Ka was rather like how he felt about Jaina; genuine, and even able to appreciate in an entirely detached and objective way that she was pretty, but without any desire behind those thoughts.

It hadn’t changed during their engagement, and it didn’t change at the wedding, either. If anything, it diminished, because he was paraded around like a spectacle in the Hapan palace, and he now understood that he was banking a lot on the hope that he would change. He was agreeing to live in the palace, with Tenel Ka’s scheming grandmother around far too often, on a planet within a larger collective where he, simply because he was a man, held no power. Although in practice he did have more power than an assistant kitchen maid or a female street beggar, on paper he actually didn’t.

And the stage was set for a problem from the start. On his wedding night, he couldn’t even get aroused, and ultimately only remedied that problem when forced to by even more guilt, when Tenel Ka kept blaming herself, and four months had passed. It brought too much color to his cheeks even now to think that his only remedy was to imagine that she was Anakin in disguise – and he had to maintain a fairly powerful mental shield that kept their minds separate during the entire exchange. Their lovemaking was never particularly satisfying. He could love her as a friend, and he could, after awhile, will himself to go through the physical motions of intimacy, but he could never open himself up to it.

And two months after the birth of Allana, at which point he was naturally expected to perform again and Tenel Ka was adding more pressure for him to simply open up to her, he packed up and left for Coruscant, citing a need to pay more attention to the Jedi Order. He immediately filed the necessary papers for a divorce and in another two months, it was done. He wanted nothing to do with Hapan politics and if he couldn’t have Anakin, then he really would rather be alone.

I left you and your mother because I was waiting for my little brother to come to his senses and come back to me, Allana. No, he couldn’t say that.

“Jedi business,” he eventually said. It was true – from a certain point of view. Anakin was a Jedi Knight.

“That’s not a good answer.”

“All right, Allana, here’s the truth.” Or one form of it, one that might have been a little closer to the real story, but not really any more incriminating than his first answer. “I care about your mother, and I care about you. But sometimes things between grown-ups just don’t work out. Sometimes two people can love each other but not be able to live together. That was what happened. Your mother needed to stay on Hapes some of the time and I didn’t like it there.”

“I don’t like it here, but I have to be here anyway,” Allana pointed out.

“It’s only for a little while. And you’re a kid. Sometimes kids have to do things they don’t like.”

“Mother didn’t want to be the Queen Mother but she had to.”

“Allana, you’re really starting to piss me off.” Jacen gripped the steering controls more tightly. “I thought your mother would be happier if I was gone, and maybe find someone who knew her world better than I did. And I know that the Jedi need me here. And look at it this way; if I was still on Hapes, then I wouldn’t be on Coruscant, and I wouldn’t be able to take care of you where Ta’a Chume wouldn’t find you.”

That answer either satisfied Allana or confused her; either way, she didn’t say anything else, and they got to the shopping center without incident. It was simply a long strip of a conglomerate of buildings, with a double walkway, wide enough for at least a dozen speeder cars side by side, where hundreds of beings of various species already were mingling and going about their daily business.

Jacen parked the speeder car and paid the lot attendant, then gripped Allana’s hand. “Don’t go anywhere without me,” he warned. “And if anybody asks about you, don’t say anything. I’ll tell them your name is Lannie and that you’re from, um, Tatooine.”

He really hadn’t had time to think of a better story, but that one would do just fine.

“And Tatooine has two suns,” he said, as if that made much of a difference. “And it’s dusty. And you’ve never been in a palace.”

“I don’t like this game,” Allana said. “It’s boring. If I was going to play pretend I’d pretend that I was the queen of a water castle.”

“You can be a girl from Tatooine who is pretending to be a queen of a water castle, then.”

Allana rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t work like that. Didn’t you ever play pretend?”

“Allana, this isn’t exactly a game. Ta’a Chume has spies that are everywhere, and some of them might be on Coruscant. Right now they don’t know you’re here and they won’t look for you, but if they find out that you are here, they will tell your great-grandmother. And if they do that, then she might hurt your mother.”

Allana didn’t have anything to say to that, but the serious expression on her face showed that she understood. “Oh. How long do I have to tell that story?”

“For as long as you’re here,” Jacen replied.

They had breakfast in a small diner on the north side that was a little bit pricey, because Jacen didn’t want to take Allana into the seedier sections, even though on the whole the upper level shopping center was a safe place. He had been entrusted with the Chume Ta’, his own daughter, and wasn’t taking any chances.

She had finally seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation, and didn’t fuss while they waited for an available table at the diner. Finally they got an empty table, and the waiter droid brought two plates of flat breakfast cakes and fruit syrup for them.

Jacen took a sip of steaming caf, but swallowed it quickly when he felt a light stirring in the Force. Before he could respond to it, though, a pair of hands clapped over his eyes, hands from a person standing behind him. “Guess who!”

I could have put my lightsaber right through you, he thought. Don’t do that. “Um… Lordo the Hutt?”

She kicked him in the shin. “No. Try again.”

“Uh, Thrackan’s new consort. What’s her name… you know, the old lady with the hook nose…”

“Kark you, Jacen.” Ingvor pulled away and eased herself into the open chair, and then she saw Allana. “Whoops. Sorry. I ought to watch my language.”

“That might be a good idea. What are you even doing here?”

“I was curious. Wondered why you were here alone – didn’t see Red.”

“Her name is… Lannie. She’s from Tatooine. And Lannie, this is Ingvor Gord. She’s Jaina’s sister-in-law. Jaina’s husband is Zekk and Zekk is Ingvor’s brother.”

“Uh-huh,” Ingvor said. “Secret kid of yours?”

“Maybe.” Jacen lowered his voice. “And if you tell anybody, anybody at all, I will hunt you down and crush you like a beetle. This could be a matter of life or death and if I have to pick whose, I will.”

“Damn, Jacen. Fine. I won’t say anything – you know I don’t talk. Hell, I didn’t even tell Han about you and you-know-who.”

“Huh?”

“Dazzling smile, eyes like blue ice, and a nice butt. I thought maybe you were buying a new bed for the two of you to use.”

“Blaster bolts! Ingvor, mind your own kriffing business. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

Allana giggled. “Father, you said a bad word.”

Jacen glared at Allana, and she covered her mouth. “Oops. I mean, uh, guy-who-adopted-me, you said a bad word.”

“Don’t let that happen again,” he said sternly. “But seriously, Ingvor, you’re getting on my nerves.”

“We all have different skills. That’s one of my sharpest ones.”

She excused herself. Allana asked, “Who was that again?”

“My sister’s husband’s sister.”

“So, nothing.”

“Almost nothing.” Jacen nodded.

“What was she talking about, the you-know-who? I don’t know who.”

“And it’s none of your business. Eat your breakfast.”

By the end of the afternoon, Jacen had purchased just enough furnishings to keep Allana from whining too much, although she looked far from happy. Jacen also had depleted almost his entire savings account, leaving him with merely five hundred credits. This was even after he had haggled the price of a cleaning droid down to one thousand fifty; it was originally one thousand and seven hundred. It took him an hour to carry all of the boxes up the stairs to their apartment, and then he still had a lot of assembly work left to do.

It took him until a little bit after dark to get Allana’s bed and table set up, and he still hadn’t finished attaching the upholstery to her chair. “Do it now,” Allana urged. “It doesn’t look right. I can see the foam.” She pushed her fingers into the blue foam that comprised the seat and back of the chair, glued to a wooden frame. “It doesn’t match the bed.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow morning,” Jacen said. “I’m tired. I had to carry all those boxes and I just spent three hours putting everything together.”

“It’s not your bedtime yet. Yours is later than mine because you’re a grown-up.”

“Allana, I said I’d do it tomorrow morning. Not now. And if you keep bothering me, I might just wait another day.”

Allana’s lower lip trembled and tears filled her eyes. Jacen was torn between feeling guilty and feeling disgusted, and the disgust slowly won. This is my daughter? And Tenel Ka’s daughter? She acts like she’s been raised by Ta’a Chume!

And that might have been a little more true than he originally thought.

“The fussing and crying,” he said, “stops right now. I don’t know what you got away with when you were living on Hapes but I’m not going to put up with it. From now on, you’ll do what I tell you, when I tell you. Do you understand?”

She nodded slowly and sat down on her bed, then made a shooing motion with her hands. Jacen sighed and stormed out, letting the door slam closed behind him.

“Hard day?” Anakin had just come home, and he sat down on the couch, still in his Jedi robes.

“Damn, Anakin. Be glad you don’t have any kids. She’s driving me crazy and she’s only been here one day.”

“It’s only for, what? A month or two? Come on, you’ve dealt with a lot worse than her.”

“It had better not be longer than a month, because right now I’m exhausted and nearly broke. Allana knows nothing of gratitude. She thinks I’m her servant, or something.” He stopped and sat upright. “Allana, I know you’re in the hall. Go back to bed.”

“I want to talk to Anakin,” she said in a very quiet voice.

Jacen threw up his hands. “If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the bedroom.”

Jacen stomped away and Allana sat down on the couch. She took a deep breath and looked at her hands. “You’re Anakin Solo, right?”

Anakin nodded. “Um, yes.”

“So you’re really good at putting stuff together and taking them apart, right?”

“Ah, well, you could say that, yeah.”

“Okay. Deedee is broken because she’s been running for too long without a break. That makes her wires get too hot and they don’t work right. So I need you to shut her off for a few hours so she doesn’t smoke and spin and make funny noises. She won’t let me near the switch.”

Anakin nodded, and then frowned. “Hey, wait a second. DD-4 droids can run continuously as long as there’s nothing wrong with their coolant lines.”

“Maybe something’s wrong with the coolant lines, then,” Allana said.

“I think you’re just trying to trick me into turning off the nanny droid so you can cause trouble.”

“I’m not going to cause trouble!” Allana shrieked.

“If it’s not trouble, then, can you tell me what you’re going to do when I deactivate your droid?”

Allana looked over her shoulder to make sure that there was nobody else listening. Then she whispered: “I am going to run away and go back home.”

“Why? Because Jacen wouldn’t fix your chair?”

“No. Because he doesn’t like me. He’s poor and he doesn’t have enough money to take care of me and he yelled at me, and that means he doesn’t like me. My mother likes me and so does Grandpa.”

Allana looked upset, and Anakin’s first impulse was to try to comfort her, but he had the feeling that Jacen wouldn’t like that very much – and that it might not help in the long run, if she was spoiled. “All right, then, you’re going to go back to Hapes. Do you have a ship you can fly home?”

“Well, um, no.”

“Do you know anybody with a ship that can get you there?”

“You and Jacen. But Jacen won’t do it so I’d have to get you to.”

“And exactly how were you planning on making me fly you halfway across the galaxy?”

“I don’t know,” Allana said, and she put her head down.

“Come on into the kitchen,” Anakin said, and he got up first. Allana reluctantly followed him and rested her chin on the table while he scooped some frozen milk into an old yellow blender. “First of all, it’s not going to work, because you don’t have any way to get home, so even if you could get out of the apartment, it wouldn’t help. It might make things worse because you don’t know your way around and there are a lot of bad areas around here – places where criminals prowl around. The kind who wouldn’t mind kidnapping little girls and torturing them to get their daddies to pay even more money. And I’m not going to take you anywhere because you’re safer here than in the palace if you stay here and don’t go out without Jacen.”

“He still doesn’t like me. He yells.” Allana pouted.

Anakin continued to talk between blender bursts. “Jacen just doesn’t know much about being a father to a little girl because the last time he was around one was when he and your aunt Jaina were six, and that doesn’t count. He had to do Jedi stuff when you were a baby.” Allana looked unconvinced, so he went on: “I’m going to tell you a little secret. It’s about your mother’s grandmother. She’s a very, very bad person, and you know how she is bad? She does it by pretending to be nice. Sometimes people aren’t what you think. Jacen really loves you, but he doesn’t know how to act like it. When he thought you were dead, he was very upset.”

“Did he cry?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” said Allana. “Then he must have been very, very sad.”

“He was. And your great-grandmother doesn’t care about you. But she wants you to be a spoiled little brat so that she can trick you into doing things for her. She buys you nice things so that you will like her and not notice when she hurts other people because you won’t believe she really could do that. And if you’re spoiled, then you’re not going to grow up to be big and tough like your mother. Ta’a Chume doesn’t like your mother because she’s strong. So if you want to make your mother happy, then you should at least try to do what is expected of you. Try not to make it all about you, because it’s not. I had to go through a lot of things when I was younger, and so did your mother and father. I’d have to camp outside, and in places worse than outside on Coruscant – dusty caves, deserts, slimy pits. And every one of those experiences made me stronger and now if I had to do it again I could, and I wouldn’t be scared.”

“I would be,” said Allana.

“That’s because you’re little, and you haven’t given yourself any chances to see just what you can do. Little by little we can help you find that out, when you’re ready.”

Anakin poured out the milkshake into a glass cup and handed it to Allana, with a plastic straw. She looked uncertainly at the straw, and then tapped on the glass. “Is this crystal?” she asked.

“No, it’s glass. It’s clean glass and it tastes the same.”

“I like crystal better.”

“We don’t have crystal, so try your milkshake as it is. I promise you won’t be able to tell the difference.”

Allana hesitantly drew up a little bit of the thick liquid through the straw and tasted it. She worked it around in her mouth for a minute and then swallowed. “You’re right,” she said. “It does taste the same.”

“See, I told you it would.” Small victories, he thought.
Allana got up from the chair and she put her arms around Anakin. “I wish you were my father instead of old Jacen,” she said. “You’re nicer.”


“Um, thank you,” said Anakin. “But Jacen is nice, too. I like him. You just have to get to know him a little better – and stop acting like you’re his boss. He doesn’t like it when people tell him what to do.”

“But he’s supposed to listen to me,” Allana protested.

“Why is that?”

“Because he’s a boy. Girls make the rules and boys have to follow them.”

“Uh, Allana, it doesn’t really work like that here. Here, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a boy or a girl. Kids don’t push adults around.”

“That’s stupid,” Allana said. She finished up her milkshake and pushed it towards Anakin.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m not going to put that away for you.”

“Oh, right,” said Allana. “GN-9! Here’s my cup.”

“You were supposed to put it in the sink yourself.”

“Why would I do that if we have a GN droid to do that?” Allana frowned and jumped out of her chair. “I’m sleepy, though. I want to go to bed.”

Anakin sent her on her way and quickly checked to make sure that Allana hadn’t found a way to tamper with the droid despite saying that she wasn’t able to. When he was convinced that it was all right to leave Allana alone, he shut off her light and closed the door, and then returned to the shared bedroom.

“Jacen,” Anakin said, “Allana isn’t very happy right now. I calmed her down, though.”

“Yeah, I know.” Jacen shook his head. “I heard some of what she said.”

“Listening at the door?” Anakin accused.

“No. The walls are thin enough that I could still hear, and I didn’t have the fan running.” Jacen leaned back on the pillows. “What am I going to do, Anakin? Allana hates me, and I can’t stay here all day watching her anyway. I have to be back at the Academy tomorrow to teach a class.”

“Take her with you?”

“Oh, hell, no. She’s nowhere near ready to start Jedi training.”

“I got her to drink out a glass instead of a goblet,” Anakin said helpfully.

Jacen’s face twisted into a faint half-smile as he planted it into his palm. “This is completely ridiculous.”

“It’s better than nothing. And she didn’t fuss when it was time to go to bed – she just went. Maybe it’ll get easier.”

“Maybe. But my daughter was still trying to run away from me. And she still doesn’t want me to be her father.”

Anakin didn’t know what to say to that, so he just held Jacen, and they fell asleep together. Jacen’s sleep wasn’t very restful.