this is a disclaimer.

AN: on the basis of the swallows and amazons verse.

share the same scar

You never wanted children.

It's a scummy place, dim-lit underground bunker in the sand heat above and dirt below. Boot-treads heavy behind you around you blaster bolts that smell of ozone: perhaps there's even smoke.

The Jawas might see it, and mark the spot for looting; the Tuskens might see it, and shiver in remembered passed-down never-forgotten fear. In Kyrithra, the city in the canyons, the Sisters of Asenan will watch, silent, and call it vengeance: a mother's right (a son's too).

You never wanted children. Never crossed your mind to want them: you had a cockpit and a lightsabre and a purpose. You had a family: parents brothers uncle aunt cousins nieces. You had the man you love.

Still do. Your husband's voice rises above the din – leave them leave them find my son – and makes a barrier between you and the world: he's here he'll take care of it.

There's a man kneeling in front of you, cradling the stump of a wrist to his chest cowering on the floor: dusty once, mudstained now where the water cooler fell and spilled across the duracrete in the fight.

Your hands are trembling in their leather gloves. You never wanted children, and yet: you could kill him, this pathetic fool, this whining coward gaping up at you pain-bright eyes blood on his lips trembling like a tree in a breeze.

This worthless nothing who took your son from you and thought the desert of all places would hide him from a Skywalker.

(The desert has done many many things to your family, and few of them were good, but: it is yours.)

Your own breath is the only thing you still hear now. In out harsh regular. Something is uncoiling in your stomach: like thick black smoke set free from a vacuum-sealed container it bubbles up and seeps into your blood and oozes out of your pores and takes you by the throat and beckons:

come now child take it it is yours it has always been yours firstborn grandchild after all here here take it do it kill him now

Yes: kill him stop this destroy the entire organisation with one blow, years of terror bombings death prevented with one smooth sweep of the sabre humming in your hands.

Or no: reach out, yes, that's it, curl your fingers just so child gooood very gooood press squeeze feel the pulse jump the windpipe give way under blackgloved fingers –

Blackgloved fingers.

Blackgloved –

No.

No.

Your son will not be their Emperor, taken twisted brainwashed trained set up as puppet ruler inciter of another war.

You will not be – that.

(once is enough. There is a pain you see in your mother sometimes that you will not inflict on the son you've come so far to find. Nor on the other, the babe you left in your family's care.)

No.

Clatter of a sabre hilt falling to the ground, and the world rushes back in on you: the stench the shouts the shots. Jesn Torv is panting panicked, but it becomes something like triumph when you back away unsteady on your legs.

"Not... not yet... r-ready, Lady Vader?"

A dozen flippant replies; more angry ones. One truth to cling to, and you grab it: both hands, desperate, calmly certain, the same way that your uncle grabbed it, a long long time ago a long long way away from here.

(You shall be a light against the darkness, and a hope against despair, he said to you, a promise if you ever heard one, as if he could hold you steady keep you in the Light by the strength of his will alone, and – truth to tell – you would not put it past him to do exactly that.

But: he doesn't need to.)

"Knight Solo," you tell Torv. "Jedi Knight Jaina Solo Fel."

He sneers.

Behind you, your son unhurt bursts into the room with a cry of "Mom!"

(You break down in your mother's arms not two days later, when you first get back: slump to the floor of your parent's kitchen and sob like a child, like you never really did when you were a child, and your mother grips your shoulders fingers like pincers and shakes you hard and says get up, Knight Solo like a whipcrack like a commanding officer like the Lady Vader who never was and never will be.

Your mother doesn't say Skywalkers don't kneel. Not anymore. But she means it.

Either way, you're home.)

In the jungles, miles from the Temple, there's only starlight, and rivers running, and the call of wild things in the night (and this too is yours).

Your husband, city-boy hotshot pilot more used to ice and snow than humid heat, is no tracker, but perhaps – perhaps he had a guide to where you are (and perhaps your son had a comforter for his brief too-long captivity).

(And maybe you chose this rock to perch on knowing it was big enough for two and maybe you didn't.)

"I never wanted children," you tell him honestly. "Never thought about it. Took me two weeks to get up the courage to tell you I was pregnant. Called Tenel Ka the day my three months were up and made her sit on me till sunup the next morning, stop me changing my mind again, rushing outta the house and having an abortion after all."

Your husband's silent a long long while. You don't tell him: I nearly had one without ever letting you know there was a baby at all. You never will. Perhaps he senses that.

"What's eating at you, Jaina?" he asks at last. "The fact that you nearly murdered a man or the fact that you nearly murdered a man over a child you once didn't think you wanted?"

Burst of laughter: not hysterical. "Both. Neither."

"When you're ready to make sense again..." he threatens: empty.

"I'll let you know."

Sigh. "Love..."

"Stay with me," you say. "Stay here with me. Let me find my balance again."

Your husband takes your hand. "Whatever you need."

I need you, you want to tell him. I need our sons.

He knows that. They need you back.

That's a kind of balance, you think, and you tuck yourself into your husband's arms and let him keep the illusion your mother cannot suffer: that he can actively help you in this one all-important fight.

No, his place is on the sidelines: but your mother would will tell him that that is enough, and there again she has the right of it.

He wakes you up near dawn and tells you categorically that he's not carrying you home, so you laugh and offer to race him instead.