I Know Something About Pain You Don't

The girl who came back to room 529 and rested her head against the doorway for a moment before putting her key into the lock and heading inside was the same one who'd left a week ago, but looked like she'd been gone for a lot longer. Because she had. (And had, as of yet, no idea how long -- or relatively not -- she'd been gone.)

It wasn't just the hair, which had been even shorter than the almost-shoulder-length it was now; there was a subtle difference in the way she walked -- spending more time wearing shoes than you normally did would do that -- and she looked a little older. Definitely tired.

Sometime on the shuttle trip back it finally hit Tahiri, the reality of the pilots she'd lost in that gigantic kriffing battle. As first experiences went, it was not near the top of the "Fun" list. She'd kept that locked down so far but, as she dropped her backpack beside her bed and curled up on it quietly, she figured she'd have to talk to someone about it eventually. As far as people with experience in that sort of thing went, Fandom wasn't without its options.

For now, though, she was just going to be glad to be back.

[OOC: Hahaha up super early because I am heading to Disneyland for the morning, but back in the afternoon, so open but SP for the next few hours and don't think I wouldn't tag from the ride lines because I have so done that. *is dork*]

Tahiri had never been a fan of waiting, but she'd been doing just that for so long now it might have been days, and as she sat in the cockpit of her X-Wing (really, these boots could come off any time now), half listening to the comm chatter, she wondered how much time had passed in Fandom. She and her pilots -- who'd dubbed themselves Barefoot Squadron, much to her self-conscious amusement -- had trained and drilled for weeks on end both as a squadron and as part of the fleetwide Jedi Force-meld strategy. The past three months had been spent in a series of diversionary attacks against Yuuzhan Vong-held Core worlds, per Admiral Kre'fey's plan.

The concept was fairly simple: they'd hit a poorly defended planet and win by virtue of numbers, and in the process the novice pilots would gain experience, the fleet would build morale, and most importantly they'd cover up their ultimate destination of Ebaq 9. Jaina and Twin Suns Squadron had been on that hellish little asteroid for a while; although Admiral Ackbar hadn't outright said so, Tahiri knew the Yuuzhan Vong would do anything to capture one or both of the Solo twins and thus Jaina was bait in a trap. Tahiri was curious as to how she was doing. She worried about Jaina, maybe more so than she did about the one in Fandom, since her Jaina didn't have the same kind of support structure. She suspected the other Tahiri was in the same position.

( She was just extending her senses toward Ebaq 9 when a shockwave of horror lanced through the Force, and she knew where it was coming from. )

[OOC: NFB, NFI, OOC okay, pi to the fifteenth decimal point. Plot points of the Battle of Ebaq 9 taken from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams, but guess who disappeared from this part of the narrative, forcing me to make stuff up? I shouldn't be allowed to make things up. One more later today and that's it.]

She was used to being pulled in two directions at once; she'd had to make the choice between her Jedi training and her life with her Tusken tribe seven years ago, she'd lived with Riina Kwaad's growing consciousness for months now, and she still had trouble with the whole concept of "moving on doesn't mean betraying Anakin." So -- used to it. That didn't mean she had to like the feeling. ( Which was why when Jacen came looking for her after dinner, Tahiri wasn't sure what to think. )

[OOC: NFI, NFB, OOC-okay, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, his acronyms are my acronyms too. Adapted, again, from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams. Hey, I didn't have to make up this part either!]

The good thing about being home, so far, was that Tahiri had been far too busy to speculate herself worried about what had gone on in the week before she'd left Fandom. After the Knighting ceremony on Mon Calamari, she'd gotten into her newly-issued X-Wing (her X-Wing, how weird was that?) and headed to Kashyyyk.

That had been over . . . she didn't know how many weeks ago, maybe three or four; nearly all her time since arriving here had been spent getting to know the eleven new pilots that had been assigned to her. That were, and this was the part that had been blowing her mind since she'd first learned this was the plan, under her command. Luckily, thanks to Admiral Kre'fey, she'd been assigned a competent executive officer, since Force knew she certainly didn't have the experience necessary to deal with the headache of military red tape, but most of her pilots were rookies, and the couple who weren't didn't exactly have their names near the top of the Flight Hours Logged lists. The time she wasn't spending in drills with her squadron was spent working with the other Jedi to develop the fleet-wide Force meld that they hoped would accomplish the same thing for them that the yammosk battle coordinators did for the Yuuzhan Vong forces. She wasn't a crack pilot, and she knew it; the only reason she was in this role at all was because she was a Jedi.

Which pretty much meant she'd do the best she could. It was all she really knew how to do.

Down time didn't come very often, so when it did she made the most of it, and with a couple of standard hours free Tahiri took the opportunity to wander off by herself, away from the constant crush of people and ubiquitous machinery that made Riina so twitchy. (Okay, maybe she was avoiding Alema Rar a little bit; she still hadn't forgotten all those times Alema'd tried to hang all over Anakin when Tahiri was right there and also Alema was crazycakes.) Running a hand through her hair -- cut short now for the sake of her pilot's helmet -- she fiddled with her comlink and debated whether she ought to check in with people back in Fandom.

. . . might be better not to.

[OOC: NFB, NFI, OOC okay, etc. Spacer post, la la la. You have to make stuff up to advance the narrative sometimes -- ah, the perils of a secondary character. Framing adapted from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams with some details taken from the short story Ylesia by the same.]

When Tahiri had gotten onto the shuttle to head back home, she'd known the first thing on the agenda, before heading to Kashyyyk to join up with Admiral Kre'fey's fleet, was going to be the ceremony on Mon Calamari. To that end she'd spent much of the trip from Fandom reading up on strategy and going over everything she'd learned in Flight and Flying and in her lessons with Jaina. (All things considered, it was probably a good thing that she had no idea there'd been a debate over whether Knighting her was going to be an express ticket to the dark side. She had enough issues with that.)

( What she hadn't been expecting was to be standing on stage in a huge auditorium, staring up at a giant holoprojection of Anakin. Every time Tahiri had ever imagined what it'd be like when she finally made Jedi Knight, she'd always thought she'd see him there; she just never thought it would be like this. )

[OOC: Part one of . . . several. NFB, NFI, OOC okay, we all know this dance, right? Adapted from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams.]

Tahiri had been expecting this call for a while now; she just hadn't expected it to come now, and she supposed the timing could've been worse. It could've been better, granted, but she'd sort of given up on hoping for these things to ever happen at a good time.

Times like this, she wished packing involved more than just making sure she had her comlink, blaster, and lightsaber and throwing a couple of spare sets of clothing (including a certain too-big-for-her shirt) into a bag along with her datapad and oh yeah, those stupid boots. Which she'd need more than usual on this trip, she knew. She wasn't sure how ready she'd be for all this, although out of everything she was expecting, it was the prospect of seeing Jacen that had her the most worried, so it would've been nice to have to concentrate more on packing. Traveling light had its downsides.

It wasn't just for the sake of keeping herself busy between now and the time her shuttle arrived that she left messages for a few people, of course, although she felt bad about giving people more to worry about on the heels of the past week.

So. Packing as slowly as possible, and trying to stay calm. Force, she hoped she was ready for this, but seriously, she was sixteen years old and needed boots just to reach the foot yokes in an X-Wing, and who'd thought it was a good idea to give her a kriffing squadron, anyway?

[OOC: Establishy, but open -- it's canon catchup tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime again.]

She'd spent the night out on the beach with Ben, but a vague unsettling feeling had drawn Tahiri back to the cabins and the comlink she'd left in her alcove there -- it wasn't that she was in the habit of leaving it behind, but she hadn't wanted the potential interruption. (Not of that. Because there was no that. Just a chance to get some uninterrupted sleep, okay?)

There was, in fact, a message waiting for her when she got there, and as soon as she played it the unsettling feeling coalesced into something very much not vague any more. Jaina -- her Jaina at home -- never sounded like this, and yet she was practically exuberant. And it wasn't that Tahiri could blame her for being happy that her twin brother was alive after all.

She'd half expected it, really, and it saved her the guilt of hoping it wasn't going to happen, but at the same time it brought certain unwanted potential futures a little closer than she'd like for comfort. Having just met someone who looked exactly like Jacen, even if George sounded and acted nothing like him, didn't do much to help either. The timing was what really sucked void, though. Tahiri couldn't have stopped being aware of the time that had passed since Anakin's death if she tried, even if she wanted to, and by her count (including the time that had passed on her mission home in spring) it had been a year since Myrkr.

So it . . . wasn't unfair, exactly; she knew that. It was just the fact that she'd gotten news of one of Jaina's brothers being alive again had come now. When it marked a year since Anakin died, and she had to face up -- again -- to the realization that he wasn't coming back.

After getting the message, Tahiri had wandered away from the campsite into the preserve and now found herself staring at a cluster of grotesque-looking angel statues. She didn't know the story of what they were or how they had gotten there, but she got the sense that they were frozen in time, somehow. Stuck in a moment they couldn't get out of.

She hadn't had that dream again last night, but she'd had it often enough in the past few weeks. Had, to some extent, been stuck in that moment for the past year. Looking at the statues now, she wished she couldn't say she knew the feeling.

[OOC: Yeah, I'm a mean, horrible person. I know. I AM SO SORRY. And I swear she will get over this or I'm going to headdesk myself unconscious. Establishy, but open, why not? ETA: Details of convo with Karla NFB, whee.]