Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [104]
Leia couldn’t call Jaina on her comlink, couldn’t give her the impression that she was keeping tabs, even though that’s what she desperately wanted to do. Eventually, having had no luck in her search, she returned to her own quarters.
And it was there she found Jaina—stretched out on the bed, lying on her side, in her pilot’s jumpsuit, her boots and other accoutrements kicked off to the foot of the bed. Jaina was asleep, and Leia took a moment just to look at her.
Though in engagement after engagement Jaina had been at the controls of one of the New Republic’s deadliest fighter craft, racking up kill after kill against savage enemies, her features were now relaxed in sleep, and she looked as innocent as a child. But she was no child now. She was a young woman, her childhood suddenly, irretrievably gone, and an ache constricted Leia’s heart. We should be away from all this now, she thought. Han and Jaina and Jacen and Anakin and I. And Luke and Mara and little Ben. In a field of flowers. On Alderaan.
Moving slowly and quietly so as not to awaken Jaina, Leia lay down on the bed and put an arm around her. It was a closeness, a protracted closeness that Jaina no longer permitted her in times of wakefulness. Too soon, she heard Jaina’s breathing change as her daughter awakened.
Jaina looked up into Leia’s face and offered a slight, sleepy smile.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s all right.” Jaina reached up to pull Leia’s arm more tightly around her. “Since you left, I’ve come here sometimes because I knew I could smell you and Dad here. You’d be all around me even when you weren’t here.”
Leia managed to keep an expression of incredulity off her face. Those words seemed so unlike Jaina—so unlike the person she’d become across the last couple of years. “Are you all right?”
Jaina shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She lay her head down on the pillow again. “I don’t think I know who I am anymore.”
“Is it this goddess thing—?”
“No. That doesn’t confuse me in the least. It’s just a confidence game. No, the problem is all being a Jedi, which seems so crystal clear in what you should do and what you should say at any given time … and then being the rest of me, where nothing is clear.” Her expression, what Leia could see of it at this angle, seemed bleak.
Leia chuckled. “Jaina, I’ve been wrestling with the same question since I was only a little older than you are now, and I still don’t have a good answer. Sometimes I’m Jedi and sometimes I’m not. Jedi teaching says that you must turn away from fear. But as a politician, I have to experience fear. Not just my own. The fear of my allies. The fear of my opponents. If I can’t feel it—if I can’t become it, in a sense—I can’t predict which way they’re going to jump when trouble hits. Sometimes being a Jedi just runs completely counter to your other goals. The methodology is just too different.” Softly, she stroked her daughter’s hair, silently willing her daughter’s torments away.
“That’s part of it, too,” Jaina said. “It took me a while to figure it out. I’m afraid.”
“It’s all right to be afraid. You’re surrounded by fearsome things. Being afraid will keep you alive.”
Jaina shook her head. “That’s not it. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of surviving … and getting to the end of the war and discovering that I’m all alone. That everyone I knew and cared for is gone.”
“Jaina, that won’t happen.”
“It’s already been happening. I mean, it was like having part of me cut off when Anakin died, but with Jacen it’s even worse. As far back as I can recall, no matter what was going on, no matter what was wrong, I could turn around and Jacen would be there. We could be on some distant hideout world or lost in the underbelly of Coruscant or wandering around on parts of Yavin Four no thinking creature has ever seen, and there Jacen was. I never had