Jaina Solo Fel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
solo_sword) wrote2015-04-23 01:42 pm
solo_sword) wrote2015-04-23 01:42 pm
The Jedi Temple- Thursday afternoon
For the third time in less than three years, Jaina was involved in overthrowing the Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance. It was getting old.
This time they had learned that Roki Kem, who had taken control of the GA in an election after they deposed Daala (who had since escaped from prison and had decided to run for office to get Jag's job in the Empire, who knew?), was now working with the Sith. Politics in this galaxy were never not interesting. When word came down that they were planning an attack on the Jedi in the Temple, the Jedi had prepared, and organized their own coup to take place during that. As one of the best fighters they had, Jaina would be in the Temple.
And it meant while trying to prepare the Temple for the attack, she had help from Ben and Vestara. One of them she was fine with, guess who.
"I just wish I had a weapon," Vestara sighed. "Even a blaster."
Ben opened his mouth to speak, but Jaina cut that right off. "Sorry, Vestara. That's the way it has to be," she said. "If being without a weapon worries you, we can get you out before anything starts."
"Not really," Vestara said. "I need to prove my loyalty."
Ben shook his head. "Ves, you shouldn't take-"
"Please don't, Ben," she said. "I understand why the Masters find it hard to trust me. I truly do."
Well, she should. "This isn’t just about the Masters," Jaina told her. "Not everyone in the Jedi Order has spent time with you. For a lot of us, it’s hard to trust a Sith."
"A former Sith," Ben corrected. "Come on, Jaina, her own father tried to kill her."
He was going to get annoying real fast if he kept this up, and Jaina tried to remind herself that she might've been just as bad at sixteen. Probably not, but maybe. "Okay, a former Sith. I'm serious, Vestara. If going into battle unarmed bothers you, you shouldn't be there."
"And how will the Jedi know who the High Lords are?" Vestara asked. "How will they know when they have found the Grand Lord?"
"We'll get by."
"Or blame me when something goes wrong," she said, sliding an arm around Ben's waist. "You're not going anywhere without me. I need to be there to watch your back. Even if I don't have a weapon to defend it."
Jaina still didn't trust her. She completely related to Vestara having to kill her own father, and she had that damned Skywalker trait that made her want to give people a second chance, but she also wasn't stupid. "Okay, then finish up here," Jaina said. "I'm going to head down to the hangar."
*****
The attack came maybe half an hour later, much earlier than they'd been expecting. As of now there were six Jedi and Vestara in the Temple, against all the Sith. Jaina sensed it before anything happened, and they didn't come through any of the obvious paths. Of course not. They were Sith. Sneaky was their thing.
Following her senses, she ended up back near where she'd left Ben and Vestara. She didn't dare go through the corridors, since that would just draw the attack to her, where she'd be outnumbered. Not that she couldn't handle that. Instead she went through the grating of the water bypass system, stopping only when she heard the fighting and found an access hatch that she could open quietly. There were plenty of Sith flooding into the area, climbing up through a missing section of grating, sort of like insects. She didn't know where Luke and Corran were, but Valin and Jysella Horn had also arrived, with Valin deflecting blaster bolts to protect his sister, and then from her vantage point she couldn't see Ben, but she could see Vestara getting hit in the back of the head with the hilt of a lightsaber and falling to her knees.
Yep, Jaina was needed here. So she climbed out of the access panel, ignited her lightsaber, and leaped over the platform's safety rail.
A blast of Force lightning flashed below her, but she could twist herself to avoid it and to catch the next bolt with her lightsaber. This sort of thing was absolutely instinctive for her by now. She landed harder on the durasteel deck than she wanted to, and a dozen Sith turned to face her, because she'd just landed in the middle of them. On purpose. And there were still plenty of Sith crawling out of everywhere.
No problem. In a situation like this, Jaina thrived on chaos. She became chaos.
Jaina leapt over an incoming leg slash, then dropped her attacker with a quick snap-kick to the temple. She blocked a strike at her neck and, still in the air, turned her jump into a cartwheel. She shifted to a one-handed grip and swung her free arm in an arc, using the Force to sweep two more Sith off their feet. Landing in their midst, she stomped on the throat of the first and jammed her lightsaber through the chest of the other, then pulled a concussion grenade off her combat harness and thumbed it active.
She dropped it at her feet and began to count. One.
The melee went still. All eyes dropped to the grenade, noted the absence of a safety pin, the arming light blinking red. The Sith looked at her with wide eyes, then spun away and tried to hurl themselves beyond the blast radius.
Jaina’s count reached Two. She caught the grenade on the toe of her boot and kicked it toward a missing section of deck grating, where a fresh stream of Sith warriors were climbing into view.
Her count reached Three, and Jaina dropped.
The detonation hit her like a hoverbus, rolling her across the deck. She couldn't imagine why they'd sprung their trap so early. This didn't seem to be a planned ambush. While dozens of Sith were already in the room, they seemed almost as confused and poorly positioned as their targets. Maybe Luke had sensed the danger and forced the issue- or maybe he had been their true target all along. Perhaps they feared Luke Skywalker just that much.
And that was a mistake.
Luke Skywalker was not the Sword of the Jedi. Jaina was, and now the Sith had trapped themselves inside a locked Temple with her.
Jaina stopped rolling and raised her head, trying to decide who to take on next. Strewn with overturned equipment and severed pipes, the chamber was too tangled with streaking bolts and sweeping arcs of color for her to see anything clearly. The floor was littered with bodies, some motionless, more writhing, too many with faces she recognized as fellow Jedi. Her droid, Rowdy, had managed to extract himself from the inspection capsule and descend the stairs from the bypass platform. Now he was working his way toward the computer interface at the front of the chamber, where the original plan had called for him to contact the Temple’s central computer, ordering it to lower the shields and open the blast doors.
Jaina scanned the room to catch a quick idea of where everyone was. Vestara was unconscious on the floor with a Sith standing over her, talking into a comm. Valin and Jysella had made it onto a pipe, fighting back-to-back three meters over the floor. And there was Ben, fighting with everything he had to get to Vestara, dodging lightsabers and blaster bolts. He hit one Sith woman with a Force blast, only to have three other Sith take her place.
So that's where Jaina aimed herself. She Force launched herself off the deck, only to have the two male Sith spinning around to defend themselves while the woman went after Ben. Jaina quickly took off a bearded man's lightsaber arm at the elbow, and moved to block an attack from the other. The problem was that the pipe wasn't the most stable of surfaces, and her foot slid down it, causing her to tumble off of it towards the deck. The other Sith man tumbled after her, so Jaina Force threw the clean-shaven one into a transfer pipe, pushing herself in the opposite direction. She landed atop the other, driving her elbow into his ribs and snapping her head back into his face. She felt his nose shatter, then rolled to her side. The other one was trying to literally get the drop on her, but Jaina was quick enough that when he landed, he did so on her lightsaber.
Okay, that had also maybe cracked a few ribs, which was not the first or probably the last time that had happened to her. But she used the Force to fling the Sith's body off of her, and got up in time for the other Sith's parang to come flying right towards her face. She was able to slice it in two, though one got close enough to sting her jaw on the way. And then she planted her lightsaber firmly in the Sith's torso. With him out of the way, she headed back towards Ben.
Ben was handling it. He'd gotten a hold of the bearded Sith's fallen lightsaber and was using it to push the female Sith back. So Jaina just decided to end it with a slight Force push towards the woman, sending her into the blade of Ben's lightsaber. When the woman crumpled, he gave Jaina a quick salute. "Thanks."
"Glad to help," she said, nodding towards a narrow aisle between two basins. "Let's go."
"They have Vestara," he said, but that was all she heard. Another robed Sith had dropped down behind Ben and had raised his hand, and Jaina was already leaping to her cousin's defense.
Ben must have sensed his danger, too, because he was already moving. They bumped shoulders as he pivoted around, then a deafening crackle split the air and Jaina found herself flying backward on a bolt of Force lightning. She slammed into the wall of a settling tank and remained pinned there, teeth grinding, nerves burning, limbs paralyzed- until Ben shoved his crimson lightsaber into the dancing fork of energy.
When the Force lightning ceased, Jaina dropped to her knees, trying to will her muscles back into working correctly. Seriously, electrocution was the worst. Luckily she didn't even need to gesture anymore to grab the Sith in the Force to yank him down the aisle, where Ben finished him off.
Ben checked for more attackers, but the battle had progressed from the initial “confusion-and-carnage” phase to the “hidden-death” stage, and there were no longer any Sith out in the open. Even the din of the battle had dwindled to sporadic outbreaks of thunder, shriek, and sizzle. "You okay?" he asked.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Jaina asked. She tried to stand, but her legs still weren't working right. She extended a hand for help, but her shoulder erupted into pain that probably meant she'd dislocated it. Again, not the first or last time this would ever happen. "Just a little shaky. Help me up."
He did so, but glanced back towards where Vestara had last been seen. One of her feet was still visible behind a tank, and Jaina knew what he was thinking.
"Hold on, Ben," she said, putting a little more weight on him than was strictly necessary to keep him from going off. "You're not going to help her by getting yourself killed."
"Who's going to get himself killed?" he countered.
"Who do you think? We’re outnumbered ten to one here, and that guy with Vestara looks like he’s in charge.”
"So?"
"So that makes him at least a Lord, and probably a High Lord," Jaina said, realizing her objective had changed from killing the enemy to keeping Ben from being killed by the enemy. Battles were unpredictable like that. "Are you really ready to go after a Sith High Lord? Because I’m not. Not when he has all the advantages."
Ben sighed. "What if it was Jag? Would you leave him behind?"
No. No, she really wouldn't. If it was Jag, that Sith would be dead no matter what it took, and Jaina could be honest with herself about that. But it wasn't Jag. It was Vestara, a Sith who kept on betraying Ben in ways, who had been working her way into the Skywalkers' confidence for months- and who might actually be waiting for a chance like this to hit the Order where it hurt. Unfortunately, Jaina couldn’t say as much to Ben. He was a teenager in love, and teenagers in love did not like to hear that their sweethearts might be lying, cheating assassins.
"You have a point," Jaina said, trying to pull her weight to turn Ben away. "But if that were Jag, he would want me to do the smart thing and not get myself killed while attempting an impossible rescue."
Ben didn't budge. "I didn't ask what Jag would do. I asked what you would do." He tried to free himself from Jaina's grasp, but she pulled him back instead. "I thought you were shaky."
"I'm getting better," Jaina said, with a firm grasp now on his robes. She would physically prevent him from going if she had to, which apparently she was doing. "And whatever I might do, it would be smart. So I wouldn't charge in without a plan, and I wouldn't get someone else killed with me."
Ben frowned. "I'm not asking you to come."
"Right," she said dryly. "And you expect me to square that with your father? That you didn't invite me to walk into an obvious trap right along with you?"
She had him there. He'd go ahead and get himself killed for nothing, sure, but he wasn't the guy who was going to take someone else down with him. "Trap?"
"Think, Ben. The Sith commander alone, Vestara lying unconscious at his feet? It’s too much temptation. He wants you to go after her." She tugged him along, and this time he- reluctantly- allowed her to. "Come on. We need to find the others and regroup. Then we'll figure out how to save Vestara."
"You'd better mean that, Jaina," Ben said seriously. "I'm not going to abandon her."
When she was not much older than Ben, she'd had to be forced to leave one brother behind to die, and then had to make the call to let the other one be captured. She knew exactly how hard this was. "Ben, I can't promise we'll save her. You know better. But we'll do what we can, okay? We just need to be smart about it."
[NFB, NFI, OOC okay. Dialogue and actually more narrative than I usually like to take is from Apocalypse by Troy Denning, but god damn I love the temple siege.]
This time they had learned that Roki Kem, who had taken control of the GA in an election after they deposed Daala (who had since escaped from prison and had decided to run for office to get Jag's job in the Empire, who knew?), was now working with the Sith. Politics in this galaxy were never not interesting. When word came down that they were planning an attack on the Jedi in the Temple, the Jedi had prepared, and organized their own coup to take place during that. As one of the best fighters they had, Jaina would be in the Temple.
And it meant while trying to prepare the Temple for the attack, she had help from Ben and Vestara. One of them she was fine with, guess who.
"I just wish I had a weapon," Vestara sighed. "Even a blaster."
Ben opened his mouth to speak, but Jaina cut that right off. "Sorry, Vestara. That's the way it has to be," she said. "If being without a weapon worries you, we can get you out before anything starts."
"Not really," Vestara said. "I need to prove my loyalty."
Ben shook his head. "Ves, you shouldn't take-"
"Please don't, Ben," she said. "I understand why the Masters find it hard to trust me. I truly do."
Well, she should. "This isn’t just about the Masters," Jaina told her. "Not everyone in the Jedi Order has spent time with you. For a lot of us, it’s hard to trust a Sith."
"A former Sith," Ben corrected. "Come on, Jaina, her own father tried to kill her."
He was going to get annoying real fast if he kept this up, and Jaina tried to remind herself that she might've been just as bad at sixteen. Probably not, but maybe. "Okay, a former Sith. I'm serious, Vestara. If going into battle unarmed bothers you, you shouldn't be there."
"And how will the Jedi know who the High Lords are?" Vestara asked. "How will they know when they have found the Grand Lord?"
"We'll get by."
"Or blame me when something goes wrong," she said, sliding an arm around Ben's waist. "You're not going anywhere without me. I need to be there to watch your back. Even if I don't have a weapon to defend it."
Jaina still didn't trust her. She completely related to Vestara having to kill her own father, and she had that damned Skywalker trait that made her want to give people a second chance, but she also wasn't stupid. "Okay, then finish up here," Jaina said. "I'm going to head down to the hangar."
*****
The attack came maybe half an hour later, much earlier than they'd been expecting. As of now there were six Jedi and Vestara in the Temple, against all the Sith. Jaina sensed it before anything happened, and they didn't come through any of the obvious paths. Of course not. They were Sith. Sneaky was their thing.
Following her senses, she ended up back near where she'd left Ben and Vestara. She didn't dare go through the corridors, since that would just draw the attack to her, where she'd be outnumbered. Not that she couldn't handle that. Instead she went through the grating of the water bypass system, stopping only when she heard the fighting and found an access hatch that she could open quietly. There were plenty of Sith flooding into the area, climbing up through a missing section of grating, sort of like insects. She didn't know where Luke and Corran were, but Valin and Jysella Horn had also arrived, with Valin deflecting blaster bolts to protect his sister, and then from her vantage point she couldn't see Ben, but she could see Vestara getting hit in the back of the head with the hilt of a lightsaber and falling to her knees.
Yep, Jaina was needed here. So she climbed out of the access panel, ignited her lightsaber, and leaped over the platform's safety rail.
A blast of Force lightning flashed below her, but she could twist herself to avoid it and to catch the next bolt with her lightsaber. This sort of thing was absolutely instinctive for her by now. She landed harder on the durasteel deck than she wanted to, and a dozen Sith turned to face her, because she'd just landed in the middle of them. On purpose. And there were still plenty of Sith crawling out of everywhere.
No problem. In a situation like this, Jaina thrived on chaos. She became chaos.
Jaina leapt over an incoming leg slash, then dropped her attacker with a quick snap-kick to the temple. She blocked a strike at her neck and, still in the air, turned her jump into a cartwheel. She shifted to a one-handed grip and swung her free arm in an arc, using the Force to sweep two more Sith off their feet. Landing in their midst, she stomped on the throat of the first and jammed her lightsaber through the chest of the other, then pulled a concussion grenade off her combat harness and thumbed it active.
She dropped it at her feet and began to count. One.
The melee went still. All eyes dropped to the grenade, noted the absence of a safety pin, the arming light blinking red. The Sith looked at her with wide eyes, then spun away and tried to hurl themselves beyond the blast radius.
Jaina’s count reached Two. She caught the grenade on the toe of her boot and kicked it toward a missing section of deck grating, where a fresh stream of Sith warriors were climbing into view.
Her count reached Three, and Jaina dropped.
The detonation hit her like a hoverbus, rolling her across the deck. She couldn't imagine why they'd sprung their trap so early. This didn't seem to be a planned ambush. While dozens of Sith were already in the room, they seemed almost as confused and poorly positioned as their targets. Maybe Luke had sensed the danger and forced the issue- or maybe he had been their true target all along. Perhaps they feared Luke Skywalker just that much.
And that was a mistake.
Luke Skywalker was not the Sword of the Jedi. Jaina was, and now the Sith had trapped themselves inside a locked Temple with her.
Jaina stopped rolling and raised her head, trying to decide who to take on next. Strewn with overturned equipment and severed pipes, the chamber was too tangled with streaking bolts and sweeping arcs of color for her to see anything clearly. The floor was littered with bodies, some motionless, more writhing, too many with faces she recognized as fellow Jedi. Her droid, Rowdy, had managed to extract himself from the inspection capsule and descend the stairs from the bypass platform. Now he was working his way toward the computer interface at the front of the chamber, where the original plan had called for him to contact the Temple’s central computer, ordering it to lower the shields and open the blast doors.
Jaina scanned the room to catch a quick idea of where everyone was. Vestara was unconscious on the floor with a Sith standing over her, talking into a comm. Valin and Jysella had made it onto a pipe, fighting back-to-back three meters over the floor. And there was Ben, fighting with everything he had to get to Vestara, dodging lightsabers and blaster bolts. He hit one Sith woman with a Force blast, only to have three other Sith take her place.
So that's where Jaina aimed herself. She Force launched herself off the deck, only to have the two male Sith spinning around to defend themselves while the woman went after Ben. Jaina quickly took off a bearded man's lightsaber arm at the elbow, and moved to block an attack from the other. The problem was that the pipe wasn't the most stable of surfaces, and her foot slid down it, causing her to tumble off of it towards the deck. The other Sith man tumbled after her, so Jaina Force threw the clean-shaven one into a transfer pipe, pushing herself in the opposite direction. She landed atop the other, driving her elbow into his ribs and snapping her head back into his face. She felt his nose shatter, then rolled to her side. The other one was trying to literally get the drop on her, but Jaina was quick enough that when he landed, he did so on her lightsaber.
Okay, that had also maybe cracked a few ribs, which was not the first or probably the last time that had happened to her. But she used the Force to fling the Sith's body off of her, and got up in time for the other Sith's parang to come flying right towards her face. She was able to slice it in two, though one got close enough to sting her jaw on the way. And then she planted her lightsaber firmly in the Sith's torso. With him out of the way, she headed back towards Ben.
Ben was handling it. He'd gotten a hold of the bearded Sith's fallen lightsaber and was using it to push the female Sith back. So Jaina just decided to end it with a slight Force push towards the woman, sending her into the blade of Ben's lightsaber. When the woman crumpled, he gave Jaina a quick salute. "Thanks."
"Glad to help," she said, nodding towards a narrow aisle between two basins. "Let's go."
"They have Vestara," he said, but that was all she heard. Another robed Sith had dropped down behind Ben and had raised his hand, and Jaina was already leaping to her cousin's defense.
Ben must have sensed his danger, too, because he was already moving. They bumped shoulders as he pivoted around, then a deafening crackle split the air and Jaina found herself flying backward on a bolt of Force lightning. She slammed into the wall of a settling tank and remained pinned there, teeth grinding, nerves burning, limbs paralyzed- until Ben shoved his crimson lightsaber into the dancing fork of energy.
When the Force lightning ceased, Jaina dropped to her knees, trying to will her muscles back into working correctly. Seriously, electrocution was the worst. Luckily she didn't even need to gesture anymore to grab the Sith in the Force to yank him down the aisle, where Ben finished him off.
Ben checked for more attackers, but the battle had progressed from the initial “confusion-and-carnage” phase to the “hidden-death” stage, and there were no longer any Sith out in the open. Even the din of the battle had dwindled to sporadic outbreaks of thunder, shriek, and sizzle. "You okay?" he asked.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Jaina asked. She tried to stand, but her legs still weren't working right. She extended a hand for help, but her shoulder erupted into pain that probably meant she'd dislocated it. Again, not the first or last time this would ever happen. "Just a little shaky. Help me up."
He did so, but glanced back towards where Vestara had last been seen. One of her feet was still visible behind a tank, and Jaina knew what he was thinking.
"Hold on, Ben," she said, putting a little more weight on him than was strictly necessary to keep him from going off. "You're not going to help her by getting yourself killed."
"Who's going to get himself killed?" he countered.
"Who do you think? We’re outnumbered ten to one here, and that guy with Vestara looks like he’s in charge.”
"So?"
"So that makes him at least a Lord, and probably a High Lord," Jaina said, realizing her objective had changed from killing the enemy to keeping Ben from being killed by the enemy. Battles were unpredictable like that. "Are you really ready to go after a Sith High Lord? Because I’m not. Not when he has all the advantages."
Ben sighed. "What if it was Jag? Would you leave him behind?"
No. No, she really wouldn't. If it was Jag, that Sith would be dead no matter what it took, and Jaina could be honest with herself about that. But it wasn't Jag. It was Vestara, a Sith who kept on betraying Ben in ways, who had been working her way into the Skywalkers' confidence for months- and who might actually be waiting for a chance like this to hit the Order where it hurt. Unfortunately, Jaina couldn’t say as much to Ben. He was a teenager in love, and teenagers in love did not like to hear that their sweethearts might be lying, cheating assassins.
"You have a point," Jaina said, trying to pull her weight to turn Ben away. "But if that were Jag, he would want me to do the smart thing and not get myself killed while attempting an impossible rescue."
Ben didn't budge. "I didn't ask what Jag would do. I asked what you would do." He tried to free himself from Jaina's grasp, but she pulled him back instead. "I thought you were shaky."
"I'm getting better," Jaina said, with a firm grasp now on his robes. She would physically prevent him from going if she had to, which apparently she was doing. "And whatever I might do, it would be smart. So I wouldn't charge in without a plan, and I wouldn't get someone else killed with me."
Ben frowned. "I'm not asking you to come."
"Right," she said dryly. "And you expect me to square that with your father? That you didn't invite me to walk into an obvious trap right along with you?"
She had him there. He'd go ahead and get himself killed for nothing, sure, but he wasn't the guy who was going to take someone else down with him. "Trap?"
"Think, Ben. The Sith commander alone, Vestara lying unconscious at his feet? It’s too much temptation. He wants you to go after her." She tugged him along, and this time he- reluctantly- allowed her to. "Come on. We need to find the others and regroup. Then we'll figure out how to save Vestara."
"You'd better mean that, Jaina," Ben said seriously. "I'm not going to abandon her."
When she was not much older than Ben, she'd had to be forced to leave one brother behind to die, and then had to make the call to let the other one be captured. She knew exactly how hard this was. "Ben, I can't promise we'll save her. You know better. But we'll do what we can, okay? We just need to be smart about it."
[NFB, NFI, OOC okay. Dialogue and actually more narrative than I usually like to take is from Apocalypse by Troy Denning, but god damn I love the temple siege.]