It was early when Jaina woke up from the nightmare, the kind of early where you don't need to look at the clock to know that you didn't need to get out of bed for hours yet. She didn't have the nightmares as often anymore, to the point where she could forget she had them at all most days, and she knew why she was having them again now. The anniversary was coming up again.

She wasn't ever going to get over what had happened and she knew it. John had said that from the beginning, Jacen had most recently driven the point home. They were right, too. There was a difference between getting over something and moving on from it, and she liked to think she'd moved on. Maybe she hadn't, what with the fact that she'd still never let herself cry over her little brother dying. But she did have to wonder just how long she was going to have to deal with this sort of thing. She still had the fighting-Jacen-as-Vader dream, had since she was fourteen, but she knew that might also be part foresight. Anakin was already dead, that couldn't happen again.

It'd be so much easier if she could just run off to Atlantis like she'd left for California last year. In her mind, it hadn't even been escaping then, it'd been the first time she'd ever tried to work through things. Since she couldn't get there, and since Jacen kept coming into her thoughts, she reached into the Force, trying to find him wherever he was. She'd tried several times since they'd parted ways on Zonama Sekot, and never once reached him. He was able to cut himself off from the Force, something that worried the hell out of her, having lived six months thinking he was dead because she couldn't sense him. She just always had to trust that he was all right and that one of these times she'd be able to get to him.

To her utter surprise, this time she felt him reach back to her.

Jaina found herself smiling once she got over the initial shock, trying to make sure through that twin bond that he was okay, that he was safe and all right, but got only concern in response. She sent him a bit of reassurance back, because the fact was, just this helped. Like she wasn't going through it entirely alone this time.

She didn't get to hold the connection for as long as she would have liked. Just like that, he was gone again, but at least she'd gotten that much. She rolled onto her side, knowing she wasn't going to get back to sleep, but at least she'd feel a little better until she decided it was a sane time to go for a run.


[Establishy as it is book day, and NFB.]