you can call me great one

If she was being really fair about it, Jaina knew that she'd had it surprisingly easy, considering everything she was juggling, and she'd taken it all on in a relatively short amount of time. It also had to be said that she had a lot of help and didn't do any of it alone.

Except when it came to her headstrong teenage padawan who didn't really have a sense of his own mortality yet. Since leaving Coruscant they'd been on the trail of at least some of the One Sith, had a couple skirmishes before they vanished, and there had been a few fights about how to handle oneself in a situation like this when your Master was terrifying in a fight and you were just still learning. At the moment he was probably sulking in the cabin he'd claimed on the ship they'd borrowed, and Jaina was in the pilot's seat, wondering if it'd be wrong to make the Imperial-based Darkmeld Jedi go drinking with her just to commiserate once she got home.

At least for now, she just sent a text. Sometimes I want to apologize for my teen years.

Which was not actually an apology.


[open for replies! If you think you got it, you did.]

The twins were a month old, so things were starting to reach something like normalcy, and that meant work. They'd started easy, heading to Hapes because Jag and Tenel aka had a lot to settle through long meetings of tense not-quite-arguing while Jaina rolled her eyes, and it had the bonus of letting Allana meet her cousins. And then the invitation had been extended to Anakin to meet all his great-grandchildren from this particular universe.

After Anakin arrived, Jaina showed him where his room was and then brought him over to her quarters just in time to watch the boys so Jag could go to a meeting.

"Thanks for the timing," Jaina said just after Jag left. "I was supposed to be in that."

[for Gramps!]

Jaina was having a horrible month- horrible summer, reall- and she needed some normalcy.

So there was a Jaina pony in her office, sitting at the desk. She was half-tempted to text Eric and apologize for probably making fun of him when he was a pony and she wasnt, but she wasn't about to give out ammunition.

[Open with SP!]

The stress of trying to meet with people and plan completely illegal activities while she was being followed around by an adult clone of her dead little brother meant that sometimes Jaina just stayed in her quarters where he had no reason to bother her. Unless the kriffing randomizer went off again. She didn't have any meetings planned and she didn't sense that anything bad was going on for once, so today was one of those days.

Of course, rather than having anything like a lazy day, Jaina was trying to gather information on the Armand Isard Correctional Facility so she had something to share when she snuck out to meet people later to put together a plan. She was so focused on that until she came up for air, she didn't even realize she had a voicemail. Which she then listened to.

"...Because of course."

[Had to. Open for calls and texts, etc.!]

It was Jaina's last day in Fandom, and considering this was like her third last day with a few "I'm not coming back"s in her early years, it didn't seem like that big a deal to her. Her things had either been donated or thrown away or shipped back to the Temple back home, and she had a couple bags set next to her at the moment, which was at least one bag more than she was used to traveling with. This was what settling in one place for a while did for you: you accumulated stuff.

She had a little bit of time till her portal, so she'd sent quick messages to those she thought might want to say goodbye and headed to the causeway and wait.

And wait, because of course the kriffing thing was late.


[Last post till she inevitably comes to visit! Open!]

Jaina wasn't going to the funeral, which she had mixed feelings about. She wanted to be there, for Luke and Ben and her parents, but the same little part of her that had tried to skip out on her own brother's funeral just wanted to get away. That wasn't why she was missing it, though. After killing Lumiya and learning afterwards that there was no way that she could have killed Mara, Luke gave the task force new orders to find Alema, because she had to have done it.

Alema had to be found, yes. She was a threat, a Dark Jedi, and crazy as all get out. But the trail didn't make sense, and while Jaina couldn't voice or even admit to herself what she feared... she knew deep down that Alema was no real match for Mara.

Between that and the thought that she had to buckle down and be (even more) serious about what they were headed into, she'd had a little Talk with Jag and Zekk when she told them what happened. She would like to say that she handled it like a mature adult, but in reality she'd snapped something like "I'm not sleeping with anyone and that's final." Then they'd sat down and decided as a slightly uncomfortable team what their game plan was, which meant leaving immediately.

She had a few hours on Coruscant now. She'd made time to find Ben already, before calling the one in Fandom. It wasn't long enough, but she'd really felt the need to reassure him that it'd be all right, and that he'd be all right, because she knew he would, and he knew she knew. And then she had just enough time to regroup and pack up for another trip that would take an undetermined amount of time and head on out.

She was starting to feel like a pro at that.


[Open, as this is the last chance to talk to her for a bit. Not that she knows this yet.]

It had taken more convincing than Jaina would have liked, but when she got some time, she was able to take Ben on a little trip, like she'd told that other Ben she would. It was mainly for her to check in with him and make sure things were going all right and there weren't any red flags, but there'd been a very large red flag right from the start: she had no idea why she had to convince Jacen to let Ben go instead of his parents.

The trip itself had been... fine? Jaina got the distinct impression that Ben would rather not go at all, but he'd been okay. And if she was being honest with herself, she and Ben didn't seem to connect the same way that they used to. She hadn't worked out training him, but she'd always looked out for him and he'd always been really glad to see her, and now he just... wasn't. He just thought he had more important things to do, because he was twelve and that's how twelve-year-olds (especially ones paired to train with self-important jerks) started to think. Then Jaina had gotten him to help her out in tinkering with the ship they'd been traveling on and things had been just fine, because he was twelve and some things don't change.

She'd gone back to her quarters to check her messages, unpacking while she listened. And when she got to the one from her grandfather, she immediately began piling the things she'd just taken out of her bag back in.

[Mostly establishy but if you feel like pinging in, I am not gonna stop you.]

Her time in Fandom had pretty much done exactly what Jaina had needed it to do: she'd had time to heal up, and while she still felt off, getting back some degree of normalcy had helped a lot. Maybe this was what happened when you coped like a normal person? When she arrived at the Temple, she went straight to the Masters, ready to explain what she'd been doing in Panem and why, and take whatever lumps she had to. She knew she could do so calmly, without coming off like she'd been traumatized or completely angry.

Of course, that was shot to hell the second Corran mentioned that she'd been gone for almost a month, when she should have only been gone two weeks. It made things a little more difficult, trying to talk about how running off was the right thing to do when you were trying so hard not to think about what it had meant the last time time had sped up for her.

Jaina didn't get an answer today, but she knew there'd be some sort of punishment, even if it was getting stuck in the kitchen for the next month. At the moment, that was a secondary concern. When she was free to leave she'd immediately gone to her quarters and got her phone, sending a quick text to multiple contacts reading: Time kriffing sped up again. How are you? and then waited for the messages to bounce back at her. If they did, she'd know she'd been cut off from Fandom again for who knew how long.

Everything went through just fine.

With a sigh of relief, Jaina decided she'd stick to her room for a while, unpacking, doing some quick math to figure this out, and waiting to see if anyone responded. She'd be cursing to herself in the meanwhile.


[Open for calls, texts or emails! If you want to have gotten the message and know about the time speed, you totally got it.]

It was pretty early in the day on Coruscant when Jaina landed her StealthX at the Temple. It was sort of strange. For all that leaving had been such a big deal to her, coming back here wasn't any kind of deal at all. She hopped out of her ship with her too-heavy bags, said hello to the Jedi she knew who happened to also be in the hangar as she headed out, and then she just went to her quarters, just like normal. Maybe it was because this was normal to her. She spent so much time going to and from one place or another, and Coruscant specifically, that there wasn't anything to feel about it.

Almost.

When she got to her quarters, which she'd last seen... months ago, she didn't even know when for sure, the first thing she did was get out her phone. She dropped her bags and took a seat on her bed, pausing before looking at it. She'd talked about what would happen if she got stuck in her own galaxy again, but she'd downplayed what a serious worry it was for her. Getting cut off for five years and thinking she'd lost people she cared about was a large part of the reason why come back here was so hard. She turned the phone over in her hand, looked at the screen to see what date and time it was in Fandom...

...and it was exactly the time it was supposed to be. That was a good sign, but she wasn't going to internally celebrate over that yet. No, she saved that for when she dialed her grandfather and the call went through. She got voicemail, but that was fine. And just like that, she felt 100% better about being back.


[Establishy! Look at me being nice to her for once.]