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After two changes of clothes, three speeder rides, and more skulking than any respectable Jedi should have to do, Jaina Solo arrived at her destination to find Kyp Durron already waiting for her. “How is that even possible?” she demanded. “You left the Temple after I did!”
“And there are quite a few tricks I haven’t taught you,” Kyp shot back from the couch. He set aside the datapad he had been reading. “Don’t ever challenge anyone who grew up on Kessel to a race through the midlevels, Solo. Anyway, I had to make sure the room was up to standards and there were no listening devices.”
“Jag had his people check it out,” she said as she tossed her bag onto the floor and shrugged out of the hooded jacket that had concealed her for the last leg of the trip. Kyp only grunted dubiously in reply.
The room was most certainly up to standards. Its sparse decor gave an impression of sophistication rather than disuse, with furniture that was simple, but finely crafted of imported materials. Jaina pulled off her boots and let her bare feet sink into the impossibly thick, downy carpeting. The bed could accommodate a family of Wookiees, and its septsilk sheets were large enough to drape a skiff. In trysting places, as in everything else, Jagged Fel had discerning taste.
Jaina perched on the low back of the couch and looked down at Kyp, whose gaze was distant. “Someone’s double extra grumpy tonight,” she observed. “Was it Trandoshan day in the Temple cafeteria?”
He made a face. “I have a lot on my mind.”
“Maybe I can get it off your mind?” Jaina said softly, and reached over to toy with a loose lock of his silver-shot hair. Kyp gave her an appraising glance out of the corner of his eye and twitched his lips into the slightest smirk. Jaina felt a sharp tug at her back in unison with a pressure in the center of her chest. Before she could flinch, she had landed on her back, a smooth nerf hide cushion beneath her, and Kyp’s infuriating grin directly above her. And then his lips closed over hers, quick and hungry, and Jaina felt his want as clearly in his mouth and hands as she felt it through the Force.
She was quite out of breath when her commlink buzzed. “Solo,” she wheezed into the pickup as she pushed Kyp away. In response, the Jedi Master shoved her bare feet off the back of the couch and pulled her sideways so her head and shoulders rested in his lap. She looked up at him, a question in her eyes, and Kyp answered by threading the fingers of his right hand into her hair and letting his left trail over her bare arms.
“You started without me,” Jag’s voice observed, a hint of wryness carrying through the little speaker.
Jaina blushed, and Kyp couldn’t help but find it fetching. “If you hurry, I might still have some clothes on when you get here.” Taking that as his cue, Kyp started to shift the hem of her tunic upward. She slapped at his hand halfheartedly.
There was the briefest of silences. “That’s why I’m calling,” Jag said, all mirth gone now, replaced with regret. “Something’s come up, Jaina, and I won’t be able to make it tonight. I’m sorry.”
Kyp watched in fascination as Jaina’s entire countenance transformed. Disappointment manifested itself in the slackness of her shoulders, the detachment in her eyes, the way she stopped struggling against Kyp’s touch. “It’s all right, Jag,” she assured him, and her voice was almost normal.
“I’d be there if I could,” the Imperial Head of State added quickly.
Jaina let a soft laugh escape. “I know you would,” she replied. “Go do what you have to do.”
In a signoff that hearkened back nearly twenty years to their shared military experience, Jag doubled-tapped his comm pickup and disconnected the call. Kyp had begun to suspect that the farewell was also Fel’s personal code for “I love you.”
He looked down at Jaina, who still wore the same wilted expression as she dropped the commlink on top of her bag. “Now who’s double extra grumpy?” Kyp asked, only half joking.
With a start she seemed to realize how her bearing had changed, and she turned an apologetic gaze on Kyp. “Sorry,” she answered. “I didn’t mean to switch off like that. Where were we?”
Gently, he smoothed her hair back from her brow. “Jaina, we don’t actually have to do anything.”
For a long moment she regarded him. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said as she interlaced the fingers of her right hand with those of his left. “But it’s not the same as setting an evening aside for just you and me, you know? It was supposed to be all of us.”
Kyp sighed. “I do know, actually.”
“I mean, what if it was me who couldn’t make it? What if you and Jag were stuck with this luxurious room and a whole evening free? Would you--”
Before she could say something that would make him even more excruciatingly uncomfortable, Kyp interrupted, “Jaina, you do realize Jag and I only tolerate each other for your sake, yes?” In the silence that followed, Jaina’s look that could have been the visual dictionary definition of dubious. “I trust Jag with my life,” he clarified, “and more importantly, I trust him with your life. But when we’re all... together... well, he’s not the one I’m looking at.”
Jaina gave him a wry, unmistakeably Solo grin. “What you’re saying is, you’re a single-bias power coupling.”
“That’s a crude metaphor,” he grumbled. She only grinned wider. “In any case, I do understand your disappointment. It’s not the same. Jag’s better at some things than I am, after all.”
Now her eyes widened in surprise. “Such as?”
After a moment’s deliberation he answered, “Foot rubs.” Jaina’s laughter was musical, and Kyp grinned down at her.
When her mirth subsided, she reached up to caress his cheek fondly. “You know what I like about you, Durron?”
“Everything, obviously.”
She snorted. “I was going to say your flexibility, but sure, everything works too.”
He worked his fingers into her hair once more and absently stroked the rich dark mass of it. “I think flexibility may be the single most useful trait I’ve ever developed. It’s certainly vital for a Jedi.”
“Swords don’t bend,” Jaina mused softly. “They don’t adapt. If a situation doesn’t fit around them, they slice through it.”
“Well, there’s something to be said for that too,” Kyp amended. “It means you never have to compromise, for one thing.”
Jaina furrowed her brow. “That’s fine in a fight, or when a moral decision is involved, but that attitude bleeds over into everything. Look at us. I couldn’t bend myself to choose between you or Jag, so we had to concoct this arrangement.”
“That was a choice in itself,” Kyp declared. “A brave choice. The right choice.”
“It was me refusing to compromise,” Jaina insisted.
“Then it’s a good thing Jag and I are flexible enough to compensate. Jaina,” he said, his voice soft and frank, “I would not change one iota of this relationship. I can guarantee that Jag wouldn’t either. And I’ll tell you now, the Sword of the Jedi can’t be looking over her shoulder all the time. You can’t endlessly question every decision you make. Especially not the ones that bring you some measure of happiness--those are the decisions you have to embrace completely.”
Her brow stayed furrowed, but her eyes held gratitude for his words. Kyp put his hand on her forehead to soothe the creases there. “Relax,” he whispered. And she did, by degrees. Her eyes fluttered closed and her muscles loosened. Through the Force he felt her drift off for just an instant, but she was back suddenly, startling herself awake again.
“Kriff, sorry! I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”
Kyp didn’t say anything, but he suspected he knew what had kept her up. The Jedi Council had been alerted to the activities of a group of beings whose objective seemed to be retrieving the carbonite-encased Horn siblings, Valin and Jysella. The identities of the operatives were unknown, but eyewitness accounts suggested they were Force users. After reviewing a few scraps of security footage, Kyp was thoroughly convinced that one member of the group was Jaina. She was always concealed, of course, and she made an effort to counterfeit a different style of fighting, but bits and pieces of her usual effortless grace snuck through, and there was an economy of motion that set off sparks of recognition in him.
He didn’t bring his revelation to the Council for several reasons. First, the identities of the others would inevitably be discovered before long, and it would do no good to formally question Jaina at this juncture. She would reveal nothing. Moreover, she would find out who informed on her, and even if she eventually accepted that Kyp was right to do it and forgave him, there would be a period in which he had betrayed her. The suffering would not be worth it. He made the selfish choice, and did not regret it.
The other reason, the bigger reason, was that he envied Jaina this little side project. She was accomplishing things, making actual progress while the Jedi Council toiled away at diplomacy and got nowhere with Daala. Kyp could not bring himself to object to her methods. When the machine of bureaucracy locked up, you could either crawl in between all the moving parts with a greasy rag and a hydrospanner, or you could climb over the bloody thing.
Kyp winced inwardly at the shoddy metaphor. In any case, part of him chafed at the fact that Jaina had not asked him to join her little band of subversives. She trusted him implicitly, so she undoubtedly had a very good reason for hiding this from him, but it still stung. His chair on the Council was getting a little too comfortable. There were times when he yearned for a good fight, and if Master Skywalker hadn’t been in exile, Luke would have easily sensed these feelings in him and warned that a Jedi craves not these things.
The softest, prettiest snore he had ever heard brought him back to the present. Jaina had fallen asleep again, her face placid at last. Kyp smiled down at her, then leaned his head back against the cushion behind him and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, light streamed through the drapes and Jagged Fel stood before him. “Eventful night?” the younger man quipped, and at the sound of his voice Jaina woke instantly.
“You made it after all,” she observed with a sleepy grin.
Jag leaned down to kiss her. “Better late than never,” he told her, allowing a broad smile onto his face. “And I’ve got the whole day off. The whole night, too, come to think of it.”
She was up in a flash, her arms around Jag’s neck and her lips locked on his with a fervor that would have overwhelmed a lesser man, but Jag met the challenge eagerly.
“Mmm,” Fel said when Jaina came up for air, “morning breath.” She smacked his chest and stomped off to the refresher. Kyp smirked, but it faded as Fel sat at the other end of the couch. The Imperial Head of State had something on his mind. “I need a favor.”
“Yes?”
“An evening with Jaina, sometime in the next month or so. Just me and her.”
“You don’t have to ask my permission for that, Fel.”
“I know I don’t.”
“Fine.”
“Good.”
A long pause. Jag’s gaze bored into the vase of mycosias on the table opposite them. “I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
Kyp felt a grin spread across his face, and was utterly sincere when he replied, “That’s fantastic, Jag.”
The younger man glanced at him, clearly surprised at his response. “I mean it,” Kyp insisted. “I’ve long since accepted that I’m... not the marrying kind. But you two--that makes perfect sense.” He wondered whether Jag had thought beyond the proposal, to what would happen with the three of them, how they would make it work. Knowing Fel, whose foresight could put a dejarik champion to shame, he would have multiple contingency plans based on Jaina’s response. He had likely already chosen a moderately priced but exceptionally talented Bastion tailor to make his suit for the wedding, a discrete midlevels cantina in which to drown his sorrows if Jaina said no to his proposal, and a suitable period to wait before he asked her again.
He was going to say something to that effect when Jaina emerged from the ‘fresher. She stopped short and narrowed her eyes when both men turned broad smiles on her. “What were you plotting?” she demanded.
Jag quickly brought his expression under control, but Kyp kept smiling and answered, “Just figuring out how to spend our day. I think we should start with room service.”
With obvious relief, Jaina smiled back and took her spot between them. She took Kyp’s hand in hers, then leaned over to kiss Jag on the cheek. “You know what?” she asked them. “I’m pretty sure I’m the luckiest rodder in the universe.”
“There’s no such thing as luck,” Kyp chided.
“Oh yeah, Master Durron? What would you call it?”
“Hard work,” Jag interjected.
“I guess I have been making you two do a disproportionate amount of work,” she ruminated. “Maybe we’ll try something different today.”
Kyp found himself grinning again as he reached for his comm to place an order with the hotel’s caterers. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in such a good mood.