Tag:
Jade Lesan
Jacen did not even flinch when the front door shut.
He waited.
There was the muffled exchange outside, the faint hum of the speeder, and then, finally, the sound of it departing the estate. Only then did he lift his eyes from the holomagazine for half a second, as if confirming that yes, they were in fact alone now, before dropping his attention right back to the engine schematic.
He should have known that would last all of three seconds.
Jade was suddenly there, marching into his space with all the subtlety of a collision alarm. When she leaned over his shoulder and blared,
“Blah, blah, blah,” directly into his ear, Jacen’s face tightened.
He slowly looked up at her.
“That was a cooling manifold.”
His tone carried the sort of grave offense most people reserved for actual insults.
“And I was reading.”
Jade, of course, did not care.
She sat down by his legs and launched into exactly the speech he knew was coming. He was boring. He was really going to sit here all weekend. Naboo was boring. Everything was boring. Jacen let her talk while he tried, with increasingly limited success, to keep reading. The exaggerated shifting on the couch did not help. Every time she bumped him, the holographic page jittered just enough to make him lose his place.
On the third bump, he exhaled through his nose and lowered the holomagazine at last.
“You do realize,” he said, turning to look at her properly now,
“that if you keep assaulting the furniture, I’m still not going to magically become interested in whatever terrible idea you have.”
His eyes narrowed a little.
“And you have one. You always have one.”
Jade looked restless in the way she only did when she felt penned in. Jacen knew that look too. It usually meant she was already halfway into a bad decision and just needed someone to come be miserable with her.
He leaned back into the couch, one arm settling across the back cushion while the holographic display floated between them.
“Naboo is not boring,” he said flatly.
“You’re just impossible to impress.”
He gestured toward the magazine with two fingers.
“They’re testing a new engine package outside Theed. Actual prototype work. New intake geometry, upgraded cooling manifold, probably a tighter thrust response curve if the article isn’t overselling it. There’s a whole feature on it.” He paused, then gave her a look. “Which you would know if you had even one respectable hobby.”
There was just enough smugness in that to make it sibling-safe.
Jacen let his gaze drift toward the window for a moment, to the bright skyline beyond. Naboo was polished, and safe, mostly. She was beautiful in a way that could become easy to overlook when you had grown up inside it. He understood, at least a little, why Jade pushed against it. He just thought she was wrong in the most dramatic way possible.
Then his attention returned to her and something in his expression shifted, subtle but present.
“If you want to do something, then say what you actually want to do.”
That was about as much concession as Jade was likely to get from him without a treaty.
“I am not sneaking you off-world. I’m also not spending the weekend getting arrested because you decided being unsupervised means becoming a menace to society.” He tilted his head slightly.
“But if your grand complaint is that home is boring, then fine. We can go somewhere.”
He tapped the edge of the holographic display and shrank it down a little so it hovered closer to his lap.
“There’s the starfighter facility outside Theed. The lake district. The upper markets. We could even take a speeder out farther from the city if you just need to stop pacing around like a caged nexu.” His brow rose.
“Assuming you can manage an afternoon without trying to turn it into a crime.”
For a moment he studied her, clearly debating whether this was generosity or self-preservation. His mouth twitched at one corner before he looked back down at the holomagazine.
“Now are you going to tell me what you want, or are you just going to keep elbowing me until one of us dies?”
Jacen Lesan
as if to say… right? 
