Chapter Text
It was an unavoidable aspect of her position.
An irreversible clause in a contract signed from the moment she'd ascended the Hapan throne. She had no choice in the matter. Her every move was watched. Every step analyzed. Every expression recorded. Documented. Dissected.
It was completely, absolutely necessary for her to take other men to her bed, at least on occasion, if they were to have any hope of protecting the secrecy of their relationship. Jacen's safety depended on it. Their daughter's safety depended on it.
Tenel Ka always says what is true. Inarguable. And Jacen is a man of logic, and he understands necessity. He knows that it gives them a deliberate advantage, a ready-made cover should any unknowable details slip through their carefully constructed screen of deceit.
It becomes a kind of game, between them. He helps her to pick them on occasion, choosing for pliability, for attractiveness, for status. For the most unlikely, the most outrageous candidates. Every idle whisper in the court is a victory; every scandal breaking across the holonet is a reason for silent celebration.
"That one," he says, when they sit in the overhanging garden together, hands twined inside the folds of her skirt, just out of view of the camera situated above them. A large group of youthful male courtiers cavort below them in the courtyard. Like most Hapans he is blond and pale-skinned, with plump, girlish lips. The muscles of his naked thighs tighten and release as he moves.
"No," Tenel Ka says, brushing the first two joints of his fingers with her thumb. "He's too young, Jacen."
"What's wrong with young?" he asks, watching the boy leap once again before landing on all fours, gyrating his hips back and forth. "They'll do whatever you want when they're that age."
"Young ones may fall in love," Tenel Ka says. Alanna squeals up ahead where she plays in the grass, rolling in the flowers with undignified delight. "That is the last thing that we want, Jacen."
When her words wash over him he closes his eyes, and he lets them slip across his consciousness like serpents. Three days later, when there is only hyperspace that spirals in blue and orange shifting dots in front of his eyes he thinks of them again, letting them curl together and harden, deep in the facets of his memory.
For two years they continue in this way. He turns his holonet console to one station every morning, and there is Tenel Ka smiling over the screen and never once letting one breath of Jacen Solo slide through the cracks in her mask of young men, and somewhere he imagines her thinking of him, continuing with his mission and sometimes visiting the family that he's allowed to have, and not one breath of Tenel Ka ever slides through his mask of indifference.
He dreams, sometimes, that he can taste each one of them on her skin. Map the curving lines of their fingertips on her belly, and feel every damp mark of dried sweat in the hollows of her collarbones.
It happens only once, one night when he's alone again and thinking of a child who will never call him daddy, and Danni Quee walks into the pilots lounge, with her smile and her golden highlights and the florescent glow glinting blindingly off her teeth, and he thinks of Tenel Ka on Hapes, wrapped up in teenage boys and million credit sheets and suddenly he finds no reason to resist when Danni's delicately filed nails creep across the inside of his thigh.
The next morning a file comes in under several encrypted passwords and in it is a detailed report of the Hapan court, strictly dry and uninteresting and nothing at all out of the ordinary from what a queen would send to a Jedi, and then in the middle there is a tiny holograph of a little girl he almost doesn't recognize, crouching in a rich courtyard with a tiny colony of insects surrounded her in a distinctly odd pattern. The children are well protected, the picture says but Jacen knows Tenel Ka and the words blur in his eyes and say I love you so much I would risk exposure to know you are smiling.
Jacen closes the file and begins to cry.
He tucks the hair behind her ears before he kisses her, and she bites down on the edge of his wrist, teeth pressing in just hard enough to sting, and he feels raw anger in her skin, white-hot and razor-sharp and simmering, just underneath the pads of his thumbs, and it's absolution that she wants, for betraying him again and again.
It all turns to ash in his fingers, curling away from his grasp because all there really ever was was Tenel Ka, and beneath every broken layer of guilt and loss is a smile that he would still burn alive just to see.