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your second child has always been different. it isn’t obvious at first, infants are infants regardless of force sensitivity. a two month old force sensitive is just as helpless as a non force sensitive two month old. she cries, and sleeps, and eats, and grows, and learns just as her older brother did before her, just as her younger siblings will after.
and yet, she is different. babies are responsive to their environments and caregivers, but this child takes it further. you don’t notice at first, you don’t have the context, but the worst of the crying fits come when your neighbor dies alone in their apartment, a freak accident, when the couple above you argue quietly inaudibly, and the father a few doors down worries for his own sick child, a sector away.
she throws a tantrum the morning your usual transport crashes, killing most of the passengers on board. the transport you would have been on, if not for the screaming only abating in your arms. your boss is understanding, and your love is developing a migraine, not helped by a screaming child. until, all at once, the tears stop with hardly a hiccup, and you leave, relieved for work, where you are greeted with relieved embraces and claps on the back from colleagues who had heard the news.
and then there are the animals. at six months old you find her locked in a staring contest with an eerily relaxed lizard. the local garden pests and strays seem drawn to her. pets are calm and content in her presence.
sometimes you set her down somewhere safe and soft and flat, surrounded by a few favorite toys and turning back to her, one of her chubby little hands will be holding a toy you swore was last on a shelf across the room. it becomes undeniable in toddlerhood, when you catch objects moving seemingly on their own out of the corner of your eye.
more often than not, the telekinesis is innocent, non-threatening. just a child fetching toys and dropped items, small things. but sometimes, in moments of high emotion, things tremble, the air fills with static. once, a vase falls from a shelf and shatters. you are not afraid, not really, but, well, you worry. you worry that it will get worse, that you aren’t what your daughter needs.
your thoughts and the hushed, after dark and early morning discussions you have with your spouse go in circles. you know you will have to make a decision, that that time draws ever nearer. you go back and forth, swap positions, agreeing and disagreeing unpredictably, sometimes ending the day with positions opposing those you started with. how do you make a decision like this?
and then the day comes. the figure in brown robes appears at your door. your stomach sinks with dread, and yet you are calmer than you have been in months, full of acceptance. the jedi is kind, with a soothing voice, somehow radiating power without the slightest feeling of threat.
as they explain your options your daughter stares, transfixed. she has been called uncanny, unsettling, both to your face and behind your back for almost as long as she has been alive. her gaze feels much heavier than it should from one so young, full of knowledge far beyond her age. the jedi merely smiles, affectionately running a hand over her head. your son's attention flickers from the jedi to his sister to his parents.
you agree to the testing. watching your daughter identify pictures she cannot see, you feel the knowledge settle within you, the acceptance that your beautiful, precious daughter has a path which leads away from you. when the offer comes, you accept. the last step is to ask your daughter. the jedi do not take children old enough to be asked without their own and their guardians permission in any but the most dire of circumstances.
the incongruous, ageless wisdom has never been more apparent than it is in that moment. when she says she wants to go, she says the jedi feels summer, the days and nights spent all together. and then she smiles, and asks if she can bring her favorite toy.
it is hard, and you grieve. you worry that you made the wrong decision. but you keep going, and you are proud. your son brags about his jedi little sister at school. the whole community is proud, telling outsiders about one of their own gone off into the stars to be a jedi.
you join a holonet group for the parents and families of jedi. you make friends, and you learn. you receive updates: art and classwork and pictures and the like. you have another child, and you tell them about their sister the jedi, and your bedtime stories are full of jedi doing miraculous things.
and then the war starts. you thank the force that your world is left more or less alone, and you thank the force that your daughter is still an initiate, too young to become a padawan and be sent to war. you wish, hope, pray that the war ends soon, before she can be chosen by a master.
the children of some of your friends die. you find yourself constantly distracted by the news of the war. you hear the things people say about the jedi, and even some of those who were so proud of your daughter begin to speak of them with disdain. some of them seem disgusted by you, some pity you for your child, stolen by beings with strange abilities shut up in their temple in the core, and some determinedly act as if you have no reason to take umbrage with their remarks, as if you are different somehow.
the temple is bombed and you spend breathless, agonizing hours hoping desperately that your daughter is safe. she and her classmates are safe in a classroom across the temple. your worry grows.
and then things begin to look up. dooku is killed and rumors swirl. you are full of hope and anticipation. it seems the war is coming to an end, with your daughter still years off from padawanship. and end it does, but in a way surpassing your worst nightmares.
you never really work out what happens. the jedi are declared traitor and executed, and you can’t make sense of it. the republic is no more. all your joy and hope is gone in an instant, replaced with a microcosm of the despair and turmoil gripping the galaxy.
you are told nothing. an officer turns up at your door. informs you your daughter was a traitor, was executed. she was a child. your child. he grills you for hours. but there is no body, no death certificate. no proof.
your holonet group is shut down, but not before a member from coruscant approaches the temple, uploads a few clips of burning, of death and despair, figures in white armor and a few crumpled bodies. her account disappears and you hear whispers that she is dead. shot on the spot after her last post.
sometime later someone leaks some security and helmet cam footage. you pour over it, hating every second, searching for some bit of evidence for your daughter's survival. or for her death. there are a few frames of a hand that could be her, a few more of a small body lying where they fell, surrounded by other, achingly small bodies, huddled behind the still forms of junior padawans, children not much older than them killed with their lightsabers raised in defense of the younger. but no face is visible.
you don’t know. you live in agony you are too afraid to express. you cannot publicly grieve for your child, a piece of your own soul made flesh. you stop telling jedi stories, your son stops bragging. his classmates avoid him.
the new imperial authorities watch you closely for any sign of disloyalty. you cannot afford to slip up. you have another daughter. she hears naught but the barest whispers of her sister beyond the facts of her existence. you cannot risk your children. they already receive enhanced scrutiny. for a few terrifying weeks an inquisitor skulks around the local schools, hovering in the classrooms of your children. when they disappear with a child from a neighboring town you feel awful, guilty, selfish relief.
you are angry. at yourself, the jedi, the force, the universe, the emperor, the republic, the clones, anyone, everything. you wish you had said no all those years ago. you are constantly afraid, you have nightmares. you are falling apart but you cannot show it.
some days are better than others. you learn to live with it, the grief and the uncertainty and anger. but it never goes away. it shifts some, the anger, to be more or less targeted at the emperor. but you still hate yourself some days. and you never find out for sure what happened to your daughter. no list of the dead is released, and your daughter never shows up on the lists of fugitives, but, well. coruscant is densely populated, packed with more sentients than populate your sector, and what is one more desperate child to the lower levels. you let yourself hope.