[[Live from the airport with free wifi I bring you the post you have been waiting for-freaking-ever for! <3]]
Sometimes Allana wondered if her mother’s preternatural calm was somehow parasitic, if she maintained her equilibrium by siphoning it sneakily from everyone around her. Maybe, she thought as she ran a hairbrush through her hair, it’s a Hapan thing. Maybe that’ll be my first lesson when I get dumped back there. How To Be Calm When Everyone Else is Panicking Because You Caused the Panic. In the absence of such a class Allana was most emphatically not calm. It was more than just the unrest at the complex, though that was bad enough having given her a first taste of what it was like to be feared, it was a pretty specific mother/daughter cocktail of Not Calm.
When she’d first left Hapes to live with her grandparents she’d missed her mother desperately. In her first few years of life she’d almost never left Tenel Ka’s side, too many assassination attempts, too much risk. Her early memories from Hapes were all of her mother: playing around the skirts of her dress in the morning, holding her hand and stepping carefully onto a shuttle, trying her best to imitate her mother’s perfect posture. She remembered too that for weeks after she’d been left with Han and Leia she’d had to determinedly stifle her tears at night, disguising her homesickness behind asking her grandfather for cup after cup of water before he’d figured out what she really wanted and sat at the foot of her bed, talking to her until she’d fallen asleep. For years she’d brought up the “Queen Mother of the planet I’m from” at every opportunity, telling anyone who would listen about her, and looked forward to her infrequent calls. But, as she’d adjusted to her new life, had come to understand what it would mean to return to Hapes and her mother, she had come to see those calls as a reminder of a responsibility she didn’t want, to resent her mother as its representative. This was made all the worse by the knowledge that her mother had also rebelled against her duty, had gone off to train as a Jedi and planned on never returning until it had become a necessity. Tenel Ka’s life seemed like a roadmap, a living reminder that whispered you’re trapped, you’re trapped.
But none of that changed the fact that Tenel Ka was her mother who loved her and who, despite everything, Allana had missed while growing up. She knew her too, and if she knew the child instead of the teenager, well, it was still better than Leia who did her best but was learning for the first time what Allana wanted her to just know. All of this, all together, swirled around to make the prospect of spending an afternoon with her mother a more complicated prospect than it was for most teenagers but, still, not one she was dreading.
“Door’s unlocked!” Allana called from her room in response to her mother’s knock and Daisy’s barking, “I’ll be out in a second!” She turned back to her closet and grabbed a long cardigan to pull over her tanktop and cast about for a moment before finding the knee-high black boots she’d become fond of in Vegas with their combination of sensibly comfortable utilitarianism and decorative buckles. Boots tugged on she grabbed a scarf and hurried out into the living room, grabbing the cup of coffee that she’d left on the table and downing the remaining liquid in one gulp before tossing it into the sink and whirling back to face her mother, grinning as if hoping a big enough smile would make her mother forget that display of teenager-living-alone sloppiness. “Hello,” she said in greeting and rocked back on her heels a little as if downshifting from her getting-ready rush.