Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Lucasfilm, Ltd. No money is being made and no infringement is intended.

Notes: Written for the Theatrical Muse 'dinner with anyone' challenge.

Dinner and Conversation
by Christine Anderson

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She thinks about all the people she's never known- and all of the ones she didn't know nearly long enough.

Anakin.

She'd give anything to see her little brother Anakin again. For so many years he was simply there, and she doesn't think she appreciated him as much as maybe she should have. Part of her always saw him as the little boy who got them into trouble, broke her things without meaning to, borrowed her tools without asking and never returned them... But he grew up, and he grew into a person she didn't have nearly enough time to get to know.

Padme Naberrie Amidala Skywalker.

Her grandmother, who she has heard stories of, but never enough. Her grandmother who was so brave and so strong, courageous enough to do what was necessary to protect her children... If her grandmother hadn't been who and what she was, Jaina wouldn't be here now, and she's always been fascinated by the things she has never known about this woman, the things she never had a chance to learn. Would her grandmother be proud of her? She would have liked the chance to find out.

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

So much of the new Jedi Order comes from the brief time her uncle spent with him, and to Jaina's generation, Obi-Wan is a legend. In contrast to her grandmother, she doesn't think there's an event in Obi-Wan's life she hasn't heard a story about- but she doesn't know which, if any, of those old tales are true. Even if only half of them are, that would be a fascinating idea; Dinner with Obi-Wan Kenobi, the last of the old Jedi... Something she could tell her little cousin Ben about, years from now, when he's old enough to understand. A child should know his namesake, one way or the other.

Anakin Skywalker...or Darth Vader.

That one hits a little too close to home... But if it didn't, if she could do it... Would she have the courage (or the gall) to sit there across the table, and demand answers? Would she have the courage to tell him what he was going to do, to ask him if he couldn't change? Would he listen? Would it matter if he did? Would she cease to be, who and what she was, because of one misspoken word? Would it be worth the price she would pay, to ask Darth Vader how in the name of all the stars he got so screwed up in the first place? Would it be worth it to say, "What the hell were you thinking?"

The Emperor.

Oh, she'd have words with the Emperor, alright- festering black bones, black heart- but it wouldn't be much of a meal. She doesn't cook, and he wouldn't eat anyway. He'd suspect poison, and she wouldn't bother to deny the thought had crossed her mind. Why not? Except that he's dead... Dead, but not dead enough. She would like to face down the Emperor, to tell him she is the Skywalker legacy come home to roost. And she'd tell him how everything he destroyed, they rebuilt. (And the Yuuzhan Vong have destroyed it again, in different ways, but that doesn't matter; they'll rebuild again.) How the Jedi have risen again, how his Empire has become allied with the successors to the Rebel Alliance that destroyed him... How his personal agent, his Emperor's Hand, threw his last command back in his face- how she didn't kill Luke Skywalker, but fell in love with him, married him...

She'd like to tell him how every year when she was a child, they'd light fireworks on the anniversary of the day the war ended- the day he died.

She's sure that would really piss him off.

Grand Admiral Thrawn.

He brought her and Jacen a cradle-gift the week they were born; a team of Imperial agents sent to kidnap them, and a bushel of cloaked asteroids in orbit around Coruscant. But before that, he rallied the Unknown Regions, fought the monsters of the deep out there on the fringes of the galaxy... faced down threats worse than the Yuuzhan Vong, left them in shreds and shambles... and brought a small army of former Imperials to fight under his banner... including the legendary father of the young man she loves, the young man who serves (as so many do) in Thrawn's name still.

She'd like to take Thrawn a present of her own; Yuuzhan Vong artwork. They could sit and discuss that artwork over dinner, and the Empire's last great Warlord could tell her how to beat them. What their weaknesses were and how to exploit them.

She thinks her parents might still be a bit pissed off about the asteroids- not to mention the kidnapping attempt. She might be, too, if she could remember these things... but there would be a certain poetic justice in Thrawn's genius saving them all now...

She wishes it were possible. Wishes more than anything, that all it would take to end this is sitting down to dinner and conversation with that old enemy. She'd do it, too, if that were all it would take.

Grand Moff Tarkin.

She doubts she'd have much of an appetite, if she were to have dinner with someone like that. But she'd like to ask him what destroying Alderaan meant to him, if anything. If he ever felt anything about it, one way or the other, or if he really was as soulless a monster as she thinks you must have to be in order to destroy a whole planet.

Bria Tharen.

Her father's old girlfriend, who left him, betrayed him, and used him- and who was one of the most fanatical agents the old Rebel Alliance ever had. She'd like to ask Bria if she ever regretted leaving Han Solo, or the ways she used him to further her own ends. She'd like to ask (she'd almost be afraid of the answer, but she'd ask anyway) if Bria would still have done what she did if she'd known that what she did would land Han Solo in the cantina in Mos Eisley the day Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi came looking for passage to a system they didn't know wasn't there anymore.

Chewbacca.

She and Chewie didn't talk much, but they understood one another. All those hours spent working on the Falcon with her father, all those times Chewie pulled her, and Jacen, and Anakin, out of danger or trouble... All the times he was there for her, and for Jacen and Anakin... She remembers sobbing into soft Wookiee fur- doesn't remember anymore what she was upset about, except that Chewie made it all okay. He was always there, friend, protector, practically family... and then one day he wasn't.

All of these people are dead. Some of them, she'll never stop missing, or will never stop regretting that she never had a chance to know. Some of them... Well, she can't say she is entirely sorry that the Emperor is gone, or Tarkin, or even Thrawn. (Although Thrawn, at least, could help make amends for some of the things he did in the past, by stopping the Vong... the others weren't good for much when they were alive, and there is nothing they could do now that would make her hate them any less.)

But the fact is, loved or loathed or simply never known, she can't see any of them. She can't sit down to dinner with them, ask them her questions, simply get to know them... She can't, and she regrets it. Regrets the chances missed to talk politics with her grandmother, Jedi history with Obi-Wan, tactics and art with Grand Admiral Thrawn, to tell Anakin and Chewbacca one more time that she loved them... Regrets, too, that she can't curse Palpatine, or somehow bring Tarkin face-to-face with the survivors of Alderaan...

And because she can't do these things, tonight she'll do something else.

Tonight she will gather her family, what is left of it, the blood relations and the extended family. Tonight, when they are all, miraculously, at the same place at the same time, she will bring them together. She'll do the math in her head, and think for a while, and then she'll call Booster Terrik.

They'll all end up on the Errant Venture; Jaina and her parents; Jacen, Tahiri, Tenel Ka; Luke, Mara, and little Ben; Booster, his daughter Mirax and son in law Corran, and their kids; Lando and Tendra; Wedge, Iella, Syal and Myri; Jag, Lowie, Kyp, the rest of Twin Suns and Vanguard; Winter and Tycho; Gavin and the Rogues; Talon Karrde and Shada (he still swears there's nothing going on there, but she's noticed the way everyone else has that it's always Karrde-and-Shada, the way it's Han-and-Leia, Wedge-and-Iella, and like the others she's laying side bets); Pellaeon and Bel Iblis (a bottle of Corellian whiskey between them, and the ghosts of too many dead children, and they might prefer to be alone with their sadness, but she won't let them) and, because they'd crash the party anyway if she left them out, Face and the Wraiths.

The meal is long and loud, and somehow it is impossible for their burdens to linger so heavily with the children running underfoot, the laughter flowing around the table with the whiskey and the toasts and the stories of better times. (They drink once to absent friends, a sober toast offered by Booster, of all people, and from then on they drink only to the future.)

There are so many of them gathered around the table, and each of them dear in their own ways- Jaina knows the chances of all of them surviving the rest of the war are slim. So many, they are bound to lose one or two more. But she will never again have to sit back and wish for this moment, to wish for one more chance to get it right... She'll mourn them and she will miss them, but it'll never be now the way it was when the war started, when she didn't say everything because she thought there would always be time. She'll never regret that she hadn't told these dear friends (the way she hadn't told other ones; her old wingmate in Rogue Squadron, a good friend, the best, and she never said...) how much they meant to her.

But they are survivors, these people. When they go down, they go down fighting, and she thinks- as they do- that if it has to be that way, better to die for something than for nothing.

When things quiet down a little she thanks them all for coming- thanks Booster for his hospitality, Pellaeon and Bel Iblis for the whiskey- and tells them how much she appreciates, respects, loves, all of them. She'd like to wrap them up in this moment, keep them this way forever- happy and safe, together- but she knows she can't. That tomorrow they will go on, that there will be other battles, and very likely other losses... She knows, too, that this may be the last time they are all together like this, ever.

But wherever they go from here, they take this memory with them. Whether they live to return or not, they take this with them. One night on the Errant Venture, a night to clear the air and to say the things that needed saying- truths passed hand to hand along the table, around the room, differences they've put behind them now, so that they just tell the stories from both points of view.

The moment passes; like most highly emotional things, it can't be sustained forever. But shades of it linger- in the way Wedge and the old Rogues toss reminiscences about the Battle of Bilbringi back and forth with Pellaeon; in the way Karrde and Booster are debating the philosophy of smuggling with Jacen... They realize that they are a family, of sorts- not simply through the connections Jaina feels to each of them, but to those they have to each other.

It is Corran Horn who names them, borrowing from an old pirate gang he once infiltrated. But the name suits them, as it did those pirates.

The survivors.

The Yuuzhan Vong can keep fighting, can overrun their worlds, can probably even manage to kill a few of them. But they are on the verge of something here, the survivors and their allies. The war is about to turn. One way or another, it's almost over.

The odds are against them. But half of their number are Corellian, and the rest just don't give a damn for odds- not anymore.

"We'll be back," Jaina tells Booster as they begin to trickle out- hours later, when they've all gone nearly hoarse from talking and laughing.

Most of them will, anyway.

And they'll have dinner. A simple meal, with her large, extended, somewhat crazy family.

It's all any of them have ever really wanted, anyway.