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Title: A Subtle Glow
Summary: Luke ponders love and the effect of time.
Genre: Romance, introspection, meanderings.
A/N: Uh. Inspired by a brief thought I had, and I just wrote it and ran with it. Thanks to GabriJade for beta'ing.

Feedback is always appreciated. :)

Luke wondered if this was the way of life, events transmuted by time, shifted around to meet a single perspective, unable to see it any other way – Obi-Wan's words of 'a certain point of view' came to mind. Because it seemed to him that he had never had this before, something this perfect, been this happy. Yet how could that be true, with all the great moments of his life? The loss and sadness had an equal share of triumph and love to match it, but now … now it was as if every moment had been changed to make this one all the more special. Like a subtle glow had settled over the moment, just waiting to fall for so many years.

And it had been many. They seemed to stretch forever in the distance, muted and with pieces lost, so he wasn't even really sure how they got from there to here. He remembered meeting her, her hatred of him, the passion of it, but he couldn't seem to recall the wary friendship. It was just there, then here, her asleep lying half on him and half on the bed, curled up against him as comfortably as if she owned him. A casual kind of territoriality he supposed Mara had always had, but he'd never noticed.

At least not in relation to him.

But he knew this all had to be a trick of the mind. It was human nature to seek perfection and never find it, and to look for it where it could never exist. And so easy to look for in a relationship, in the eyes of a person who says 'I love you.' He thinks it's in every heart, except perhaps for the blackest – he thinks of an old Emperor who dared to try to raise a girl, and crush her to fit his mold – to want that. Where there is want, there is the capacity for self-delusion, to achieve that want.

He has had so few relationships to analyze, but he doesn't think he sees this kind of awe-inspiring glow in the relationship of Leia and Han – oh, love, certainly. Not this dizzying sort, but the hardy kind, and only in rare moments of truly dark cynicism could he imagine it permanently falling away from either of them. There was a steadfastness there he couldn't help but admire, envy.

So this absurdness, this surely fleeting feeling of perfection – that would pass. He couldn't imagine the problems now, couldn't imagine polite distance, nor any argument able to separate them, but it's all wishful.

But he has faith. He's known Mara for years, her fiery temper, her amazing ability to inspire fury in others – himself most notably, she'd always surprised him that way – her sheer stubbornness, the way she inflicted pain when she had no user manual for another way to behave, an oddly childlike reaction to living a life she'd never been raised for. But that was familiar enough, a thought he'd had many times about himself, the self-pitying depths to which he had privately sunk. I wasn't raised for this, I wasn't ever told how.

But she was loyal. Stubbornly loyal, she laughed and made him laugh, and damn if she wasn't one of the quickest learners he'd ever seen. He couldn't imagine her with Yoda, all that temper and all that inventiveness going head to head with a quirky and very old Jedi Master. It was an entertaining thought, and one he thought he should not share, should the subject ever arise.

She matched him and complemented him at the same time, his equal in the sense that as a whole, she could stand in front of him and face him down. She had her weaknesses and he had his – her strengths, and his. He thought they'd be more than the sum of their parts, more than they could ever be individually. He could point to no specific memory, not here and now with good feeling spreading throughout his heart until he thought there simply couldn't be any more, but he knew it nevertheless.

He has faith and practicality in equal measure to carry him through when the glow of this faded. And he knows Mara does, too.

She stirs in his arms, fingers twitching against his side, and he wonders what has woken her. He lifts his hand, lets it run through her hair until it hits a tangle and he stops, to start over again, to run his hand through the soft golden red until he reached the curling tips, still damp from her shower earlier.

There's no physical mark of their bond, their marriage – which was a strange thing, when he considered it. Just the concept, of this invisible thing, written down somewhere, that binds two people to each other. It seems to have more solidity to him now, to have spoken the words, to have declared intent.

She opens her eyes, and he imagines he can see the green of them even though, really, it's too dark for that. He feels that rush of pure feeling, pure affection, and knows it won't stay so free of anything else through the end. He smiles, he can't help it, and she smiles back, the same giddiness shown to him in the brightness of her waking mind, the quirk to her lips. He knows her so well now, in a way he can't describe, can't quite remember from their intense sharing on Niruan. But that's okay – he has the rest of their lives to remember every detail, good and bad.

When he says, "I love you," he means it as a promise.

finis