Note: With the casting of Laura Dern in Episode VIII and the obvious resemblance between Daisy Ridley and Felicity Jones, I decided to write a short thing where Felicity Jones's Rogue One character, (let's call her Lyra Erso) is Skymom! and where Nu!Mara Jade, who has the same backstory essentially as book!Mara, lives and returns to the fight when she feels Luke return from his exile.
It so happened that Luke Skywalker fell in love with a former Imperial. It just didn't happen to be her.
Mara Jade watched as his once unrequited love for Lyra Erso became real, and all she could do was feign indifference until she could feign it no more. When that day came, she said her farewell and shot away on her ship from the jungle moon where he had set up his Jedi Academy and tried her damnedest not to look back.
But she still saw him everywhere. In the blue eye of a young and eager copilot wanting her to pick him for a smuggling run and sweep him away from whatever rock he was living on; in the metal hilt of his father's lightsaber that he had gifted to her after she had squelched the last command the Emperor had implanted into her mind; in her dreams, sleeping and awake, when his mouth would find hers, when the heat of his still good hand would palm her curves and slide down the hollow of her throat until his fingers came to rest near her heart. She hated every moment of it; wondered if this is how he had felt about Lyra in those ten years between the time he first met her and the time he found her again.
He had told her about Lyra, as early as the days when she had made it her life's mission to kill him, using the pretense of telling a story about one of the rebel pilots who had stolen the first Death Star plans. But Mara had seen through it, saw the stars in his eyes, and had throw at him all the disgust she could muster while trudging through the forests of Mykyr. "She was a traitor," Mara had spat reflexively, because she knew all about Lyra Erso, who had betrayed the Emperor; even her own father, Galen.
"Depending on your point of view," he had said calmly. "Have you asked yourself what your point of view is now?"
She had hated the way he could look through her, but somehow this ability of his had never translated into him understanding how she felt about him. But it was a two-way street, she rationalized. She had never spoken up, either, but she hadn't wanted to risk losing him as an ally, as a friend if he hadn't felt the same way, and she had never been sure, even when he looked at her that way sometimes.
But Lyra had squashed any of those hopes, and so Mara did what she was good at; found another way to live as far away as possible from the pain she felt.
But their inexplicable link through the Force contrived to take even that away from her. She had felt the reverberation of his grief when Ben Solo had turned; when the students at the Academy had been slaughtered; when he had felt Lyra die through the Force. Mara had curled up in the cabin of her ship, shaking with the boom of his grief for two days, dry heaving until she could set her ship to take her away from the echo of his pain. And then like that, her connection to him had severed; he had disappeared.
And then fifteen years passed, and she wondered every other day where he could be as she watched the galaxy around her come to pieces again with the rise of the First Order. But she continued on with her life; kept her distance from his family, from the a new conflict in which she had no stake, or so she told herself.
And she was able to do so—building herself a good life, even making some friends, until she felt that tremor again through the Force, the unmistakable fingerprint that was him, a glimmer, then a beam, then the burst of a star going super nova. He was back from wherever he had been, and despite her better judgment, she sought out his light again, found it in the Resistance base where Leia Organa embraced her as an old friend and where she saw a girl who looked too much like her dead mother.
He was older, of course, sadder than she had ever known him, but he was still Luke somewhere beneath that scruffy beard, that graying hair. She leaned against the door jab, waited for him to turn because of course, he sensed that she was there. He had sensed it the moment she had landed.
She used to think that he must have sought out the darkness in others to balance out the light in himself, but with age came wisdom, hard-earned or not, and Mara realized a truth that had long eluded her: Luke Skywalker hadn't sought out the darkness in Lyra; he had never sought out the darkness in her, either. What he did was see in them their own inner light, a beacon that shone out from the black of space, out of the fear and shadows that haunted the lives they had lived before they found their way out. Before they ever met him.
He turned to look her her, and she swore she could still see in that face the boy from Tatooine.
"Mara Jade," he had said at long last.
She nodded at him, a small smile on her face.
"It's been a long while, Farm boy, hasn't it?"