"LUKE…WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
Author: Haruo Chikamori
E-mail: hhchikamori
Rating: M
Classification:
Spoilers: N/A
Summary: Anakin Skywalker finds out about Mara Jade.
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Wars, Walt Disney owns Star Wars. George Lucas no longer owns Star Wars. And no, I didn't get a chance to offer. I really don't have that much to begin with - unless I could buy the franchise for a quarter which wouldn't happen. Really…
AN: This is a rewrite of the one I did a long time back before I pulled the story due to the threat of SOPA. Well, now I really don't care…so here's the rewrite.
Death was peaceful. No cognizance of the passage of time. No epic battle of good versus evil – of Jedi versus Sith. It was just everlasting peace forever and ever.
Frankly, Anakin Skywalker was bored out of his mind.
When he had met up with the rest of the Jedi after his passage from life to the embrace of the Force, he realized that there were things that he, when living, hadn't understood about the Force. The Nature of the Force encompassed all things, both living and non.
In fact it was too peaceful.
"Bored you are, hmmm?" a voice was heard to state clearly emanating from about waist high. Anakin looked down to see a familiar shimmering blue figure who tapped his gimer stick (and how the hell did his gimer stick end up there too) on what passed for a walk-able surface. "Gaze upon your son, have you? Much he has done with the resurgence of the Jedi."
"Yes, he has." Anakin replied as he looked upon the tiny wizened Grand Master of the Jedi Order.
"Go to see him, you have?" Yoda asked curiously, wiggling his pointy long ears and scrunching his face.
"I have once; just to say that I was not able to see him as often as I would have liked to any longer. Our powers to appear to those still living diminish, do they not? Master Yoda?"
"Appear to him, you may not, however, still see him temporarily, you may, however be aware of you, he will not." Yoda explained with a gimlet stare at Anakin. "Explicit on this, Master Qui Gon was. This power will not diminish."
"I believe I will try this." Anakin stated, noticeably cheered as he looked at Master Yoda, but then winced as a sharp pain was felt right about shin level. "OW!" He had been whacked with Yoda's ever present gimer stick.
"Do or do not, there is no try." Yoda admonished, his face scrunched up in a disgusted pout, "Many times have I said this! Learned this well, you should have." He said waving his gimer stick. Anakin still couldn't figure out how that hunk of wood had transcended the Force.
Concentrating on gathering the Force together to him, he gazed into the mists of time and gazed upon his son. He did recognize the place. It was a cavernous room. At one point he had been there with the 501st. But the cavern completely inundated with water was not exactly how he remembered that space in that fortress. Half the cavern was submerged with water and there was more coming in from a hole in the wall. But why had the Force brought him to this location to view his son, then he realized that he was seeing his son more drenched to the skin than he had ever seen him; sitting with an equally soaked woman on a ledge just barely a few meters higher than the roiling water in the cavern. There was a familiarity to the Force signature from that woman. It was someone that he knew from his days as Darth Vader. Shock and disbelief colored his viewpoint as he watched his son seemingly very familiar with that woman. Their conversation, which he could overhear clearly, didn't reassure him any either.
"Back when you first came here," the woman stated. "I told you you could go back to Coruscant, if you wanted to and let the Qom Jha and me tackle the fortress by ourselves. You said no, that you had to be here and not to ask you why.
His son was silent for a long moment as he considered his response then stated after taking a deep breath, "I had a vision of you on Tierfon." he said quietly. "Back before I knew you disappeared. I saw you lying in a pool of water surrounded by craggy rock." He hesitated, "And you looked…"
There was no mistaking the emotion in the woman's voice. "Dead?"
"Yes." Luke replied to the query. Anakin thought to himself. The voice is so familiar but death must have done something to my memory, I can't for the life of me place her yet she is so familiar to me.
The reverie had caused him to miss a bit of the conversation. The woman said to his son. "You didn't know, but after that pirate base thing, Faughn told me you and I made a good team. She was right, We really did."
Anakin's spectral eyebrows nearly shot up to his hairline. They really did. That meant this woman and his son had been having adventures for a long time.
"It was…it was something very special." His son admitted. What was special? Kriff it, he had missed another segment of conversation with his shaak herding.
Anakin hastily used the Force to adjust his angle of view so that he could get a better look at the woman's face. Familiar red hair though thoroughly drenched, green eyes. That was Emperor Palpatine's servant. What the kriff was she doing here? Didn't his son know that she had orders to kill him directly from Palpatine himself? He had heard it reverberate through the Force when he had picked up Palpatine to throw him over the edge of the abyss into the power core of the Death Star.
"Mara…" Anakin's mind uttered a panicked shriek of alarm into the Force as his jaw quite literally hit the ground. Luke continued with his statement. "Will you marry me?"
Luke what the nine Corellian hells are you doing?! You're proposing marriage to Palpatine's hired assassin?
Anakin was stunned into silence as Mara asked. "You mean if we get out of here alive?"
Anakin sputtered unable to do anything as his son said. "I mean regardless..." Kriff it, he wasn't Sith any longer, he couldn't Force-choke the woman to save his son.
"Yes, I will…" Mara replied. Luke looked overjoyed as the two embraced, their lips touching in a kiss.
Are you insane, Luke?! Anakin was shocked, his thoughts furiously tumbling around in his head – what coherent thoughts were there, the rest were screaming like ambulatory Fenner's Rocks. That would mean that woman…Mara Jade was going to be his…his daughter-in-law! Oh, the ignominy of it all. To have an Imperial Assassin, an Emperor's Hand as a daughter-in-law.
"Love him she does." Master Yoda said quietly, he had been standing there all the while. "Truly deep, their love is." This was pricelessly hypocritical coming from the Grand Master who all but banned attachment during the Republic days. "Truly revived the Jedi are and not the misguided policies, created we had. Learned we have now, that attachment can be good for the Jedi."
"You know, my young Padawan…" Obi Wan Kenobi materialized behind him. "It wasn't just you and Padme who were attached in contravention of the Jedi Policies. I've found others. It's interesting what knowledge you gain in the embrace of the Force." He steepled his fingers as he looked at his former padawan.
Anakin looked disgustedly back at the scene. "I have a bad feeling about this…" he muttered.
*****THE END*****