Part 4 sunset
Mara.
She surfaces from sleep, slowly.
She is warm, and comfortable, and a sweet exhaustion still tugs at her despite the rest. But something is calling her, softly; coaxing, making her rise from the depths of her unremembered dreams.
"Mara. Hey, Mara."
She ignores it, hoping for the nuisance to take the hint and disappear. But the voice is insistent.
"Wake up. Come on, Mara!"
Mara groans and buries her face in the pillows. "Skywalker. Let me sleep."
A note enters his voice that is definitely too cheerful, and therefore too suspicious for her to ignore. Even for ever-cheerful Luke Skywalker, that sound is stretching it.
"Breakfast's ready. We even have blue milk! But if you don't want to join me I am going to have all the Jawa cakes for myself as long as they're still hot…"
Sighing, Mara blinks, opens her eyes – and looks directly into the familiar face of her husband-of-one-night.
We are married.
And despite everything, she cannot help it. She just stares, unmoving, suddenly wide awake and completely overwhelmed: his grey-blue-grey eyes are sparkling, the light from the windows shines on his hair and Mara knows him. The lines of his face are so familiar, beloved – he does not seem any different to her, except that he is. Or she is. Or both of them are? She has not realized she has lifted her hand but when Luke's eyes darken and flutter shut she suddenly can feel his skin under her finger tips. She traces the curve of his cheek bones, the lines at the corner of his eyes.
"Mara-"
"Shhhh," she whispers, touches his lips with her thumb.
He falls onto her lips with bruising force.
Her body remembers him. It is not like last night was the first time for her, or even for the two of them. And yet, this feels different. Last night was slow, soft and careful, like getting to know each other again after a long separation. Their kisses are almost forceful now, breaking apart something and, at the same time, forging it new: tempering it in fire, giving new meaning to something familiar. Shattering her into a million tiny, sharp-edged pieces and then rebuilding her, bit by bit, until the only thing she can see and hear and taste and feel is him.
It is a silence of a different sort, so different than all the silences she has experienced before in her life, and it hurts her and exhilarates her and washes away all the hollow memories of lives she led before without leaving her empty.
"Now the caf is cold," Luke whispers, his forehead pressed to hers, after what feels like an eternity and a heartbeat. He chuckles and the sound reverberates through her entire body. "Not that I care, so good riddance."
No. The caf is for her, he makes it for her alone because Luke Skywalker, at heart, is a farm boy who does not like the bitter taste of caffeinated beverages. Mara, on the other hand: she likes the bitterness, the reminder. But right now, she is neither hungry nor thirsty, either.
"Say something," Luke says, hovering above her, his hair falling into his eyes. Mara looks at him, looks and looks and swallows, but there are no words to express what she feels for him. And he just smiles, brilliantly and a little bit painfully, too, like he knows all the unsaid things stuck in her heart. He knows. Mara knows he does. It is always him who says it but he does not mind, because she might not say the words out loud but he can read feel them reverberate through her entire being. She was afraid he would not understand, once upon a time, and he followed her and showed her that he understood: body, soul and heart.
"I love you, Mara."
His warmth makes her glow. For a backwater desert planet moisture farm boy he wields his words pretty well; maybe some of Leia's diplomacy has rubbed off on him. Maybe it is just that he fills her silence with something she never had believed would exist. Why only he can do it, why it has to be him when there are so many other people in the universe, she has no idea. What makes him so special? What would have happened had she not met him, or had she, even worse, killed him by the Emperor's orders? Would she have withered away, lonely and filled with hate for him and anyone else? Would she have turned to the Dark Side? Would she ever have learned to trust in other beings again? Oh, but in the end, none of it matters. She is here, and so is he. Luke is the song to her silence, the calm after the storm, and she loves him more than the winds carrying the scent of rain across the desert.
Instead of words, she sends him memories.
Lying on cold stone floor, pain pulsating in her burned shoulder. The Quom Jha's annoyingly diffuse voices in her ear and her mind, and her angry thoughts: whoever the guys inside this fort are, they shot her! Skywalker's Force presence around her trembles like he is laughing (at her) and at any other given time she would have snapped at him, out of my head, Skywalker!, but the pain is getting worse and she needs every ounce of concentration to keep it at bay. Skywalker's presence around her shifts and suddenly the pain slips away, bit by bit, until the only thing she feels is calm. "Sleep, Mara," he tells her, and his voice is soft. The unconsciousness brought onto her by the Jedi healing trance is creeping in at the edges of her vision so she tries to focus on his features, on his blue-grey-blue eyes. His smile is the same as ever, and -
you came for me
Fighting through a host of battle droids, deep underneath a forgotten fort, feeling the Force bolster her lungs and her muscles and her concentration. The black tunnel of the battle meld, one misstep and both of you are dead, she has never experienced something like this and it should terrify her. But strangely, she never was less afraid. Maybe that is because of Skywalker's steady, familiar presence next to her, the warmth of his back on hers. The way both their minds mix, merge into each other until there is no Mara and Luke but only LukeMara, MaraLuke, one entity that feels and thinks and fights. And there, in the midst of their combined presences, she glimpses something she never would have expected; something she can barely believe. Luke, of course, realizes and reacts, almost guiltily trying to hide what she has already seen. They do not have time for this; they are fighting for their lives. Still, Mara cannot help it: the sudden flash of joy, the unexpected sensation that lights up her entire being, and -
you love me
The sudden revelation that wipes away the memory of so many lost nights, so many dark hours. His proposal, so hilariously clumsy, so precious. So ill-timed, too, when both of them are sopping wet and about to drown in an underwater cavern below a forgotten fort on an unchartered planet. And yet she cannot remember a moment when she was happier than then, right there, with Luke's hand on her cheek and his cold lips kissing her as if she was oxygen and he needed her to breathe, and Mara finds herself kissing him back with all the memories of years lost -
i promise i will never leave you
Their wedding. Their honeymoon, including the trip to the Unknown Regions. Days and nights spent together and sometimes apart, and somehow Mara forgets how it is to be alone. She never realized she could feel lonely until she met Luke Skywalker; now she is sharing her heart and her mind with him and it should be too much, too fast. Overwhelming. But, contrarily to everything she ever expected, she does not mind the least. It is like she has suddenly found the missing puzzle piece to her existence; she cannot imagine ever living without it again. She is gifted a family in the space of heartbeats: Leia and Han and the Solo kids, so precious and beautiful and smart; JainaJacenAnakin. And, then, Ben. Her little boy, her beautiful son. Every time she wakes up from a far-too-short night and sees Luke cradling their child, whispering stories to him or humming lullabies, something in her chest constricts almost violently. It stays with her while Jacen, Jaina and Anakin grow from babies to children to teenagers, so bright, so wonderful. It stays with her while Ben grows up, the perfect blend between Luke and her. She looks at him and can see herself and Luke as children, lost and loved and searching. It always hurts, but it never is a desperate pain anymore.
i love you more than desert nights
It stays with her when Luke dies and Han and Leia begin traveling the galaxy together, when Jacen and Jaina leave to build their own families and Anakin takes more and more responsibility at the Temple. The memories are vivid and alive as Ben marries, the silence-that-is-not-silence-anymore being with her every day. Han and Leia return to stay with her at the Temple. Jacen and Tenel Ka visit with Allana. Jaina and Jag come home, too, and Ben has children of his own. Mara holds them and remembers, and whispers to them that their grandfather loves them very, very much. Luke's memory is with her whenever her grandchildren climb unto her lap and demand a story and her daughter-in-law admonishes them not to hog the Grand Master and she just laughs and asks them what they want to hear, and they choose the story of the last Jedi who defeated the evil emperor. It makes her heart ache, tremble with pain and loss and longing; and perhaps some of the pain is due to age, as well. But it also is a silent, soft reminder at how sometimes, people do find what they have been looking for their entire lives.
For that, she will forever be eternally, unspeakably grateful.
"Grandma, the ghost man is there, again. He's looking at you."
"Is he, love? Tell him to look at you and your sister, as well, to make sure that you are always safe."
"He says he swears he will, and that you know he always keeps his promises."
i promise -
And that, Mara figures, is enough for her. She may not have had an easy life. But somewhere along the way who she was has stopped defining her; someone has filled her silence and showed her a song and she has never looked back since then. She has done her utmost to pass on his legacy, to live his wishes and his dreams and to protect those he loved. She is pretty sure she has not been able to save everyone and everything; she has made mistakes along the way, has lost people and hopes and dreams. But she has trudged forward, step by step. So - she guesses it is alright if she did not manage to achieve everything he would have achieved. Luke Skywalker always was better at saving people than she was.
You did well, Mara.
And maybe she will not ever see him again, will not ever hear his voice again, but - she did her best. She tried. She can live with that.
Mara.
He is there, so close, so much like in her memories. She dreams of him every night and though sometimes she cannot remember it, she always knows. Mara Jade Skywalker also knows she is dreaming right now. But his face – she has not seen it this clear since what feels like forever, and everything inside her reaches out for him.
Luke. Luke. Stay, my love.
She can almost feel his chuckle, the warmth of his Force presence wrap around her like a beloved, comfortable blanket. He is smiling. She always loved his smile, so warm and familiar, the smile that made his eyes light up. Once upon a time there was a woman that was lost in darkness and despair, and a man who found her and offered her help and trust and loyalty and never once let her deter him from doing the right thing, and the woman could not help but fall in love with him -
Mara.
"Please stay," she whispers in her sleep, a tear running down her face. "Luke-"
"Shhh. Mara. Wake up, my love."
