Dashira, Alderaan
1 BBY
A few days later, grumbling and making a good show of her reluctance, Mara sat with Eli over tea in the dining hall and took a red pen to the list of classes Errol had suggested he audit. She marked out most of them and wrote in additional ones with no offer of compromise. Then she left him there to finish his tea alone with only the minimum of leave-taking.
The classes she'd suggested consisted mostly of political science, classical Alderaan history and art theory. The first day he quickly learned that they were as challenging and engaging as anything he'd covered with his tutors on Coruscant. He found himself listening intently in each of them, and the morning passed quickly.
When the lunch hour arrived he searched through the dining hall until he saw her distinctive mane of copper-colored curls through the crowds of students and serving droids. As he approached the table where she was sitting, she stood and nearly collided with him yet again.
"Oh, hello," He said pleasantly.
She met his eyes briefly, and he was deeply gratified to see the lightest shade of pink touch her cheeks. "Oh, it's you."
"Hey, who's your friend, Mara?" A voice said from her table.
Eli looked at her five companions. "Hello. I'm Eli. Mara and I met a few nights ago at the opera house.
"He was with Errol," Mara put in.
The one who'd spoken was a Pantoran girl with cerulean blue skin and golden eyes. She looked at Mara with a teasing grin. "I see. I'm Vala. Do you want to join us?"
Eli glanced at Mara, who rolled her eyes. He grinned. "Absolutely."
He sat, and the others introduced themselves. Other than Vala, there was a Mirialan who gave his name as Keo, and the others were human; Dahlia and Ormond, who were a couple and barely noticed anything apart from each other, and Niall, who pretty obviously carried a torch for Mara and hated him on sight.
"Where are you from, Eli?" Vala asked, apparently enjoying baiting her friend.
"Chandrila, originally," Eli replied.
"Oh, I hear that's nice," Keo said obligingly
"It's mostly grass and farms," Eli said dismissively.
To be honest, that was all he remembered of Chandrila. It had been over a decade since he had set foot on his birth planet. Still, as the home planet of Mon Motha, it elicited positive responses in many rebel circles and tended to deflect suspicion.
"Not only farms," Keo said, and launched into an extremely technical breakdown of the relative differences between Alderaan and Chandrila environmental protections. Eli tried to follow along, but was quickly lost. His eyes drifted to Mara, and from her small smile and eye roll he gathered that this kind of lecture was a habit of Keo's.
He was surprised at how quickly they all accepted him into the fold. After that one introduction it was taken entirely for granted that he would sit with them everyday. How strange for people to trust so easily! They may not have been the kind of people he would have chosen to spend time with on his own, but he had never had the freedom or inclination to spend time with much of anyone aside from his supervisors and tutors. They certainly didn't advertise much in the way of rebel sympathies or extremist thought, but it had only been a little while, and no one was that trusting. In spite of himself, he began to feel a begrudging affection for them. And the more time he spent in their presence, the more chinks in Mara's wall began to appear. By the second week she was actually smiling when he appeared at their table.
Being seen with her had its advantages. The anarchists at his residence hall apparently held any associate of Leia in thrall, and as soon as they noticed him hanging around with Mara and her friends, the tension at the door of his residence hall eased considerably. But Mara didn't appear to appreciate them as much as they appreciated her.
"Posers," He heard her mutter under her breath as they passed the group one day.
He was building a foundation, he told himself. It was a murky part of the process, but a part of it nonetheless.
He kept the details about his background vague, of course. And of course she noticed. She knew he came from a privileged background, and that he'd spent time in the capital, but that was all. In the meantime he carefully probed to learn the strength of her connection to the royal family.
It was strange. Her mother seemed to work in the palace in a serving capacity. She was a glorified housekeeper, from the way Mara talked. Mara and Leia had grown up together, played together as children. But their level of intimacy seemed like a lot for a royal and her employee's child, and Mara mentioned that Leia would have paid for the entirety of her education if Mara had not outright refused.
"Personally," Errol said with his mouth full over dinner one evening. "I think Bail Organa's been banging her mom."
For once, Eli had to admit that Errol might have a point. Stranger things had happened. That wasn't too far from his background, after all. All the better for my purposes. Knowledge of a royal's illegitimate child could be valuable information in certain circumstances.
But he wasn't at all certain what his end game was on Alderaan. Pestage was being vague, continuing to press him to "keep your eyes and ears open." It could be a long term position. It could take years. He did not fully admit to himself that the prospect of remaining for years wasn't entirely unpleasant.
In the meantime he went to classes, took tests, passed, failed, drank spiced wine and strong bitterstem tea in smoky cafes as he heatedly debated political theory with Niall, or film theory with Keo or art theory with Mara and Vala. Mara began to invite him along with the others to concerts and street festivals and hikes in the foothills where at last he could see the magnificent snow-capped peaks he had only glimpsed before. The bracing cold air was like a stimulant. His brain seemed to fire at twice the rate it had on Coruscant. His meditations seemed deeper. His very movements seemed more controlled as he stalked through the campus with glowing cheeks and visible breath.
Night after night he had nothing to tell Pestage or his underlings. Clearly rebel sympathies were strong in and around campus, but there was nothing to take before the security committee, no evidence of wrong doing of any kind. He could sense Pestage's impatience through the comm.
One steely winter day he climbed the stairs to the campus museum, the sight of Mara's afternoon job. She had no less than four, and he honestly didn't know how she performed her duties, studied, and still had so much time to go around with him and the others. She seemed to be the type of person who couldn't stand to sit still very long.
The door slid open to reveal her scanning the bottoms of hundreds of antique cups with a little handheld scanner. She looked up at the sound of the door and her face lit up. He felt the corners of his mouth curve in response.
"We just received an estate," She told him. She frowned at the cups. "A lot of it is junk, but I wanted to show you this one thing."
She put down the cup and scanner and wiped her hands on her tunic, waving him over to a side room. It was inky dark inside, painted black to contrast with the only illuminated object in the center of the room. The sculpture was deep crimson, glowing slightly, and looked like a combination of one of the sewer mutants from Coruscant and a jelly toast dropped jelly side down. Eli grimaced before he could stop himself.
Mara laughed.
"What?" Eli asked, flushing.
"That's not the first time I've seen that reaction to a Malia sculpture. I take it you aren't a fan."
"I take it you are," Eli replied with a twist of his lips.
She lifted her eyebrows. "What don't you like about it?"
"Is this a character test I am just about to fail?"
She shrugged. "Isn't everything?"
"I don't know. Shouldn't art...say something if not look like something?"
"Who says it doesn't?"
He shrugged back.
"Malia began the sculpture a day after she learned her son was killed in the Clone Wars."
Eli sighed. "Okay. Can art never communicate anything but deep despair and nihilism anymore?"
"These are dark times," Mara pointed out.
"Are they? The war is over."
Mara's face hardened. "I think you know how most of Alderaan feels about that."
"Well, what about the high ideals? Courage, loyalty, duty, et cetera. I never seen them addressed or represented in art anymore," Eli said.
"First of all, I think you aren't looking hard enough. And secondly, only making art about those things sounds pretty limited to me," Mara said.
"Only if you are dead set on howling at the sky and bewailing the unfairness of everything." Eli retorted.
Mara's eyes twinkled. "You really are offended! That's a good thing, I think. It's still evoking a kind of passion in you, even if it isn't the kind you expect."
"It's still hideous," Eli muttered.
"Not all art should make you feel happy, and not all of it needs to be beautiful," Mara said. "I think it's more like speaking to the universe, and yelling and screaming if you have to. If art makes someone feel something, it means we're connected. Then we are more than just isolated sparks flaring briefly in the dark and then going out."
Eli had nothing to say to that.
She took a step toward him. "And you literally haven't even scratched the surface of this sculpture."
Eli stiffened as she slid her hand over his, her cool slim fingers pushing his hand down through the sculpture's strange filaments and ribbons of crimson. The shapes wavered and absorbed their joined hands with strange silver ripples and a tingling warmth. Then he gasped as he was overcome with a rush of the most consuming sadness and longing he had experienced in over a decade.
He had heard of such things of course; art that had tactile neuro-stimulators installed to provoke an actual biological emotional response in the audience. They were highly controversial. Some called them deeply irresponsible. Rumor had it that one artist had been driven to suicide as he worked on one, using the neuro stimulator on himself over and over to get the emotional response just right. Eli had heard of exhibitions where counselors were standing by to attend to those unprepared for the experience.
He could see why. He jerked his hand away and backed up, holding it to his chest as if it was actually wounded. But his hand was unmarked. Mara watched him silently. He blinked hard to rid himself of the mist that had clouded his eyes.
"That was a cruel trick," He said quietly.
She looked away, shame covering her face. "You're right. I'm sorry. Should we go to the dining hall?"
He nodded, and they returned to the main room. He could see her blushing, feel her guilt. She wouldn't look him in the eye as she gathered her things and they opened the door, stepping into the indifferent winter afternoon.
They could hear shouts outside. They stopped at the bottom of the stairs to watch a large procession of students flooding the courtyard before the museum. Some carried flimsy signs and some were using their comvids to project glowing blue slogans in the air above their heads.
"Anti-imperialists," Mara said. "Leia's actions in the Senate must have gone poorly today."
The marches were nothing new, but Eli watched them carefully as he always did, making a note of the faces he saw. "I'm surprised the Academy allows this."
"I'm surprised you don't understand," Mara retorted. "Even if they didn't have a point – which of course they do – free speech is paramount here. The imperialists are allowed to march just as often."
"My mother was killed at a rally like this one."
Mara froze.
He hadn't meant to say it. It was way too much personal detail, something she could feasibly search on the holonet. But he still felt a kind of residual haziness from the neurotransmitter experience inside, and the words had tumbled out of him before he could stop them. He couldn't bring himself to look at her.
He swallowed. In for a penny, in for a pound. "I was eight. We were in a market place on Chandrila when they came through, just like that. Same signs, same slogans. One threw a rock and smashed a window, and within seconds the air was full of them. A big one hit my mother above her eye. There was blood, and then she went down and wouldn't wake up. It was the imperialists who got us out and tried to get her to the medical droids, but it was too late."
Mara seemed to shake herself. She lifted a hand toward him, her face stricken. "Eli, I..."
He sidestepped it, backing away with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. "You know...I think I might take dinner in my room tonight."
He trotted off with his heart in his throat.
