Ellaisintheair: Thank you! That end scene to that chapter is one of my favorites, too. They just go so well together!
salanderjade: Thank you! I'm so glad that the characters are coming off well and as themselves. I have a hard time with Mara, because the fangirl in me often goes the opposite direction of what she would do. LOL But I really made an effort to make her character follow pro-fic. And I love your comments on angst. I found that it was really hard to write a 50,000 word novel without drama! But you're right. The Hero suffers but for the greater good in the end.
EmeraldEyedJedi: I learned evil cliffies from the best! LOL I struggled with whether she would actually kiss him or not, but I think the temptation would have been too much to bear. I think it could have gone either way, however. Thanks so much!
Rarobin: hee, I am trying to be sneaky! You guys have to keep with me for the next 10 chapters. LOL And thank you so much for the characterization comment. I really tried hard to get them 'right'. I hope to continue to do so for the rest of the story! Thanks!
Luke Skywalker Fan: Yep... Luke's stuck. We'll see for how long... I love Luke so much and that compliment makes me smile. I really want to get him right. Thank you!
Jedi-Lover: LOL! Girl, you know I could never do that to you (or to me). Another reader had thought that perhaps Betrys was Callista's daughter. Yep, another one I could never, ever do. Thanks for peeking in, gal!
Fallon Skywalker: No worries, there are 9 chapters and an epilogue left! We still have a long way to go. I feel terrible for Luke, too. That's why I wanted to write this to try to set some things 'right'. I hope I succeed in doing so. Thank you for reading!
Endor Solo: Yep, just a bit awkward. Until Mara's practicality kicks in. LOL Thanks and I hope you'll enjoy this new chapter!
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Chapter 6 is one of the shorter chapters to EoA, but still important. But due to that you'll get Interlude 2: Death this week on Wednesday. It actually deals with the aftermath of death and how Luke and Mara were handling life in their own dimensions prior to the beginning of the story. Thanks for reading, everyone!
CHAPTER 6
For a moment, he stood quietly expecting to feel the strange tug that would throw him from one universe to the next. When nothing happened, he tapped the screen again, naively hoping that he had pressed in the wrong spot. Still he stayed in place, the screen on the device remaining the same, with the strange code unmoving across it.
A flush started to build in his cheeks, and he dreaded looking up at Mara. He viciously jabbed at the screen again, but still he didn't move, didn't experience a blinding flash of light or anything other than a wall of annoyance through the Force, directed at him from Mara.
"Problems?"
"Um…" He mentally cursed himself. He was the Grand Master of the Jedi, but at the moment he felt more like a toddler caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "I'm not sure why it's not working."
Mara was silent, and Luke braced himself. As always, with Mara, it was one step forward and many steps back.
"Did you turn it on?" she asked sardonically, stepping close to him to look at the lighted screen.
"Very funny," he muttered, still embarrassed to be standing there when he should be home now, thinking about reuniting with Ben.
Ben! Panic shot through him then as he looked down at the device, his only gateway home. "Why didn't it work?" he asked aloud, flipping the machine over as if an answer might be imprinted there.
"I hope you're asking the tiny droid in your pocket that's going to fix this thing," Mara growled, her own face tinged red as she stood in front of him. Just moments before he had been kissing her lips, but now they were twisted on her face, her eyes above them revealing her anger. "Why are you still here? I thought this thing was going to pull you back to wherever you came from?"
"It is! I mean—I used it to get here, didn't I?"
Mara's eyes narrowed as she studied him, suddenly on her guard again.
Luke reeled back as if slapped. "Please don't doubt me, Mara. I promise you the same thing I did before—I am Luke Skywalker and this device brought me here. I just don't know why it won't send me back."
Mara's eyes bored into his intently. "I…not five minutes ago I thought I'd never see you again. And now I find that I'm stuck with you, what? Forever? I know who you are—the Force tells me it's true, and so does my heart. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. Give me that."
She took the device from his hands roughly, but then relaxed her grip as if afraid she might transport herself away if she handled it too carelessly. The screen was still lit with the strange code visible, but there was nothing else to be seen, no instruction to tell them what to do next. "What happened when you used it the first time?"
Luke explained to her about the strange pull he had felt in his body after he had pressed the device's screen for the first time, and about how he had merely blinked and found himself in an apartment at once familiar and wholly foreign to him. His apartment, but not.
"When you showed me how you came to find me, I saw that you had taken this from someone you had arrested. What did he tell you about it?"
"It was all…very vague."
Mara's brow arched. "Vague."
"He mentioned the twenty-four hour recharge to me, and how there were infinite places that we could jump to. That it was as easy as pressing the screen and leaving it all behind."
"And you wanted to do that? To leave it all behind?"
It was unspoken, but clearly there in his face, her demeanor. A question that she had put to him before. What about your—our—son?
"I struggled with it. I turned him down. And then later, I…" Luke trailed off and blew out a frustrated breath. He sat down on the couch, looking up at Mara as she continued to stare at Naelli's machine, eyes tracing over the simple lines of it. Somehow he wasn't ready to tell her he had ultimately used the device because of a vision. He could only imagine how well she would take that news. Mara may have become a Jedi of the highest order, but she had always shied away from the more mystical elements of the Force. A vision had led them together at Nirauan, but even that she had seemed uncomfortable with. This may be an entirely different Mara, but he had a hunch that she felt the same away about Force visions.
After a long, tense moment she handed the device back to him. "I wonder if somewhere in the infinity of time there's a Luke who chose not to push that screen."
He looked up at her, wounded, but didn't speak.
She gave her own sigh. "What am I going to do with you now, Skywalker?"
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It was still early morning. Mara had retreated back to her bedroom, the closed door putting needed distance between them. Luke sat in a straight-backed chair in the spare bedroom, the machine that had caused so much friction sitting innocently on the table in front of him. If he didn't know what it was capable of he would have thought it was a datapad, but this was far more intricate and dangerous.
He had been so foolish. In his zeal to see Mara again he had given so much away, taken the easy way out. It was unseemly for a Grand Master to still be so impetuous, and yet the Force still whispered no hint of wrongness to him, no hint of imbalance or corruptness. Mara had always shied away from using the Force so indiscriminately, never using it for her own gain. He remembered how disjointed he had felt as a Jedi before Mara had given him a piece of her mind in the caves under Nirauan, and how her words, so simple and true, had helped lead him on a path in the Force that had been so right for him. The bond that had grown between them been a gift from the Force, a prize for finally seeing beyond his own nose and dialing back on the power he often used without questioning. His failure at Byss with the Reborn Emperor had forever altered the course of his life, and the path of the Jedi. Mara had helped him through that, even as he had started to come to the realization of his misuse of power on his own, she had been an impetus to change.
But then there was the Vong War and Vergere and her insistence that he himself—and all the Skywalkers—had brought imbalance to the Force. He had listened to her when he should not have, and later proclaimed that there was no Dark Side. He had been completely fooled. It had taken time to get his head on straight again, to realize that he was taking the Jedi down a dangerous path. Master Yoda had been right—the Dark Side would forever dominate your destiny.
With Mara's death had come new challenges—his immediate killing of Lumiya and the period of darkness afterward that culminated with Jacen being revealed as not only Mara's murderer but as Darth Caedus. A Sith Lord.
How did his carefree nephew become so tainted and changed? How did he go so far down that dark path as to become a Darth? Luke remembered Leia's fears before she became pregnant, discussed only once and with shame, even though he completely understood and could even somewhat relate. It hurt to see that her fears were realized through Jacen, and did not even know how she felt about one of her twin children had to kill the other.
There was so much that he blamed himself for, and the Solo children were at the top of that list. Short-term bandage solutions had been the only way to fix so many problems, a galaxy full of problems that he was ill equipped to handle. Mara told him time and again not to take it all on his shoulders, and he had learned, had let others help him and take the lead. But even still, he felt a duty to the galaxy as the last of the Old Jedi and the first of the New.
Placing a shaking hand to his temple, he regarded the lines of traffic outside the window. It was just lightening toward morning, but the vehicles still had their lights on. He watched them pass, wondering at who was in them and what their lives were like. They had their own troubles and tribulations, of course, but he liked the idea of taking a speeder and queuing in with traffic, flying far to the other side of the planet and taking a passenger freighter to a destination unknown.
The feeling was fleeting, though. He could never abandon Ben, the Jedi…or Mara. Mara, lying down the hall, undoubtedly not sleeping. He could picture her lying with one arm and hand crooked up under the pillow, supporting her head, her legs splayed slightly out and nestled under the cover. Even if she wasn't his Mara, she was still Mara…and his heart yearned for her. He wanted to go and slip in behind her, to lie with her and hold her, to find an answer as to how to get back home, even if the thought of leaving her still frightened him.
And that gave him pause. What if his intention was what kept him here? Could it be that he wasn't quite ready to leave Mara behind?
He nixed that thought after a moment, knowing that though his heart was heavy, it alone was not what kept him here. The device did not react to his panic the last time; he had deliberately used its power.
He felt so unbalanced here and that thought also gave him pause. He had assumed that the nagging feeling he felt was due to him being out of his own time and place, upsetting the Will of the Force. But the feeling was still there, just at the edge of his perception, and he still needed to talk to Mara about it.
Casting his eyes in the direction of Mara's room, he again sought the comforting feel of her presence in the Force. She had her shields completely up, but he could still feel her essence and basked in the warmth it provided. Somewhat refreshed, he dropped into a meditative pose and delved into the waves of the Force, seeking an answer or at least a direction in which to turn to find his way home.
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"Here," Mara said later, thrusting a small bundle at him. "Those are all of his clothes that I have left."
"Oh." Luke looked down at the small bundle in his hand. He thought it strange to think that she only had a little bit of her Luke's clothing left. He had yet to go through Mara's belongings, except to pack them away in boxes and move them to storage. He planned to get around to it one day. "Thank you."
She didn't answer, settling at her holocomm station. She opened the HoloNet and typed an inquiry. Her back remained to him as she typed and he wondered what she was thinking. He figured that she was embarrassed for kissing him when she thought he was leaving forever. He felt somewhat similarly, though he had a bit more embarrassment on his side after making a mess of things and jumping into her life unexpectedly.
Her fingers continued to move over the controls and he cleared his throat, not wanting to interrupt but unsure of what to do. "Uh, Mara…would you like me to leave? I mean, since we don't know how long I'll be here—"
"Where are you going to go? You don't have any credit accounts here, Skywalker," she snapped, apparently still on edge.
"Well, that's true, but I have some creds on me."
"Enough to last you indefinitely? Just stay here. We'll reevaluate when the kids come back."
"Are we—you—going to tell them about me?" he asked, thinking of her Ben and how similar he was to his own son, and of the daughter whose existence still amazed him.
"We'll make that jump when we get there, but the short answer is probably not." She tapped at the controls a few more times and then turned in her seat. "Right. I've cancelled a few meetings and handed over my classes to other Masters. Now we have nothing but time. How are we going to get you home, Skywalker?"
Luke smiled at Mara's all-business demeanor. She really was a universal constant. "Well, I meditated, and I think I know a good place to start. Or, should I say, a good person to start with. His name is Marse Naelli, and he's the man I arrested and took this device from."