Chapter 10

After providing statements to the authorities they were allowed to leave. The uniformed aliens had encouraged them to leave the system completely, but there was little chance of that since they still had Niargen's crudely drawn map to follow.

"Give me that," Mara snapped, taking the cup from him. She narrowed her eyes to try to read it. "I'm guessing it starts at the asylum and sends us—" She paused and looked over the neatly laid out streets before turning her back toward the black holes visible through the dome. "In this direction."

She took off down the street, pushing damp hair back from her head. The heat was stifling and Luke discreetly wiped at his own face as he followed meekly behind. He wondered if he should tell her what he had just realized about having been set up by Daala. There was too much information jumbling around in his mind, too many questions and what-ifs. Why would Daala send him to another dimension? Why not just kill him? What was she doing to the Jedi in his absence?

The thought propelled him forward. He stepped into stride beside Mara as he realized anew that he needed that device to get back home. He couldn't afford to be wishy-washy. Everything he had worked so hard to build could be falling to pieces back in his own dimension. Not to mention Ben. He could only hope that Daala hadn't acted against the Order in any way. But if she had, he had faith in his Jedi, though he still felt a pang of fear in his heart.

He followed Mara as she took a sharp detour between two buildings, her finger following the line on the cup. The Force sharpened her senses and he hesitantly reached out with his own Force inquiry, trying to determine if the path they were on was the correct one.

"Don't do that." Mara's harsh words cut into his concentration.

"Do what?" They had stopped in the shadow of the two buildings but he could still see the glint of ire in Mara's eyes.

"Don't overlap your presence with mine."

"I… I didn't realize that I was," he said, thinking back over the last few moments and realizing that he was being honest with her. He hadn't intentionally tried to merge with her, thinking that ability lost with the bond that had never existed between them.

"Well, you were. So don't." Mara's words were crisp and he found himself nodding to appease her. She glared at him a moment longer but relented, turning back into the consummate Jedi he had come to admire. She traced the lines on the cup again and looked out over the landscape that stretched before them. They had reached the end of the city and there was only a barren field between them and the base of the dome. "According to this, there should be something here."

"Perhaps it's buried?" He sounded skeptical even to his own ears.

"Anything's possible, I guess." Mara flipped the cup upside down. "Unless I was supposed to read it this way."

Luke took the cup from her and tilted it on its side. "Or like this."

But she didn't smile as he had hoped she would. She didn't even offer a "Cute, Skywalker." She just marched out into the field, leaving him to follow her once more. He trudged on after her, casting out his Force sense, suspicious of the open field and the rooftops of the fringe of buildings behind them. He was careful not to overlap with Mara's strong presence but it was hard for him not to do so, having missed the pure beauty of her Force essence. Glancing down at the cup he stopped in his tracks, tilting it again to view it in the bright, artificial dome light. Something about the pattern of the lines and points seemed familiar to him.

Mara's voice cut into his puzzling thoughts. "I think Niargen is in the asylum for a reason, Skywalker."

"What?" He looked up from the cup and the tantalizing answer, just out of his reach. He looked around at the barren field and kicked at a tuft of browning grass under his feet. "I think you're right. I don't think the IDD was ever here. I guess that leaves us to wonder if it survived the Death Star after all."

"And to figure out how to get you home." Mara looked straight at him as she said the words, no fear of him leaving visible in her eyes this time as there had been the first time he had tried to go.

He swallowed hard. "Yeah, that too."

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They headed back to the ship, discouraged and silent with one another. The Sabre was where they had left it, still under its shield. Luke went warily up the ramp, a quiet Mara trailing behind him. Her mood had darkened even further as they trekked back through the hot city.

They ran through the startups quickly and departed; the one nice thing about a giant black hole as a planetary backdrop was that there wasn't much traffic to queue into.

Luke's head hit the back of the co-pilot's seat as they hit lightspeed. The fact that he was no closer to getting back home assaulted him. He had been hopeful that Niargen could provide an answer, but he had clearly been in no condition to help him. He was obviously not of the same mentality as the man who had created the IDD those many years earlier. His cup map had turned out to be a bust, even if Luke still kept it in his cloak due to the familiarity of the lines on it. And now the new idea that he had been set up was gurgling in his mind, too fresh for him to share with Mara just yet.

Mara was silently fuming in her seat and he dreaded to look at her, to see the anger in her eyes. He could feel it coming off her in waves, not as strongly as he would have felt it were they bonded, but strongly enough that he grimaced. A pissed-off Mara Jade was a scary Mara Jade. He had known that since the very beginning.

She tapped at the autopilot and stood up to sweep from the cockpit before he could speak. He sighed and put a hand to his forehead. Should he go after her? He could feel the anger still. It wasn't dissipating as she moved away, but he didn't want to spend the rest of the flight home with her like this. He was stuck in her dimension now; what did that mean? He would never stop trying to get home to Ben, but who would he be to Mara and her kids? A stranger? A nobody? The thought terrified him.

He waited another few minutes, watching the starlines that gave him no answer as to what to do. He discarded his cloak and left the cockpit. He found Mara in the open lounge, performing a kata that he had often witnessed her perform when trying to expel excess negative energy.

"Mara?" he asked tentatively. She didn't answer but continued with her kata. He sighed and watched, his eyes tracing over the line of muscles in her arm as she moved. She was as beautiful as he remembered, and just as stubborn. "Mara, can we talk?"

Still she didn't answer. She twisted her arm up and around, releasing the tension in her shoulder as she lowered it to her waist. She looked at him and her mouth was a thin line on her face, the tension still evident there.

"I just wanted to say that I'm sorry."

With that she dropped her combat mode and gave him a blank stare. "You're sorry?"

"For so many things—the map to nowhere and getting us shot at not the least of it. I never wanted to drag you into anything like this."

Mara's eyes hardened. "You didn't—" She broke off in a laugh. "Skywalker, you created this whole mess by jumping universes in the first place!"

"But I never meant for anything like this to happen! I'm so sorry, Mara." And he was. He could feel through the Force more than just her anger. There was a feeling of despair and he knew that he was the cause of it. It hurt him to realize that he had upset her so badly.

"You're sorry?" she repeated. "You should be. You came here without invitation and turned my life upside down! You've shown me what I can't have and what I shouldn't want."

Luke winced. She was right, but he had told her that already and was getting sick of apologizing. "I thought we had moved past this, Mara. We already discussed how wrong I was to come here. But go ahead and tell me again. You've always been so good at telling me how wrong I am."

"Maybe your Mara was, but I'm not used to being in that position," she sneered. "My husband would never have put me in a situation like this. He never would have almost gotten me killed!"

"You're always throwing that into my face. Was he really so different from me? Or are you hiding behind that idea to keep your emotional walls in place? You forget Mara, I know you, just as well as you know me." Luke was breathing hard but felt relieved that she was arguing with him. This was familiar territory, even with a different Mara.

"If you know me so well why did you come here to find me? You should have known that I wouldn't have wanted that." Mara blew a breath out of her mouth when she finished.

Luke gave her an appraising look. "But see, Mara, I know that's not true. You like to pretend you don't need me, or want me, but you do. You always do."

Mara's eyes widened and she looked caught, so he wasn't surprised when the next words out of her mouth were meant to provoke. "Want you? I want my husband, and you aren't him. Just like I'm not your wife. They're both dead and they're not coming back! You're just going to have to get over her and deal with it!"

"You think I don't know that?" Luke's voice was deceptively calm as he ran a hand through his hair. "You think I didn't see her body in the morgue, kiss her cold lips? They were so cold, Mara…" His eyes fluttered closed as he remembered. "And all I wanted to know was why? Why would she do that? Why would she leave me with nothing more than a note? Gone hunting for a few days. Don't be mad at me, farmboy… I can repeat the damn note word for word but I still don't understand it."

Mara's eyes narrowed as she listened to the words of her doppleganger's last note to her husband. Her brow furrowed. "She left a note?"

But he wasn't really listening. He paced the floor in front of her. "I mean, I just don't understand. I've puzzled it out. Intellectually I can understand that she did it for Ben, but to throw twenty years away, to not trust me…" He trailed off and turned, seeing Mara, looking at her as if he had never seen her before. "Why would you leave me in the middle of the night, with nothing more than a note, Mara?"

"I didn't leave you!" Mara growled. She stalked close to him. "I am not your wife. I don't know why she left you like that, and I can't answer for her."

"Then I'll never know," he murmured.

"Not since you're stuck here, no." The light in her eyes betrayed the anger still flaring there.

"How many times do I need to apologize to you?"

"I don't want your apology. I want you to understand what you've done! How do you think I felt, watching that sleemo lift that pipe toward you, to hit you in the chest? Right where Luke was wounded?"

Luke's brow furrowed and he backtracked over the memories of the last few hours. He vaguely recalled the man they had chased raising a pipe in defense, but he had easily sheered it in half. It has never been a danger to him. "Mara, I had that under control."

He knew the words were the wrong ones the second they left his mouth. Mara's eyes flashed, the green fire in them more dangerous to him than any lightsaber.

"You had it under control? Just like everything else in your life, Master Skywalker? What about when you jumped on the back of that speeder, or, I don't know, when you left your son and jumped dimensions to find a woman who is not your wife? How in control were you then?"

He opened his mouth to speak, but Mara was on a roll. "What am I supposed to do with you now, Skywalker? Do you plan to come home with me and pretend to be my Luke? The father of our kids?" She brought her hand to her mouth and choked back a small sob, her eyes glassy in her red face.

He wanted to deny her words, but she was right. He was not her husband and would never claim to be. Would never try to take or fill his place. But the thought of being stuck in this galaxy, unable to be with her, to know she was so close but so out of his reach… "I don't know what I'm going to do now, Mara. All I know is the thought of being without you…" he trailed off. "Don't you know that's why I'm here? I've missed you," he said, repeating the words he said to her when he first arrived. "I miss you."

The air between them grew thick and Luke felt overly sensitized as he brought a hand out to grasp her arm. Her skin was smooth under his fingers and he rubbed his thumb in a small circle on her arm, amazed to just be touching her again, even so innocent of a touch.

Mara gasped and instinctively pulled her arm away, using the back of her hand to wipe against her eyes. She backed up but he followed, knowing that they were on a precipice here and he may never again get this chance. He grasped her arm again and pulled her to him, looking down into her eyes. She fought against his hold but he knew it was only for show; she could easily remove herself from his grasp if she really wanted to. His eyes skated over her beautiful face, the face he had loved so well. "Mara."

Her eyes flashed to his and she visibly crumpled before him, tears leaking out of the corner of her eyes. "Luke." She brought a hand to his face and caressed his cheek.

"Don't you understand, Mara? I did it because I missed her…you. Because every day without you felt like I was living a half life and it was killing me." He advanced on her and took his time to look at her, eyes tracing over features he had long since memorized. "And now I've gotten to know you, Mara. This version of you, so much the same as my wife, but also different. I know you're not her, but I long for you the same way I did for her. The thought of never seeing you again…never touching you, never speaking with you… I couldn't… can't… handle it."

The words were unspoken between them but he knew that she caught what he meant, that he didn't know how he could live in the same galaxy with her and not be her husband. This new reality was even more unsettling than the one he had left behind.

"You should have thought about that before!" she seethed, moving in to his personal space and staring up at him. "You should have thought about what it would do to me to see you again, the man that I want more than anything in this galaxy and can't have!"

Her chest was heaving as she finished her sentence and he didn't think, only reacted, just as she accused him of doing. He moved his grasp to her upper arms and pulled her to him, kissing her lips.

Fireworks exploded behind his eyes at the touch of her lips, so long missed and denied, only a hint of the passion in the kiss they shared when they had thought he was leaving. Her lips were slightly chapped and he pulled back to see if she were going to deck him or push him away. Instead she pushed back into him, kissing him this time, and her lips softened under the intensity of the kiss. He couldn't think any longer and could only take in the sensations, the familiarity of her perfect lips moving against his, her scent and silky skin under his hands. He loosened his grip just slightly to run his right hand up and into her hair. He caressed the skin at her hairline and tilted her head upward to his liking.

Mara groaned against his lips, opening her mouth to him even as her momentum pushed him back to the bulkhead wall. He collapsed against it and kept kissing her, the taste of her as addictive and sweet as he remembered. They pulled back for breath but he didn't let her get far, kissing a line from her mouth to her ear by way of her jaw. He breathed hotly into her sensitive ear, murmuring her name until she shivered against him.

She grabbed his face and pulled him back into a kiss, moving closer to him until her chest rubbed against his and her legs bumped against his own. He instinctively leaned down and grasped her under her bottom. She jumped up and wrapped her legs around his waist. He turned and pushed her into the wall, never breaking his kiss with her.

White-hot need bled out from Mara's Force sense and he groaned into her kiss, the unreality of the situation escaping him as his body reacted to the touch of his wife. He was hard and enflamed and pushed up against her. A gasp escaped his throat at the exquisite sensation of pleasure. He hadn't been this turned on in a long time, hadn't wanted sex when the one he loved was gone.

But the Mara in his arms was no memory. She was as warm and as alive as he remembered, giving and taking from him only as she could. Her fingernails dug into his back through his shirt as he lifted her against the wall. He nuzzled his head into her neck and kissed her pulse point.

He held her suspended just above him on the wall. "Mara?"

She seemed to understand his unasked question. She kissed him again, parting his lips with her tongue and stroking it with her own. It was answer enough for him, but it wouldn't happen here.

He turned from the wall and carried her to her stateroom.

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Because fighting always leads to hot sex…. At least in my fandom world. ;) Interlude 3: Love is the next chapter…