Title: The Saber
Approximately 12 ABY
Author's Note: This is my response to the Clue Challenge game over at TFN. I have to write a story with a certain Place, Action and Character. It is sort of like a word prompt challenge. In this story I have to have the following elements:
Mara Jade, Repairing a weapon, Jedi Temple
Mara Jade tried for the umpteenth time to get the lightsaber to come together as Luke had instructed. She had the parts laid out on the table in front of her. She closed her eyes and concentrated with the Force to levitate and move the pieces to their proper alignment, but no matter how hard she tried it never worked out.
She made a frustrated sound and let the parts clatter back to the table. She rose and paced her small room within the Jedi Praxeum on Yavin IV. Nothing seemed to be working out for her since her arrival to the moon. In fact, she didn't know why she agreed to come to this fetid world to train in the first place. She didn't even want to be a Jedi…she just wanted to become more knowledgeable in handling the Force. If she had the capability to touch the Force she might as well become fully familiar with its capabilities.
So here she was, a reluctant apprentice, learning the ways of a Jedi and one of the key events for a Jedi Apprentice was constructing their own lightsaber. Of course, she already had a lightsaber; it was the one given to her by Luke after their adventures on Wayland. It was the lightsaber he lost on Cloud City. It was also the lightsaber once carried by Luke's father, Anakin Skywalker, also known as Darth Vader. She never liked the idea of carrying Vader's old weapon and jumped at the chance to build her own...but things weren't working as planned.
She walked across her sleeping chamber to her bookshelf and picked up the lightsaber given to her by Luke. The grip was uncomfortable. It was made for a much larger hand…Vader's hand. She realized it was the saber of Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight, but she was also not sure what atrocities were committed with this blue bladed lightsaber prior to Vader becoming fully Sith. She had heard rumors within Palpatine's court that Vader had led a battalion of Clone Troopers into the Jedi Temple to arrest the Jedi. She also heard there were no survivors. All the Jedi knights and apprentices were killed including the Jedi younglings. Could this be the weapon that decapitated and eviscerated small children?
Maybe her lightsaber wasn't coming together because the Force wanted her to use Vader's weapon. Luke had said his father returned to the light side of the Force and revealed himself to Luke during the Ewok celebration. Maybe the spirit of Jedi Anakin Skywalker wanted her to do good deeds with the weapon and purge its evil stigma.
Or maybe she is just terrible at constructing a lightsaber and she was just trying to find a convenient excuse for her own failure.
She turned the weapon over in her hand. She felt in the Force there was a connection between her, this weapon and Skywalker, both the father and his son. What the link was, she had no clue. She put the lightsaber back on the shelf and returned to her desk. She couldn't imagine a situation where she and Luke could ever have a connection together. She needed to work harder in constructing her lightsaber…or maybe she needed a better imagination.