3

The dejarik board was worn, its actual purpose unfulfilled in favor of its current service as dinner table for longer than any recent pilot of the freighter could recall - but Luke remembered one match quite vividly.

But sir, nobody ever worries about upsetting a droid.

That's 'cause a droid don't pull people's arms outta their sockets when they lose. Wookiees are known to do that.

I see your point, sir. I suggest a new strategy, R2: let the Wookiee win.

He collected the wrappers from the ration packs and stood, brushing his free hand across the board as he rose.

"She's seen better days."

The girl's shoulders hunched. "I'm sorry! Unkar Plutt wouldn't let anyone inside, it's really only dumb luck I happened to know the access code. If I'd known it was the Millennium Falcon, I definitely would have - "

"He's not criticizing you. The Falcon has always seen better days, but none of us were around yet when they happened. The Republic might not have been around yet when they happened."

"Oh. Okay. Sorry."

"Kid, what have I told you about the apologizing?"

"Oh! You're right, sorry, I - "

"Kid."

"Yeah?"

"Shut it."

"Yes, Master."

Her eyes rolled, but he noted that they softened first. "Finish cleaning up and run the maintenance checks. The Farmboy and I have a few more things to iron out before bed."

"Yes, Master."

"And can it with the 'Master' stuff."

"Yes, Mas - uhhh - yes, okay."

Now her eyes closed as she offered a silent bid to the Force for patience. The mission, remember the mission, remember the mission…

They left the ship and by silent agreement walked back to what he'd already begun to consider their talking spot. Also silent was the agreement to postpone the discussion until they reached it. Instead, they both reached out to the Force, taking in the sights and scents and sounds of the evening and reveling in the pulse of the energy woven through it all.

Then their presences brushed up against each other in the Force like the accidental touching of hands in passing. Both immediately disengaged from one another and allowed their connection to the life web to go passive.

"Sorry," they both said.

"It's fine," they both said.

Neither noticed that they had put additional physical distance between each other as they strolled. As though that could remedy their closeness in the Force, which seemed not to have diminished despite the many years apart.

When they reached the outcropping and had seated themselves, Mara collected her thoughts. There was so much to impart, and she knew that she had to be perfect in her approach if she was to convince Luke that her plan for the future was sound. Before she could begin that persuasion, she was aware, she had to shake him out of his self-loathing and despair.

"Okay, I get it, you're in seclusion. I know most of what happened and - and I do get it, and I'm sorry, sick and sorry about your Jedi. And…and about Ben." She started to press on, but decided maybe that was enough for a moment.

"You could not possibly get what this experience has been." Almost to himself he added, "I think part of the reason I'm here is because I don't get this experience."

"I couldn't?" She took in a deep breath, controlled her emotions, released it. "Bet you a hundred credits I could."

"Try me."

"So, you're nineteen, and you're run off a backwater - sorry, no water, backsand - farm, into a larger galaxy you have to to save before you can take any time to understand it, get your bearings. You're learning to walk and the Rebellion needs you to sprint. You're always being put to tasks just beyond your skill level. It's a kriffing miracle that you rise to the occasion just about every time. Five years later you do it, save the galaxy from Ultimate Evil with the power of love. But there's no celebration in it for you, because the cost was the life of the father you'd just managed to redeem. And your newfound sister is no comfort, she loathes the very air his respirator breathed for him. So the entire galaxy throws itself the party to end all parties and wants you to be the guest of honor, but you slink off to who knows where to hide from the attention. Maybe there's a little bit of resentment, that everyone's so happy - not that they don't deserve to be, but that's gotta feel so disjointed, their ultimate joy being your ultimate grief."

Wedge got it, Luke remembered. Out of everyone, including Leia, including the usually almost presciently empathetic Mon Mothma, it was Wedge who stopped amidst the celebration to ask if he was okay, pat him on the shoulder, offer to talk about anything if Luke wanted. An offer he hadn't accepted until much later, but appreciated nonetheless.

"After a little while you get new marching orders, from the Force itself you think, to rebuild the Jedi. Convinced a rookie Knight should not be Grandmaster of even an Order of one, you go on your big odyssey. Gonna learn everything there is to know about the Force from every Jedi artifact you can find. Along the way, you meet me, we spend a couple years visiting the stranger corners of the galaxy. When we part ways, you go on to do the thing. Set up a Temple, recruit Force Sensitives, teach them to stand on one hand and lift rocks with their special gift."

Mara's irreverence was starting to rankle Luke, but he knew she was doing it on purpose. He refused to rise to the bait.

"So, you're finally feeling competent and on top of your task. The galaxy spins on, things seem to be going well, then you get the next scare: your sister and her husband are entrusting their stupid-powerful son to your training. It must have felt like you had a mlafunctioning thermal detonator thrust at you. You love your nephew but he's a Skywalker and that means things. Blah blah blah, great destiny, great potential for light or dark, yadda yadda."

"Mara."

Her eyebrows crashed together. "Well, it sounds silly when you just say it outright. It's silly, the fact that the fate of the great powers of the galaxy and the balance of the Force itself can tilt on the whims of a single dysfunctional family."

"Hmph. I've always thought so."

Now her expression softened. "No, you haven't, Luke. There was a time you embraced it. Don't rewrite history just because it's painful." She paused. "That's…one of the things I've had to stop myself from doing. The years I was running with Karrde - it was easy to bury myself in my cover. Mara Jade, slightly corrupt and totally mundane former ISB agent who doesn't even believe in the Force, much less control it. That Mara had never met Palpatine, never done his wetwork, never tarnished her soul in service to his ends." Her eyes drifted away from him as memories tried to assault her. She pushed them off. This wasn't about her.

"And that's why I do get it. When Ben fell, it didn't just feel like you'd failed at setting up a new Order. It felt like everything you'd ever accomplished had burned along with your Temple. You led an elite fighter unit by the end of the war, Luke, these weren't the first lives lost under your command. But it was so much more personal. Because it was your own nephew who did it, because you'd personally recruited and trained each of those students, and because you feared exactly this outcome. And I'll tell you one more thing going on in that meiloorun you call a brain - you think you've repeated your father's great mistake, unleashing the Dark Side in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Causing the outcome you fought hardest to avoid. Doing it all to prevent harm coming to a loved one. The Old Jedi feared attachment, and you were so proudly sure they were wrong, because attachment brought Anakin Skywalker back to the light. But now it's caused you to drive Ben Solo into the dark.

"So, not only does it feel like you've undone all your successes, it must feel like you, personally, have thrown the galaxy back into the same chaos from which it was still trying to recover. It must have been particularly galling, caused particular - revulsion - when the galaxy still looked to Luke Skywalker to save it from the evil Kylo Ren."

Luke winced.

"You think, these fools, they bought into the legend. They think one Jedi can light the dark and save the galaxy. And, full of self-loathing because you were once a member of this particular club of fools, you go back into hiding. No one Jedi, not even a Skywalker - especially not a Skywalker - can do it all. You know the true story now, and it's one of hubris. A kid from an Outer Rim moisture farm with stars in his eyes and a rotting family tree flew by the seat of his pants for five years, failed his way to the top of a Rebellion, got his deadbeat dad to act like a father for one crucial moment, and fooled the brightest minds in the Alliance and all the sentients watching at home into thinking he was a capital-herf Hero who could do capital-aurek Anything."

Luke stood up and paced, restlessly shying away from Mara's relentless uncovering of the thoughts and feelings he'd been wrestling the last six years. He remembered when Leia had asked him to join her Resistance. It had nauseated him. How could his sister, whose beloved son he had lost, still want him to help save the New Republic? Still think he was capable of it? Not only did everything he touch turn to poodoo in in the long run, no matter how much it looked like aurodium at first, but the fact that her son was fighting on the wrong side was his fault. The fact that there were no other Jedi to join the cause was his fault.

He didn't know what he could have done to stem the tide of hero worship and the…mythification… of his name and story that occurred as the Rebellion slowly overthrew the Empire and built itself into a proper governing power. He did know how to keep the destructive cycle from repeating. He would decline to play the role his sister and so many others wanted. Fighting the First Order was someone else's task. And, though he didn't know whether or not the Jedi deserved to be rebuilt yet again, if it did it would be by and under the leadership of someone wiser.

Someone who didn't look clear-eyed at the failures of his predecessors and literally repeat every single one of them.

"So, how'm I doing?" Mara asked, observing his restiveness.

He glared at her. "If I tell you I owe you a hundred credits, will you stop?"

She chuckled. "Yes, yes. I'm sorry, Luke. But I really do understand how you feel, and that's why I want you to remember what I'm about to say instead of everything I just said. It's the thing that sort of brought me back to center when I was thrown off by being confronted by my failures. You ready?"

"No."

"Okay, good, here it is: your failures do not undo your successes. Quite aside from the fact that Ben's fall and the murder of your Order was not your responsibility - even if they were, that wouldn't somehow tarnish the many, many wonderful things you and your gifts accomplished for the Rebellion. The death of your Jedi does not mean you were wrong to convene a new Order. And the fact that the galaxy, and maybe even Leia, bless her, may have unrealistic expectations for what you can do now does not mean there's nothing you can do now."

"…Did you hear me? Because I said no."

"I heard you. It was a rhetorical question. We're never ready to hear the home truths that get under our skin."

Luke's frustration at this unceasing poking at his emotional sore spots reached its zenith. "Mara, why are you here? Why, after twenty-five years of no contact save when our missions crossed each other, have you sought me out to deliver this lecture - and this child, this supposed apprentice?" He spat the word.

"Because, Luke, and I'm very sorry, I'm so, so sorry, but there really is peril we will need an order of Force users to fight, and there really is nobody else who can gather and train them."

"Yes there is! I'm looking at her!"

This startled a sardonic laugh out of her. "Me? You can really picture that? Grandmaster Mara Jade? Luke, I'm snide, I'm impatient, I have a very short fuse before my empathy runs out, and I like it that way. I'm no teacher. I'm no leader."

"Well, neither am I. If I haven't proven it well enough by now, that's too bad. I'm certainly not going to stumble through another attempt at leadership just to convince you."

"Kriff it! You're so stubborn! This was always your problem. You're a smart guy and you're not without wisdom, you know the galaxy is more than black and white, light and dark, but when you decide on a certain worldview, nothing short of the Force Ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi could make you take a new perspective."

"I'm stubborn? I can't think of a single argument we had when we traveled together that you didn't win through pure indomitable will. It was like slamming my head against a bulkhead!"

Now Mara gave a more authentic laugh. "You know, I seem to recall that you actually did that, once."

He almost snarled. "I'm quite sure it was much more than once; maybe you only caught me the one time."

He sighed, sat down again. "Mara, I see where you're coming from. I do, and I appreciate your perspective. You have given me some things to think about, or maybe a new way to think about the same things I've been dealing with for a while now. But I genuinely do not know that I have it in me to try again to restart the Jedi. I do know that I don't want to."

"Good! Because I have a better idea."

"…Okay, now I'm confused."

"I said the galaxy needs an order of Force users. I didn't say they had to be Jedi." Her eyebrows winged up as her eyes locked onto his.

He was stunned. Stunned at the simplicity of the idea. Stunned at the enormity of the idea. Stunned that it had not occurred to him at all in six years of asking himself where he'd gone wrong and what, if anything, he could do next to serve the will of the Force. He tried to think through the concept.

"Something new…"

"Something new," she confirmed. "Something that serves the Force, flows naturally from its will. Something without rigid dogma. Remember Odan-Urr?"

"The philosopher who reinterpreted the Jedi Code, made it more orthodox. Established the High Council, forbade attachments, restricted initiation into the Order to younglings in their earliest mental developmental phases."

"We can start by throwing his entire body of contributions to the Jedi out of the airlock."

Luke snickered. "I can only imagine what Yoda would say to that."

"I think he'd say something along the lines of, 'Madness this is, Young Skywalker! To violate the ancient Jedi Code, heresy it is. Leads - here he'd pause for dramatic effect - to the Dark Side." A voice chuckled, having delivered a reasonably accurate impression of the late Grandmaster.

Luke and Mara started at the voice, looked at each other in a confusion that was both eased and heightened when a semi-transparent figure, limned in blue and white, faded into being before them.

He was tall. Luke was always surprised - and annoyed, just a bit - at his height. He wore Jedi robes; his hands were tucked into the opposing sleeves. His features were bold and handsome, his hair curled thick and long. His smile was wide. He was young, which made Luke very conscious of his own age.

Mara was shocked. She had spoken with Sith spirits many times, in her own journey of discovery, but visits with Light Side Force ghosts had been extremely rare - she'd spoken with three, in the almost thirty years since she began trying in earnest to restore and deepen her connection to the Force. This was a very intense moment.

It was, however, the identity of this particular spirit that had her most surprised and bemused.

Luke's eyes misted and a helplessly beatific smile came over his face. "Father," he breathed.

AN: Thanks for Reading Temple Island Confrontations! I look forward to your review. Should I keep going with this story? Should I tell the tale of Luke and Mara's adventures earlier in the canon timeline? Let me know!