"We have to change clothes? Just for dinner?"
"Ben," Mara said, letting her weary exasperation creep into her voice, "that's what high society people do. And it's not just dinner, it's a formal dinner with the queen in your father's honor, so yes, you absolutely have to put on clean clothes."
"But nothing I packed is any better than what I'm wearing right now."
"I think you'll find the wardrobe has been magically filled with possibilities just your size." Mara pushed him toward his bedroom door in their suite of rooms. "Almost like someone called ahead and planned it. Come on, let's go have a look."
It was an impressive suite, in keeping with the rest of the palace, though the marble floors were softened somewhat by enormous rugs. Mara steered Ben into his room and pulled open the wardrobe doors. There were six possibilities in six different hues plucked straight out of the rainbow. Considering Ben's red hair and natural coloring, the same as her own, Mara seized on a formal tunic in a jewel green tending toward blue.
"There," she said, laying it on the bed. "Pair it with your black pants and boots. All set?"
"Why'd you give me the sparkly one?" Ben demanded, eyeing the shimmering crystal embellishments.
"They're all sparkly," Mara insisted. "Don't worry, you won't be the only one. I'll be back later, and I expect you to be dressed. Nanna, keep him focused."
With one of her men squared away, Mara went to check on the other one.
In their own room, Luke was rifling through his options wearing the same skeptical expression she had seen on his son. "Is this really necessary?" he asked, his tone implying he already knew the answer. "None of this is really 'me.'"
"Maybe not," Mara allowed. "Or maybe so. You'll never know until you try. In another life, you might have grown up wearing this stuff."
"Yeah, but this is this life." He pulled out an outrageously red tunic with puffed sleeves and gold detailing to make his point.
Mara snorted, and pushed that one back inside. "Okay, okay," she said, "let's not throw a tantrum. Just let me work."
Considering the available outfits with a discerning eye, Mara managed to strike a compromise. She turned and relieved Luke of his belt with practiced fingers. "They've accepted you as one of their own," she reasoned, stripping off his layered robes. "If you show up tonight still looking like Anakin Skywalker, something completely 'other,' you won't have much chance of winning any new friends."
"I suppose you're right," Luke sighed, left with the high-collared black shirt and pants that had been his default look as long as she'd known him.
Mara pulled out a tunic and shirt combination in dark blue, discarded the shirt with its long row of pearl buttons, and tossed the rest to her husband. "Pull that on," she said. "I think it might actually suit you."
Luke had his doubts. "If you say so."
It was long, it was elaborate, and it did sparkle in places. It had decorative split sleeves down to the elbow, and the symbol of the Royal Naboo embroidered along the hems, but once he'd finished the look with his ubiquitous black utility belt and lightsaber, Mara thought it achieved an elegant synthesis of who Luke was supposed to be.
He spread his hands. "So?" he asked. "Does it work?"
Mara offered him a coy smile. For someone as physically unthreatening as Luke could be at first blush, a bit of well-placed regalia was very effective, making it easier to see through his natural diffidence to recognize the Master of Masters, and in this case the son of a queen. "It works surprisingly well," she said. "But hold on. Humor me."
Ignoring his terse sigh, she returned to the wardrobe and came away with the short cape that was meant to complete the ensemble. Luke bit his tongue and let her attach it by the hidden clasps that hung it asymmetrically across his shoulders.
"You're sure?" he asked, reluctantly trusting her judgment. "It's not too much?"
"Just enough," Mara assured him, coming up on her toes to kiss him, inviting him into her thoughts to see the flattering impression firsthand.
Luke smiled despite his best efforts to twist it into a frown. "Well, you're a biased witness," he said, "but you're the only one I've got, so I'll take your word for it. What are you going to wear?"
Mara just smiled and kissed him again, lightening his mood as much as she could, determined to enjoy the evening. "Let's find out, shall we?"
She came away with a very feminine aquamarine gown of layered satin and lace, dramatically slit up to both hips to reveal the complementary color of the underskirts, but—in keeping with the family theme—Mara exchanged the underskirts for her own black pants and dress boots, wearing her belt and lightsaber as the designer had never intended. It was very fashion-forward of them, she decided, the royal Jedi look. She stuck some jeweled pins in her hair, slipped on a pair of spangled earrings, applied some judicious cosmetics, and she was ready.
"Time to spare," she said, glancing at the chrono. "Let's see if our boy put himself together."
Ben was waiting for them in the sitting room, pacing back and forth like an agitated Cathar, trying to acclimate himself to the new clothes. "Mom, are you sure?" he asked, turning to meet them. "Because I think I look like a—" He stopped short. "Whoa, Dad, you look good. Better than Uncle Lando."
Luke appreciated the compliment, although it did nothing to make him feel less self-conscious. "Thanks," he said. "But let's not talk about it anymore."
Luke's fears of being overdressed were completely unfounded. When they arrived in the banquet hall, the place looked like an exotic fish tank, swirling with vivid colors, patterns, and fashionable headdresses. The air was alive with voices and sedate chamber music, and Mara surmised that it was the sociable cocktail hour before the main event. Both of them had crystal glasses pressed into their hands within a minute of stepping into the room.
"Very friendly," Mara observed, taking a cautious sip of the effervescent green wine. "Not bad."
Ben frowned at being conspicuously left out. "This is going to be one of those boring grown-up things, isn't it? I'm starving."
"Even if it is," Mara said, "I know you'll be on your best behavior and not embarrass your father on this trip. See? Here come your friends. It won't be that bad."
Darred and Ruwee were hurrying across the room with a small crowd of other children in tow, boys and girls of various ages, all of them apparently eager to get a glimpse of their peers' famous relations, but not so eager that they didn't all stumble to a cautious halt at least ten paces distant. The young Verunas didn't notice.
"Come on, Ben!" Ruwee demanded. "Everybody wants to meet you! There's just going to be a lot of standing around and talking for at least another hour."
Ben turned back to them. "Can I go, Dad?"
"Yes, you can go," Luke said. "Just come find us before everyone sits down."
"Don't worry, Master Skywalker, we'll bring him back," Darred assured him. "We're seated right across from you!"
Mara shared a moment with Luke as they watched them go, both of them appreciating again that somehow they were still managing to provide a more well-adjusted childhood for their son than either of them had enjoyed. Mara had been kidnapped and trained as a child soldier, while Luke's early life had been tempered by hardship and choked with secrecy. He hated secrets, especially family secrets, and that was one of the reasons this visit was especially important to him.
Then he remembered something, a more recent secret, and turned a quizzical look at her. Mara immediately knew what he meant, her uncomfortable flashback outside the palace that afternoon. She brushed him off again.
"Remind me after dinner," she said, hiding behind a discreet sip of wine. "Here they come."
Realizing the guests of honor had arrived, the crowd had begun to shift in their direction. Luke turned and pounded the contents of his glass, knowing he probably wouldn't have another opportunity.
He was right.
The next hour was spent shaking hands, making polite conversation, and being introduced to more names and faces than anyone could be expected to remember. Representatives from all the ruling families were present, some of whom could apparently claim some kind of distant relationship to Luke by virtue of the fact that intermarriage was common between the preeminent houses. It was all a blur after the first twenty minutes.
Mara noted that Ben seemed to be having a better time of it, holding his young audience rapt with basic demonstrations of his telekinetic skills. Ordinarily she and Luke would have disapproved of his treating the Force like a parlor trick, but Mara was so relieved to see him embracing his abilities that she was willing to let it slide.
As the hour was winding down, Mara felt something suddenly catch Luke's attention, and then she also saw Pooja surreptitiously beckoning to them from across the room. She was standing with her mother and the rest of her family, most of whom were studiously keeping to themselves. Confrontation was inevitable, and it would be best to have it over with before the rift became more awkward and more public than it needed to be.
Excusing himself to go join them, Luke turned and crossed the room in measured strides, Mara close behind. Pooja welcomed them with excessive warmth, determined to set the tone for the whole group. "Luke!" she said, clasping his hand and then turning to present him to the others. "You haven't yet been introduced. This is my mother, Lady Sola Naberrie, my sister, Ryoo, and my nieces, Mirra and Sana."
It was a forbidding array of feminine antipathy, but Luke focused primarily on the matriarch. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you, Lady Naberrie," he said, extending his hand.
Sola accepted the gesture with a steady grip and a clear eye despite her age. She wasn't rude, but she wasn't warm either. At best, one could say she seemed resigned. "Grand Master Skywalker," she said. "We meet at last."
The subtleties of her tone struck Luke the wrong way, but he wasn't sure how to react yet. A lot happened in the next moment. Luke deliberately read his mother's sister as best he could, looking for some living echo of Padmé and trying to gauge her hostility toward him. Sola scrutinized him as well, perhaps looking for those same echoes, but stern lines appeared around her mouth as she superficially encountered only Skywalker.
"Mara," Sola continued, disengaging to nod at her. "It is undoubtedly an honor. I am certain we will be seeing much more of one another in the coming days." With only the barest attempt to mask her discontent with a smile, she turned and drifted away into the crowd, her daughter and granddaughters with her.
Mara was left standing there with Luke and Pooja, keenly aware they had been snubbed but unable to pinpoint any explicit insult.
"I'm sorry," Pooja said, looking pained, and moving to follow her mother. "We'll be sitting down soon, but let me handle this."
Mara watched as Pooja marched up to Sola in an angry tousle of skirts, hoping the drama would go unnoticed by the larger assembly as the two exchanged terse words. Luke didn't care. He was furiously examining the impression he had gleaned from that brief meeting, turning it over and probing it from every angle, his expression darkening as he pared it down to a few inescapable conclusions.
"She knew," he hissed at last, the implications flashing through his mind in quick succession, making him angrier the longer the thought about it. "She's known for years."
"Of course she did," Mara hissed back, many things making sense in retrospect. Sola hadn't seemed surprised by it all so much as disappointed that the truth had finally caught up with them. "She's in the best position to know. You'll have to take that up with her later."
A clear tone reverberated through the hall, quieting the conversation and encouraging everyone to take a seat.
Four long tables had been set in an open rectangular formation. The Skywalkers and the Naberries were all seated together, directly opposite the queen who presided from the other side of the room. There was a brief shuffle as people found their places. Luke was making a conscious effort to clear his mind and improve his mood as Ben rejoined them with Darred and Ruwee, and everyone sat down. They were almost settled when a man Mara didn't recognize stirred a vehement objection out of the boys by plucking their place cards off the table and moving them farther down the line.
"Uncle Janren!" Ruwee seethed. "How are we supposed to talk to Ben from way down there?"
Before things could escalate, Mara switched their own place settings, putting herself on Luke's left and moving Ben to his right, realigning the boys with a minimum of fuss. The derangement of the seating chart would undoubtedly make the master of ceremonies itchy, but it wasn't worth a scene.
Luke was putting up a veneer of patience like a shield; he had not quite reestablished his equilibrium before the unnecessary commotion erupted all around him, and now he regarded the etiquette anarchist seated across from him with a dubious expression. "Janren Naberrie, I presume?"
He was handsome enough, Mara decided, and he dressed like he knew it, with dark hair, dark eyes, a clipped goatee and a rakish smile. She estimated him to be at least forty. "You assume correctly, Grand Master Skywalker," he said, playfully holding up his perambulating place card.
"Luke."
"I beg your pardon?"
Luke sighed. "Janren, you don't answer to me, and I assume you're a relative of some kind. I'm not going to try to sit here and eat while you pelt me with 'Grand Master' every five minutes. So, it's Luke."
Janren directed a theatrically self-satisfied expression at Mara, as though he thought himself the beneficiary of some extraordinary condescension, his eyebrows practically crawling up onto his scalp. "As you say," he agreed.
The first course was paraded into the room, and service began on opposite sides of the hall simultaneously with Luke and Queen Archana being served the first portions. Mara guessed it to be some kind of seaweed salad, fleshy little stalks already cut into bite-sized florets, looking fresh enough to have been harvested within the last half hour. She was also aware of both Luke and Ben waiting to see which fork she chose before presuming to touch any of their own.
"So," Luke said, poking at his salad, "explain."
Janren looked uncertain. "I'm sorry?"
"I assume you're going to explain how we're related, and why it was absolutely necessary for you to snipe Ruwee's seat to talk to me."
"Oh!" he laughed. "Of course. I'm sure that's the only thing you've been hearing all evening, but we might as well get it over with." Janren sat up straight and offered a courteous nod. "I am the son of Ryoo Naberrie, grandson of Sola Naberrie, nephew of Pooja Naberrie, and I believe your first cousin once removed."
"Breaking ranks with your grandmother?" Mara asked. The salad was lovely, crisp and salty, with little air capsules that popped as she chewed them. Darred was showing Ben how to pop them against the plate with his fork, but was corrected by Pooja.
"I doubt I'm breaking anything," Janren said dismissively, spearing a bite. "I've never shared Grandmama's private vendetta against the Jedi, and that brings me to the second point." He looked up with a sly smile. "If you think I'm going to spend this entire evening making smalltalk with my mother when I could be down here enjoying the opportunity of a lifetime, you are mistaken."
Luke took his time framing a reply, still trying to decide what he thought of the man. Janren, interpreting his silence as bemusement, took it upon himself to explain.
"Maybe you haven't entirely realized just what a spectacle you are, especially in Theed," he said. "I know that must sound like a ridiculous thing to say to Luke Skywalker, but here you're practically a myth. Amidala's lost child has been a cultural taboo for more than fifty years, not that it did anything to stop the rampant speculation. Theories and counter-theories, rumors, and amateur investigations have been batted around in clandestine social clubs ever since. Had the child survived? Had the Jedi taken it? Who might he or she be now? Who was the father? There was even a fringe movement about twenty years ago demanding the exhumation of Amidala's body, although the government never entertained the idea for a moment. It was a whole subculture, and if you watched enough late-night holos, you were certain to eventually catch one or two local documentaries full of baseless speculation no one ever expected to see challenged." He looked them up and down, just savoring the moment. "Now here we are. You exist. It's very surreal to finally have an answer to the mystery, let alone to be sitting across the table from him."
Luke seemed to appreciate the significance, but thinking about it just made him tired. It had been a long day. "I do have a sister, remember."
"Oh, of course!" Janren agreed. "The fact that there are two of you was an unexpected bonus. The longtime enthusiasts nearly lost their minds. Leia was probably wise to sneak in and out the way she did. They'll be ready for her next time." He chewed thoughtfully for a while, unabashedly staring at Luke as though he were a traveling exhibit. "I have to say, you're shorter than I expected."
Mara might have choked on her salad if she'd had less discipline, and even Ben turned around with an incredulous look.
"I mean," Janren explained, amused by the absurdity as he saw it, "by reputation, one expects Luke Skywalker to be some great legendary colossus, or at least someone taller than myself." He shrugged. "I suppose that's just a downside to being a Naberrie. Sorry."
Ben narrowed his icy blue eyes. "You'll be sorry if you ever—"
"Ben, don't be rude," Mara interjected, cutting him off before he could say what she was thinking. "Talk to your cousins."
Luke ignored the whole thing and changed the subject. "Maybe you can enlighten me, Janren, since you're here," he said. "What exactly is it about me that my aunt finds so objectionable?"
"Oh, it's not you personally," Janren was quick to clarify. "She doesn't even know you. It's what you represent. She always blamed the Jedi for what happened to her sister."
"And you don't?"
He shrugged again. "People make their own decisions. Now that we're in possession of the facts, I can't blame Anakin Skywalker for what happened. After all, Padmé was a beautiful woman, and people want what they want." He nodded appreciatively at Mara. "I can't help but observe that you and your father seem to be of the same mind in that regard."
Luke soured again, remembering the more egregious holos of his parents that Artoo had reluctantly shared with them. "The marriage was not objectionable in hindsight," he allowed, "despite the prohibition at the time, but there were certainly other aspects of the situation that my father could have handled better."
It was a grim understatement.
"Aren't there always?" Janren observed. "Marriage is a dicey prospect, which is why I've never attempted it. Makes you jumpy. Take my cousin, for example. Oberrin got so worked up worrying about how he could protect his family from the Vong that he left them here, enlisted in the war effort and got himself killed for no reason, leaving two orphans and an insane widow. If he'd just kept his head, they could have all been fine."
"I can assure you the battle for Coruscant was not fought for no reason," Luke insisted, bristling in spite of himself. The acrid desperation of that day still stung even after a decade, the sinking certainty that defeat was inevitable despite their best efforts, that the defenders were just too few to hold the line. Luke and Mara had both been shot down, and had come within a few heartbeats of losing their son to the invaders. All things considered, they had much more in common with Oberrin than Janren did.
"I wasn't trying to imply that it was," Janren protested, "but what was Oberrin supposed to do about it? He'd have been more use here than as cannon fodder over the capital."
"And if everyone thought that way, there would have been no fleet to defend the evacuation," Luke countered. "Timeless ideals like heroism and sacrifice are ideals for a reason, and your—our—cousin was no less a hero than anyone else in the sky that day. His sons can be proud."
Janren was unimpressed. "Of course you have to say that, Luke. You're indispensable. You tip the scales of fate wherever you go, so you have no choice but to fight, and you never will. That's why you're feted with honors and state dinners, Your Grace, while the rest of us line up just to gawk and be grateful we aren't you."
"If you're insinuating that a rank-and-file soldier has no hope of altering the outcome of a battle, I have hundreds of counterexamples for you."
Janren lifted his hands, one of which was still holding his fork, recognizing that the exchange was becoming heated and was starting to draw attention from up and down the table. "Maybe you're right," he relented, "but I have no ideals and no sons to bemoan the fact. Oberrin is the honored dead, and I'm still here seeking my fortune. History is more than welcome to judge which of us was the wiser."
Then he shifted the conversation, and they had to endure a seemingly endless description of the many creative business ventures he had exploited during his career. Apparently his latest conquest was an exclusive arrangement with the palace to supply the queen's favorite appetizer, the seaweed on their plates. Something about a huge indoor saltwater farm in the heart of Theed with portable tanks to ensure the freshest possible harvest. Nothing came out of his mouth to change their initial impression that he was a shallow, self-interested man with no aspirations beyond his own comfort, looking for cheap thrills rather than a relationship. Despite Luke's reverence for family, Mara could tell he was in no hurry to spend any more time than necessary with Cousin Janren.
The food, at least, was excellent, some consolation for the poor company. Six courses later, they were finally enjoying dessert, a dish of airy cream flavored with chocolate, a particular nod to Luke and his personal preferences. It must have been hideously expensive to serve that many people, and Ben was sure to let Darred and Ruwee know who they could thank for the rare treat.
"You get chocolate anytime you want?" Ruwee asked, astonished.
"Mostly the kind you drink," Ben explained. "Every so often, somebody sends Dad a crate of the stuff. A lot of people owe him favors."
"We might have to come live at your house, then," Darred suggested.
When the dinner service ended, Queen Archana rose and gave a brief address, and then left the hall with her train of handmaidens, freeing her guests to get up and mingle if they wished. Janren excused himself from the table, satisfied for the moment with his experience of the Skywalkers and looking for a change of society.
"Burning stars," Mara muttered, sipping the melting ice in her glass as she and Luke shared a wave of guilty relief. "I thought he'd never shut up."
"I kind of stopped listening when he started explaining the details of professional voorpak breeding," Luke confessed.
Mara stifled a snort. "You mean to say you missed all that fascinating stuff about industrializing woosha plant cultivation?" She ran a hand across Luke's leg under the table, a gesture of both affection and encouragement. "Do you want to hang around here or call it a night?"
"I'd just as soon get out of here if it's all the same to you," he said.
"Now, boys, boys," Pooja was saying from her place farther down the table, fending off her clamoring grandsons. "We'll have to ask the Skywalkers, and now might not be the best time. They might have had enough of us for one day."
"What is it?" Mara asked.
"We want to have a sleepover!" Ruwee announced. "Ben promised to let us play his hologame if we did."
Luke turned to her with a silent question. Mara could see he had no objection, glad to see Ben having a good time and making friends, but he didn't want to give preemptive permission and make her the bad guy if she'd rather not. She assured him that she didn't mind; their suite was certainly big enough to accommodate them all, and Nanna could manage them. Luke wanted to be certain she didn't feel coerced for his sake, willing to champion her privacy against all comers if necessary.
"They're talking it over," Ben told the boys.
"But they aren't saying anything," Darred protested.
"They're Jedi. They do it all the time."
Mara turned to Pooja. "We don't mind if you don't mind."
Pooja smiled in that gratefully tolerant way all parents understood. "Very gracious of you both," she said. "Boys, thank the Grand Master."
"Thank you, Grand Master Skywalker!" they droned in perfect unison.
"And mind your manners. I'll have your things sent over."
Extricating themselves with the boys, Luke and Mara returned to their guest suite. Tempted to mentally shut down for the evening, Luke nonetheless reminded himself to appreciate his surroundings for what they were. Mara felt him groping in his memories for any hint of familiarity, but there was nothing.
"Good evening, Masters Skywalker," Nanna greeted them in her soothing voice as they entered their rooms, Artoo tweedling beside her.
"Good evening, Nanna," Luke replied, always courteous to the droids. He patted Artoo's dome in passing.
"Why do you still have a nanny droid?" Darred asked with a disdainful curl of his lip.
"She's not just a nanny droid," Ben boasted. "She's a TDL/XL built over a YVH 1 war droid. Uncle Lando gave her to Mom and Dad to help look after me, 'cause we get up to a lot of crazy stuff. She's got giant blasters in her arms, and could break your neck before you knew what hit you."
"Oh, awesome! Can we see them?"
"There is no need for a defensive demonstration at this time," Nanna insisted.
"Nanna," Mara said, cutting through the chatter, "Darred and Ruwee will be staying in Ben's room tonight. Their things will be sent over shortly. They can stay up and play until then, but I want everyone in bed before local midnight."
"Yes, Master Skywalker."
The boys followed Ben into his bedroom, and Mara went to join Luke on the balcony. He was leaning on the stone rail, gazing wistfully out over the twinkling lights of the dormant city. The waterfalls beneath the palace put a low roar and a fresh wet scent into the air, and the moonlight touched everything with a silver glow. He gladly put his arm around her as she came to stand beside him.
"This has to be one of the most beautiful planets I've ever seen," he said. "I don't think I'll ever get tired of looking at it."
"Makes Tatooine look like an even bigger dustball by comparison," Mara agreed. "And Coruscant's been transformed from an urban hellscape into an urban jungle. There's definitely something refreshing about this place, clean and slow. Maybe we could retire here eventually," she suggested, the wry edge in her voice implying she couldn't yet imagine a future in which they survived long enough or were allowed to retire.
Luke smiled, catching all the nuance. "Maybe," he agreed.
"The locals seem like they'd be eager to have you," she continued, "despite your less enthusiastic relatives."
Mara leaned into him, purging the accumulated tension of the day as they stood at the pinnacle of an ancient palace, overlooking the tranquil capital of that enchanting planet that had once been his mother's domain. Luke was taking a long moment to just absorb it all, trying to feel like he belonged there, putting himself as best he could in Padmé's shoes. Mara was struck by the uncharacteristically sentimental thought that Padmé would have been very proud of Luke if she could have been there with him.
She ran her hand along his back, over the soft but unfamiliar weave of his formalwear, just appreciating his closeness and what a shared triumph it was for them to be there. Some deeply broken part of the Skywalkers was finally being set right, something Luke had wanted for a very long time no matter where the truth may take him.
No one had expected it to take them anywhere like this.
"I didn't realize I was marrying a prince," Mara said slyly.
"Oh, stop." She could feel his harmless scowl even as he pulled her closer in the deepening darkness. "This isn't who I really am. You know I'll always be your farmboy."
Mara sighed. "It may not be how you were raised," she said, "but it is who you are. We're supposed to be coming to terms with that, and not just for your sake. If we're going to go through all this, I want Ben to understand where he fits in the universe."
Luke digested that for a while, and she could sense that he grasped her meaning. Mara still had no idea where she had come from, what culture she could possibly claim, or even where to begin looking for answers. She had convinced herself that it was best to let it lie in the absence of all leads, but she had to wonder what she would do if she somehow chanced upon a forgotten hologram as Luke had.
"I'm sorry," he said, without pretense or ceremony. "It's just all so foreign to me."
Mara could detect a distinct frustration there, an existential weariness as Luke was obliged to once again reframe everything he thought he knew about himself. It had all been so much simpler in those bygone days when he had been a brash twenty-year-old boy, when his mother had been nameless and Anakin Skywalker had died a hero's death defending the Jedi Temple. The more truth they uncovered, the more he and his sister understood that most of their life's work had been payment of the blood debt that was owed to the rest of the galaxy. The violence of their parents' fall had blasted a gaping wound through recent history. Leia had dedicated herself to restoring the Republic, Luke to rebuilding the Jedi Order and their own family.
Then, once again, something crossed his mind that distracted him from his own thoughts. "It's after dinner now," Luke reminded her with gentle concern. "What's going on with you today?"
"Oh, that." Mara didn't really want to talk about it, but confronting the monsters in her past had always proven to be the best way to lay them to rest. "Just a memory. I was here once before, a long time ago."
Luke knew what that meant. "On mission?"
Mara nodded, staring out over the empty expanse. "One of my first."
"The fatal kind?"
She nodded again.
Luke was quiet. He wasn't surprised. He had always known what she had been, and had never judged her for it, but he never made excuses either, expecting her to own the mistakes of her past as they all did. Every now and then one of those fetid flowers would bloom, and they would have to talk it out. There was nothing they could do to change it, but as unpleasant as an honest admission could be, a festering secret was much worse.
"Do you want to show me?" he asked.
Not really, was her reflexive reaction, but then she thought better of it. Luke was there, ready and willing to bear that burden with her. She didn't have to be unreasonably strong for him. Every time she had refused his help in the past, she had come to regret it. "Yeah," she decided. "Nice night for a walk, I guess."
As they passed through the suite, they could hear the boys in the far bedroom settling in with Ben's handheld hologame.
"Here," Ben was saying, "lemme get it set up, and you can have the next turn."
"Jedi Apocalypse?" Darred asked. "That hasn't even been released yet!"
"Yeah, it still has some bugs in it," Ben admitted. "They sent Dad an advance copy to get his feedback, but he doesn't have time for that, so he gave it to me."
"That is unreal," Ruwee chimed in, obviously impressed. "I gotta have a turn next. Can I play as your dad?"
"Only if you play at the highest difficulty level. All the bad guys are bigger. You might want to start as someone who isn't a master."
"Nanna," Mara whispered, alerting the defender droid without disturbing them. "We're going out for a while, an hour at most. Call us if anything comes up."
"Yes, Master Skywalker."
The gathering downstairs had not yet completely dispersed, but the rest of the palace was quiet and seemed mostly empty. It almost felt like they were the ghosts, melancholy spirits from the future walking unseen through a fragment of the past. Luke grasped her hand as they descended the grand staircase, as much for his own comfort as for hers.
Weary guests were trickling toward the main palace gates, most of them too tired, too distracted, or too inebriated to notice the Skywalkers as they slipped through the vaulted chamber. Mara led Luke to an illuminated tunnel that bypassed the outer stairs, letting them out into the night on a secluded pedestrian courtyard at the back of the huge entryway statues. It was completely deserted, much like it had been forty years ago on a similar night.
Mara let her steps wander forward, guided by memory. "It was here," she decided, stopping beside an enormous stone planter. "Palpatine had come back for the Empire Day celebrations. There was always a night parade through the city, loud, crowded, fireworks going off everywhere. I was assigned to a member of Moff Panaka's staff who had been turned by the resistance."
Luke had followed her, and he put his arm around her as a gentle reassurance of his continued affection. "He never saw it coming, did he?" he said, his voice grim.
She shook her head. "In the morning, it was discovered that he'd accidentally and tragically overdosed on his favorite recreational substance right here. He was officially mourned, the site was scrubbed, and the whole incident disappeared as a news item in twelve hours."
Mara opened her thoughts to him, allowing Luke to see and experience the memory with her, walking together with the hapless functionary, surprising him with a sleeper hold, shoving the needle into his arm and leaving him behind the topiary as the pyrotechnics roared overhead. They had always been honest with each other as Force-bonded spouses, but after Alema Rar's recent attempt to drive a wedge of doubt between them, only the most brutal candor would do.
Luke couldn't offer her forgiveness; he wasn't the one who had been wronged. But he was unfailingly loyal and sympathetic, and he thought no less of her. They just stood there together for a long time, an inadequate vigil of silence for the victim no one else would remember.
All those years later, the Emperor still cast a long shadow.
"I'm sorry," Mara said at last, dragging herself back to the present. "I didn't want to make this about me."
Luke shushed her, and turned to gather her against his chest. "This is about us," he insisted. "Your past is no less important than my past, and I'm starting to get a bad feeling that Palpatine is going to be a bigger part of both than we would like. But we can't run from it anymore. Just come with me."
Mara closed her eyes, and just allowed herself to be held. He made it sound so simple, and maybe it was, but that didn't make it pleasant or easy. At least they didn't have to face any of it alone. After seventeen years, it seemed their deepest wounds and ragged edges had perfectly conformed to one another, forging an invincible partnership out of two broken people who had seen more than their fair share of the ugly side of life.
Luke turned away, taking her by the hand and gently pulling her toward a path overhung with trees and illuminated by string lights. "Come on," he said, "let's go for a walk. The boys will be winding down by the time we get back, and then maybe we can make some better memories."