When Luke opened his eyes in the early morning darkness, he stared at the ornate ceiling for three whole seconds wondering where he was. Then the rush of memory and context was enough to jolt him fully awake. Mara was asleep beside him in a bed opulent enough for a king, and a mild breeze billowed the gauzy curtains. They weren't on Ossus at all, but in Theed Royal Palace, and they had clearly both passed out last night without remembering to close the window. That was probably why he had slept so well. There was always something soothing about a planet where the elements weren't so severe that you had to hide from them.
He considered going back to sleep, listening to the stirrings of the twilight wildlife, but he hadn't made it that far in his career by neglecting his own training. Luke slipped out of bed and dressed as quietly as possible. It wasn't easy to sneak away from Mara, but he had made an art of it over the years. Armed with his lightsaber and carrying only a spherical training remote, Luke padded through the living room, casually saluted Nanna to assure her all was well, and left by the front door.
The rest of the palace was still sleeping except for a few members of staff and a small army of cleaning droids. No one stopped or questioned him, just quietly moved aside as he passed. He was headed for the hangar attached to the back of the palace, somewhere he wouldn't be so afraid of damaging something.
After the foreign grandeur of the palace, the familiar echoing expanse and mechanical aromas of oil and starfighter fuel were a strange relief. There were six duty pilots seated around a collapsible table when Luke walked in, all engrossed in a lively game of cards. One of them looked up with idle interest, turned white and scrambled to his feet, followed so quickly by the rest of his wingmates that two chairs toppled over.
"Grand Master Skywalker," the ranking officer greeted him with a stiff salute. "How may we help you, sir?"
Luke returned the gesture, giving them tacit permission to stand down. "I was wondering if you might have an empty out-of-the-way place I could borrow for an hour," he said.
The simple request seemed to take them off guard. "I'm sure we could find one, sir," the officer assured him, turning to bark at his crew. "Come on, let's get that mess in Bay Three cleaned up!"
There was a brief flurry of activity as they cleared away all the miscellaneous crates, tools, and spare parts, stacking them against the walls and providing an empty space of about twenty-four square meters. Luke thanked the crew, and they returned to their duties.
Standing there alone beneath the glare of the full-spectrum lights, Luke closed his eyes and rooted himself in the living Force all around him. He felt the lumbering and yet delicately-balanced rhythms of the planet, preparing to shift from night to day as the dawnline approached again, straining against the gravitational anchors that held it on course. It was a dance that had begun long before any of the miniscule people on its surface ever existed, and it would continue long after they were gone.
Securely grounded and feeling the vitality of the universe pulsing through him, Luke ignited his lightsaber for the first time in several days. That sharp and evocative sound at once recalled his highest thrills and his deepest fears, setting his every nerve alight. He may be half Naberrie, but he was all Jedi, and he wasn't ashamed of it, no matter how many other Naberries chose to look down their noses at him. He switched on the remote, tossed it into the air, and the battle was joined.
It was no challenge really, even with the device dialed up to maximum difficulty, hissing and spinning all around him, spitting as many as one hundred bolts per minute. At home he usually practiced with three at once. Time slowed in his perception, and his body moved almost without his conscious will, weaving a defensive perimeter faster and more accurately than human reflexes could ever hope to accomplish alone.
It was just a simple exercise to keep him loose and maybe even work off some frustration. He couldn't help aging, but he thought he was still doing a pretty good job of keeping up with the physical demands of the job. He had first noticed himself slowing down in his mid-forties during the Yuuzhan Vong war, although in his defense he had been chasing an insane dark Jedi cyborg giant through the ruins of Coruscant on foot, something that would take the wind out of almost anybody. That had been ten years ago, and if the recent violence of the Killik war was any indication, he could still handle himself well enough.
The effort wasn't as satisfying as Luke had hoped it would be. Truth be told, it was boring. He was about to pack it in when there was a glimmer of something much more interesting on the edge of his awareness, an alluring mix of devotion and excitement spiked with imminent danger. Time accelerated again as he spun and caught Mara's saber on his own, grinding the blades around and slinging her past him. She reclaimed the momentum in cartwheeling flip and leaped at him again, exchanging a few rapid blows before catching him in a brief stalemate.
"I thought the Master might like a real workout this morning," she said, a challenge in her lovely green eyes.
Luke smiled and firmed his defense into a stiff offense, beating her backward. He had learned a long time ago that it was dangerous to be lenient with her. Mara didn't spare him a serious attack, and the maintenance bay echoed with the drone and crackle of heated combat. The reckless danger of it was exhilarating, but the perfect synchrony of the dance, the exquisite timing of each thrust and parry, made it a thing of beauty. It was everything he loved about their marriage compressed into a few intense moments, iron sharpening iron, a violent expression of absolute trust and confidence.
Mara was feeling very energetic that morning, leaping and twisting around him with an ease that befitted a senior Master, but Luke's first foundations had been laid by Yoda, and even now there were few who could challenge him in aerial maneuvers. The battle assumed a new intensity, both of them vaulting off one another, trading kinetic energy, kicking off walls and clashing in midair like live wires.
It could have gone on for hours, but it wouldn't be very considerate of them to monopolize the space for that long. They were only guests, after all. Mara finally stumbled, just a slightly imbalanced landing, but it was enough of a distraction for Luke to wrest her lightsaber out of her grasp and summon it into his own hand. He deactivated both blades and tossed her hilt back to her, but she silently agreed that enough was enough. They were both panting and sweating, and they pulled each other into a hug to conclude the match.
Then Mara stiffened, and Luke also noticed that they had an audience. Ben, Darred, Ruwee, and the entire crew of duty pilots were looking on from the hangar door, most of them in slack-jawed amazement.
Mara pulled away and planted a hand on her hip. "Slow morning?" she asked the pilots.
"Yes, ma'am," they admitted, but beat a hasty retreat back to their station.
Luke sighed. "Ben, I thought we told you to stop sneaking away from Nanna like this. What are you guys doing out of bed?"
Ben shrugged. "Well," he explained, "they really wanted to see your lightsaber, and I knew you probably wouldn't show it to them for no reason, so I told them there might be a chance if we got up really, really early."
Clever and resourceful, that kid was starting to remind Luke of both himself and his wife more every day. "And how did you find me?" he asked as a point of interest.
Ben shrugged again. "Same way Mom did."
Pleased by his son's new readiness to use the Force, Luke was willing to forgive his skulking around. "All right, all right," he said with a grudging smile, "show's over. You all might as well get dressed. We have things to do today."
Getting dressed in the local style was again an adventure, but not so much of a leap as it had been the night before. Ben was content to take his fashion cues from his cousins, especially since the cultured but informal dailywear was notably sparkle-free. Luke stubbornly dressed himself in his black Jedi tunic, but condescended to trade his outer robe for a native equivalent in blue and golden yellow, fixed to his shoulder with the gilded badge of the Royal Naboo.
"Are you sure?" he asked again when Mara insisted on that detail. "I don't really want to flaunt it."
"Why not?" she retorted, securing the clasp herself. "It's yours to claim. Own it. It's what they expect of you, so don't disappoint them."
After breakfast they were escorted into the palace archives, a very extensive database documenting the affairs of the kings, queens, and senators of Naboo, the history of the planet, and other items of cultural significance. It was a very comfortable room, everything upholstered in red and gold, furnished to muffle unwanted noise. An archivist droid took their initial requests and made a few suggestions, pulling up banks of relevant files and leaving them to browse at their leisure. Ben and the boys weren't as interested, and they settled on a bench seat like a three-headed monster bent over his hologame.
Mara stood behind Luke as he sat at the console, running her hand gently along his back as he began scrolling through the collection of archived holos. He was feeling vulnerable again today, still not able to completely fathom that a lifetime's worth of information about his mother finally lay at his fingertips. She said nothing, letting him go through the archive at his own pace, just providing silent support and experiencing his shifting emotions with him.
There was a lot of material to go through. Artoo had not documented much from Amidala's early reign, at least not after the defeat of the Trade Federation. An image of the victory celebration on the palace steps included a few other familiar faces.
"Hey, is that your father?" Mara asked, pointing out a blond boy Ben's age looking slightly uncomfortable in his Jedi tunic, standing near a random astromech she would bet good money was Artoo. She had a hard time imagining Anakin Skywalker ever being a child. She hadn't quite believed the holocube Leia had brought back from Tatooine all those years ago.
"I think so," Luke said. "That's Obi-Wan, anyway. Everybody looks so young."
It was bittersweet to see the earliest days of the relationship knowing how it ended. Luke had been glad to learn that his parents had truly loved each other, that they hadn't abandoned him by choice, but that just made his father's devolution into madness all the more tragic and inexplicable. It was an emotional maelstrom he had been trying to understand from within, and it had taken him to some very dark places. Certainly a large share of the blame could be pinned on Palpatine, but people were not ultimately turned toward darkness against their will.
There he was, Mara noticed, in the background of that same holo, standing there in plain sight with an insufferable smile on his face, the seed of everyone's destruction.
It was all bubbling up again, the instinctive cues from those formative memories he couldn't remember, and Luke had to pause and decide whether to indulge or dismiss it. He chose to feel it although he didn't like it and it made him extremely uncomfortable, the creeping primal dread he suspected he may have empathically absorbed from his mother. Unfortunately, it was the only shared experience they had.
"It might have so easily been different," he said, mostly to himself, imagining in the blink of an eye a thousand different scenarios that all ended more happily than the one they had lived.
"You mean if your father had been more discerning in his choice of confidant?" Mara asked as Luke began scrolling through the holos again. "I wouldn't blame him too much for that, at least not in the beginning. Palpatine had a way of getting what he wanted."
Luke grunted, and she felt a pulse of grim agreement. "He was very aptly named," he murmured into his hand, resting his elbow on the console. He was no doubt referring to the Emperor's Sith identity, Darth Sidious. "He's always there somewhere, isn't he? Slipping through the tiniest crack, poisoning everything before you even know he's there. He keeps cropping up, and I just want him gone."
A son's protective instinct was churning inside him with no outlet, victims and perpetrators all long dead. Now that Luke finally had a name and a face to love in Padmé, he also had specific wrongs to resent, and he had been struggling with that ever since the ugly truth had exploded into their lives. There was nothing he could do but swallow it and roll on, and he hated that.
Almost as if to bait him, the next holo of Queen Amidala featured Senator Palpatine whispering predatorily into her ear.
Luke's reaction was visceral and violent, and he shoved himself away from the console to pace the length of the room, primed to explode. The boys noticed, pausing their game and looking uncertain, but Mara waved them down.
"He's dead, Luke," she said, trying to calm him.
"Yeah, I know," Luke growled, turning back. "I saw him die, maybe three times. Obviously not soon enough." Palpatine had done more damage to the galaxy than anyone in living memory besides the Yuuzhan Vong, but his near conquest of the entire Skywalker family did seem rather personal. He had painstakingly corrupted and almost destroyed Luke's father, tried to ruin or kill Luke himself several times, entertained designs on both Luke's sister and his late nephew, abducted the woman he loved as a child and molded her into an assassin, and now Luke had to look at historical proof of that same loathsome man using and exploiting his mother. His fingers flexed as if they ached for a lightsaber. "I'd set fire to his grave if I thought he'd end up any more dead."
It was a rhetorical threat, because there was no such grave, but it was a dark sentiment all the same. "Let's not dwell on that," Mara suggested.
Ben, Darred, and Ruwee were rooted in place, not sure whether they dared continue as if nothing was wrong.
"You boys can't play that game all day," Mara decided. "You'll end up hunchbacked and cross-eyed." She tossed Ben a blank datacard. "Go download some sources. I want two thousand words about Grizmallt and the colonization of Naboo before the end of the week."
"But Mom!" Ben protested. "I'm not in school right now!"
"We can take school anywhere. Get Darred and Ruwee to help you."
Luke abruptly turned and headed for the door. "I'll be back," he said, still angry. "I need some air."
Mara let him go and stayed with the boys, though she did shoot a glare at Palpatine's ghost and switched off the holodisplay. They thought they had finally been free of him years ago, free of him and free of that blasted psychic hangover that was the result of extended exposure to him. The man was poison, no doubt about it, and they were only just now appreciating the extent of his pernicious influence. They had been able to heal each other, but there was nothing they could do about the damage he had done to other people.
Drifting to the window, Mara could see Luke pacing through the manicured gardens below. Ben joined her, sneaking a tentative peek of his own.
"What's wrong with Dad?" he asked.
"Oh, he's just coming to terms with some bad things that happened a long time ago," Mara explained. "There may be a lot of that while we're here, but he'll be fine." She ruffled Ben's hair and slapped him on the back. "Go work on that report while you can. Don't worry about your father. That's my job."
Luke stalked through the small maze of hedges and sculpted topiaries, trying to find some calm in the sound of gravel beneath his boots, the smell of the trees, and the warmth of the sun. It wasn't Naboo's fault that it had produced a monster like Palpatine. At least, he was pretty sure it wasn't.
The whole thing was making him jumpy and deeply irritable. It was all too close for comfort, and after just one day he was sick of being reminded of it. He was here for his mother, and yet there was Palpatine at every turn, coiled around her memory like a snake. Luke had known all about his father being enthralled to the Emperor, but he hadn't expected that to be just one half of a devastating pincer maneuver. It bothered him on a fundamental level, as if the pincers were still closing. At the same time, Luke realized it was all absurd, this neurotic compulsion to demand that a dead man back up and give him some space.
The dreaded Emperor had been nothing but a distant name once, so distant as to be almost inconsequential, a vague menace sitting near that bright center of the galaxy he would probably never see, impossibly far away from everything he had ever known. Luke was still unable to quite accept how repulsively close they had really been, moving in all the same circles, originating from the same planet, the same city, even—all the fates forbid—the same extended family. He would have to accept it, but at the moment he didn't know how. It just made him angry. He'd had no idea of the horrifying context all those times he had faced Palpatine in the flesh, but Palpatine had known. Palpatine had known exactly what he was doing, bleeding the next generation of Skywalkers to fuel his own rise once again, and that just made Luke angrier. It was no wonder Obi-Wan had tried so hard to hide him and Leia when they were young.
But then Luke discovered that he wasn't in the mood to think about Kenobi either. Old Ben had allowed some very significant secrets to die with him, and had declined to share them even from beyond the grave. Luke was convinced Kenobi had only given up the truth about Leia under duress, and even then he had let Luke draw his own conclusions. That one still burned, mostly because of the disaster that might have ensued if they had been left to their own devices without Han to come between them. Luke had been smitten with Leia from the first moment they'd met, and that sibling bond could easily be misinterpreted if one wasn't expecting it. That was probably why he'd been so eager to fill his mind with Gaeriel Captison after Endor, because most of his favorite thoughts about Leia had suddenly become wildly inappropriate.
He was tired of being lied to, tired of being denied basic truths about himself and those he cared about. What was the good of trying to go through life with your eyes wide open if everyone else was withholding vital pieces of the puzzle?
It was on that note that he looked up and saw Sola Naberrie coming along the path ahead. She slowed when she saw him, and obviously considered turning back the other way, but there was no avoiding him now. She gathered herself and marched on toward the door, still slender and willowy in her later years, proud and stubborn. It reminded him of Leia, and Luke briefly wondered how similar Padmé might have been if she had survived.
It looked like she was actually going to try breezing past him without any acknowledgement, something Luke had already decided he would not allow. "Good morning, Lady Naberrie," he said.
Sola nodded. "Grand Master Skywalker." She continued walking, clearly hoping that would be sufficient.
"Sola," Luke began again, and something about his hardening tone and demeanor was enough to stop her. At his age he wasn't willing to be brushed off so easily anymore. "I'd appreciate a word with you."
It was still a request, but just barely. The old woman stood her ground with an air of tolerant annoyance that he didn't like, but at least she would give him a hearing.
"Forgive me if I assume too much," Luke said, cutting to the chase, "but I gather our relationship did not come as a surprise to you."
"I had my suspicions," Sola admitted. "We could all see that Jedi Skywalker had an unhealthy obsession with my sister. When they both met an untimely end, the circumstances were very obscure. It was an unsettled time, and official accounts varied wildly, but the fact of her secret pregnancy was no longer in doubt. It was assumed and widely reported that her child had died with her. You, with your distinctive surname, did not escape my notice during the rebellion, but we knew nothing of Anakin's background, nor whether yours was a common name, and so we thought nothing of it. But later," she said, narrowing her eyes, "after the turn of the war, it was revealed that you and Leia Organa were in fact twin Skywalkers, that you were mysteriously and suspiciously separated at birth the same year my sister died, that you were indeed Anakin's children. Then I had no doubt."
"But you said nothing," Luke persisted. He had been put through a lot of trouble and misery over the years, groping in the dark for any clue to his mother's identity, a mystery that might have been cleared up with a single message. "Why?"
Sola gave him a sour look. "Surely you can understand our reluctance to embrace the scandal. Padmé Amidala's salacious secret marriage to a rogue Jedi? It was the Jedi who failed to protect her, failed to prevent one of their own from taking advantage of her, and then delivered her body to us with barely the pretense of an apology." She indicated his appearance with a sneer and an impatient gesture. "Now you are the Jedi, the exalted Master of them all. You may be Padmé's son by an accident of birth, Luke, but you have always been Anakin's blood. You would do well to be satisfied with that."
She turned to go inside.
"Stop."
It was a bald-faced command, and it did stop her immediately.
How did this woman even now presume to deny him his own mother, to imply that he was somehow less than worthy?
How did she have the audacity?
"I'm sorry if the accidents of my birth are offensive to you, Lady Naberrie," Luke said, his festering anger finding a new object. "I hope you don't think I've come here just to tarnish the good name of your house and claim its honors by force. I know very well what I am, and I don't need this," he insisted, swatting at the royal device pinned to his shoulder. "If I were younger, I might have renounced it and left you to choke on your own pride, but after waiting fifty-five years just to know my mother's name, I won't give it up so easily."
Luke had advanced several paces, coming to stand toe to toe with her. "I didn't come here to claim a title," he said severely. "I came to find my family, some of whom apparently knew exactly who I was for decades and still said nothing."
He was furious and made no attempt to hide it, painfully reminded of all the family he had already lost—his father, his mother, Shmi, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, Aunt Dama and Uncle Sam, Uncle Haro, his own nephew Anakin, the Naberrie grandparents he might have known—and how he would have given his good hand to have any one of them back again.
Luke shook his head in disgust. "It must be an extraordinary privilege to have so many relations that you can so extravagantly discard your own sister's children. Think twice before you discard anyone else, Aunt Sola," he warned, sweeping past her to storm inside alone. "Someday we may be scarce."
Mara felt Luke trying to gather himself in the corridor before opening the door to the archives. He had gone out to calm down, and instead was more riled up than before. She shared a significant look with Ben from across the room. Despite her insistence that he focus on his project, they had both witnessed the confrontation from the window, and they could feel the storm of resentment Luke was still trying to tamp down. Mara finally went to retrieve her husband, opening the door and interrupting his self-imposed solitude.
"Come on," she said, gesturing inside. "You can't hide from either of us."
Luke sighed. "I guess you're right."
"So," Mara continued, snapping her fingers at Ben and closing the door behind them, "too scandalous a relative for milady's taste?"
"Oh, you heard?" His tone was equal parts sarcasm and indignation.
She ran her hands along his shoulders, able to soothe those rampant sentiments he wasn't quite ready to renounce yet. "Just a guess. Maybe you thought it would be easy for a moisture-farming son of a Sith Lord and his smuggler assassin wife to horn their way into a royal family."
Luke sneered. "I don't care about all the pomp and ceremony."
"No, but they do. At least Sola does, she and Ryoo. Their loss, I say. Pooja seems much more reasonable."
"Yeah." He was calming down now, reminded that there were some among his newfound family who weren't sorry to know him. Luke stroked her face and pulled her closer, anchoring himself to her again amidst all the upheaval.
But Mara knew the real reason he was so agitated had little to do with Sola and everything to do with Palpatine. "He's really getting under your skin, huh?" she said.
"He is," Luke admitted. "I can't help it. He's literally the last person I want to see, but it's like I can feel him stalking me, every time I turn around, always closer than I thought. It's creepy."
Mara wrapped her arms around him, doing what she could to at least keep the specter at a decorous distance. "Like I said, he had a way of getting what he wanted."
"It used to be so far away," Luke continued, accepting the embrace. "When Obi-Wan was trying to convince me to run away to Alderaan with him, that was my excuse, because it did feel that way. The Empire was worlds removed from our problems on Tatooine, and there was nothing any one of us could do about it, which I'm sure is what they were saying about Uncle Haro when he left." He sighed. "Now it's so close, breathing down my neck, so tangled up with our family that we don't make sense without it."
Then he stiffened, and Mara knew some black thought had just occurred to him. She almost asked him to leave it be, but that was why they were here in the first place, to confront all these realities, pleasant or otherwise.
Luke pulled away and sat down at the console again. Instead of the holos, he pulled up Senator Amidala's official record of service at Coruscant.
"You're not going to insist on reading through the whole transcript, are you?" Mara asked, seeing it was thousands of pages long.
Luke shook his head, typing in a prompt. "Just one session," he assured her as the information scrolled by in an unintelligible blur.
It stopped right at the end, an emergency session of the galactic congress that would live in infamy. Sure enough, Amidala's presence was noted, but there was no vote to record and she hadn't ventured to make any public comment. It must have been a very sobering day.
Luke sank back into the chair, looking disgusted and defeated. "We were there, Mara," he said. "Leia and I were there in the room when he declared the Galactic Empire."
None of it was far away anymore.