Love Is a Choice
"But you'll be home for dinner tonight," Luke said. "Don't spend all night working again."
"Believe me, I'll be home," she said. "That's where I'm heading now."
"I'd better see what Han and Leia have to say about Gejjen, while I hang around the Senate and wait for Omas."
"If I'm still sitting at home with a congealing plate of nerf casserole at midnight . . ."
"Okay. Dinner at eight. Set in permacrete."
Despite the best of intentions, Luke was not home by eight. As usual, he had his reasons. Sometimes you really just have to stop and take a moment. The domestic dinner date from Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice that we didn't get to see.
40 ABY, Skywalker apartment, Coruscant
It was nearly a quarter to nine before Mara was willing to admit that she had probably jinxed herself yet again. That was always the trouble with making definite plans—too much potential for disappointment. She was absently scrolling through the feeds on her datapad, skimming through items of galactic news she didn't want to know anything more about, sitting in front of that plate of congealing casserole she had been dreading. She couldn't even be mad at Luke. It probably wasn't his fault. It was just the way life was.
"What do you think?" she asked Artoo, who was cozied into his charging niche in the kitchen. "Traffic or politicians?"
The astromech just whistled mournfully.
Mara certainly wasn't mourning the casserole. It wasn't anything to rave about, just a brick of frozen mass-produced nutrition for those nights when neither of them felt like cooking. It was definitely one of those nights.
The meds had taken the edge off her headache, and the short trance had diminished the swelling, but that gash in her forehead would be reminding her not to underestimate Lumiya for a while. The split lip, black eye, and the cable burn around her neck all served the same purpose. Had she walked into the Council like that to mortify her own vanity, or had she secretly relished the shock value of her entrance, needing the other Masters to appreciate that she and Luke were doing more than just sitting at home wringing their hands? It had certainly shocked Luke, something she felt a little guilty about, mostly because she knew how guilty he already felt for failing yet again to take care of Lumiya himself.
Deep down, Mara couldn't blame him for that, either. It was frustrating, and she'd made a point of telling him so, but Luke couldn't kill someone who wouldn't fight him. Lumiya had finally gotten smart and recognized that, and had started using that technicality to her advantage. Luke was simply incapable of dispatching anyone who insisted on having a civilized conversation instead, and Mara wouldn't change that about him. That's what he had her for. Lumiya knew Mara would kill her cold, and so would fight. Problem solved. After a few days, she'd be back on the hunt.
The old girl had some staying power, Mara had to admit. There was an uncanny harmony between them, two Emperor's Hands who at one time had looked enough alike to have been mistaken for sisters, both of whom had ventured into an intimate orbit with Luke Skywalker and gotten burned. Mara had eventually accepted the painful course correction and surrendered to her better nature. Lumiya had instead nursed a grudge for forty years, subsisting on a diet of revenge and resentment, appearing from time to time to rain havoc on the man who had maimed her. They were all approaching sixty, and she was still at it. It was no wonder Luke had allegedly expressed an antipathy for redheads in those early years.
Mara had finally resigned herself to sink a fork into her food when she felt that familiar pressure in her mind, constant, affectionate, remorseful. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Be there soon. She put her fork down to wait for him. It had already been an hour, so she supposed she could spare a few more minutes.
She could feel he was tired, worn down by more than just a long day. Luke was worried about her, worried about Ben, uneasy about Jacen. At least he was back in regular communication with Han and Leia, regardless of how irregular it may be for the Grand Master to have such high-profile defectors only a comm call away. They didn't care about the impropriety anymore. If anything was going to tear their family apart, it wasn't going to be politics.
Family was truly a force to be reckoned with. After living more than half her life without one, Mara had come to appreciate how strong that bond could be. It was the fortress Luke maintained around himself, his anchor and his retreat. It was the treasure Leia protected, her reason to keep fighting when everything else seemed lost. It was the home Han had never expected to have, the beacon that kept calling Jaina back, the foundation Ben was trying to build a life on even if he insisted on doing it alone. Once upon a time, it had been important to Jacen too.
When Luke finally dragged himself through the door, Mara was mildly surprised to see he was weighed down with several shopping bags. He dumped them on the counter, took one look at the casserole, and then picked up the pan and let it slide into the garbage.
"You don't want that," he assured her before she could object. "I picked up something else on the way home, something bite-sized and not too acidic. Don't want to hurt your lip." He sounded as tired as he felt, tired and exasperated, trapped on that ever-spinning rodent wheel of interplanetary politics. Finally, he turned. "Hey, sweetheart, would you mind stepping out for two minutes? Then come back."
Tired and exasperated herself, Mara was just intrigued enough to play along. She shrugged. "Okay."
Two minutes seemed more like ten while she was standing awkwardly outside her own front door. The last thing she needed just then was to have the nosy bizit down the hall catch sight of her face and report a domestic battery to CSF. The case would go nowhere, but the headlines would be rich.
When her chrono had marked exactly one hundred and twenty seconds, Mara opened the door and walked back in. Luke had made the most of the time. He had softened the lighting and set the table with some of her favorite takeout. He had even scattered flower petals in a trail from the door to the kitchen. In light of their current problems, it was a pitiful effort that Mara nonetheless appreciated very much. She chose to ignore the overflowing garbage bin, stuffed with empty boxes, bags, and denuded stems.
"This is what people do, right?" Luke asked, transferring their drinks from the disposable cups into more civilized glassware, none of it quite able to put a smile back on his face. He was grasping at the proverbial straws. "How normal people show their wives they appreciate them?" He reached and added a squirt of her favorite liquid vitamins to her glass, turning the contents a deep purple. He paused as understated music began playing in the other room, and Artoo came rolling back in. "Knew I forgot something."
Mara slid her arm around her husband and pulled him away from all his fussy preparations. "You think I need flower petals to feel appreciated?"
Luke melted into her embrace, holding her close but very carefully, not sure how extensively she had been injured. "I'm sorry," he said.
"For what?"
"For everything. For all of it. For the way we have to live, for what's happening to Ben, for Jacen, for all this trouble with Lumiya, for your face . . ." He pushed her hair back so he could see that gash again in all its crusted glory. "I hate seeing this happen to you."
"Well, I appreciate that," Mara said, swaying gently to the music and forcing him to do likewise, "but you don't have to apologize for it. This is who we are, Luke, and I never expected otherwise. She won't be so lucky next time."
"I know, but—"
"But nothing," Mara insisted. "Stop. You're getting yourself all in a twist again about things you can't change, and that never does any good."
"I could have changed this," Luke countered, bitter with self-reproach, "if I'd just stayed on task at Gilatter and finished the job."
"All right, so she played you," Mara said, putting that to one side. She had accepted it now, and didn't see any reason to berate him about it anymore. "She knew exactly what to say, and only because you're so blasted forgiving that you'd let a vornskr talk you out of a tree. We all get played sometimes. I'm pretty sure Jacen has been playing me for months, and I'm not happy about it, but it is what it is. That's why we need to work as a team again, the way we used to. You can tell me when Jacen's selling me a load of poodoo, and I'll bring you Lumiya's head in a box."
He sighed, but didn't protest. "I just wanted better for us," Luke said, content to follow her lead even if his heart wasn't in it yet. "When I asked you to marry me, I wanted to give you so much more than all my old unfinished business."
Mara drew a deep breath to blunt her initial frustration, pulled Luke closer and laid her head on his shoulder. "Later you'll have to tell me who told you that was all you ever gave me, so I can grind his face into the pavement," she said icily. "Practically every good thing I've ever had has been because of you. I don't regret signing up for this crazy ride, I'd do it again, and I'll fold anyone who suggests otherwise like prefab drop module. You understand me?"
Luke suppressed a wry laugh, her abrasive reassurance beginning to lighten his mood. She could always cheer him up if she yelled at him just the right way. "Yes, ma'am."
"Besides," Mara continued, lifting her head again with her best saucy look, "I have a new and intriguing point of view for you."
"Oh?"
"I believe you when you said Lumiya doesn't seem to hate you. Maybe she doesn't. I think she hates me."
Luke frowned, more out of skepticism than displeasure. "What's she got against you?" he asked.
"She won't say," Mara admitted, "at least not in so many words. But when she caught me poking around her ship up there on Hesperidium, she called me the worst and most degrading thing she could think of. Any guesses?"
"Um," Luke hesitated, intrigued but cautious, "I think any guess might prove hazardous to my health."
Mara smiled, a crooked one to spare her lip. Smart man. "She called me 'little housewife,'" she said. "That was the first thing out of her mouth. For all Lumiya's protests that she's grown beyond emotion and self-interest, I'll bet there's still a part of her that's choking on the fact that I'm happy and she's not, that I get to sleep beside Luke Skywalker every night, and all she got was a stolen kiss and the hot end of your cannons."
"I never meant to hurt her," Luke maintained, just for the record. "That was her choice."
"I know," Mara assured him, "and she's still making that choice. You'd have been forced to hurt me too if I'd kept pressing the issue back in the day." She looked into his eyes, and could still recognize a whole constellation of reasons why she was grateful to have gone another way. "You convinced me to choose differently."
Luke gazed unabashedly at her as well, blind to all defects and flaws, his grim expression finally softened into a smile. "So that's your theory?" he asked. "Lumiya envies you?"
Mara shrugged. "It's as good as any other. We're going to kill her regardless."
That dry laugh finally sputtered out of him, and Luke shook his head. "Just so you know," he said, "I don't see you as my little housewife. You say things like that too often."
"Oh?" Mara tilted her head with new interest. "How do you see me?"
Luke smiled again, recognizing the potential trap, but confident he could clear it. "I think you are the most incredible and most beautiful Jedi Master I've ever known," he said, "and it still amazes me that I'm lucky enough to wake up with you every morning."
Mara couldn't stop herself from smiling, no matter how much it hurt. "Good answer, farmboy," she granted, coming up on her toes to give him a very careful kiss, gratified to feel that warm bloom of happiness deep in his chest. "I love you, too, and don't you ever forget it. Now, come on. I'm starving, and you're letting dinner get cold. Again."
The story continues in the next chapter, Breaking Ranks (Chapter 5).