Fic: "The thing that burns him" 1/1 -- Luke vignette, post-Sacrifice
Title: "The thing that burns him"
Character/s: Luke Skywalker, reference to Mara Jade Skywalker, Ben Skywalker
Timeframe: Between Sacrifice and Inferno
Keywords: Angst, missing scene, introspection
Warning: Sacrifice spoilers, if anyone anywhere is still unspoiled for that one.
A/N: Also posted at the JC.
Summary: Luke struggles to cope with loss in the wake of his wife's death
====
It’s a strange thing, grief. He has thought that he’s known it before. He has lost people, people close to him, people he loves. Some died, fading away in the dank light of a swamp world. Some were murdered in fiery explosions of light or in single, clean sweeps of a blade. Some were just gone, walking away from his life. He grieved them all, and he grieved other losses, too, knowingly or unknowingly. He grieved the father he had worshipped as a child, consumed by innocence-destroying truth. He grieved a small part of his faith in himself, his belief in his own strength and goodness, after the blunders at Byss.
The loss of Mara, though - the loss of Mara is another thing entirely. It exists beyond emotion, beyond thought, so vast and meaningless he can’t rationalise it, however he tries. It feels as though he is trying to grasp something impossible: another language, a concept so alien it defies the bounds of his thoughts. There is a strange impermeable emptiness, numb like the phantom sensation of a missing limb. It horrifies, but it entrances, like some grotesque thing, and he is unable to look away.
He moves through each day, concentrating on the tasks that demand his attention. He ignores the flickers of thought, smothered half-born, that he should mention this to Mara when he sees her, that she would know what do say to this person, that he would ask her about that or another thing. He expects to see her at the edge of his eye when he turns, his eye anticipating a flash of dark red-gold hair and a flicker of pale skin that aren’t there. If his momentary hesitation at the absence is visible, no one comments on it.
She is there when he dreams, if he sleeps. The dreams aren’t about her, necessarily; they are confusing things and confused, often, Jacen shouting incomprehensible things, Ben standing far away, Leia with her back turned, Jaina pursuing things he can’t see, Han grim-faced with blaster in hand, aiming at nothing. Mara is just there, because she’s always there, always part of him, central feature of his emotional landscape. He wakes from these dreams and lies in darkness, conflicted; feeling the space beside him more keenly than ever, yet touched by a lingering warmth held over from the murkiest edges of sleep, a sense that she is not far away.
He is desperately grateful for Ben, for his presence. Ben has lost a mother, and needs not to lose a father also. He is mindful of that in the deepest darkest parts of the day and night, when the loss looms large and threatening, and he wants briefly to succumb to - to whatever lies beyond that terrifying gulf of pain. He must resist, for Ben needs him; needs Luke Skywalker, needs him to be a father and a teacher and needs him to function. Ben struggles through his own maze of sorrow, and needs his father to help him through and keep him whole. Luke clings to that, though he is careful not to let Ben see how desperately he does so; Ben has already lost far too much and been forced to bear greater burdens than one his age should have to bear. And though they are linked in their loss, Ben has lost a mother, while Luke has lost a wife; the same person is lost, but their losses are not identical. He forces himself to be mindful of that with Ben, to reach past the urge to drown in the inward sea of his own grief and memory to make himself focus on what Mara was to Ben, what his son needs and what his son has lost.
He greatly admired Mara as a mother to their son, and when he sees Ben, he sees the love and the strength Mara gave to him. He also sees the shades of her face in their son’s features, in the shape of his jaw and in the fire in his hair, and the echoes of Mara in the faint, proud defiance in the way Ben holds himself. Even when Ben is uncertain, Luke sees in him Mara when she was younger, an age ago when they first met, and she was beautiful and bitter and angry, desperate for something to believe in. He’s intensely proud of the person his son has become, even through adversity and grief he should never have had to suffer, and while he’s too fragmented to tell him in words, he trusts Ben knows, because he’s so like his mother, and she always knew too.
He feels keenly and perhaps selfishly, though without guilt, that he alone best understands just what the universe lost in Mara. He saw and knew her in a way no one else did. He knew her body, knew how she moved, how she breathed, how her lips curved as she spoke, how her hair tangled in liquid shapes on the pillow as she slept. He knew, not everything about her, but more than anyone else had ever been allowed to see, and it enables him to perceive with aching depth just what brilliance has been taken away from him and from the face of the galaxy. It feels at times like a nightmare come true, like something he has been dreading for many years at last realised, and that heightens the sense of unreality. Wasn’t it a vision of Mara dead that sent him desperately searching for her all those years ago on Nirauan? It had terrified him then to a degree he had not understood, until he was forced to confront the mire of feelings that lay between them. He’d asked her to marry him then, that vision of death still hanging over his head, committing to her regardless of potential loss, realising the gain was ever greater. He’d almost lost her to the Vong illness, her vibrant life-force siphoned away over long and painful months. Ben’s birth had been a dark period, perhaps more so than Mara ever realised, certainly to a greater degree than Luke had ever revealed to Ben, for Luke had been forced to watch helplessly while she died by inches and degrees. His visions then had been bereft of her presence, had whispered again of her death, but they had joined and triumphed, and his unease in that moment had been forgotten in the joy that followed. He has come close to losing her so many times only to snatch her back to him at the last moment; he was infinitely blessed for each of those moments, and yet - and yet. Part of him still waits, now, for that last-second salvation that will never ever come. Part of him, he suspects, always will.
The last few days she was alive had been a tapestry of gaps and absences, painfully at odds with years of togetherness. He’d seen her in passing, glimpsed for a few minutes, and there’d been no time, none - he thought then there would be time later. Their last words were trivialities, and he was asleep when she left on her last, final mission, leaving him no farewell, no last embrace, no warmth of his skin to hers. Just a note, in the end, and the memory of that final phantom touch.
Don’t be mad at me, farmboy…
It isn’t, he thinks, enough. Not close to enough.
It stings when he thinks about it, because it reminds him that she died with something important untold between them. He felt that there was something there, in those last days, but he didn’t press her for it; there would be time to ask later, he had thought, like a fool. It isn’t the secret itself that bothers him now, but the fact after so many years of intimacy, she died with something unsaid. Why did she not tell him? He isn’t sure. Perhaps it was some suspicion she harboured, and she awaited proof. Perhaps she waited for a particular time. Perhaps it was something huge, something terrible, perhaps, something that made she, who knew him sometimes better than he knew himself, hold off telling him. His curiosity is duller than the scorched sand back on Tatooine. It’s gone now, with her, and he may never know what it was. Just another thing lost.
He forces himself not to drown in what is gone, and it is a conscious, meticulous effort, requiring control in every moment. He’s good at control; Mara taught him so much about it, with her strength and her determination. He has to be strong for their son, as he’d once promised her, many years ago, when Ben was still an infant, far away in hiding while they were nearing the end of fighting in the Yuuzhan Vong war. Love him with all your heart, Mara had said then; make him the centre of your world. She feared that something were to befall her, his anguish at the loss might overwhelm him, might erode even his duty to their child; he had sworn then not to ever let that happen, and he swears the same again to himself and to her, now.
Then no matter what, she’d said all those years ago, the future’s assured.
Looking at Ben, living embodiment and testimony of his love for Mara, Luke has to agree. No matter how bleak the days seem, Ben is there, their wonderful son, part Luke and part Mara and an individual in his own right. Luke protects him with everything he has, as he has promised.
It hurts to breathe, and it hurts to live, but for Ben, for Mara, Luke will do so.
-end-
====
Character/s: Luke Skywalker, reference to Mara Jade Skywalker, Ben Skywalker
Timeframe: Between Sacrifice and Inferno
Keywords: Angst, missing scene, introspection
Warning: Sacrifice spoilers, if anyone anywhere is still unspoiled for that one.
A/N: Also posted at the JC.
Summary: Luke struggles to cope with loss in the wake of his wife's death
====
It’s a strange thing, grief. He has thought that he’s known it before. He has lost people, people close to him, people he loves. Some died, fading away in the dank light of a swamp world. Some were murdered in fiery explosions of light or in single, clean sweeps of a blade. Some were just gone, walking away from his life. He grieved them all, and he grieved other losses, too, knowingly or unknowingly. He grieved the father he had worshipped as a child, consumed by innocence-destroying truth. He grieved a small part of his faith in himself, his belief in his own strength and goodness, after the blunders at Byss.
The loss of Mara, though - the loss of Mara is another thing entirely. It exists beyond emotion, beyond thought, so vast and meaningless he can’t rationalise it, however he tries. It feels as though he is trying to grasp something impossible: another language, a concept so alien it defies the bounds of his thoughts. There is a strange impermeable emptiness, numb like the phantom sensation of a missing limb. It horrifies, but it entrances, like some grotesque thing, and he is unable to look away.
He moves through each day, concentrating on the tasks that demand his attention. He ignores the flickers of thought, smothered half-born, that he should mention this to Mara when he sees her, that she would know what do say to this person, that he would ask her about that or another thing. He expects to see her at the edge of his eye when he turns, his eye anticipating a flash of dark red-gold hair and a flicker of pale skin that aren’t there. If his momentary hesitation at the absence is visible, no one comments on it.
She is there when he dreams, if he sleeps. The dreams aren’t about her, necessarily; they are confusing things and confused, often, Jacen shouting incomprehensible things, Ben standing far away, Leia with her back turned, Jaina pursuing things he can’t see, Han grim-faced with blaster in hand, aiming at nothing. Mara is just there, because she’s always there, always part of him, central feature of his emotional landscape. He wakes from these dreams and lies in darkness, conflicted; feeling the space beside him more keenly than ever, yet touched by a lingering warmth held over from the murkiest edges of sleep, a sense that she is not far away.
He is desperately grateful for Ben, for his presence. Ben has lost a mother, and needs not to lose a father also. He is mindful of that in the deepest darkest parts of the day and night, when the loss looms large and threatening, and he wants briefly to succumb to - to whatever lies beyond that terrifying gulf of pain. He must resist, for Ben needs him; needs Luke Skywalker, needs him to be a father and a teacher and needs him to function. Ben struggles through his own maze of sorrow, and needs his father to help him through and keep him whole. Luke clings to that, though he is careful not to let Ben see how desperately he does so; Ben has already lost far too much and been forced to bear greater burdens than one his age should have to bear. And though they are linked in their loss, Ben has lost a mother, while Luke has lost a wife; the same person is lost, but their losses are not identical. He forces himself to be mindful of that with Ben, to reach past the urge to drown in the inward sea of his own grief and memory to make himself focus on what Mara was to Ben, what his son needs and what his son has lost.
He greatly admired Mara as a mother to their son, and when he sees Ben, he sees the love and the strength Mara gave to him. He also sees the shades of her face in their son’s features, in the shape of his jaw and in the fire in his hair, and the echoes of Mara in the faint, proud defiance in the way Ben holds himself. Even when Ben is uncertain, Luke sees in him Mara when she was younger, an age ago when they first met, and she was beautiful and bitter and angry, desperate for something to believe in. He’s intensely proud of the person his son has become, even through adversity and grief he should never have had to suffer, and while he’s too fragmented to tell him in words, he trusts Ben knows, because he’s so like his mother, and she always knew too.
He feels keenly and perhaps selfishly, though without guilt, that he alone best understands just what the universe lost in Mara. He saw and knew her in a way no one else did. He knew her body, knew how she moved, how she breathed, how her lips curved as she spoke, how her hair tangled in liquid shapes on the pillow as she slept. He knew, not everything about her, but more than anyone else had ever been allowed to see, and it enables him to perceive with aching depth just what brilliance has been taken away from him and from the face of the galaxy. It feels at times like a nightmare come true, like something he has been dreading for many years at last realised, and that heightens the sense of unreality. Wasn’t it a vision of Mara dead that sent him desperately searching for her all those years ago on Nirauan? It had terrified him then to a degree he had not understood, until he was forced to confront the mire of feelings that lay between them. He’d asked her to marry him then, that vision of death still hanging over his head, committing to her regardless of potential loss, realising the gain was ever greater. He’d almost lost her to the Vong illness, her vibrant life-force siphoned away over long and painful months. Ben’s birth had been a dark period, perhaps more so than Mara ever realised, certainly to a greater degree than Luke had ever revealed to Ben, for Luke had been forced to watch helplessly while she died by inches and degrees. His visions then had been bereft of her presence, had whispered again of her death, but they had joined and triumphed, and his unease in that moment had been forgotten in the joy that followed. He has come close to losing her so many times only to snatch her back to him at the last moment; he was infinitely blessed for each of those moments, and yet - and yet. Part of him still waits, now, for that last-second salvation that will never ever come. Part of him, he suspects, always will.
The last few days she was alive had been a tapestry of gaps and absences, painfully at odds with years of togetherness. He’d seen her in passing, glimpsed for a few minutes, and there’d been no time, none - he thought then there would be time later. Their last words were trivialities, and he was asleep when she left on her last, final mission, leaving him no farewell, no last embrace, no warmth of his skin to hers. Just a note, in the end, and the memory of that final phantom touch.
Don’t be mad at me, farmboy…
It isn’t, he thinks, enough. Not close to enough.
It stings when he thinks about it, because it reminds him that she died with something important untold between them. He felt that there was something there, in those last days, but he didn’t press her for it; there would be time to ask later, he had thought, like a fool. It isn’t the secret itself that bothers him now, but the fact after so many years of intimacy, she died with something unsaid. Why did she not tell him? He isn’t sure. Perhaps it was some suspicion she harboured, and she awaited proof. Perhaps she waited for a particular time. Perhaps it was something huge, something terrible, perhaps, something that made she, who knew him sometimes better than he knew himself, hold off telling him. His curiosity is duller than the scorched sand back on Tatooine. It’s gone now, with her, and he may never know what it was. Just another thing lost.
He forces himself not to drown in what is gone, and it is a conscious, meticulous effort, requiring control in every moment. He’s good at control; Mara taught him so much about it, with her strength and her determination. He has to be strong for their son, as he’d once promised her, many years ago, when Ben was still an infant, far away in hiding while they were nearing the end of fighting in the Yuuzhan Vong war. Love him with all your heart, Mara had said then; make him the centre of your world. She feared that something were to befall her, his anguish at the loss might overwhelm him, might erode even his duty to their child; he had sworn then not to ever let that happen, and he swears the same again to himself and to her, now.
Then no matter what, she’d said all those years ago, the future’s assured.
Looking at Ben, living embodiment and testimony of his love for Mara, Luke has to agree. No matter how bleak the days seem, Ben is there, their wonderful son, part Luke and part Mara and an individual in his own right. Luke protects him with everything he has, as he has promised.
It hurts to breathe, and it hurts to live, but for Ben, for Mara, Luke will do so.
-end-
====