Fic: "Bloodstain and Ember" -- Luke, Leia, Mara AU, 1/1

[deaka]

Title: Bloodstain and Ember
Rating: PG
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Mara Jade
Pairings: Luke/Mara
Keywords: Angst, AU
Disclaimer: Star Wars belongs to Lucas et al, not me.

WARNINGS: References to character death, past torture and current angst.

Summary: Sometimes, having survived is the most difficult part.

A/N: Cross-posted at TFN.



Luke moved his lightsaber in a sweeping arc, automatically and unconsciously adjusting for the altered motion of his prosthetic arm at the joint of elbow and shoulder. His lightsaber blade met a green one, and locked there.

His opponent still fought like an assassin, despite years of re-training. Her movements were centred inward and contained, rather than being outward and showy. She was precise to a fault. Her grip on the hilt of her weapon was steady.

She met his gaze as their blades spat and hummed between them, the flat green of her eyes reflecting the brilliant light, her expression shuttered.

“Enough,” he said. He lifted his blade away.

She lowered hers, still watching him. He had become accustomed to deflecting that look, or at least to telling himself he was doing so. He turned his head, and that was when he saw the other woman leaning against the far wall.

“I’ll see you back at the ship,” he said absently, deactivating his lightsaber.

From the edge of his eye, he caught her nod. He turned his head marginally, watching as she walked away, her gait effortlessly economic. Her hair was tied back, red tail brushing the collar of her plain grey jumpsuit.

He lifted a hand to finger his own hair. It, too, was becoming wilder than he liked. They had been out of civilisation too long, he thought.

For a moment, a memory flickered in his mind: her hair, free of constraint, the ends tickling his face as she leaned over him. He tasted her breath on his lips, felt the points of pressure where her body touched his, firm and gentle, infinitely real.

He pushed it away.

He turned toward the other woman. She leaned by the main door, arms crossed, one booted foot against the wall behind her, pose at odds with the fineness of her maroon-red bolero and cream tunic. Age had treated her well, though the marks under her eyes bespoke weariness.

She pushed from the wall as he approached, quirking an eyebrow. “Plan on using that?” A nod indicated the unlit lightsaber he still held in one hand, and she smiled a little, brown eyes cool. He caught himself, and clipped the hilt to his belt. He indicated they should walk.

He was forced to adjust his tread to hers after a few steps, as his was quick, hers more measured. He controlled his impatience at the slowed pace.

“How are the children?” he asked after they’d left the building, stepping out onto the faux-skyway beyond. The long corridor was devoid of other people. Holographic panels secured in the walls played looped displays, currently a jagged metropolitan skyline and under a twilit, brittle sky.

His eyes slid away of their own accord. When they encountered hers, he fought an urge to flinch.

She looked at him warily. “Fine,” she said. “The next hyperspace clearing is in a month. I plan to visit then.”

“They must be almost old enough to train,” he said.

She drew a breath. “If you try to turn my children into Jedi, I will have you hunted down,” she said. Her voice was even, but harder than durasteel.

“You deny them their birthright.”

Her expression turned even colder, her eyes almost black in the light. “If you want children to fill your Jedi ranks,” she said, with slow, harsh precision, “make your own.”

He suppressed an exhalation. “I’m not going to come in the night and steal them away from you, Leia.”

Her lips compressed, she cast him a look, flickeringly uncertain, then turned her head away. He set his jaw resignedly.

“How is Mara?” she said slyly, after a moment.

“You saw her,” he said. “She’s well.”

“She won’t wait for you forever.”

“Good.” He closed his fist, then opened it, gazing straight ahead.

“She cares about you,” Leia’s voice had softened, just slightly. “And you can’t deny to me that you have feelings for her. I don’t understand why you torture yourself.”

He continued to gaze ahead. “I have nothing to offer her.”

“Isn’t that for her to decide?”

He said nothing.

“Besides,” Leia said, “it’s quite obvious that all she wants is you.”

He blew out a ragged laugh. “Me?” he echoed. “I can’t give her that. There’s hardly anything left, is there.”

Leia touched his arm hesitantly, over the coarse grey of his jumpsuit. He pulled from the touch, not seeking sympathy, but her fingers tightened.

“Han wouldn’t begrudge you a life,” she said intently.

“Han wouldn’t give a damn,” he said.

Her fingers tightened further. He imagined her face whitening, though he held his gaze away from her. “Don’t.”

“You weren’t there,” he said. “He saw me, in those cells. I watched them do things to him, terrible things, and he never, ever forgot.”

Her fingernails were biting into his flesh now, through the sturdy jumpsuit. “Stop,” she said through her teeth.

He fell silent. Gradually her fingers loosened, as she breathed carefully.

“Anyway,” he said, after a long pause. “I have to put the Jedi order first. What kind of life would that be? I couldn’t subject anyone to that.”

They passed a doorway, closed and sealed. In the thick black glass, he glimpsed their reflection, and was caught for a moment at how different they were. Leia wore her hair pulled back, all serene beauty and hard eyes. His hair was lighter than hers, touched with grey that had grown in years ago, tending toward untidiness as it did when allowed to grow unchecked - and then there were the scars on his face, and the pale eyes he was told were unnerving; Mara said he didn’t blink enough.

People said to him that he looked like his sister, and he knew they were lying.

Leia had released him, now. “Oh, grow up,” she said tiredly. “Do you think anyone expects for you to settle down and domesticate? Do you think she expects that?”

“I couldn’t put her first,” he repeated.

Leia didn’t speak for a time. They crossed a junction of corridors. He was careful not to look at the images displayed on the holoscreens, though he caught an edge of copper and gold light, the flicker of speeders between buildings. The familiarity crept up his spine like a clawed hand, waking a subliminal chill of dread.

He had thought he would never have to see that damned world again, with its culture and power and awe, and its trembling mass of horrors in shadowed halls and artificial light.

“What you did, you did for all of us,” Leia said, her voice once again soft.

He waited.

“It hurts me to see you like this,” she said, even softer.

He looked away. “I’ll take my scars elsewhere, will I?”

Her hand caught his arm again, tightening in reproof. It was synth-flesh, anyway. She could dig as deep as she liked into that false skin, and she would find no blood.

“Don’t be like that,” she said. He shrugged something approximating apology, and she went on, “Sometimes it feels like someone else came back.”

He opened his hand. “I had to become someone else,” he said. “Someone who could betray his friends and leave his cause behind, someone who could do the things I had to do. If I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have worked. The Empire would have executed me at once. I would have been of no use whatsoever. To anyone.”

“You didn’t have to do it to be valuable to us,” Leia said. “I told you that then.”

He shook his head wearily. “I was Darth Vader’s son. The entire Rebellion knew. Do you really think they would have let me stay?”

She was silent. He wondered what she would say if he told her how deeply entrenched it was, that elaborate lie he’d had to build around himself in those long months he’d been with the Empire. How he’d retreated into it when the burden became too much to bear, letting the other one come to the surface. The traitor, he thought of it in his head. A different person.

The traitor had helped him survive after he’d been discovered, too. It was a heartless, amoral creature, seeking to survive at any cost. It took over in the torture sessions, when he’d become too weak, too broken. It knew how to endure.

And it didn’t die. It was still there, at the back of his head, a murky presence that lived in darkness.

He looked at Leia. She met his gaze, lips tight, eyes narrowed. He’d often thought that she reminded him of their father. That almost frightening strength of will, personality, power, whatever a person chose to call that influence others felt in her presence. The stubbornness in the way she handled relationships. Her hard way of looking at reality, expecting it to reshape itself to her expectations.

He knew, even as he thought it, that if he were to express that sentiment aloud, she would never speak to him again.

“How have your travels been?” she asked, almost stiffly, in the silence.

“Difficult,” he said neutrally.

“We’re working on permanently fixing the hyperspace routes in the Core,” Leia said. “With the clearing having to be done ever few months, we don’t have the resources to be re-plotting routes for the entire galaxy.”

He made a vague noise, disinterested.

“The Allied Republic can’t be held responsible for large-scale destruction caused by the Empire’s reckless use of untested mass weapons.”

“Rehearsed that line often enough, haven’t you?”

“It’s true.”

He looked to the side. Overhead, ceiling-set glowpanels gleamed to life, casting clean white illumination in pools over the pale floor. He saw from the edge of his eye that the displays now showed a night scene, indigo with glittering flecks.

“So - do you plan on having children?” Leia said, suddenly savage. “It seems like one of the more straightforward ways to repopulate your order, and you do favour the practical. Duty comes first, isn’t that right? Birthright supreme? You’ve argued that to me often enough.”

He closed his eyes.

“Don’t tell me you’re squeamish,” she said.

He opened his eyes and rounded on her, pinning her against the screen of the holographic display. Her eyes widened and her face became guarded, her chin tilted upward to meet his gaze. A luxury airspeeder the size of his hand flitted behind her head, edges distorted the indentation her head made in the soft screen.

“What makes you think I still have the ability to father children?” he said, voice precise, held perfectly level. “They all but killed me in those cells. Remember?”

Her expression flickered, but he walked away before he could see pity or anything else form there.

“Luke,” she said behind him.

He allowed her to catch up. She put a hand on his shoulder, turning him around to face her. He shrugged her off and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

She hesitated. He turned and began to walk again.

“When are you leaving?” she said, again catching up to him.

“Soon.”

“When will you be back?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t. It depends on the routes, whether the way is clear. I can’t predict that.”

She surprised him by reaching out a hand, clasping his. He permitted the contact, though he was uneasy with it. Her hand was soft, fingers warm against his chilled palms.

She seemed to be considering her words, but in the end she released him. He dropped his hand level with the seam of his jumpsuit trousers.

“What’s wrong with your hand?” she asked.

“Prosthetic parts are hard to come by,” he said. “It’s fine.” He stretched the fingers on that hand reflexively, felt the unevenness of the movement. He would have to tune the workings again that night.

She looked at him, and again he had the feeling she was trying to find the words to say something. Something to fill the empty spaces, maybe, or to bridge the gulf that had opened between them when he’d gone to infiltrate the Empire, and widened with Han’s death. He took in her face, noting the faint lines around her mouth, the shadows denoting lack of sleep under her eyes. No words sprang out, though, no hidden meaning or long-sheltered forgiveness waiting there in the familiar curves and plains of her face for him to find.

Sometimes he hated himself, for the foolish tricks his mind played. She held no absolution in check for him, because it had never been hers to give.

“Take care,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, slowly. “You too.”

He nodded once, went to turn, but she hugged him, quick and hard, releasing him as he tensed. Then she turned away, and he swung on his heel and strode in the other direction. He didn’t look back. He knew she would already be gone.

He felt Mara’s presence as he crossed the junk-littered docking bay towards their battered freighter. It had seen much better days, its gunmetal-grey hull pockmarked and scored with laserfire and shrapnel.

He glimpsed movement in the cockpit through the forward viewscreen, but kept his head down as he navigated around the metal debris across the bay floor. He reached the docking ramp, flipped the recessed code pad open and keyed in the encrypt. The ramp descended, and he climbed it.

The hold was small, the bulkheads and floor heavily scuffed. He headed down the corridor toward the cockpit, passing worn furnishings, the low wall-set table and in-built lounge, and the small room containing the captain’s narrow berth.

The cockpit door was closed. Her presence was bright and strong on the other side. He paused a moment, pressing a hand against the bulkhead framing the door. Then he extended the other hand and tapped the control. The door slid open.

Mara was in the pilot’s seat, a datapad in her hands, a handful of flimsies spread untidily across the deactivated flight controls. Her head turned swiftly at the sound of the door.

“The reports?” he said, entering the cockpit.

“Finished,” she said as he stepped up behind her. “And the supplies are loaded.”

“The departure permit?”

“Checks out.” She keyed one of the communication controls, indicating the flashing display showing clearance status. She keyed it off again and, with a practised flick, brought up the nav computer. “I’ve got some partial hyperspace routes. We’ll need to stop and get some stats on drift before we can go further than the Rim edge, though.”

“Good,” he said, looking through the viewscreen at the untidy bay.

She touched his hand, enough to startle him into looking down, because neither of them were tactile by nature. “How did it go?”

He turned his head away again, though there was nothing to see through the scratches and the dirt. “Same as always,” he said distantly.

Her hand lowered, but he caught it. She turned her head, and he looked at her, seeing the way her hair flicked over her collar, the way it caught the dim lights of the cockpit and shone. The scars on her neck, white lines on pale skin, disappeared down under that collar, hidden beneath the thick grey of her jumpsuit.

She gave him a look that was guarded, but quizzical. He put a hand on the back of the seat, and knelt down in the narrow space between chairs. Something like understanding flickered in her face, even though he had given her no words.

She offered her hand again, which he carefully took between his own.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“It’s not,” he said. “It’s really, really, not.”

She shook her head slowly. Her other hand caught the side of his jumpsuit, anchoring him, as if he stood on a brink, about to fall. Her expression mingled a thousand things he couldn’t begin to name. “Here and now, it is.”

He kissed the palm of her cupped hand. It smelled faintly of engine grease, and tasted of salt and plastiflex. She moved her hand to his shoulder, and he kissed her, drawing her to her feet so that they stood together.

Tomorrow, he thought, his resolve could return, with all the guilt. Tomorrow he could reason about holding back from risking the one good thing in his life, about protecting her from his twisted, broken world of lost hope when she was already head-and-shoulders into of her own sizable volition. Tonight was tonight, and he refused to think about anything beyond the light that reflected from her eyes. He would give all he could, and his scars were known to her, tame under her fingers.

His nightmares were more intense than he had experienced in months. She was there when his blinding panic had subsided, reaching out carefully, easing him back as he jerked away reflexively. She held him, hard muscle and warm skin, and he buried his face in her hair, silent, all but wordless.

He pretended to sleep, wishing she would hate him a little more, because he surely hated himself. He breathed deeply, and smelled fire under the cheap cleaner in her hair, fire and blood.

In the morning he dressed in a clean grey jumpsuit. She donned her bottoms, but wore a white tank top, the grey sleeves of the jumpsuit slung around her waist out of the way. He crossed behind her as she finished dressing, touched her red-gold tresses, and said, “Might be a bit long.”

She turned her head marginally, caught his eye and smiled, then tied her hair up in a quick motion. He made a resigned face. She turned and caught a lock of his hair, twisting it around her finger and tugging lightly. “Tsk,” she said. She walked away.

He smiled and followed.

They left the planet early, the docking control accepting the fake departure pass without any difficulty. The doors heaved back overhead, revealing a brown haze. Mara piloted the ship up and out, through the ruins of atmosphere toward space. Off to the east, Luke glimpsed a flash of a different-coloured dust where the superdroids were at work terraforming the world to its pre-catastrophe state, before the asteroids had struck, laden with chemicals to poison the biosphere.

They left atmosphere. The planet diminished below, a curved arc of browns and greys. He began inputting the plotted hyperspace route, fingers moving across the nav controls by rote.

He pictured Leia, busy in the labyrinthine corridors under the planet’s surface, running her government, trying to hold together the remnants of a shattered galaxy. He briefly remembered her as she had been, back in the days when they first met, shining under the light of Yavin. Not unmarked, even then, but resilient, despite the losses already inflicted. He wondered where in the time since she’d lost that bright-eyed girl. He knew where he’d lost the boy he’d been, back then; knew each step on the long and torturous path. But Leia - Leia had become something else more subtly, growing older and sadder and harder as the years had past.

Silently, he farewelled her, both that young girl he’d once loved, brilliant and filled with life, and the woman who looked at him with pity and suspicion mingling poorly-hidden in her eyes. In a way they were both gone, just as Han was gone, just as that boy was gone. Just as Mara would be gone, too, one day - a thought that hurt so much it frightened him, remarkable when he thought he’d lost everything worth living for years ago.

They were drifting now, out of the well of the planet’s gravity. His fingers had stilled on the nav controls, over the lever that would activate the hyperdrive. Mara sat back in her chair, ready but not expectant. Her thoughts trickled in a steady stream at the edge of his awareness, cool and untapped.

He caught her eye, and she lifted an eyebrow, looking at him sadly. He forced a smile, and pushed the lever. They jumped to hyperspace.

[end]