Fic: The Slow Unfolding Science of Cosmology (1/1, PG)
Title: The Slow Unfolding Science of Cosmology
Author: Dorian
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Marriage as a dialectical sequence. Luke/Mara.
The Slow Unfolding Science of Cosmology
1.
The ocean stretched as far as the eye could see, nameless, filling the shuttle's viewpanels for hours without interruption. The sensors failed to pick up any major land masses, no settlements or technology, just teeming layers of ocean life that descended beyond the range of military equipment into the world's lightless depths.
I suppose a map would be too much to ask for, Mara had said when he'd shown her the fragmented data, the faint outline of possibilities glimmering. Once Luke would have called it luck when the archipelago appeared on the horizon, not registering on any of their scanners, the scattered islands sweeping out from a central point like a seashell or a spiral galaxy.
"The largest island?" Mara asked -- confirmation more than a question, already easing the ship around in a wide arc. He nodded absently.
Only a handful of landing pads remained, cracked and uneven, gradually being reclaimed by sand and gray-brown grasses; low bluffs sloped down to narrow white beaches, the familiar feel of sand under his feet transformed into something alien by the salt smell in the air. The waves uncurled against the shore with a wild violence, their restless motion contained only by edges of the sky. It wasn't new, not the shock of years ago, but the sea never lost its wonder.
He sensed Mara's amusement -- a few waves in a large body of water were not quite enough to impress her -- but through their new affinity he saw how her amusement was threaded through with other feelings, too shaded and contradictory to fit easily within words.
She joined him, drawing so close their arms touched but then leaning away, unconsciously seeking a more familiar distance. "Whatever was here, Palpatine knew about this place." She hesitated, uncharacteristically, but as always refused to cushion his reality. "There isn't going to be anything left."
As far as they could tell from reconstructed reports his father had handled it personally. "Probably not," he agreed, touching her arm, letting his thumb slip under the edge of her jacket and brush along the inside of her wrist, feeling the subtle sway and pulse of her body, still caught between leaning forward and pulling back.
It wasn't that he would find anything; it was that he had to look.
She shaded her eyes with her free hand and examined him for a long moment. "Well," she shrugged, satisfied or at least accepting. "I guess we're in for a hike."
He squeezed her wrist and let go. "I guess so."
At least this time the packs were lighter and they weren't underground.
"And hopefully no one will be shooting as us," Mara added, catching his thought as she tightened her wrist holster, not at all concerned by the incongruence. Hopefully never carried much weight with Mara.
She smiled, a wry private expression. "It's called a healthy skepticism. Maybe if you could recognize it, I wouldn't always be pulling you out of jams." But she touched his shoulder in passing, quick and gentle, and the lines between them blurred a little further.
The hatch slid shut behind them with a soft hydraulic hiss. Sand quickly gave way to rock, light brown and porous. And higher up drifts of red paper-like flowers spilled over the ground in waves, sometimes running part way up a cliff-face as though carried forward by their own momentum. A haze of tiny insects swirled through the air like dust motes, invisible until they caught the light, harmless, unlike the green iridescent flies that stung.
Mara paused, frowning up at the sky. "For an island this isolated there are sure a lot of bugs."
"They might not be native." Biological contamination between worlds was common enough. "If this really was a Jedi school, or a records center, there would have been a fair amount of off-world traffic." He looked back, used to wondering about Mara but less in the habit of asking. "I didn't know you were interested in island biosystems."
She cocked her head to one side, considering him, thoughts tightly contained. "You pick up a lot of odds and ends working for someone like Karrde." She almost left it at that, but instead crossed her arms, squaring her stance. "Knowledge kept me alive even when the Force deserted me."
Once she would have been simply challenging his preconceptions, his habitual reliance on the Force, but this was more complicated, a different kind of test, and he wasn't at all sure what she wanted.
But apparently listening was enough, because she resettled her pack, the sudden tension unwinding. "We're burning daylight. And I, for one, would rather not go stumbling around looking for ruins in the dark."
"But you make it sound like so much fun."
She cast an eloquent, disdainful glance over her shoulder, sweaty from the climb and heat, the wind pulling her red-gold hair loose from its braid and across her face, while above them the sun spun through the planet's short day, climbing to the exact center of the sky before being drawn inextricably back under the endless green waves.
2.
The tread of boots faded away, fanning out to search the other hallways, chasing after phantom noises.
He moved away from the door. "They fell for it. We should be safe here, for a while at least."
It hit him again, the smell of burnt flesh, tugging him back across the years (flames licking up towards the sky, black columns of smoke against the horizon, too late)
Her anger struck him across their wide open bond in place of the blow she had too much self-control to deliver but he could feel jumping just under her skin, the dark violent impulse bunching up the fingers of her unbroken hand.
"You would've done the same thing." It came out more defensive than he intended but he wasn't sorry for protecting her, refused to apologize for it.
There was a hanging pause, taut, pulling tighter until Mara slumped back against the wall, everything running to exhaustion like trying to hold onto fistfuls of water. "Not so recklessly. Not when it wasn't necessary." Her words fell into the dim space between them, not gentle but too complicated to be simply accusatory.
Life was rarely as simple as he wanted it to be, and Mara had a knack for forcing him to acknowledge that.
They both knew death, the gaping holes it left, the hard cold drop of abandonment as an old life was pulled to pieces in an instant (two bodies blackened and skeletal, huddled against the sand, the dome of the main house falling in on itself with a crack) and he knew she would risk her life for him without hesitation, but it didn't get twisted up inside her, fears magnified and distorted like a shadow thrown out across the floor, undermining her judgment.
She was starting to shake, fine tremors that she was trying to hide -- pain and adrenaline, maybe the early stages of shock -- falling back into older habits so easily, built up during years of being alone with no one and nothing to count on but herself. He took her elbow, avoiding the burns, waiting for her to look up, softly brushing loose hair away from her face because he couldn't help himself, he needed to do something.
"Sit. Please," he didn't know what she was going to say, didn't care. "Please, just sit."
Even when Mara was angry, she could recognize common sense. The large stone slabs that made up the floor and walls were cold this far below ground and their shoulders ended up pressed together. She didn't pull away.
The room was very quiet, just the overlapping sound of their breathing, magnified by the stillness. Mara reached awkwardly across her body, hand hovering over the long shallow cut along his throat.
"Even if I couldn't get out of the way, it wouldn't have killed me." Her head fell back again the dirty stone wall, eyes squeezed shut. "First lesson: even Jedi need air." A strange combination of images surfaced in her mind, layered, blurring together: a man in a dark heavy coat walking into and out of a square of yellow light, rhythmic gushes of blood, heart-driven, a long wheezing gurgle and then nothing but the muffled silence of snow falling in the dark space between high buildings. Memories from another life.
Her mind slammed shut, her body instinctively straightening, putting distance between them. "This isn't the time or the place. I'm not sure I could get out of here on my own even if I had two good hands and a cache full of explosives, so keep your head next time. No more fool stunts."
Her anger was cool now, distant, tightly contained. But there was a flash, vivid, dream-like: being trapped between crossfire, deflecting energy bolts, how she would have felt him bleed out, slipping away, helpless -- it washed over her barriers and into him like a storm driven wave. Her fears and his, both of them worn raw, everything too near the surface.
She was right. Not the time or place. He pushed down concern and anger and the faint specter of old grief, carefully smothering the bright, terrible rage that whirled through him at the deep burn marks evenly space down the inside of her arm, the commander's crude, precise sadism.
He found a point of calm inside himself, let it expand outwards, filling his mind. "We have seven hours until the guards change at the north hanger and the planetary shield drops. Let's see how much I can heal that hand."
The abandoned storeroom was dim and narrow, full of damaged machinery. He waited, feeling her sink into a light healing trance, and then slipped gently past the outer layers of her mind, gathering up her pain and exhaustion. She recognized the intrusion, felt the weight lift off her and settle onto him, and her concentration was disturbed by a momentary ripple of emotion, balanced between dark humor and resignation.
You can't fight every battle.
He wasn't sure if she was telling him or herself.
3.
The sound of the lock being keyed pulled Luke from his trance and he stepped back into the ordinary flow of time. The afternoon had vanished, leaving the apartment shadowed, full of grays and deep blues, the hours unspooling elastically, without perspective. Superimposed over everything an image lingered, high white walls and layers of silvery twilight -- there had been a quality like memory, experience worn down to the bright essential kernels and the rest slipping away, no longer fixed to any precise point. The present remembering the past and the future remembering the present like concentric circles...
He blinked the puzzle away, unfolding from his mediation position as Mara closed the door carefully, telegraphing her mood in polar opposite, the violence of her original impulse turned inside out.
A late night, he didn't say. Late nights, early mornings, watching as she juggled two lives, determined not to slow the progress of her Jedi training now that she'd committed herself, but too loyal to abandon her old duties until Karrde found replacements, easing the transition as much as she could.
Mara wasn't an easy person to replace.
She dropped a stack of datapads on a side table where they fanned out like sabbac cards, her presence in the Force unsettled, radiating tension as she moved around the room. He recognized her mood, the desire to lash out held carefully back; it was one of the first pieces of her he'd come to know so many years ago as they crossed through the dense humid tangle of a dangerous jungle. They'd been strangers to each other for so long, battering at each other in passing, always on the way to other people, more important battles, everything else overlooked.
She stopped near the balcony doorway, silhouetted by the endless field of city lights, closer than he'd expected, but just out of arm's reach.
"You'd think we'd be old news by now," she said, crossing her arms, looking out at the city. Traces of her edgy sense of exposure escaped her tight self-control. "This is what I get for marrying a great war hero."
It was meant to be sarcastic -- nothing more -- but the genuine curl of dissatisfaction with him and her new life stung. It was conscious effort not to pull away -- mentally and physically -- knowing how easily the distance would spring up between them, like it was already there. There were a lot of ways to start a fight with Mara, but he'd found remoteness was pretty near the top of the list.
The room was made up of the vague half-shapes of familiar objects and outside, in the place of stars, running lights stretched across the sky in brilliant, abstract lines of red. He watched as she forced herself to relax, felt the roll of conflict twist, turning inward.
She glanced at him, carefully not smiling, her mood shifting as unpredictably as the night wind on the open desert.
"You know what this squirrelly little NR reporter kept asking me?"
He moved a little nearer. "Hm?"
"If you liked sleeping with the enemy."
There were too many ways to react to that -- simple embarrassment, indignation on her behalf, regret that their marriage had ended up pulling her closer to a past she'd left behind long ago -- but he caught the edges of her strange dark humor instead, willing to follow her lead. "What did you say?"
"If he wanted to know he should ask you."
He grimaced. "Thanks."
"Anytime." And she did smile.
They drifted back to silence and he felt her unwind by slow degrees, deliberately reaching beyond herself, stepping outside the closed circle of frustration. All around them millions of lives overlapped in a few square kilometers, the faint awareness like rain falling softly on the edge of hearing, endless shifting patterns formed from individual ripples, too many to count, always changing, always the same.
He heard her sharp intake of breath.
"You feel that?" he whispered.
She nodded, awe-struck, and for a moment she was completely transparent to him again, a glimpse, dizzying, unencompassable, like staring down into the secret glass-green heart of a stilled ocean.
The room wrapped around them, dark and warm, unchanged, the ambient glow of the city bright enough to block out distant suns -- everything tiny particles in the vast living body of the universe.
Nothing in existence was truly alone.
Luke? The question was many-faceted, unformed, falling into the spaces between and beyond words; his response immediate, distance and separation suddenly an illusion.
It felt like water closing over his head, and nothing like drowning.
Author: Dorian
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Marriage as a dialectical sequence. Luke/Mara.
The Slow Unfolding Science of Cosmology
1.
The ocean stretched as far as the eye could see, nameless, filling the shuttle's viewpanels for hours without interruption. The sensors failed to pick up any major land masses, no settlements or technology, just teeming layers of ocean life that descended beyond the range of military equipment into the world's lightless depths.
I suppose a map would be too much to ask for, Mara had said when he'd shown her the fragmented data, the faint outline of possibilities glimmering. Once Luke would have called it luck when the archipelago appeared on the horizon, not registering on any of their scanners, the scattered islands sweeping out from a central point like a seashell or a spiral galaxy.
"The largest island?" Mara asked -- confirmation more than a question, already easing the ship around in a wide arc. He nodded absently.
Only a handful of landing pads remained, cracked and uneven, gradually being reclaimed by sand and gray-brown grasses; low bluffs sloped down to narrow white beaches, the familiar feel of sand under his feet transformed into something alien by the salt smell in the air. The waves uncurled against the shore with a wild violence, their restless motion contained only by edges of the sky. It wasn't new, not the shock of years ago, but the sea never lost its wonder.
He sensed Mara's amusement -- a few waves in a large body of water were not quite enough to impress her -- but through their new affinity he saw how her amusement was threaded through with other feelings, too shaded and contradictory to fit easily within words.
She joined him, drawing so close their arms touched but then leaning away, unconsciously seeking a more familiar distance. "Whatever was here, Palpatine knew about this place." She hesitated, uncharacteristically, but as always refused to cushion his reality. "There isn't going to be anything left."
As far as they could tell from reconstructed reports his father had handled it personally. "Probably not," he agreed, touching her arm, letting his thumb slip under the edge of her jacket and brush along the inside of her wrist, feeling the subtle sway and pulse of her body, still caught between leaning forward and pulling back.
It wasn't that he would find anything; it was that he had to look.
She shaded her eyes with her free hand and examined him for a long moment. "Well," she shrugged, satisfied or at least accepting. "I guess we're in for a hike."
He squeezed her wrist and let go. "I guess so."
At least this time the packs were lighter and they weren't underground.
"And hopefully no one will be shooting as us," Mara added, catching his thought as she tightened her wrist holster, not at all concerned by the incongruence. Hopefully never carried much weight with Mara.
She smiled, a wry private expression. "It's called a healthy skepticism. Maybe if you could recognize it, I wouldn't always be pulling you out of jams." But she touched his shoulder in passing, quick and gentle, and the lines between them blurred a little further.
The hatch slid shut behind them with a soft hydraulic hiss. Sand quickly gave way to rock, light brown and porous. And higher up drifts of red paper-like flowers spilled over the ground in waves, sometimes running part way up a cliff-face as though carried forward by their own momentum. A haze of tiny insects swirled through the air like dust motes, invisible until they caught the light, harmless, unlike the green iridescent flies that stung.
Mara paused, frowning up at the sky. "For an island this isolated there are sure a lot of bugs."
"They might not be native." Biological contamination between worlds was common enough. "If this really was a Jedi school, or a records center, there would have been a fair amount of off-world traffic." He looked back, used to wondering about Mara but less in the habit of asking. "I didn't know you were interested in island biosystems."
She cocked her head to one side, considering him, thoughts tightly contained. "You pick up a lot of odds and ends working for someone like Karrde." She almost left it at that, but instead crossed her arms, squaring her stance. "Knowledge kept me alive even when the Force deserted me."
Once she would have been simply challenging his preconceptions, his habitual reliance on the Force, but this was more complicated, a different kind of test, and he wasn't at all sure what she wanted.
But apparently listening was enough, because she resettled her pack, the sudden tension unwinding. "We're burning daylight. And I, for one, would rather not go stumbling around looking for ruins in the dark."
"But you make it sound like so much fun."
She cast an eloquent, disdainful glance over her shoulder, sweaty from the climb and heat, the wind pulling her red-gold hair loose from its braid and across her face, while above them the sun spun through the planet's short day, climbing to the exact center of the sky before being drawn inextricably back under the endless green waves.
2.
The tread of boots faded away, fanning out to search the other hallways, chasing after phantom noises.
He moved away from the door. "They fell for it. We should be safe here, for a while at least."
It hit him again, the smell of burnt flesh, tugging him back across the years (flames licking up towards the sky, black columns of smoke against the horizon, too late)
Her anger struck him across their wide open bond in place of the blow she had too much self-control to deliver but he could feel jumping just under her skin, the dark violent impulse bunching up the fingers of her unbroken hand.
"You would've done the same thing." It came out more defensive than he intended but he wasn't sorry for protecting her, refused to apologize for it.
There was a hanging pause, taut, pulling tighter until Mara slumped back against the wall, everything running to exhaustion like trying to hold onto fistfuls of water. "Not so recklessly. Not when it wasn't necessary." Her words fell into the dim space between them, not gentle but too complicated to be simply accusatory.
Life was rarely as simple as he wanted it to be, and Mara had a knack for forcing him to acknowledge that.
They both knew death, the gaping holes it left, the hard cold drop of abandonment as an old life was pulled to pieces in an instant (two bodies blackened and skeletal, huddled against the sand, the dome of the main house falling in on itself with a crack) and he knew she would risk her life for him without hesitation, but it didn't get twisted up inside her, fears magnified and distorted like a shadow thrown out across the floor, undermining her judgment.
She was starting to shake, fine tremors that she was trying to hide -- pain and adrenaline, maybe the early stages of shock -- falling back into older habits so easily, built up during years of being alone with no one and nothing to count on but herself. He took her elbow, avoiding the burns, waiting for her to look up, softly brushing loose hair away from her face because he couldn't help himself, he needed to do something.
"Sit. Please," he didn't know what she was going to say, didn't care. "Please, just sit."
Even when Mara was angry, she could recognize common sense. The large stone slabs that made up the floor and walls were cold this far below ground and their shoulders ended up pressed together. She didn't pull away.
The room was very quiet, just the overlapping sound of their breathing, magnified by the stillness. Mara reached awkwardly across her body, hand hovering over the long shallow cut along his throat.
"Even if I couldn't get out of the way, it wouldn't have killed me." Her head fell back again the dirty stone wall, eyes squeezed shut. "First lesson: even Jedi need air." A strange combination of images surfaced in her mind, layered, blurring together: a man in a dark heavy coat walking into and out of a square of yellow light, rhythmic gushes of blood, heart-driven, a long wheezing gurgle and then nothing but the muffled silence of snow falling in the dark space between high buildings. Memories from another life.
Her mind slammed shut, her body instinctively straightening, putting distance between them. "This isn't the time or the place. I'm not sure I could get out of here on my own even if I had two good hands and a cache full of explosives, so keep your head next time. No more fool stunts."
Her anger was cool now, distant, tightly contained. But there was a flash, vivid, dream-like: being trapped between crossfire, deflecting energy bolts, how she would have felt him bleed out, slipping away, helpless -- it washed over her barriers and into him like a storm driven wave. Her fears and his, both of them worn raw, everything too near the surface.
She was right. Not the time or place. He pushed down concern and anger and the faint specter of old grief, carefully smothering the bright, terrible rage that whirled through him at the deep burn marks evenly space down the inside of her arm, the commander's crude, precise sadism.
He found a point of calm inside himself, let it expand outwards, filling his mind. "We have seven hours until the guards change at the north hanger and the planetary shield drops. Let's see how much I can heal that hand."
The abandoned storeroom was dim and narrow, full of damaged machinery. He waited, feeling her sink into a light healing trance, and then slipped gently past the outer layers of her mind, gathering up her pain and exhaustion. She recognized the intrusion, felt the weight lift off her and settle onto him, and her concentration was disturbed by a momentary ripple of emotion, balanced between dark humor and resignation.
You can't fight every battle.
He wasn't sure if she was telling him or herself.
3.
The sound of the lock being keyed pulled Luke from his trance and he stepped back into the ordinary flow of time. The afternoon had vanished, leaving the apartment shadowed, full of grays and deep blues, the hours unspooling elastically, without perspective. Superimposed over everything an image lingered, high white walls and layers of silvery twilight -- there had been a quality like memory, experience worn down to the bright essential kernels and the rest slipping away, no longer fixed to any precise point. The present remembering the past and the future remembering the present like concentric circles...
He blinked the puzzle away, unfolding from his mediation position as Mara closed the door carefully, telegraphing her mood in polar opposite, the violence of her original impulse turned inside out.
A late night, he didn't say. Late nights, early mornings, watching as she juggled two lives, determined not to slow the progress of her Jedi training now that she'd committed herself, but too loyal to abandon her old duties until Karrde found replacements, easing the transition as much as she could.
Mara wasn't an easy person to replace.
She dropped a stack of datapads on a side table where they fanned out like sabbac cards, her presence in the Force unsettled, radiating tension as she moved around the room. He recognized her mood, the desire to lash out held carefully back; it was one of the first pieces of her he'd come to know so many years ago as they crossed through the dense humid tangle of a dangerous jungle. They'd been strangers to each other for so long, battering at each other in passing, always on the way to other people, more important battles, everything else overlooked.
She stopped near the balcony doorway, silhouetted by the endless field of city lights, closer than he'd expected, but just out of arm's reach.
"You'd think we'd be old news by now," she said, crossing her arms, looking out at the city. Traces of her edgy sense of exposure escaped her tight self-control. "This is what I get for marrying a great war hero."
It was meant to be sarcastic -- nothing more -- but the genuine curl of dissatisfaction with him and her new life stung. It was conscious effort not to pull away -- mentally and physically -- knowing how easily the distance would spring up between them, like it was already there. There were a lot of ways to start a fight with Mara, but he'd found remoteness was pretty near the top of the list.
The room was made up of the vague half-shapes of familiar objects and outside, in the place of stars, running lights stretched across the sky in brilliant, abstract lines of red. He watched as she forced herself to relax, felt the roll of conflict twist, turning inward.
She glanced at him, carefully not smiling, her mood shifting as unpredictably as the night wind on the open desert.
"You know what this squirrelly little NR reporter kept asking me?"
He moved a little nearer. "Hm?"
"If you liked sleeping with the enemy."
There were too many ways to react to that -- simple embarrassment, indignation on her behalf, regret that their marriage had ended up pulling her closer to a past she'd left behind long ago -- but he caught the edges of her strange dark humor instead, willing to follow her lead. "What did you say?"
"If he wanted to know he should ask you."
He grimaced. "Thanks."
"Anytime." And she did smile.
They drifted back to silence and he felt her unwind by slow degrees, deliberately reaching beyond herself, stepping outside the closed circle of frustration. All around them millions of lives overlapped in a few square kilometers, the faint awareness like rain falling softly on the edge of hearing, endless shifting patterns formed from individual ripples, too many to count, always changing, always the same.
He heard her sharp intake of breath.
"You feel that?" he whispered.
She nodded, awe-struck, and for a moment she was completely transparent to him again, a glimpse, dizzying, unencompassable, like staring down into the secret glass-green heart of a stilled ocean.
The room wrapped around them, dark and warm, unchanged, the ambient glow of the city bright enough to block out distant suns -- everything tiny particles in the vast living body of the universe.
Nothing in existence was truly alone.
Luke? The question was many-faceted, unformed, falling into the spaces between and beyond words; his response immediate, distance and separation suddenly an illusion.
It felt like water closing over his head, and nothing like drowning.