Fic: "Straightaway Dangerous" -- 1/1, G
Title: "Straightaway Dangerous"
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade
Category: AU, character study, vignette
Warnings: None that I can think of, other than AU
Summary: "Assent -- and you are sane -- , Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --"
A/N: Thanks to gabri-jade for her assistance. And credit for the title and summary to Emily Dickinson, from Much Madness is divinest Sense
She watches, standing at the upper-storey window, as he greets the children who run to join him in the yard. They’re all manner of species, Rodian and human and Twi’lek alike, but they’re united in their ragged clothing, their bare feet, their underfed bodies. They cluster around as he kneels in the dirt. As he speaks, hands spread. His prosthetic hand is wrapped in a dirty bandage. It barely resembles a flesh-and-blood hand anymore, but she would guess, herself, that these children have seen too much to be frightened by wires and circuitry.
The street beyond the yard is wide and empty. Vehicles are rare here, attracting the wrong sort of attention. People stay inside, out of the hazy sun, the choking smell of the dry dust. Only the children roam, clustered in packs, lean and dirty.
The settle around him now, some crouching in the dirt, some sitting cross-legged. A scuffle breaks out at the back, quickly resolved. An older boy pushes aside smaller children roughly, presenting something small to the man kneeling, awaiting praise. The man takes it, but speaks to the boy. Two girls shove each other, to one side of the group. A Twi’lek boy glares, his lekku twitching. The man addresses the group, and they turn their attention to him as one, leaning forward, a boy at the back shuffling closer.
He comes in later, the children dispersed again, spilling off in a running, tumbling group. His hair is tousled and dusty, his face reddened from the parched air. He pulls off the dirty bandages that wrap his hand, one loop at a time. Loosens the coarse fabric around his neck, revealing blotchy scars. He looks at her as he’s doing so - proving he’s not afraid to show himself damaged, perhaps.
“So,” he says.
“Strange occupation for you,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
He shrugs. “They have nothing else.” He crosses to the small, rough kitchen and does something, his body blocking his movements. The old processor clanks to life. “I’ve never been much with letters and such. But there are other things to learn.”
“They seem eager.” She offers it vaguely, like a consolation, still curious.
“They have nothing else,” he repeats, as though that’s an answer. The processor hums and groans. Something rattles out in the street.
“You should fix that processor,” she says.
“Don’t have the parts.” He turns and brings a hand down on it, hard - jarringly, the thud is that of metal on metal, not flesh on a harder surface. It quiets somewhat.
“Still rule with the fist, I see,” she says. He looks at her, implacable.
She feels a flicker of annoyance. His blankness is unnerving, the detachment in his silence off-putting. She refuses to allow it to affect her. She crosses her arms, tilts her head. “This doesn’t strike me as the likeliest place for a former emperor to show up. And the teaching - an odd way to spend your days.”
“It’s somewhere,” he says. His eyes don’t meet hers, but it’s disregard, not shame. “And it’s something.” The processor clanks loudly, and falls silent. He pulls out a rough earthenware cup, and another, rubs the first on his sleeve, releases a trickle of water from the processor into the cup until it’s almost full, then fills the second. He hands the first to her as he passes, and she’s startled. The courtesy is half-rote, his attention elsewhere, and she imagines a teenage boy long ago being chided by his aunt to pour first for guests. “I suppose the New Republic is uneasy?” he says as he peers through the dirty window.
“That you’ve reappeared, and in a penal settlement on the edge of nowhere? You might say they are. You might say they wonder what you’re up to.”
“Up to?” His laugh is drier than the dust. “I have nothing left to plot with. Tell them that.” His eyes meet hers, frank and knowing. “They have nothing to fear from me.”
“In my experience, words like that are said right before the blaster appears.”
“In your experience, that’s probably so.”
She narrows her eyes, searching his face for hidden meaning, layered insult. His expression is inscrutable. “Where have you been all this time?” she demands. “Even I couldn’t track you.”
“I didn’t want to be found,” he says evasively.
“And now you do?” she asks, pensively.
He glances in her direction, but doesn’t meet her eyes. She sips her drink. It tastes like processed water, warm and vaguely earthy.
“Depends who’s doing the finding,” he says, apparently to himself.
She turns to look at him. Again, he meets her gaze openly, until she has to look away. Sometimes meeting problems head-on isn’t the best way. Sometimes old instincts are hard to shake. She’s not sure who’s more the coward.
“So,” he says, rubbing at something on his arm. “Are you here to arrest me?”
“Would you let me?”
His eyes are a faded blue as he looks out at the street. “I might.”
She laughs, sharply. “Because the lure of incarceration beckons?”
He doesn’t respond to the derision, beyond looking past her, still and quiet. “Because you get tired of running.”
She looks away, because there’s something too painful in his eyes. “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s not worth staying.”
Now he looks away. “Maybe.”
They stand and watch the street. “Do you have regrets?” she asks.
“I played my role,” he says serenely.
“You usurped the galaxy,” she says pleasantly.
He breathes out, and that has a kind of familiarity to it: forceful and contained, his essence exhaled. “I went where the Force led me.”
She raises her eyes to the sky visible through the streaked glass. “Please.”
“I became what I had to be,” he says stoically, though there’s an underlying weariness. “Sometimes what’s best for the future isn’t straightforward.”
“I can’t believe you’re still saying that.” She turns, sets the cup down and glares at him. “I thought it was an excuse to try to evade sentencing. All that Force-made-me-do-it nonsense.”
“I never said it made me,” he corrects easily. “I accept responsibility.” He looks at her, eyebrows slightly lifted, his gaze direct. “I’m not insane.”
His stare is unblinking. Sometimes she suspects that he is, in fact, delusional. Not insane, because that implies derangement and damage. His mind is sharp, all colours and jaggedness and awareness. But there is a certain discordance that could be simple (not simple, though, complex) difference or something deeper, subtly wrong (genetic trait, inherited flaw).
“Do you think the New Republic could be as prosperous as it is if the galaxy hadn’t been forced to unite under me?” he enquires.
She hates that she almost wants to believe him; hates that he does that to her. But she hates more that when he looks at her, there is something in his gaze that belies his assurance. More than anything, that disturbs her. It’s easier - kinder - to think of him having absolute faith his delusion than it is to think of him touched by doubt. There’s been too much blood, literal and figurative.
An unwary person could drown in it.
“You subjugated the galaxy,” she says.
“Semantics,” he murmurs. He turns to face the window again, carefully resting the cup he holds on the dusty ledge.
She watches him watch the street. “Are you going to leave now?” she asks.
“Go somewhere I won’t be found?” His lips turn, flatten, a grimace or a smile, bleak either way. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you choose this place?”
“I’m not sure I did. One day I just stopped. Moving from world to world, never settling, until I wasn’t running from anything, anymore, just running. Then I woke up one day, and I decided not to anymore.”
“And you stopped here.”
“It’s somewhere.”
“So you said.” She runs her fingers over the splintered ledge of the window. “And the teaching? The rest, I get. I don’t understand that.”
“You have no idea, Mara.” He turns to her, his face open, almost raw, eyes intent. “The children here… They have nothing. Not hope, not dreams, not even a future. They’ve committed no crime, yet they’re condemned from the moment they’re born. They live and breathe hopelessness.”
“You can fix that?”
“No.” His gaze drifts somewhere else. “I’m not that egocentric. Or ambitious. Not anymore. Maybe their future was in my hands, once. Maybe I failed them all.”
“I thought that you only played your part. Did what was necessary.” She says the words without intonation. When he doesn’t speak, she glances at him. He’s looking at her, and she recognises the look on his face from old, but it’s melded with shades of something else now, and she can’t read it. At her stare, he catches himself and the expression vanishes, flicking off as though severed.
“Doesn’t matter now,” he mutters, turning away.
Is that it, she wonders. She pictures him building up dreams of overthrowing the corrupt regional rulers on this world, in these systems, turning around the poverty, handing these people power on a platter. And then he would turn his gaze outwards, toward the New Republic with its overcrowded, inefficient senate system and over-privileged Core World majority, and he would flex his maimed fingers, and know they couldn’t stand against him. He gave them their power, bought with blood he spilled, and, dissatisfied with what they had done with it, how they had squandered it, he could take it back, make things right.
All for the sake of a cluster of hope-starved children on a backwater planet that resembles his childhood home. Or is it the ghosts in those small bodies, echoes of the children who’d died on Yagos VI when he ordered orbital bombardment? The lost youth in the eyes of the soldiers who had died on either side of the war?
It is, she thinks, so like him, that twisted bundle of passion and idealism and despair, wrapped in a power greater than a single being should wield. It hurts.
He burns too brightly.
“Got enough for your report?” he says, with a half-smile, lips turning upward, eyes bitter. He’s watching her, has been watching her, seeing - what? - on her face.
“Enough,” she says. She brushes her fingers against the seam of her trousers, erasing the coating of fine dust. She wonders if he understands what she’ll be telling them. Wonders if she knows herself. Analysis - inferring in advance of data. He’ll kill them all again, in his faith and his passion. And he thinks himself cured of conquering.
Even damaged, he can still defeat the galaxy. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will.
His hand moves, fingers curling in. The parts cycle together, wire and circuits, clinging pieces of synthflesh. She crosses in quick strides, puts her hands on him - one hand at his waist, closing on his ragged, dusty cloak and worn tunic, the other hand against the side of his neck. This close, she sees the slight widening of his eyes, the dilation of his pupils in surprise.
She almost apologises, but instead she kisses him.
His lips are chapped, but warm. His skin is rough with stubble. His mouth tastes like badly processed water, cool and vaguely gritty.
He stands frozen under the touch, not moving against her, towards or away. His body is hypercoil-tense, muscles taut. She wonders how long it is since he’s known touch - of any kind.
She pulls back.
“It’s all right,” he says, forgiving what’s unsaid, because he’s always been good at that (and she tries not to be bitter). Or denying, deflecting, because that’s a talent of his as well. He takes her hand from his neck, from his tunic, eases her away, steps back. He turns. The line of his shoulders is sharp, a history written there.
She steps after him, and he turns. He puts his hands on her waist as she kisses him again, the pressure of the prosthetic hand barely felt low on her back; just the light, strange sensation of too-narrow, too-smooth fingertips against her dark suit. He kisses her hesitantly, then with sudden urgency.
Their mouths part, and he turns his face away, breathes. His breath is warm against the nape of her neck and shoulder; it’s also unsteady, and she thinks for a frightening moment he’s breaking down, thinks he’s crying, but he’s not, not this time, not ever since she’s known him.
He smells of sweat and dust and heat. His body is leaner than she remembers, but the way he moves and breathes is the same. There’s grey in his hair, threaded, near-invisible, through the unruliness. There’s dust there, too.
Maybe she’s about to do a very stupid thing. Maybe she won’t. She doesn’t really care, though. From here on, she does not operate for the New Republic; this time is hers. There are too few things in the universe she can truly claim as her own. Whether she takes this or not, she will not waste it.
She has never found it easy to be wise when it comes to Luke Skywalker.
- end -
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade
Category: AU, character study, vignette
Warnings: None that I can think of, other than AU
Summary: "Assent -- and you are sane -- , Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --"
A/N: Thanks to gabri-jade for her assistance. And credit for the title and summary to Emily Dickinson, from Much Madness is divinest Sense
She watches, standing at the upper-storey window, as he greets the children who run to join him in the yard. They’re all manner of species, Rodian and human and Twi’lek alike, but they’re united in their ragged clothing, their bare feet, their underfed bodies. They cluster around as he kneels in the dirt. As he speaks, hands spread. His prosthetic hand is wrapped in a dirty bandage. It barely resembles a flesh-and-blood hand anymore, but she would guess, herself, that these children have seen too much to be frightened by wires and circuitry.
The street beyond the yard is wide and empty. Vehicles are rare here, attracting the wrong sort of attention. People stay inside, out of the hazy sun, the choking smell of the dry dust. Only the children roam, clustered in packs, lean and dirty.
The settle around him now, some crouching in the dirt, some sitting cross-legged. A scuffle breaks out at the back, quickly resolved. An older boy pushes aside smaller children roughly, presenting something small to the man kneeling, awaiting praise. The man takes it, but speaks to the boy. Two girls shove each other, to one side of the group. A Twi’lek boy glares, his lekku twitching. The man addresses the group, and they turn their attention to him as one, leaning forward, a boy at the back shuffling closer.
He comes in later, the children dispersed again, spilling off in a running, tumbling group. His hair is tousled and dusty, his face reddened from the parched air. He pulls off the dirty bandages that wrap his hand, one loop at a time. Loosens the coarse fabric around his neck, revealing blotchy scars. He looks at her as he’s doing so - proving he’s not afraid to show himself damaged, perhaps.
“So,” he says.
“Strange occupation for you,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
He shrugs. “They have nothing else.” He crosses to the small, rough kitchen and does something, his body blocking his movements. The old processor clanks to life. “I’ve never been much with letters and such. But there are other things to learn.”
“They seem eager.” She offers it vaguely, like a consolation, still curious.
“They have nothing else,” he repeats, as though that’s an answer. The processor hums and groans. Something rattles out in the street.
“You should fix that processor,” she says.
“Don’t have the parts.” He turns and brings a hand down on it, hard - jarringly, the thud is that of metal on metal, not flesh on a harder surface. It quiets somewhat.
“Still rule with the fist, I see,” she says. He looks at her, implacable.
She feels a flicker of annoyance. His blankness is unnerving, the detachment in his silence off-putting. She refuses to allow it to affect her. She crosses her arms, tilts her head. “This doesn’t strike me as the likeliest place for a former emperor to show up. And the teaching - an odd way to spend your days.”
“It’s somewhere,” he says. His eyes don’t meet hers, but it’s disregard, not shame. “And it’s something.” The processor clanks loudly, and falls silent. He pulls out a rough earthenware cup, and another, rubs the first on his sleeve, releases a trickle of water from the processor into the cup until it’s almost full, then fills the second. He hands the first to her as he passes, and she’s startled. The courtesy is half-rote, his attention elsewhere, and she imagines a teenage boy long ago being chided by his aunt to pour first for guests. “I suppose the New Republic is uneasy?” he says as he peers through the dirty window.
“That you’ve reappeared, and in a penal settlement on the edge of nowhere? You might say they are. You might say they wonder what you’re up to.”
“Up to?” His laugh is drier than the dust. “I have nothing left to plot with. Tell them that.” His eyes meet hers, frank and knowing. “They have nothing to fear from me.”
“In my experience, words like that are said right before the blaster appears.”
“In your experience, that’s probably so.”
She narrows her eyes, searching his face for hidden meaning, layered insult. His expression is inscrutable. “Where have you been all this time?” she demands. “Even I couldn’t track you.”
“I didn’t want to be found,” he says evasively.
“And now you do?” she asks, pensively.
He glances in her direction, but doesn’t meet her eyes. She sips her drink. It tastes like processed water, warm and vaguely earthy.
“Depends who’s doing the finding,” he says, apparently to himself.
She turns to look at him. Again, he meets her gaze openly, until she has to look away. Sometimes meeting problems head-on isn’t the best way. Sometimes old instincts are hard to shake. She’s not sure who’s more the coward.
“So,” he says, rubbing at something on his arm. “Are you here to arrest me?”
“Would you let me?”
His eyes are a faded blue as he looks out at the street. “I might.”
She laughs, sharply. “Because the lure of incarceration beckons?”
He doesn’t respond to the derision, beyond looking past her, still and quiet. “Because you get tired of running.”
She looks away, because there’s something too painful in his eyes. “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s not worth staying.”
Now he looks away. “Maybe.”
They stand and watch the street. “Do you have regrets?” she asks.
“I played my role,” he says serenely.
“You usurped the galaxy,” she says pleasantly.
He breathes out, and that has a kind of familiarity to it: forceful and contained, his essence exhaled. “I went where the Force led me.”
She raises her eyes to the sky visible through the streaked glass. “Please.”
“I became what I had to be,” he says stoically, though there’s an underlying weariness. “Sometimes what’s best for the future isn’t straightforward.”
“I can’t believe you’re still saying that.” She turns, sets the cup down and glares at him. “I thought it was an excuse to try to evade sentencing. All that Force-made-me-do-it nonsense.”
“I never said it made me,” he corrects easily. “I accept responsibility.” He looks at her, eyebrows slightly lifted, his gaze direct. “I’m not insane.”
His stare is unblinking. Sometimes she suspects that he is, in fact, delusional. Not insane, because that implies derangement and damage. His mind is sharp, all colours and jaggedness and awareness. But there is a certain discordance that could be simple (not simple, though, complex) difference or something deeper, subtly wrong (genetic trait, inherited flaw).
“Do you think the New Republic could be as prosperous as it is if the galaxy hadn’t been forced to unite under me?” he enquires.
She hates that she almost wants to believe him; hates that he does that to her. But she hates more that when he looks at her, there is something in his gaze that belies his assurance. More than anything, that disturbs her. It’s easier - kinder - to think of him having absolute faith his delusion than it is to think of him touched by doubt. There’s been too much blood, literal and figurative.
An unwary person could drown in it.
“You subjugated the galaxy,” she says.
“Semantics,” he murmurs. He turns to face the window again, carefully resting the cup he holds on the dusty ledge.
She watches him watch the street. “Are you going to leave now?” she asks.
“Go somewhere I won’t be found?” His lips turn, flatten, a grimace or a smile, bleak either way. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you choose this place?”
“I’m not sure I did. One day I just stopped. Moving from world to world, never settling, until I wasn’t running from anything, anymore, just running. Then I woke up one day, and I decided not to anymore.”
“And you stopped here.”
“It’s somewhere.”
“So you said.” She runs her fingers over the splintered ledge of the window. “And the teaching? The rest, I get. I don’t understand that.”
“You have no idea, Mara.” He turns to her, his face open, almost raw, eyes intent. “The children here… They have nothing. Not hope, not dreams, not even a future. They’ve committed no crime, yet they’re condemned from the moment they’re born. They live and breathe hopelessness.”
“You can fix that?”
“No.” His gaze drifts somewhere else. “I’m not that egocentric. Or ambitious. Not anymore. Maybe their future was in my hands, once. Maybe I failed them all.”
“I thought that you only played your part. Did what was necessary.” She says the words without intonation. When he doesn’t speak, she glances at him. He’s looking at her, and she recognises the look on his face from old, but it’s melded with shades of something else now, and she can’t read it. At her stare, he catches himself and the expression vanishes, flicking off as though severed.
“Doesn’t matter now,” he mutters, turning away.
Is that it, she wonders. She pictures him building up dreams of overthrowing the corrupt regional rulers on this world, in these systems, turning around the poverty, handing these people power on a platter. And then he would turn his gaze outwards, toward the New Republic with its overcrowded, inefficient senate system and over-privileged Core World majority, and he would flex his maimed fingers, and know they couldn’t stand against him. He gave them their power, bought with blood he spilled, and, dissatisfied with what they had done with it, how they had squandered it, he could take it back, make things right.
All for the sake of a cluster of hope-starved children on a backwater planet that resembles his childhood home. Or is it the ghosts in those small bodies, echoes of the children who’d died on Yagos VI when he ordered orbital bombardment? The lost youth in the eyes of the soldiers who had died on either side of the war?
It is, she thinks, so like him, that twisted bundle of passion and idealism and despair, wrapped in a power greater than a single being should wield. It hurts.
He burns too brightly.
“Got enough for your report?” he says, with a half-smile, lips turning upward, eyes bitter. He’s watching her, has been watching her, seeing - what? - on her face.
“Enough,” she says. She brushes her fingers against the seam of her trousers, erasing the coating of fine dust. She wonders if he understands what she’ll be telling them. Wonders if she knows herself. Analysis - inferring in advance of data. He’ll kill them all again, in his faith and his passion. And he thinks himself cured of conquering.
Even damaged, he can still defeat the galaxy. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will.
His hand moves, fingers curling in. The parts cycle together, wire and circuits, clinging pieces of synthflesh. She crosses in quick strides, puts her hands on him - one hand at his waist, closing on his ragged, dusty cloak and worn tunic, the other hand against the side of his neck. This close, she sees the slight widening of his eyes, the dilation of his pupils in surprise.
She almost apologises, but instead she kisses him.
His lips are chapped, but warm. His skin is rough with stubble. His mouth tastes like badly processed water, cool and vaguely gritty.
He stands frozen under the touch, not moving against her, towards or away. His body is hypercoil-tense, muscles taut. She wonders how long it is since he’s known touch - of any kind.
She pulls back.
“It’s all right,” he says, forgiving what’s unsaid, because he’s always been good at that (and she tries not to be bitter). Or denying, deflecting, because that’s a talent of his as well. He takes her hand from his neck, from his tunic, eases her away, steps back. He turns. The line of his shoulders is sharp, a history written there.
She steps after him, and he turns. He puts his hands on her waist as she kisses him again, the pressure of the prosthetic hand barely felt low on her back; just the light, strange sensation of too-narrow, too-smooth fingertips against her dark suit. He kisses her hesitantly, then with sudden urgency.
Their mouths part, and he turns his face away, breathes. His breath is warm against the nape of her neck and shoulder; it’s also unsteady, and she thinks for a frightening moment he’s breaking down, thinks he’s crying, but he’s not, not this time, not ever since she’s known him.
He smells of sweat and dust and heat. His body is leaner than she remembers, but the way he moves and breathes is the same. There’s grey in his hair, threaded, near-invisible, through the unruliness. There’s dust there, too.
Maybe she’s about to do a very stupid thing. Maybe she won’t. She doesn’t really care, though. From here on, she does not operate for the New Republic; this time is hers. There are too few things in the universe she can truly claim as her own. Whether she takes this or not, she will not waste it.
She has never found it easy to be wise when it comes to Luke Skywalker.
- end -