Fic: "Honour the Fallen" -- Leia, Mara (of a sort), G, 1/1
Title: Honour the Fallen
Author: deaka
Rating: G
Characters: Leia Organa Solo, Luke Skywalker, mention of Mara, Ben, Jacen, Jaina
Pairings: Luke/Mara, Leia/Han
Timeframe: Between Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi
Warnings: Spoilers for Sacrifice for anyone who's managed to avoid them to this point.
Summary: It was left to Leia to remember, and she does.
The brilliant lights of Coruscant did not reach the shadowed balcony Leia stood on, tucked into the hidden recesses of the Jedi Temple. It had escaped the methodical routing of the lower areas and stood intact, curved barriers gleaming faintly where they stood watch over the sweeping vista of Galactic City. Mara had loved this balcony; as long as Leia had known her, she’d had a habit of standing and looking over across the lights of Coruscant. Many years ago, it had been Imperial Palace -- once her childhood home -- that offered elevation enough to view the arcing towers and the velvet, hidden depths of the world. Later it was the Temple, standing tall amidst the structures that reached far into the darkened sky, that stood for her vantage point and lookout.
Leia didn’t understand what had prompted Mara’s nightly vigils, whether it was merely remembrance of a world she’d once known, or if it was a practised ritual, a means of preserving peace and security -- it would not be outside of Mara’s worldview to check the skyline for enemies before withdrawing for sleep. Leia had joined her occasionally, while staying in the Temple for briefings or a visit, sometimes falling into absorbing conversations about identity and past and freedom, sometimes arguing over galactic politics, sometimes laughing about colleagues and husbands and children. Other times there was just the silence, broken only by the undying murmur of the city below. Sometimes Luke would be there, too, in the shadows somewhere on Mara’s other side. Other times he was not, Mara standing amiably and comfortable alone.
Now Leia stood alone, looking over a city that carried on regardless of what was lost; a city that didn’t care who watched over it, its frantic life churning on unheedful of the individual tapestries of death and love, births and losses that swirled at its core. It was left to Leia to remember, her hands clasped to the cool, silvery metal of the barricade as Mara’s had once done.
Leia had neither Luke’s fathomless closeness nor Ben’s open, unshakeable bond in which to anchor her memories of Mara. Instead she had fragments, piecemeal, built over a long time to form a whole she’d never expected. She had that bitter, defiant woman in a holding cell in Imperial Palace, who wore around her a shield of pain and distrust, who promised Leia she’d kill the brother who had already, in his voice and eyes, told Leia of his faith and trust in the woman who would be his killer. She had the woman who’d saved two of her children from abduction while infants, expecting nothing in return. She had the woman whose eyes followed Luke, who looked at him with pensiveness and regard always, as if he were a puzzle, a mystery, something with pieces misaligned whose true nature she was trying to discern. She had the woman Mara wanted the world to see then, sarcasm and watchful eyes that waited for betrayal.
Later came the Mara she saw, caught in reflection through her brother’s gaze, in the way his face softened and lost the preoccupation and otherworldliness that had come to mask the humour and spirit Leia had first known him for. “It feels like coming home,” he’d said to Leia in a moment when it was just the two of them, early in those days after he and Mara had returned from Niruaun. “Like nothing I’ve ever felt before. There’s peace here. She’s the place I’ve been looking for, Leia, my whole life.” Leia had been pleased for him, but bemused at the same time, for she’d never seen the side to Mara that shone from his eyes except filtered through him; she brushed the broad, deep loyalty and the strength of honour and compassion, but they were held at remove, translated through the surface of Luke’s regard.
Then she saw, one evening, at a gathering of Jedi where she felt little more comfortable than a restless Han, how Mara’s hand lifted and fell, drifting, aimless, on Luke’s arm, how her fingers encircled his wrist and slid to clasp, palm to palm, his hand. Light bounced from Mara’s hair, from Luke’s pale tunic, and Leia saw how Luke’s shoulders loosened slightly, how Mara’s stance eased. There was a hidden language there she knew, that startled her, seen externally. It melded the blooded trust of warriors who’d fought side-by-side with the intimacy of lovers, skin and touch -- and she’d guessed, but now she knew -- and it was as clear as the sky was bright with orb-lights and free of stars, as clear as Han’s presence beside her. And in the touch of Mara’s fingers to Luke’s hand, in the angle of her booted feet, she saw a Mara who loved her brother.
In the furore of the week before the wedding, Mara’s layer of distance developed splinters - fracture lines of anxiety and frustration and a kind of embarrassed joy that spilled beyond her best efforts to contain it. In the months that followed, the distance fell away completely, until Mara was no longer someone known and valued through Luke, for Luke’s sake; rather, she became a friend, appreciated entirely on her own merits. Leia remembered the times she had listened and sympathised with Mara’s frustration over the difficulty of balancing marriage and duties; remembered when Han was away and Luke was far off on Yavin 4 and she dragged Mara out to dine and drink and visit holotheaters that ran reenactments of the war effort so that they could share a whispered commentary and hide their laughter behind their hands, suspending the faint distraction in Mara, the way her eyes drifted to the sky. Beside Han, it was to Mara Leia spoke the longest about the pros and cons of resigning as Chief of State; Mara had Luke’s insight and wisdom, and the political and strategic acumen to go with it -- and unlike Luke, her advice didn’t always, inevitably, end up relating back to the Force in some subtle and probably unrealised manner.
It was Mara who acted as intermediary when Jaina’s teenaged resentment swelled against Leia, smoothing the edges of Jaina’s sulks and Leia’s guilt with sound judgement and a keen sense of when to point out the deficiencies of her own childhood as a comparison point. Mara was there, too, when Leia lost hold of Han, his pain and grief pulling him from her fingers in pursuit of the ghost of Chewbacca. In return, Leia pretended not to see the decline in Mara’s health, ignoring the times Mara’s attention slipped or she lost a train of thought, when she faltered or flagged momentarily, when she seemed briefly unsteady on her feet. Mara refused to pay heed to the disease that was slowly consuming her, and she allowed nothing less from others. Leia remembered most strongly of that time the fire in Mara’s eyes, burning brighter than ever, undiminished; and she recalled Mara weeping alone on the Jade Sabre, tears bleeding over her cheeks, moisture glistening around her eyes, while her hands knotted with frustration. Sometimes, too, she’d seen Mara look with sorrow and longing at Jaina, her hand going to her middle absently, eyes bleak with fear.
Leia hadn’t been there for the tumult of Ben’s birth. She arrived later, Han by this point restored to her, to find a gaunt and weary Mara, hair thin, eyes sickly and shadowed, holding a red-faced and wrinkled mass of warmth and hunger as if she would never let go. An exhausted Luke stood at her side in week-old clothes and stubble, a ghost of faint desperation lingering in his smiles. Leia had held the tiny, squalling infant, the unseeing trust in Ben’s eyes bringing in a wash the love and pain and uncertainty of responsibility for a life so helpless.
Mara had given her Ben to hold, later, after Anakin’s death, Mara wordless in the face of Leia’s grief. Leia told her, over and over again, that she was sorry they’d come so close to losing Ben in the scrambled rush from Coruscant, but Mara told her in hushed tones it wasn’t her fault. Mara had sat with her for hours, deep into the night, as Leia spoke, words and memories tumbling out without consistency or coherency. Ben slept in her arms and Mara never moved to take him away, her eyes only straying to him from time to time, brows drawn down, eyes shadowed with sorrow and soft fear as Leia wept for a son who would never grow old.
Months later, Leia had hugged Mara she stood, bleak-eyed, having finally decided that the safest place for Ben was in sanctuary while she and Luke fought on. She’d comforted Mara, and Mara had shared her joy at Jacen’s deliverance from the hands of the Vong. Leia remembered Mara sitting with her on a base somewhere -- which one, she couldn’t now remember -- Mara’s head tilted, eyes shadowed with lack of sleep, as they’d discussed the war effort, sacrifice and guilt. Luke had come in red-eyed and weary from some late briefing, smiled at Leia, asked what they were talking about. Mara’s hands had drifted to her chest, arms crossed but slightly open, as if holding the memory of touch. “Motherhood,” she’d said. Luke’s eyes drifted downward, and Leia knew he’d seen the gesture. “Ah,” he’d said, touching Mara’s hands gently, kissing her forehead, smiling at Leia and moving away.
Leia remembered the end of war; remembered Mara sitting on a rock amidst a clearing on Zonama Sekot, Ben in her arms, now a toddler, blinking and bewildered and a little wary of the woman holding him, almost a stranger, though Mara clung fast. She was laughing with Jaina, who flushed and looked toward Jag, in her discomposure a great deal like Han. Jaina stretched and looked at the sky, then closed her eyes, and Mara rested her cheek against Ben’s head, hugging him tightly. Leia stood and watched, Jacen warm and silent at her side; and that was what she remembered.
After, of course, came Jacen’s long absence, his longer silence and his return amidst the chaos of the Killik threat; for the peace as the galaxy rebuilt itself, dragging its limping, bloody shards together in the wake of the Vong war, had been shortlived. In that time Leia had formalised her role as Jedi. Luke had been encouraging when she approached him about it, and used words like, ‘at last’, and ‘recognised process’. Mara had quirked an eyebrow and said it was her decision whether she felt the need to formalise her status; obviously, said Mara, Leia already was a Jedi in experience and practice. Luke had said, “Well,” and Mara had looked at him, eyebrow lifted, lips quirked, and he’d mumbled something about deficiencies his own training and leaving the decision to Leia.
Later Leia had sat with Jaina and Mara at a scratched table in a mess hall somewhere, Zekk not far away because he never was far from Jaina in those days -- sometimes then, still, Jaina slipped and her I became we, and his glance, wherever he was, would shift across, leaving Leia with a strange mixture of unease and sympathy towards him -- as Jaina had spoken with barely contained fury about Jacen. Leia remembered her own dismay mingled with a sharp awareness that she barely knew the man who’d come back, wearing her son’s clothing and with his smile, but with eyes filled with secrets and his body held in a careful manner. Mara, though, had been withdrawn, gaze held away, and Leia had known Mara was thinking of Ben, trailing after Jacen, his bright Force sense open for the first time in his life, brilliance warm and exposed.
She remembered Ben of thirteen, almost two years ago, standing in his black outfit, impatient as Mara adjusted his collar. His hair shone as if reflecting the flare of Mara’s brilliant shading, bright against his clothing, their bent-together heads catching the light of the sun and bouncing it back like fire. Jacen had appeared at the end of the walk, striding ahead of Luke. Leia remembered Mara’s hand on Ben’s shoulder, fingers hesitating on the dark, thick material as if to pull him back, but Ben shrugged away without looking and Mara’s hand flicked free, fingers open in the air. Ben trotted to meet Jacen as Luke looked on, disapproval unhidden in his face. Leia had stepped to Mara’s side, had caught flash of a naked distress before her features settled to their usual cool amusement.
Leia had known Mara had fought Luke over Jacen, that it had cost her and them both. She and Mara had discussed concern for him early on, but the war had forced Leia and Han into exile, and contact had been sporadic. That flash, extracted from a thousand patchwork memories, was the closest Leia had come to understanding, but even though she’d searched she had found no meaning or revelation within it. It was static, held there in the past, never changing or growing.
There was also that most carefully kept of all the memories, lines and edges drenched and sharp with the effort to recall every detail. The last memory: the final time she’d seen Mara, laughing together over spiced drinks as the lazy Corellian sun spilled down. Mara had been preoccupied, her finger drifting to twist a strand of hair, eyes moving to the side and away as she slid in questions about Jacen. In the wash of memory it was clear that Mara was still calculating carefully, strategies and effect lining up in her head, the judgement being made as they spoke. Her fingers had trembled slightly and there was an edge at the back of her eye, something that coiled and burned when she spoke Jacen’s name. She had recently learned, of course, that he had used her son for murder, painted her child’s fingers with blood before he was even grown; she’d been ambushed with his abuse of her trust, his gross violation of the vulnerable and aching faith forced on a parent when placing a child into the care of another. Jacen had turned Ben into the thing she’d been used for, whose scars had been decades healing, whose darkness she had never entirely erased from her life.
Leia wished she had known then what Mara was already planning as they spoke. She wished she could have reached across the table, caught Mara’s wandering fingers in her own, and begged her to stay. Begged her not to feel she had to make absolution for trusting Jacen, to redeem herself in his blood. She wished she’d recognised the unwavering, merciless gleam in Mara’s eyes, the old, hard abstraction that stopped at nothing in pursuit of a brand of justice more brutal than Leia was familiar with. Luke would have known, would have recognised it in an instant; Leia, knowing Mara like a sister, but not well enough, had let her walk away to her death, blithe and unknowing.
Leia looked unseeing into the pockets of darkness that made up Coruscant’s night. She touched her throat, swallowing back a burning, aching sorrow. She had told Luke of that last conversation, back in the first few months after Mara’s death. He’d looked at her with bloodshot, listless eyes, and told her in a toneless voice it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, that Mara wouldn’t have listened. It hadn’t helped him or Leia, and she wished, later, that she’d held her silence and let him keep his.
Closing her eyes, Leia wrapped her fingers around the cold metal of the balustrade. It hummed faintly under her skin, catching the vibration of the field-dampening unit protecting the building from its own great height. That idle mid-afternoon conversation wasn’t her only source of anguish. She failed Mara, too, in her grief, in her love, in all the sorrow and the pain, entangled. Her only consolation was that she thought Mara would understand.
Leia thought of the infant, clad in a soft green jumpsuit, hands opening and closing incessantly, one of two saved with Mara’s assistance those many long years ago. She thought of the toddler, dark-haired and dark-eyed, laughing as she stopped him from tasting some variant of crawler on New Alderaan. She thought of the boy, knees dirty from the forest floor on Yavin 4, teary-eyed over the loss of a brightly-coloured and probably venomous mothlike creature into the tall dark canopy. She thought of the teenager, uncertain eyes and thoughtful stance, meditating restlessly on the floor of the Falcon. She even thought of the young man, scarred hands and elusive smile and unyielding integrity, forged in unimaginable horror, crouching to speak to a refugee on some war-torn world.
He tormented her, that boy, for Leia couldn’t bring herself to wish he never existed. She couldn’t regret laughing with him at silly jokes, she couldn’t regret putting her arms around his thin shoulders as he mourned the loss of a brother he’d seen die months before but had never been able to grieve for, and she couldn’t regret her pride and joy for his compassion and dignity, for his survival and endurance, for his return when all was thought lost.
Even when it meant Mara’s life and the lives of many, many others, the wish that she’d never known him would not come.
That, Leia supposed, was her weakness. Perhaps even her sin. She felt shame that she carried him with her, as if doing so made her complicit in his eventual crimes, the atrocities she abhorred. But in this she was merely a mother -- except there was no merely to it, at all. That was what hurt most.
She watched the darkness of Coruscant from Mara’s old lookout. There should, she thought, have been rain; the sky should have been blanketed, swallowed in gloom that gushed down, painting her cheeks, dripping from her fingers, pooling by her boots.
Instead the sky was starless and clear, a gibbous moon hanging in its farthest corner, struggling to make its light shine across the garish cityscape.
The door whispered behind Leia. She turned her head and Luke nodded to her, his face remote in the silvery backwash of used light. He moved into the deep shadows to her left, crossing to lean against the curved metal of the balustrade, his hands spread wide. He stared out at the city. After a time, he lowered his head.
Leia stayed there with him and their shared ghosts, companion to the shadows and the faltering moon and the waning, softly shaded memories, long into the night.
[end]
Author: deaka
Rating: G
Characters: Leia Organa Solo, Luke Skywalker, mention of Mara, Ben, Jacen, Jaina
Pairings: Luke/Mara, Leia/Han
Timeframe: Between Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi
Warnings: Spoilers for Sacrifice for anyone who's managed to avoid them to this point.
Summary: It was left to Leia to remember, and she does.
The brilliant lights of Coruscant did not reach the shadowed balcony Leia stood on, tucked into the hidden recesses of the Jedi Temple. It had escaped the methodical routing of the lower areas and stood intact, curved barriers gleaming faintly where they stood watch over the sweeping vista of Galactic City. Mara had loved this balcony; as long as Leia had known her, she’d had a habit of standing and looking over across the lights of Coruscant. Many years ago, it had been Imperial Palace -- once her childhood home -- that offered elevation enough to view the arcing towers and the velvet, hidden depths of the world. Later it was the Temple, standing tall amidst the structures that reached far into the darkened sky, that stood for her vantage point and lookout.
Leia didn’t understand what had prompted Mara’s nightly vigils, whether it was merely remembrance of a world she’d once known, or if it was a practised ritual, a means of preserving peace and security -- it would not be outside of Mara’s worldview to check the skyline for enemies before withdrawing for sleep. Leia had joined her occasionally, while staying in the Temple for briefings or a visit, sometimes falling into absorbing conversations about identity and past and freedom, sometimes arguing over galactic politics, sometimes laughing about colleagues and husbands and children. Other times there was just the silence, broken only by the undying murmur of the city below. Sometimes Luke would be there, too, in the shadows somewhere on Mara’s other side. Other times he was not, Mara standing amiably and comfortable alone.
Now Leia stood alone, looking over a city that carried on regardless of what was lost; a city that didn’t care who watched over it, its frantic life churning on unheedful of the individual tapestries of death and love, births and losses that swirled at its core. It was left to Leia to remember, her hands clasped to the cool, silvery metal of the barricade as Mara’s had once done.
Leia had neither Luke’s fathomless closeness nor Ben’s open, unshakeable bond in which to anchor her memories of Mara. Instead she had fragments, piecemeal, built over a long time to form a whole she’d never expected. She had that bitter, defiant woman in a holding cell in Imperial Palace, who wore around her a shield of pain and distrust, who promised Leia she’d kill the brother who had already, in his voice and eyes, told Leia of his faith and trust in the woman who would be his killer. She had the woman who’d saved two of her children from abduction while infants, expecting nothing in return. She had the woman whose eyes followed Luke, who looked at him with pensiveness and regard always, as if he were a puzzle, a mystery, something with pieces misaligned whose true nature she was trying to discern. She had the woman Mara wanted the world to see then, sarcasm and watchful eyes that waited for betrayal.
Later came the Mara she saw, caught in reflection through her brother’s gaze, in the way his face softened and lost the preoccupation and otherworldliness that had come to mask the humour and spirit Leia had first known him for. “It feels like coming home,” he’d said to Leia in a moment when it was just the two of them, early in those days after he and Mara had returned from Niruaun. “Like nothing I’ve ever felt before. There’s peace here. She’s the place I’ve been looking for, Leia, my whole life.” Leia had been pleased for him, but bemused at the same time, for she’d never seen the side to Mara that shone from his eyes except filtered through him; she brushed the broad, deep loyalty and the strength of honour and compassion, but they were held at remove, translated through the surface of Luke’s regard.
Then she saw, one evening, at a gathering of Jedi where she felt little more comfortable than a restless Han, how Mara’s hand lifted and fell, drifting, aimless, on Luke’s arm, how her fingers encircled his wrist and slid to clasp, palm to palm, his hand. Light bounced from Mara’s hair, from Luke’s pale tunic, and Leia saw how Luke’s shoulders loosened slightly, how Mara’s stance eased. There was a hidden language there she knew, that startled her, seen externally. It melded the blooded trust of warriors who’d fought side-by-side with the intimacy of lovers, skin and touch -- and she’d guessed, but now she knew -- and it was as clear as the sky was bright with orb-lights and free of stars, as clear as Han’s presence beside her. And in the touch of Mara’s fingers to Luke’s hand, in the angle of her booted feet, she saw a Mara who loved her brother.
In the furore of the week before the wedding, Mara’s layer of distance developed splinters - fracture lines of anxiety and frustration and a kind of embarrassed joy that spilled beyond her best efforts to contain it. In the months that followed, the distance fell away completely, until Mara was no longer someone known and valued through Luke, for Luke’s sake; rather, she became a friend, appreciated entirely on her own merits. Leia remembered the times she had listened and sympathised with Mara’s frustration over the difficulty of balancing marriage and duties; remembered when Han was away and Luke was far off on Yavin 4 and she dragged Mara out to dine and drink and visit holotheaters that ran reenactments of the war effort so that they could share a whispered commentary and hide their laughter behind their hands, suspending the faint distraction in Mara, the way her eyes drifted to the sky. Beside Han, it was to Mara Leia spoke the longest about the pros and cons of resigning as Chief of State; Mara had Luke’s insight and wisdom, and the political and strategic acumen to go with it -- and unlike Luke, her advice didn’t always, inevitably, end up relating back to the Force in some subtle and probably unrealised manner.
It was Mara who acted as intermediary when Jaina’s teenaged resentment swelled against Leia, smoothing the edges of Jaina’s sulks and Leia’s guilt with sound judgement and a keen sense of when to point out the deficiencies of her own childhood as a comparison point. Mara was there, too, when Leia lost hold of Han, his pain and grief pulling him from her fingers in pursuit of the ghost of Chewbacca. In return, Leia pretended not to see the decline in Mara’s health, ignoring the times Mara’s attention slipped or she lost a train of thought, when she faltered or flagged momentarily, when she seemed briefly unsteady on her feet. Mara refused to pay heed to the disease that was slowly consuming her, and she allowed nothing less from others. Leia remembered most strongly of that time the fire in Mara’s eyes, burning brighter than ever, undiminished; and she recalled Mara weeping alone on the Jade Sabre, tears bleeding over her cheeks, moisture glistening around her eyes, while her hands knotted with frustration. Sometimes, too, she’d seen Mara look with sorrow and longing at Jaina, her hand going to her middle absently, eyes bleak with fear.
Leia hadn’t been there for the tumult of Ben’s birth. She arrived later, Han by this point restored to her, to find a gaunt and weary Mara, hair thin, eyes sickly and shadowed, holding a red-faced and wrinkled mass of warmth and hunger as if she would never let go. An exhausted Luke stood at her side in week-old clothes and stubble, a ghost of faint desperation lingering in his smiles. Leia had held the tiny, squalling infant, the unseeing trust in Ben’s eyes bringing in a wash the love and pain and uncertainty of responsibility for a life so helpless.
Mara had given her Ben to hold, later, after Anakin’s death, Mara wordless in the face of Leia’s grief. Leia told her, over and over again, that she was sorry they’d come so close to losing Ben in the scrambled rush from Coruscant, but Mara told her in hushed tones it wasn’t her fault. Mara had sat with her for hours, deep into the night, as Leia spoke, words and memories tumbling out without consistency or coherency. Ben slept in her arms and Mara never moved to take him away, her eyes only straying to him from time to time, brows drawn down, eyes shadowed with sorrow and soft fear as Leia wept for a son who would never grow old.
Months later, Leia had hugged Mara she stood, bleak-eyed, having finally decided that the safest place for Ben was in sanctuary while she and Luke fought on. She’d comforted Mara, and Mara had shared her joy at Jacen’s deliverance from the hands of the Vong. Leia remembered Mara sitting with her on a base somewhere -- which one, she couldn’t now remember -- Mara’s head tilted, eyes shadowed with lack of sleep, as they’d discussed the war effort, sacrifice and guilt. Luke had come in red-eyed and weary from some late briefing, smiled at Leia, asked what they were talking about. Mara’s hands had drifted to her chest, arms crossed but slightly open, as if holding the memory of touch. “Motherhood,” she’d said. Luke’s eyes drifted downward, and Leia knew he’d seen the gesture. “Ah,” he’d said, touching Mara’s hands gently, kissing her forehead, smiling at Leia and moving away.
Leia remembered the end of war; remembered Mara sitting on a rock amidst a clearing on Zonama Sekot, Ben in her arms, now a toddler, blinking and bewildered and a little wary of the woman holding him, almost a stranger, though Mara clung fast. She was laughing with Jaina, who flushed and looked toward Jag, in her discomposure a great deal like Han. Jaina stretched and looked at the sky, then closed her eyes, and Mara rested her cheek against Ben’s head, hugging him tightly. Leia stood and watched, Jacen warm and silent at her side; and that was what she remembered.
After, of course, came Jacen’s long absence, his longer silence and his return amidst the chaos of the Killik threat; for the peace as the galaxy rebuilt itself, dragging its limping, bloody shards together in the wake of the Vong war, had been shortlived. In that time Leia had formalised her role as Jedi. Luke had been encouraging when she approached him about it, and used words like, ‘at last’, and ‘recognised process’. Mara had quirked an eyebrow and said it was her decision whether she felt the need to formalise her status; obviously, said Mara, Leia already was a Jedi in experience and practice. Luke had said, “Well,” and Mara had looked at him, eyebrow lifted, lips quirked, and he’d mumbled something about deficiencies his own training and leaving the decision to Leia.
Later Leia had sat with Jaina and Mara at a scratched table in a mess hall somewhere, Zekk not far away because he never was far from Jaina in those days -- sometimes then, still, Jaina slipped and her I became we, and his glance, wherever he was, would shift across, leaving Leia with a strange mixture of unease and sympathy towards him -- as Jaina had spoken with barely contained fury about Jacen. Leia remembered her own dismay mingled with a sharp awareness that she barely knew the man who’d come back, wearing her son’s clothing and with his smile, but with eyes filled with secrets and his body held in a careful manner. Mara, though, had been withdrawn, gaze held away, and Leia had known Mara was thinking of Ben, trailing after Jacen, his bright Force sense open for the first time in his life, brilliance warm and exposed.
She remembered Ben of thirteen, almost two years ago, standing in his black outfit, impatient as Mara adjusted his collar. His hair shone as if reflecting the flare of Mara’s brilliant shading, bright against his clothing, their bent-together heads catching the light of the sun and bouncing it back like fire. Jacen had appeared at the end of the walk, striding ahead of Luke. Leia remembered Mara’s hand on Ben’s shoulder, fingers hesitating on the dark, thick material as if to pull him back, but Ben shrugged away without looking and Mara’s hand flicked free, fingers open in the air. Ben trotted to meet Jacen as Luke looked on, disapproval unhidden in his face. Leia had stepped to Mara’s side, had caught flash of a naked distress before her features settled to their usual cool amusement.
Leia had known Mara had fought Luke over Jacen, that it had cost her and them both. She and Mara had discussed concern for him early on, but the war had forced Leia and Han into exile, and contact had been sporadic. That flash, extracted from a thousand patchwork memories, was the closest Leia had come to understanding, but even though she’d searched she had found no meaning or revelation within it. It was static, held there in the past, never changing or growing.
There was also that most carefully kept of all the memories, lines and edges drenched and sharp with the effort to recall every detail. The last memory: the final time she’d seen Mara, laughing together over spiced drinks as the lazy Corellian sun spilled down. Mara had been preoccupied, her finger drifting to twist a strand of hair, eyes moving to the side and away as she slid in questions about Jacen. In the wash of memory it was clear that Mara was still calculating carefully, strategies and effect lining up in her head, the judgement being made as they spoke. Her fingers had trembled slightly and there was an edge at the back of her eye, something that coiled and burned when she spoke Jacen’s name. She had recently learned, of course, that he had used her son for murder, painted her child’s fingers with blood before he was even grown; she’d been ambushed with his abuse of her trust, his gross violation of the vulnerable and aching faith forced on a parent when placing a child into the care of another. Jacen had turned Ben into the thing she’d been used for, whose scars had been decades healing, whose darkness she had never entirely erased from her life.
Leia wished she had known then what Mara was already planning as they spoke. She wished she could have reached across the table, caught Mara’s wandering fingers in her own, and begged her to stay. Begged her not to feel she had to make absolution for trusting Jacen, to redeem herself in his blood. She wished she’d recognised the unwavering, merciless gleam in Mara’s eyes, the old, hard abstraction that stopped at nothing in pursuit of a brand of justice more brutal than Leia was familiar with. Luke would have known, would have recognised it in an instant; Leia, knowing Mara like a sister, but not well enough, had let her walk away to her death, blithe and unknowing.
Leia looked unseeing into the pockets of darkness that made up Coruscant’s night. She touched her throat, swallowing back a burning, aching sorrow. She had told Luke of that last conversation, back in the first few months after Mara’s death. He’d looked at her with bloodshot, listless eyes, and told her in a toneless voice it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, that Mara wouldn’t have listened. It hadn’t helped him or Leia, and she wished, later, that she’d held her silence and let him keep his.
Closing her eyes, Leia wrapped her fingers around the cold metal of the balustrade. It hummed faintly under her skin, catching the vibration of the field-dampening unit protecting the building from its own great height. That idle mid-afternoon conversation wasn’t her only source of anguish. She failed Mara, too, in her grief, in her love, in all the sorrow and the pain, entangled. Her only consolation was that she thought Mara would understand.
Leia thought of the infant, clad in a soft green jumpsuit, hands opening and closing incessantly, one of two saved with Mara’s assistance those many long years ago. She thought of the toddler, dark-haired and dark-eyed, laughing as she stopped him from tasting some variant of crawler on New Alderaan. She thought of the boy, knees dirty from the forest floor on Yavin 4, teary-eyed over the loss of a brightly-coloured and probably venomous mothlike creature into the tall dark canopy. She thought of the teenager, uncertain eyes and thoughtful stance, meditating restlessly on the floor of the Falcon. She even thought of the young man, scarred hands and elusive smile and unyielding integrity, forged in unimaginable horror, crouching to speak to a refugee on some war-torn world.
He tormented her, that boy, for Leia couldn’t bring herself to wish he never existed. She couldn’t regret laughing with him at silly jokes, she couldn’t regret putting her arms around his thin shoulders as he mourned the loss of a brother he’d seen die months before but had never been able to grieve for, and she couldn’t regret her pride and joy for his compassion and dignity, for his survival and endurance, for his return when all was thought lost.
Even when it meant Mara’s life and the lives of many, many others, the wish that she’d never known him would not come.
That, Leia supposed, was her weakness. Perhaps even her sin. She felt shame that she carried him with her, as if doing so made her complicit in his eventual crimes, the atrocities she abhorred. But in this she was merely a mother -- except there was no merely to it, at all. That was what hurt most.
She watched the darkness of Coruscant from Mara’s old lookout. There should, she thought, have been rain; the sky should have been blanketed, swallowed in gloom that gushed down, painting her cheeks, dripping from her fingers, pooling by her boots.
Instead the sky was starless and clear, a gibbous moon hanging in its farthest corner, struggling to make its light shine across the garish cityscape.
The door whispered behind Leia. She turned her head and Luke nodded to her, his face remote in the silvery backwash of used light. He moved into the deep shadows to her left, crossing to lean against the curved metal of the balustrade, his hands spread wide. He stared out at the city. After a time, he lowered his head.
Leia stayed there with him and their shared ghosts, companion to the shadows and the faltering moon and the waning, softly shaded memories, long into the night.
[end]