Fic: Dream Days -- Luke, Mara & Ben, 1/1
Title: Dream Days
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade Skywalker, Ben Skywalker
Rating: G
Warnings: None (unless you count happy!fic)
Timeframe: EU, between NJO and DNT
Summary: Luke, Mara, Ben and a warm day on Coruscant.
A/N: Credit for the title to Powderfinger's Dream Days at the Hotel Existence.
Coruscant’s light has changed since Vongforming, falling with a richer, fuller colour that sits heavy on the eye. Despite the work done by the Vong shapers after the war, restoring the world to its natural state, it will never be exactly the same.
Luke opens his hand to the spill of the sun. This, he thinks, will be all his son ever knows of Coruscant, this slow golden treacle, marked by its passage through the air. Ben might read of the white, clear light before the fall, but to him it would always be words describing something lost, bereft of the pull of memory.
Mara’s hair is slightly darker in this light, golden strands muted. The shade of the multifarious trees and saplings around them dapples her pale tunic, while the wind sets it moving gently.
Mara lifts an eyebrow at him, and he smiles, acknowledging his straying thoughts.
Her return look is amused, if tingled with a hint of concern. Occasionally, when he allows it, his Force awareness will swell and sharpen, his thoughts perforce wandering with it. A lingering side effect of the poison that almost killed him and the strange means of purging it, perhaps, or maybe just the natural evolution of his relationship with the Force. He taps and reserves it, but, as ever, she sees more than he is able to conceal.
“I was thinking,” he says, to dispel any such worry, “about the light.” His gesture takes in the sky, sparkling purplish blue, as a wellspring.
Her glance follows his upwards, then more practically back down to her opening hand. Her fingers cup as though the light is water to pool and stream away, then open, releasing the image. “How so?”
He moves his own extended fingers. “To Ben, this is natural. Will always be.”
She says, “Ah.” Her arm links with his, encircling and embracing. “Feeling our age, love?”
He smiles at her conducive leap. “Maybe.”
“Coruscant has its scars.” Her arm tightens on his, perhaps not intentionally. “We all do.”
He thinks, not of his own near-escape from death, but of Mara’s long illness. The first bout, drawn out and painful, sapping her energy and faith in herself. The second, plundering her down to the depths, the bare rock of her soul, where she stood tooth-and-nail guard over the child within her. Her long and frightening recovery, and the lasting, hidden damage. Sometimes he wonders if her faith in the Force has ever returned in full; it was warily given to begin with, and the Force had not supported her in those darkest hours, had not kept her alive - that was all her, stripped bloody until all that remained was the fighter who wouldn’t die. The Force had vanquished the illness in the end, or such was Luke’s memory of it; but how she remembered it, at the very edges of her life as she had been, he did not know.
He smiles, though it feels a little uneven. His hand closes on hers and squeezes. Her fingers are warm from the sun, dry and strong.
They find a place in the edge of shade under tall trees. The ground covering is purple and springy, and smells, oddly, like the groundroot paste his aunt used to make for special occasions. Under it is dirt, hiding all indication of the metal bones far below that hold the island oasis afloat in its elevated position among the strung lines of vehicles and the jagged, sometimes broken buildings that mark Coruscant’s ancient, upturned face.
Ben is visible not far away, where children of various shape and hues of skin and fur play on the open ground under the falling light. He stands slightly away from the others, intent on his fingers. The occasional, uncertain glances he darts towards the larger group as they laugh and run make Luke ache, but he’s learnt - is learning, or trying to - that sometimes a parent has to watch at a distance. Ben will approach on his own terms, or he won’t; Luke can’t take that away from him.
Ben’s solitary nature is a source of gentle concern for them, unsure as they are whether it is his innate inclination or some expression of trauma held over from a time and a war still fresh for them but which he can hardly remember. He’s an unusual child, as far as the combination of terms is not self-evident, because Luke doesn’t know that a usual child exists - and they are an unusual family. Luke sees more of Mara in Ben than he sees of himself, but Mara is the light of his eyes and Ben shines as a mirror to them both, so perhaps that is only to be expected.
Mara stretches out in a rare posture of repose, yielding the guard to him. Her hair tickles his fingers as she rests against him. Her eyes follow Ben. He feels her muscles loosen as much as they ever do, still ready to come to alertness in an instant if necessary. By habit his gaze plays along the treeline opposite, the profile of the buildings beyond, the shape of the airspeeders in the distance, marking and tracking movement. The passive scan is as ingrained as breathing.
The trees ripple in the same wind that tugged at Mara’s tunic, and shade flickers about them. Luke thinks, for some reason, of Tatooine, a place and a time where to him trees stretching greenly to the sky would have been strange and alien, where wind always meant looking with trepidation to a horizon that was nearly-infinite for the haze that signalled a coming sandstorm. Where, once, kind eyes had watched over him, near and afar, through dry, languid days of boredom and dust.
He has a feeling that if he stepped foot on Tatooine now, years since he had last visited, decades since it had been home, it would be that wide, stark desert and the searing double light that would seem alien. Is that a betrayal of Beru and Owen, people who, after all, he has come to appreciate and understand more in the years that have stretched between him and their deaths? He isn’t sure he can answer, even to himself.
Mara possesses nothing and no one to ground her to her childhood apart from herself. She rarely speaks of it, and seems content in her present in a way he sometimes fails to understand. Seeing the gaps in her past has caused him to question his own neglect when it comes to the people who raised him; for long years he’d barely mourned them, tangled notions of resentment and hurt choking and filtering his memories in a way he is only beginning to understand.
He had thought, once, that he had closed them and his loathed years on Tatooine out of the person he’d become, and it is only as he has grown older that he has come to realise how much they remain with him. And how little he regrets that fact.
He winds his fingers through Mara’s hair idly, watching an airspeeder peel away from the gleaming edge of the bronze building to the east.
“I’m glad we did this,” Mara murmurs. Her tone says she’s not really seeking a response, caught in her own reflections.
Luke watches as Ben offers whatever is on his fingers to an equally-fascinated Akwari child. A brilo-beetle, Luke guesses with considerable certainty; the reflective-winged insects flit and dance in abundance out in the sunlit areas. He lets his gaze wander again across the treeline, catching only deep green shadows.
“I am too,” he says, thinking briefly of the distant Jedi academy, rebuilt on Ossus. It would be whirring on without him, a tapestry of minor crises, information streaming in and out across the galaxy like the Jedi who come and go. The demands on his time there are sizable, but he is always careful to buy, beg or steal time out for Mara and Ben from those demands. Still, this opportunity for dedicated days spent as a family is rare. It had been Mara’s idea, and as soon as she’d suggested it he’d embraced it wholeheartedly, turning down the inevitable invitations for meetings and conferences that arise whenever he is within proximity of Coruscant.
Mara breathes in the quiet, the music of her thoughts and pulse and the working of her body, blood and cells and mind, melding into a familiar song in the Force. She spills over with a peace that he absorbs like air; anyone else would be surprised to sense that peace from her, not famed for her even temperament, but there is no one who knows her as he does. It resides at the core of her, that peace, a solidity of strength and conviction that is and always has been a balm to him.
Ben hesitates as his playmate laughs and exchanges words with a passing child, then smiles as the other impatiently tugs him in. He blows on his fingers, and something glitters away into the blue, aching sky.
Luke watches the green trees under the languid sunlight, and thinks that, no matter the quality of the light or the shape of the trees, here with these people, this is home. He’s content, and that, too, is something he’s learned to cherish and protect.
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade Skywalker, Ben Skywalker
Rating: G
Warnings: None (unless you count happy!fic)
Timeframe: EU, between NJO and DNT
Summary: Luke, Mara, Ben and a warm day on Coruscant.
A/N: Credit for the title to Powderfinger's Dream Days at the Hotel Existence.
Coruscant’s light has changed since Vongforming, falling with a richer, fuller colour that sits heavy on the eye. Despite the work done by the Vong shapers after the war, restoring the world to its natural state, it will never be exactly the same.
Luke opens his hand to the spill of the sun. This, he thinks, will be all his son ever knows of Coruscant, this slow golden treacle, marked by its passage through the air. Ben might read of the white, clear light before the fall, but to him it would always be words describing something lost, bereft of the pull of memory.
Mara’s hair is slightly darker in this light, golden strands muted. The shade of the multifarious trees and saplings around them dapples her pale tunic, while the wind sets it moving gently.
Mara lifts an eyebrow at him, and he smiles, acknowledging his straying thoughts.
Her return look is amused, if tingled with a hint of concern. Occasionally, when he allows it, his Force awareness will swell and sharpen, his thoughts perforce wandering with it. A lingering side effect of the poison that almost killed him and the strange means of purging it, perhaps, or maybe just the natural evolution of his relationship with the Force. He taps and reserves it, but, as ever, she sees more than he is able to conceal.
“I was thinking,” he says, to dispel any such worry, “about the light.” His gesture takes in the sky, sparkling purplish blue, as a wellspring.
Her glance follows his upwards, then more practically back down to her opening hand. Her fingers cup as though the light is water to pool and stream away, then open, releasing the image. “How so?”
He moves his own extended fingers. “To Ben, this is natural. Will always be.”
She says, “Ah.” Her arm links with his, encircling and embracing. “Feeling our age, love?”
He smiles at her conducive leap. “Maybe.”
“Coruscant has its scars.” Her arm tightens on his, perhaps not intentionally. “We all do.”
He thinks, not of his own near-escape from death, but of Mara’s long illness. The first bout, drawn out and painful, sapping her energy and faith in herself. The second, plundering her down to the depths, the bare rock of her soul, where she stood tooth-and-nail guard over the child within her. Her long and frightening recovery, and the lasting, hidden damage. Sometimes he wonders if her faith in the Force has ever returned in full; it was warily given to begin with, and the Force had not supported her in those darkest hours, had not kept her alive - that was all her, stripped bloody until all that remained was the fighter who wouldn’t die. The Force had vanquished the illness in the end, or such was Luke’s memory of it; but how she remembered it, at the very edges of her life as she had been, he did not know.
He smiles, though it feels a little uneven. His hand closes on hers and squeezes. Her fingers are warm from the sun, dry and strong.
They find a place in the edge of shade under tall trees. The ground covering is purple and springy, and smells, oddly, like the groundroot paste his aunt used to make for special occasions. Under it is dirt, hiding all indication of the metal bones far below that hold the island oasis afloat in its elevated position among the strung lines of vehicles and the jagged, sometimes broken buildings that mark Coruscant’s ancient, upturned face.
Ben is visible not far away, where children of various shape and hues of skin and fur play on the open ground under the falling light. He stands slightly away from the others, intent on his fingers. The occasional, uncertain glances he darts towards the larger group as they laugh and run make Luke ache, but he’s learnt - is learning, or trying to - that sometimes a parent has to watch at a distance. Ben will approach on his own terms, or he won’t; Luke can’t take that away from him.
Ben’s solitary nature is a source of gentle concern for them, unsure as they are whether it is his innate inclination or some expression of trauma held over from a time and a war still fresh for them but which he can hardly remember. He’s an unusual child, as far as the combination of terms is not self-evident, because Luke doesn’t know that a usual child exists - and they are an unusual family. Luke sees more of Mara in Ben than he sees of himself, but Mara is the light of his eyes and Ben shines as a mirror to them both, so perhaps that is only to be expected.
Mara stretches out in a rare posture of repose, yielding the guard to him. Her hair tickles his fingers as she rests against him. Her eyes follow Ben. He feels her muscles loosen as much as they ever do, still ready to come to alertness in an instant if necessary. By habit his gaze plays along the treeline opposite, the profile of the buildings beyond, the shape of the airspeeders in the distance, marking and tracking movement. The passive scan is as ingrained as breathing.
The trees ripple in the same wind that tugged at Mara’s tunic, and shade flickers about them. Luke thinks, for some reason, of Tatooine, a place and a time where to him trees stretching greenly to the sky would have been strange and alien, where wind always meant looking with trepidation to a horizon that was nearly-infinite for the haze that signalled a coming sandstorm. Where, once, kind eyes had watched over him, near and afar, through dry, languid days of boredom and dust.
He has a feeling that if he stepped foot on Tatooine now, years since he had last visited, decades since it had been home, it would be that wide, stark desert and the searing double light that would seem alien. Is that a betrayal of Beru and Owen, people who, after all, he has come to appreciate and understand more in the years that have stretched between him and their deaths? He isn’t sure he can answer, even to himself.
Mara possesses nothing and no one to ground her to her childhood apart from herself. She rarely speaks of it, and seems content in her present in a way he sometimes fails to understand. Seeing the gaps in her past has caused him to question his own neglect when it comes to the people who raised him; for long years he’d barely mourned them, tangled notions of resentment and hurt choking and filtering his memories in a way he is only beginning to understand.
He had thought, once, that he had closed them and his loathed years on Tatooine out of the person he’d become, and it is only as he has grown older that he has come to realise how much they remain with him. And how little he regrets that fact.
He winds his fingers through Mara’s hair idly, watching an airspeeder peel away from the gleaming edge of the bronze building to the east.
“I’m glad we did this,” Mara murmurs. Her tone says she’s not really seeking a response, caught in her own reflections.
Luke watches as Ben offers whatever is on his fingers to an equally-fascinated Akwari child. A brilo-beetle, Luke guesses with considerable certainty; the reflective-winged insects flit and dance in abundance out in the sunlit areas. He lets his gaze wander again across the treeline, catching only deep green shadows.
“I am too,” he says, thinking briefly of the distant Jedi academy, rebuilt on Ossus. It would be whirring on without him, a tapestry of minor crises, information streaming in and out across the galaxy like the Jedi who come and go. The demands on his time there are sizable, but he is always careful to buy, beg or steal time out for Mara and Ben from those demands. Still, this opportunity for dedicated days spent as a family is rare. It had been Mara’s idea, and as soon as she’d suggested it he’d embraced it wholeheartedly, turning down the inevitable invitations for meetings and conferences that arise whenever he is within proximity of Coruscant.
Mara breathes in the quiet, the music of her thoughts and pulse and the working of her body, blood and cells and mind, melding into a familiar song in the Force. She spills over with a peace that he absorbs like air; anyone else would be surprised to sense that peace from her, not famed for her even temperament, but there is no one who knows her as he does. It resides at the core of her, that peace, a solidity of strength and conviction that is and always has been a balm to him.
Ben hesitates as his playmate laughs and exchanges words with a passing child, then smiles as the other impatiently tugs him in. He blows on his fingers, and something glitters away into the blue, aching sky.
Luke watches the green trees under the languid sunlight, and thinks that, no matter the quality of the light or the shape of the trees, here with these people, this is home. He’s content, and that, too, is something he’s learned to cherish and protect.