In Shadows and Darkness

Chapter 29

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

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Mara woke in the early hours of the morning and for long, sleepy moments couldn't work out why. They'd arrived at Endor two days earlier and Luke had spent the whole time on the new battle station, only returning a few hours ago to collapse into bed, exhausted. She'd curled up beside him, body hugging his, skin to skin, listening to his breathing in the darkness until he'd fallen into a broken, restless sleep, twisting and turning as he always did but never quite escaping his dreams.

Mara had laid awake in the darkness watching him, wondering what a Sith dreamed; terrible things? Nightmares and visions, barbed and twisted through with Darkness? Fractured foresight and future revelations perhaps... or simply dreams; moments and memories, hopes and fears all jumbled together, like everyone else.

He'd jolted awake with a gasp, jerking upright, arms held protectively before him, fingers splayed. For long seconds he stared breathless into the darkness, wide-eyed, chest heaving... then slowly tense muscles loosed as realization of where he was crept in and his breathing gradually returned to normal, and eventually he'd laid down on his back as his eyes closed, drifting again.

"Stop watching me." he'd murmured quietly into the darkness without opening his eyes.

Mara loosed a smile, "I'm not." She said, "I'm looking in your general direction."

"Well then look in some other general direction."

"I like this one." she'd maintained gamely.

He'd remained silent for long seconds and she began to wonder if he'd fallen asleep, then he rolled from his back onto his side, draping his arm over her and pulling her closely to him so that she faced away, body laid within the curve of his.

"Go to sleep." he'd breathed against the back of her neck, and she'd settled, closing her eyes, lost in his warmth and his touch...

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Which was what was absent now. Slowly it percolated into her drowsy mind that she was alone- Skywalker was gone.

But the pale greeny-blue glow of an automemo light traced a soft line around the partly-open door so Mara rolled quietly from the bed and catwalked towards the diffuse light in the room beyond. Luke was sat with his back to her, leaning back to balance on the rear legs of the chair at his desk on the far side of the room, his bare shoulders highlighted by the dim light of the automemo.

Frowning, Mara took a half-step forward in absolute silence.

Immediately, Luke hit a key on the automemo and the screen fell dark, throwing the room into hazy star-shadows from the viewport.

Mara frowned, pausing instantly. "What's going on?"

"I'm working."

"Well then why did you just turn it off?"

His head turned slightly, the muscles in his back tensing just visibly, five years of lessons hard-learned spelled out in the scars across his back and arms, just visible in the wan light, "Is that what you came in here to find out?"

Mara paused for long seconds; she'd been on the very edge of shouting at him, indignant at the accusation... but wasn't it true?

He sighed; "What the hell are we doing? Who do we think we're fooling."

"Not each-other, apparently." Still smarting from the near-break-up just a few weeks ago, Mara wasn't looking for a fight; "Actually I was just reflecting that your answer was good enough for me."

He turned, tone and words indulgent, full of mock belief. "Really? 'Cos now I'm completely persuaded of your good intentions."

She smiled, draping her arms about him where he sat, "Come to bed, pushover."

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Mara laid her arm across him, head on his shoulder as they lay back down, the pale glow of distant stars their only light. He heard her sigh, felt her breath against his skin, felt her warmth, mental and physical...

A sudden regret washed over him- at what he didn't know; realization of what this had become perhaps? Fear that it wouldn't be enough when it came to the moment, as it hadn't been for his father.

'Darkness wouldn't care.'; His father's words echoed in Luke's thoughts, a lifeline to cling to, a promise that he wasn't yet lost. But then his father had clearly cared a great deal for his mother... he still did. And yet and he'd still turned on her in the moment.

The words came from his mouth in a whisper before he'd even thought them. "Don't ever cross me Mara."

She tensed against him, "What?"

"Don't cross me."

"Is that a threat?" Her voice hardened slightly, but he couldn't muster the same, rueful.

"No; I don't threaten- not you."

She turned to look at him, "Well then what the hell was it?"

"I don't know... Just... don't. Don't cross me."

The sincere, heartfelt tone in his voice unnerved her. "...Why?"

"..I..." The truth was like a body-blow and it burned him to say it out loud; "...I don't know what I'd do."

Unsettled as she was, Mara didn't back down. "Hey, I can look after myself."

"Not against me."

There was no trace of doubt in his voice- and she knew why. She sat up now, turning to face him. He was looking not at her but at his left hand, using his thumb to turn the blue-stoned ring he wore on his little finger, lost in thought. "You'll... that moment will come Mara- my fate in your hands."

She shook her head, about to deny, to offer reassurance-

"Don't..." he cut in, refusing her automatic response. "I just... I don't know what I would do if you crossed me..."

Mara remained still but he looked away, deeply troubled. Eventually she reached out to touch his cheek but he shied back, taking her hand, unwilling to be comforted. Instead she glanced down at the ring on his hand as he took hers, wrapping slim fingers about it.

"Where is this from?" she asked at last. "You always wear it."

He shook his head; even this he couldn't tell her, for fear that his lies about surreptitious meetings with his own father would be uncovered. How could he live like this- but how could he leave her?

His eyes went again to the ring his mother had worn, the memory of his father's words on the day he had given it to Luke searing through his thoughts; "You cannot be close to another- you cannot allow another to be close to you. Failure is inevitable and the consequences will spiral from your control."

"I am not you." Luke murmured in quiet denial, as he had done that night.

"What?" Mara asked, squeezing his hand reassuringly.

"Someone once told me that I could only destroy that which I loved."

Mara froze, green eyes wide, and the burst of shocked elation which radiated out from her brought Luke's own eyes up in surprise as she repeated hs word;

"...Love?"

Luke frowned... 'value'- his father had said 'value'. It was he who had said...

Should he be pleased or terrified? Or both?

She lifted his chin gently to look into his eyes, "You know I..."

"Don't say it." he whispered quickly, "Don't ever say it."

"Why?"

".....What if I've cursed us both already?"

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Leia settled into bed, tired to the bone, pulling up close to Han who murmured sleepily, arm settling about her. She closed her eyes and sighed, lulled by his warmth and his presence, even in sleep.

It had been a hard meeting tonight; Han had arrived back several days ago and been debriefed, telling the Chiefs of Staff exactly what had happened; about Luke, the meeting- everything. There were the usual questions about why exactly Lu... The Heir had let him go again, but they'd been less strenuous than before, more curious and confused than accusing.

Then word had come in tonight about the others. Tag, the Intel Chief, had announced that all agents onboard the Patriot had failed to report in at their regular contact time earlier that day and everyone had waited on tenterhooks, hoping for the best, fearing the worst...

They waited forty-eight hours before closing the files, marking them MPD. What was worse was that it placed all information they'd sent since their arrival on the Patriot into question - months of preparation and valuable covert surveillance all wasted, because now they had no idea when the agents had been discovered and therefore how much information had been falsely fed to them.

The fact that all three had been silenced at the same time was particularly damning, since it inferred that it wasn't a mistake on the agent's part; none had made contact with or known the identity of each-other, so the speed of their combined removal meant they were already being watched... all of them.

Which brought up another old issue- Tag maintained that the leak had to have been internal; from Home-One.

Despite the Intel Chief's rejection of it based on the fact that it was glaringly obvious and the Wolf just didn't work that way, all thoughts had turned to one person- the only one who had once again walked from a compromised mission unscathed; Han Solo.

She sighed, mind racing despite her physical exhaustion; why had Han been exempt- more than that, actively removed. His description of his departure meant it was clearly in a way which had been calculated to keep Han's presence there from the Emperor. And hadn't she received the same protection, when she'd been aboard the Patriot? No-one else in her team had- she'd been singled out, she knew that. Again a cold tingle ran down her spine at the memory of his warning cutting across every other thought in her mind, sharp as a blade; 'Run!'

She jolted, resisting the automatic impulse to do that even now, a rush of adrenaline surging through her.

Why- why had he helped her? Because he knew her? But that made no sense; surely he knew her role in his exposure as an Imperial agent...

And if he was an Imperial, if he was the Emperor's Wolf, then why feel anything at all for her - for the friendship they'd had - because if he was a spy then it surely hadn't existed at all, above the role of agent and assignment.

Why let his arch-enemy, leader of the Alliance and the one who exposed him, go?

None of it made sense.

She drifted slowly to sleep, distant memories and absent friends rolling through her mind, tangled up with regret and betrayal and loss...

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When she woke four hours later with a jolt, all those distant memories had seeped away into the cold dark of night, leaving only an eerie emptiness, a silence profound as the depths of space and for an instant - just a fragment of a second - she thought she had heard it even here... the howl of the wolf from her dreams.

She jerked upright, arms out to steady herself, head spinning...

For a split-second she thought that the massive Corvette had lost power - that this was the reason that she'd snapped awake, arms stretched before her to steady herself against the stomach-turning shift like gravity realigning - but Han only vaguely started, lifting his head, sleepy and surprised in the same moment, "What?"

Leia remained stock-still, waiting for the motion to level out, aware from his expression that Han felt nothing at all.

"What is it?" he murmured, dragging himself awake.

She opened her mouth to reply but realized she had no idea what to say...

All she was left with was one overriding feeling, one absolute truth;

"Something's about to happen."

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Luke woke at dawn with a start, gasping a short breath in, Mara moving just slightly in her sleep beside him as he glanced about the room, the distant glow of the never-sleeping Coruscanti metropolis casting hazy shadows in the filtered gloom-

Then... like the galaxy realigning, like reality shifting, there was a stretched second of altered perceptions pulling his senses taught, making him tense against the wave of nausea and disorientation until the upheaval slowly ebbed, reality seeping back in, stabilizing, equilibrium restored... nothing and everything changed.

It took a second for him to acclimatize to the shift, remaining perfectly still, muscles tense, holding feather-light contact with the Force as he tried to chase down the nebulous feeling...

But the moment had passed, nothing left but trailing tendrils melting to nothing, insubstantial as ghosts in the night.

Uneasy, he turned over to nudge Mara. "Up. Get up."

She stirred again, eyes not yet open, "Mmm?"

"Mara- wake up."

This time she opened her eyes, voice and sense instantly awake, remembering where she was, of the danger they were both in simply by being together here, "What's wrong?"

"Something just happened- did you sense it?"

"Sense it? no." She was confused more than anything; that he would even ask her such a thing.

"You did." he said tightly, "You have your hand to your head."

"I have a headache, that's all."

"Something changed."

Mara frowned as he rose, padding over cold fossilstone floors to the tall windows, keying the photovoltaic blackout down to let the glow of early dawn seep through, pale and diffuse.

"Get dressed." There was an urgency to his voice, a tenseness to his body as he turned without looking back. "Quickly."

"What did you sense?"

"I don't know. Nothing specific." he said, "It's... hidden. Something happened... something's happening right now, right here. You need to leave."

She nodded once, knowing better than to waste time with questions now; Luke wasn't the type to get spooked easily... and despite his outward calm, this was the most nervous she'd seen him in years.

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She left moments after Luke, he leaving his private rooms to walk the long way round through rambling hallways in his sprawling apartment to the Morning Room, his surprised bodyguards in tow, affording Mara a hasty, unnoticed exit by carefully making her way to the Music Room, avoiding the main corridor as much as possible.

She'd admitted to Luke long ago that there was a concealed stairwell in the large storeroom attached to the Music Room and they'd fallen back on it several times since then- enough that it had developed its own name in their coded shorthand; the Reserve.

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Luke stood alone in the Morning Room amid tall paneled walls of ornate relief-carved wood, gazing out without really seeing, his shirt untucked and loosely buttoned, his feet bare, mind still completely lost in examining that ambiguous shift in the Force, the magnitude and the extent of it exceptional.

He was wrong; something hadn't happened. It was about to happen; was happening right now, events tumbling forward like an avalanche gathering momentum, the mere fact that it was coming sufficient to send a shockwave sheeting through the Force.

Something... some elusive twist within it, originating here in the Palace, was radiating outwards with sweeping tendrils of cause and effect, some already in motion, others yet to fulfil.

He sighed, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, frustrated and tired, the hour so early it was almost still night. But every time he grasped some sense of heightened perception it scattered and he was left with nothing; vague impressions and hidden traces, like trying to follow the course of a single droplet in a gushing river...

His thoughts went instantly to Master Yoda, some distant memory triggered with acute intensity- but even as the thought came to mind it was lost, comprehension lying just beyond his reach, strangely reluctant to come, the path to that memory broken from moment to moment... somehow... withheld rather than forgotten. Luke closed his eyes, searching within for an answer that he knew was bigger than himself.

Alternately goaded and coerced by Palpatine, Luke's attunement to the Force had increased exponentially in the last few years until it ran like oxygen in the blood through his veins, affording him a connection and a clarity like never before, a fact he kept carefully hidden from his Master, reluctant to offer further reasons for Palpatine to invoke claims of Force-induced inception or vague prophesies which bound Luke to some preordained destiny just as it had his father.

But it was still there, the connection which he had once strived so hard to achieve now as natural as breathing. And now every single fiber of his being told him that knowledge was barred; that the Force itself witheld-

But it didn't work like that- not for Luke, not anymore.

Jaw clenched he pressed on, tracing tiny embers, pushing through the barrier, searching for that denied connection, for that hair's-breadth sliver of access which remained always exposed at the verge of the shadows and the light-

Yoda's words, long ago, coalesced with ominous portent in Luke's mind; 'Like the flow of a river, some say the path of the Force is; that an individual- a Jedi- may alter the course occasionally, like a stone in water, but ultimately it still flows to the sea.'

Why that - why now? Luke struggled to see the connection, to resolve muted intuition, diffuse and scattered, almost intentionally evasive. As if simply by searching he was pushing against the will of the Force; a path not meant to be challenged, secrets never disclosed...

He crouched to a huddle, knees to his chest, arms out before him resting against his knees- and stilled physically and mentally; pinpoint focus, light and subtle, drifting into precise, flawless alignment with the Force; lost in the current, slipping through the flow like a fish in a river...

And within it was a sense of... convergence, a defining moment reached; a breach being resolved-

A fracture restored...

And then it was gone, the momentary empathy rebuffed, cold reality closing about him, making him shiver in the sharp dawn chill.

It occurred to him to contact his father; surely he too had sensed the disturbance. Vader had already been in the Palace when Luke had arrived three days earlier, his father having returned to Coruscant to await the first stage of the Executor's DEMP-refit.

But to contact his father now, so soon after the Force-shift, would raise the Emperor's suspicion when Luke had worked so hard to successfully mollify Palpatine over the past months.

He closed his eyes, head lowering in concentration, trying again to see the path - but the Force twisted in on itself, shadows within shadows.

All he knew for sure was one fact;

"Something's happening." he whispered to the dawn.