Beyond - Legends When Luke Met 'Benta' - vignette, post-ROTJ AU, pre-L/M

Title: When Luke Met ?Benta?

Author: JalendaviLady

Timeframe: post-ROTJ

Characters: Luke Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker, Mara Jade

Keywords: pre- L/M

Summary: AU. A Jedi Knight, an ex-Sith, and a former Emperor?s Hand all walk into a party?

Notes: This was written for the song-based fic challenge by the Skywalker-Jade Revival Society. This challenge required writers to pick a song they thought applied to Luke and Mara?s relationship and write a fic using themes from the song. Interestingly enough, a requirement for the themes to be used in the same way as they were in the song was not part of the challenge. This was therefore roughly inspired by ?Lady In Red? by Chris de Burgh.

This is also part of my on-going AU series, so yes that is that Triclops and Kendalina from the kid?s series dancing around the floor together the entire evening. Kalani is an OC apprentice. The trainees Anakin remembers goofing off with as an apprentice are also OCs.

Edit: Yes, Mara's younger than canon here. In the series, I've been going by the Children of the Jedi suggestion that Luke was 18 in ANH and therefore about 21 to 22 in ROTJ, as well as my gut feeling that Mara is about 5 years younger than Luke instead of the I-just-found-out canon of being born 17 years before ANH and therefore about 21 in ROTJ.

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It is one of those formal events one could never quite get away from.

She?d fled into the Rebellion.

A lot of people had, and it had been far easier than she?d thought. Certainly more easy than it should have been. If she?d dared try to use her Imperial rank, unofficial though it was, she could have given them a fair number of pointers.

Not that she could have dared. There were very few on the Rebel side who could have identified her, and none who would have wanted her around.

Not with what was running loose in her head still running loose, anyway.

She keeps that thought shielded. She has to.

The Jedi are here, or at least some of them. And they aren?t really Jedi proper, most of them, anyway, which isn?t exactly a secret.

That was part of why she really hasn?t tried to get away from this event.

She?d been watching one of them, bit by bit.

Oh, it wasn?t hard to cover up having a serious thing for looking at Luke Skywalker. Not even cover up, just excuse. Half the women in the Rebellion before Endor had some form of crush or heavy curiosity aimed in his direction. Even after the whole mess with Vader turning back and surviving, there was still some interest in the young Jedi Knight.

Not as much, though, and to hear the female pilots talk it was mostly one night tryst material anyway.

She wanders along the wall as Kendalina gets too near in her endless circles of the dance floor with her darling. There is no way to know how much the woman and her Sith-spawned husband would be able to read out of her mind, given how much they exist in each other?s.

During the past months since she arrived, she has been working her way up the maintenance hierarchy. All on skill, of course. There?s no connection she can use here for leverage, and she doesn?t dare use the Force for anything outside her own mind. And for some reason, in the Rebellion?s eyes, even the chief hyperdrive mechanic (Force be praised she?d learned that skill, and learned it well) of the remaining squadrons on board was allowed to informal parties.

That the Lady Ex?s population was far lower than it had been under the Empire and that most of its space was either storage for material that needed to be held for later use or housing for those not in fighting trim at the moment did nothing to help her get out of coming, particularly not when the women in the squadrons had recently threatened to drag her there.

One of the few bits of her old life she had managed to smuggle out in her flight was a close-fitting but dignified calf-length red dress. It wasn?t much of anything compared to most of what she?d been exposed to growing up in the Emperor?s service, just something she wore when she had to do business on the

 

She holds herself like someone twice his age. The only thing breaking that illusion is that she still hasn?t quite physically grown into adulthood ? it?s most noticeable around her face. He doubts that even he would have noticed that if he hadn't been told her real age - she'd have at least seemed twenty-five.

That's an interesting observation about Mara... young, but with an old soul.


Well done and good story.

 

This is a pretty neat AU. I'm not familiar (at all) with the kid's series so that stuff went right by me, but its still a pretty neat story.