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Beyond - Legends Imperial Service Record (Post-TLC Mara Jade, very subtle L/M)

Discussion in 'Fan Fiction- Before, Saga, and Beyond' started by Bel505, Oct 24, 2020.

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  1. Bel505

    Bel505 Jedi Grand Master star 2

    Registered:
    Jul 4, 2006
    Title: Imperial Service Record
    Author(s): Bel505 (Admiral Byzantium)
    Timeframe: Approximately one year after The Last Command
    Characters: Mara Jade
    Genre: Drama (?)
    Keywords: Mara Jade
    Summary: Sitting alone on the roof of the Imperial Palace, Mara Jade gets some unexpected company.
    Notes: It would help to be familiar with Allegiance and the Mara Jade comic published in Star Wars Tales #1, which are referenced in the proceeding story, but familiarity with them is not necessary. Additional notes at the end.




    Imperial Service Record

    Coruscant had not always been named Coruscant. Sometime in the distant past, so far distant that even how long it had been was forgotten to all but a handful of historians, the planet had a different name. Mara Jade didn't know what its name had been. Perhaps no one did.

    But she had grown up here—at least, for all the years she could remember clearly. She had stood on this very rooftop more than once, contemplating tasks, assignments, dangers, foes. Then the planet had been simply Imperial Center. She had known the planet's previous name was Coruscant but never stopped to reflect on the name. Not until she had returned here, fresh out of a brief dip in a bacta tank, the Emperor's last command banished from her mind for good, had she ever stopped to look.

    Coruscant glittered. The buildings stretched skyward, reinforced by repulsorlifts that allowed them to reach far higher than they would have naturally. Windows flickered as airspeeders and spaceships soared lazily through the urban canyons. The planet's sun was nearly set, casting an orangish-reddish glow that sparkled and shaded the buildings alike. Above the horizon she saw the planet's semi-spacebound Skyhooks, massive stations tethered to the planet's surface in geosynchronous orbits, gleaming like rubies. Below her she could see Senate Hill, the dome of the old Senate building cast in a reflected glow. Palpatine's placement of the Imperial Palace had ensured that the Senate dome was always cast in shadow when the sun rose, and always cast in reddish, somber light when the sun set again. Palpatine had always liked to gloat.

    She watched as the red faded into black, the dome now cast in shadow rather than its usual gleaming white. Of all the planets in the galaxy, few had prospered as much as Coruscant had under the empire. Palpatine had insisted on drawing all the power and wealth within his grasp he could and destroying the rest and under his rule Coruscant had become a black hole for the galaxy's rich and powerful. All came. Few escaped—until Isard had deliberately sacrificed the planet in a gambit to destroy the nascent New Republic. Now, with Thrawn dead and the New Republic firmly entrenched both on Coruscant and in the galaxy, the gravity of the old Imperial Center began once more to draw wealth and power into its hungry maw.

    It was that or starve.

    Mara sighed as that thought finished ricocheting around her brain. The image was hardly conducive to finding inner peace. But few of her thoughts had been the last few days.

    She leaned on the chest-high wrought stone railing at the edge of the palace roof, wondering what she was doing here. Her Smugglers' Alliance office in the Imperial Palace—her office!—still felt wrong, like a bizarre reflection of reality. The first week she spent in it had been a dreamlike haze, walking the hallways that had raised her, shaped her, built her, and housed her; had taken the child that Palpatine—or his agents (perhaps even Vader, her lightsaber whispered to her)—had found and shaped her into the Emperor's Hand, two words which could only be spoken with capitalization and dread.

    One thing that hadn't changed was the respect. It was remarkable, really, how little had changed in how people treated her in the Palace. Her history was no secret, not anymore, certainly not to the people who were high enough placed in the New Republic government to work in the Imperial Palace. Everyone who approached her did so with a wariness that bespoke both fear and awe. When she had been the Emperor's Hand it had annoyed her greatly when people like Isard had dared treat her otherwise. Now it just reinforced that she did not belong here. The palace no longer felt like home but more like the prison it had, in hindsight, always truly been.

    What was it, she wondered, that had brought the sense of inner peace she had felt the last time she stood on this roof, the last time she had leaned against this stone railing? Why had then been soothing, reassuring, a glimpse into her future and this time it was instead into her past?

    She didn't know. And the quickening of her heartbeat when she tried said she wasn't ready to think about it just yet.

    Twenty meters behind her, the door out onto the roof opened. She stretched out to the Force, her brow furrowing. Her first thought was of Skywalker, but the Jedi wasn't on Coruscant. The presence she felt was vaguely familiar, but not familiar enough to instantly recognize.

    "Palace Security said I could find you here," a brisk voice that would have sounded perfectly at home in the Imperial Palace when Coruscant had been Imperial Center said. She turned towards it, keeping her hand carefully away from the lightsaber on her belt. The man had longish reddish blond hair that covered his ears and a neatly trimmed beard. Both were starting to go white—whiter than they had been the last time she had seen the man. Of course, then she'd had a blaster against his jaw and he'd been wearing sleepwear—not a General's uniform.

    "General Madine," Mara said in surprise. The two had encountered one another on Kintoni about five years before, while Mara had still been flitting from system to system to evade Ysanne Isard's intelligence operatives. She had taken the opportunity to warp up old business. The encounter had ended amicably enough, although not before he had tried to kill her with her own lightsaber. "This is a surprise."

    "I can assure you, Miss Jade," he replied, his intonation carrying the barest hint of amusement, "it is not as much of a surprise as our last meeting." He approached and his bearing had none of the expected wariness. Instead he held out his hand. "Let me formally introduce myself, since we weren't the last time. I'm Crix Madine." He ducked his head in a nod as he waited for her to take his proffered hand. "Thank you for your help on Kintoni, by the way."

    Mara paused for a moment, evaluating the man, what she remembered of his record, and his sense in the Force before she took his hand. She didn't bother to return the introduction. "I take it you were satisfied with your share of Governor Barkale's ill-gotten gains," she said.

    "It covered the New Republic's expenses for the better part of a year," Madine replied as he released his grip on her hand. To her surprise he stepped past her to the stone railing, looking out over the view. "I haven't come up here before," he commented, watching the view. It didn't seem to offer him any more inner peace than it was currently offering her.

    Mara watched him cautiously. Madine wasn't acting like an enemy, but there were only so many reasons for him to have approached her like this—for him to have deliberately sought her out. Leia Organa Solo had assured Mara and Karrde that there would be no punishment meted out for her time as Emperor's hand—Leia's voice had been so soft, so understanding, so forgiving in that meeting that it had only added to Mara's anxiety—but Leia was not the New Republic's Empress and her word was hardly law.

    "I did my research after our encounter," Madine said. "I wasn't sure who you were at first. Imperial Intelligence was my first guess, but you didn't seem like one of Isard's. The way you let me go and let us have Barkale's stash told me you weren't ISB. The only useful hint was—"

    "The lightsaber," Mara finished for him.

    "That's right. Only a handful of Imperial Agents carried lightsabers. So, I started collecting intelligence reports and I asked General Cracken to send me all the reports he had. Put together a little dossier on a mysterious woman who went by the title Emperor's Hand." He rested both his hands on the rail and Mara could see in her peripheral vision that his belt had a blaster holster. She could also see that it was empty. "The dossier was incomplete, of course."

    "Of course," Mara echoed stiffly.

    "I gave it back to Cracken when the word started going around that we had the Emperor's Hand in custody, and he quietly passed it around the Provisional Council members when you escaped again." Madine paused, letting the cool Coruscant breeze flow around them both. "I wasn't surprised when you came back with Jedi Skywalker as a confirmed ally."

    Mara was abruptly tired of the conversation. "Because Skywalker has a history of turning foes into friends? Or because I once held a blaster to your head and didn't pull the trigger?"

    Madine's head turned towards her, seemingly not put off by her scowl. "Because over and over again your record was of someone who punished the guilty and protected the innocent. Poln, Kintoni, Qiaxx, Ghel Daneth, Neftali… every mission was a display of careful precision. And yes, because if you'd really been an enemy of the New Republic you would never have let me live on Kintoni."

    Mara firmed her lips together and locked her gaze on the glittering skyline. I just didn't want to run from the Rebellion and Isard at the same time, she thought. "What do you want, Madine?"

    "You know Governor Ferrouz said something else in his report," Madine's voice was soft, understanding – he sounded like Leia, and she abruptly knew that Leia had sent him, or at least discussed this meeting with him before he'd deigned to come up here, and she felt a burst of indignation that she had to be handled like some kind of asset– "He said you brought Imperial Justice."

    Mara's anger flamed away into surprise. "What?"

    "Imperial Justice," Madine repeated, and she could hear the capitalization for each of the two words… but there wasn't any dread. "I believed in it too," he said after the words had fully diffused into her thoughts, and this time there was no mistaking the compassion in his voice. "During the Clone Wars the Old Republic had fallen apart, gone to chaos, and service in the Imperial Army, service to the new Empire was how I could make a difference." She could hear the darkness of the memory, of gleaming past purpose darkened by the shadow of experience. "I could make a difference," he repeated. "But then Dentaal, and I finally saw Palpatine's Empire for what it was." He looked down. "I remember what that was like. Twenty years of loyal service and I had been the enemy all along."

    Mara's anger flamed back into existence as quickly as it had fled. "And you think that's what I'm feeling now, is it? Guilt?"

    Madine shrugged. "Of course. But dealing with guilt is easy—it drives us to act. The hard part was realizing that I never really knew who I was, and that if I didn't know who I was before then how can I know who I am now?"

    Mara scowled at him and his presumptions. She especially scowled at how close he was hitting home. "I see your lips moving but I'm hearing Organa Solo's voice." She crossed her arms across her chest and glared at him. "She put you up to this."

    "Not exactly," Madine demurred. "We discussed it but I would have come even if we hadn't. You made an impression on Kintoni and I thought it was important that we talk, after what happened on Wayland." He gave her a small but genuine smile and Mara got the impression that Madine wasn't a man who smiled very often—it looked uncomfortable, almost alien on his face. "I just wanted to tell you that if you ever wanted to talk about it, I know a lot of ex-Imperial defectors who have faced exactly this, and so does General Skywalker. We'd all be happy to talk about it, if you ever want to."

    She could stay angry—with Leia, with Madine. Or get angry with Luke, because she was sure this was all actually his fault—he had probably asked Leia to look after her while he was away. She'd just have to remind him that she didn't need looking after when he and Karrde got back from Ukio. But she found that her anger was hard to sustain. "Fine," she said sourly. "Was that all, or were you also going to try to recruit me for some mission just vital for galactic security?" She narrowed her green eyes at him, and if they'd been blasters his impeccable uniform would have had two smoking craters in it.

    "Not this time," Madine said. He shrugged one shoulder. "But if something comes up, I'll be sure to ask. Or send Karrde a request for your services."

    "I don't come cheap," she retorted, as if to remind him that she hadn't gone and done anything stupid like sign up for the New Republic Defense Force.

    "Nothing Talon Karrde provides does," Madine replied dryly. He pushed off the stone railing and straightened his uniform. "Well, I've said what I came to say. I'm sure you can find me if you want to continue this conversation." He nodded and headed back towards the door.

    She heard him turn back briefly to look at her, but she was gazing out over Coruscant again.

    Mara sighed and leaned forward, her chin lowering toward her chest as she closed her eyes. Her anger—which had been mostly for show anyway—passed back into an ache of loss and loneliness and uncertainty. She should have stayed with Talon on the Wild Karrde, she thought. At least there she had routines and a sense of what normal meant. She knew who she was, the role she was supposed to play. Here she was still trying to figure it all out, figure herself out, and with Skywalker gone the closest thing she'd had to constancy was missing.

    But at the same time, talking with Madine had helped, which surprised her. And as she opened her eyes back up and peered out over the cityscape, watching all the people go about their evening business, she found a bit of the inner peace that she'd found the last time she stood up here. And, to her surprise, a hint of pride.

    Imperial Justice.

    "Madine?" she called.

    "Yes, Miss Jade?" he asked, his voice distant.

    She breathed in the Coruscant night air and wondered if she'd ever be free of the weight Palpatine had laid on her shoulders. "There's a service elevator down the hall on the left. It'll return you to the ground floor from here much faster. The passcode is 5997." She waited another two seconds, until she heard the door open, and then called out again. "If you want, General, I'm free for lunch tomorrow."

    He turned back, regarding her curiously.

    His regard made her self-conscious. "You're right. I need to talk about it and … no one understands."

    He nodded. "Sure. I'll make the time. See you tomorrow." There was the opening and then the closing of the door, and he was gone. She sat and watched the city, alone.








    I wrote this back in February, while I contemplating using my COVID isolation to try to write the bigger fanfic that I'd been idly daydreaming about since I first read Jedi Search back in the 1990s. The original plan was for it to be Chapter 2 of that larger story, the reader's introduction to Mara Jade, but as the story shifted, so did its place in the story. Now, it's a part of a Chapter somewhere between 15-20 (I'm not telling where), but posting it early doesn't really spoil anything. I'm hoping it'll draw more readers to Interregnum! *pushes readers towards Interregnum*
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2021
  2. WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

    WarmNyota_SweetAyesha Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Aug 31, 2004
    Fantastic ... Mara's sense of who am I now? Who do I want to be was brilliantly written and echoed and reinforced by Madine's words. I can well imagine that a lot of Imperial defectors have those feelings. [face_thinking]

    Having someone who understands goes a long way to gaining your inner equilibrium.
     
  3. Gabri_Jade

    Gabri_Jade Fanfic Archive Editor Emeritus star 5 VIP

    Registered:
    Nov 9, 2002
    This is very good.

    This may be a small quote, but it's just a solid little piece of writing. It feels so authentically SW that it could have been in one of Zahn's own books.

    I like this very much too, that what Mara once expected as her due now makes her feel like an outsider.

    An excellent bit of Mara characterization, that at this point in time someone being kind to her would feel unnerving.

    I love both Mara's indignation here and how you write it.

    I also very much like this bit of introspection from Madine. People do often tend to forget that Mara's hardly the only former Imperial in the New Republic, or the Rebellion before it. (I was recently skimming one of the Bantam novels and was deeply annoyed by a line from Han's POV that Mara had once worked for the Empire, so he would never trust her - aside from all the many other problems with that comment, Han once worked for the Empire. Leia and Mon Mothma served in the Imperial Senate. Biggs and Tycho and Hobbie and Madine all defected, plus plenty more. Was no one watching continuity with those books?) It's good to see another former Imperial working through the psychological issues of that, and reaching out to Mara. Plus Mara's (almost certainly correct) suspicion that Luke had told Leia to look after her and her irritation over it is perfect.

    Overall, very polished writing, excellent characterization, and more nuanced than even the profic often is. It may take me a little while to catch up, but I will certainly check out Interregnum. :)
     
    WarmNyota_SweetAyesha and Bel505 like this.
  4. Bel505

    Bel505 Jedi Grand Master star 2

    Registered:
    Jul 4, 2006
    *faints dead away*

    Thank you so much! It means a lot, because when I'm trying to make sure I'm getting Mara's voice right, your writing is something I often turn to. So you being fond of this little ditty—which I wrote on a whim, the first little bit of writing I did for Interregnum—means a lot.

    (The new piece you posted the other day fits so perfectly as a predecessor for this, too. This is set on Coruscant about a year after TLC, and I envision the time in between was spent with a few months on Coruscant, then the rest of the year Mara and Karrde were away from the planet. So this is Mara coming back after already having had a bunch of time for introspection... and for whom, that immediate post-TLC period was spent very closely with Luke, before they went their own ways for a while.)

    For some reason I feel like I understand Mara, her voice comes easily. God only knows why, we have nothing in common.
     
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2020
  5. Gabri_Jade

    Gabri_Jade Fanfic Archive Editor Emeritus star 5 VIP

    Registered:
    Nov 9, 2002
    Well, now I'm blushing, thank you very much [face_blush]

    It's always nice when a character's voice comes easily and you don't have to struggle with it! I definitely enjoyed this fic, and look forward to reading more by you :)
     
    WarmNyota_SweetAyesha and Bel505 like this.