Saga - Legends Reclamation (AU, Rebellion era, L/M, ensemble cast)

Chapter Nineteen



Luke’s squadron turned out to consist of him, Wedge, Tycho and Hobbie—apparently the existing squadrons were at full capacity and Wedge was assembling this one out of new recruits and backup pilots—a lanky man introduced to her as Wes Janson, a Balosar man, a Mirialan woman with a delicate line of diamond tattoos along each cheekbone, and two human women, with a few more pilots under consideration to fill the roster soon, Wedge told her.

Mara lost track of the introductions after Janson, though. Wes—this was the pilot Wedge had considered to teach this class before Luke had effectively volunteered her. She watched him out of the corner of her eye as the other pilots were introduced, trying to assess his possible skill from the way he held himself. Janson noticed her scrutiny and crossed his eyes at her.

Well. She supposed that was where the “undisciplined” aspect came in. This was definitely going to be a change from the Imperial military she was used to.

She enjoyed herself immensely on the sims, making a note to wheedle more simulator opportunities from Wedge later. It had been far too long since she’d flown a fighter. She flew a sim run on a TIE setting, then one on an X-wing—Luke was right, it was an interesting model of ship. She wouldn’t mind learning her way around one. Then she sat off to the side and watched the others take their runs, nearly bursting with silent pride when Luke’s scores led them all.

Afterward, Wedge led everyone to a clearing outside the base where, he said, they could throw each other around with fewer lasting consequences. “Wes, up front.”

Janson tossed him a lazy salute and stepped forward. He was taller than Luke, and a full head taller than her. She saw Hobbie shift uneasily as Janson stood beside her. Luke just grinned.

“Mara, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t inflict any permanent damage,” Wedge said. “I still need him to fly. But other than that, go to it.” He turned toward the others. “Mara and Wes will give us a basic demonstration of what you’ll be starting to learn today, then we’ll get into some actual practice.”

Janson bounced lightly on the balls of his feet as he settled into a wide stance. “Smaller opponent gets first strike, I believe,” he offered with a grin.

Mara smiled, settling her own weight easily. “I wouldn’t dream of it. After you.”

Janson bounced for a moment longer, eyeing her, then struck out with his right fist, aiming for her jaw. Mara stepped swiftly to the left and lifted her own right arm to catch his fist in her open hand while angling herself to hook her left arm over the top of his outstretched one at the elbow. She pulled back and down with her left arm while thrusting her right arm forward, folding Janson’s arm back against his own shoulder, then threw her full bodyweight into continuing the push as Janson began to bend backward beneath the assault. A quick bend of her left knee into the back of Janson’s right one put an end to his sudden struggle for balance, and a heartbeat later he was on his back on the ground with Mara on top of him, his right arm still captured by her left, with her other arm against his throat and her right knee on his chest.

Janson blinked at her, apparently only just now registering that he’d been downed. Mara ignored the exclamations of their audience to smile coolly at him. “Never underestimate a smaller opponent.” She released him and stood, holding a hand out. “But then, you knew that, didn’t you?”

He took her hand and she pulled him to his feet. “You have to teach me that move,” he said as she did. “But maybe demonstrate it on Wedge this time.”

“Oh, no,” Wedge said from where he was grinning off to the side. “You’re her demonstration partner whether you like it or not. Anyway, you pulled your punch there, didn’t you?”

“Yes, he did,” Mara said. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Courteous, perhaps, but you were assuming I’d start off easy too. Dangerous. Always assume your opponent will go for the throat.”

“Yeah, no worries there,” Janson said, rubbing his throat theatrically.

“Okay,” Wedge said, “Now Mara’s going to show us exactly how she did that. I’m sure you’re all convinced of the importance of paying attention now. Even Wes.”

Luke was grinning at her again, and Mara returned the smile before turning back to Janson. “Throw that punch again, slower this time.”

---

The rest of the class went surprisingly well, better than Mara would have guessed it would when she had hesitantly offered to teach it. Her inexperience as a teacher was balanced by her bone-deep knowledge of hand-to-hand combat tactics, and the memories of her own rigorous tutors and how they’d explained such things to her. Despite that first exchange, Janson had an entirely respectable knowledge of the subject for an amateur. Luke, Tycho, and Hobbie, as well as Asha, one of the human women, who had been halfway through her academy training before she also defected from the Empire, had all been taught the basics and had a good foundation for learning more. Wedge knew how to throw a decent punch and not much else, but he and all the others were keen learners. Wedge dismissed everyone just before lunch, and Mara promised to let him know when she could teach another session once her own position and schedule had been pinned down.

When lunch was over, Luke headed back with the others for more training and Mara was left to her own devices. Leia and Ben were nowhere to be seen in the mess hall, and while she was pretty sure she could track them down, Mara decided that it could wait for a while. Luke had so far taken the lead in getting them settled, and it was time for her to pull her own weight there.

Back in the apartment, she emptied both their bags on the bed and began sorting. The tiny sonic clothes cleaner in the refresher only held a few items at a time, so while the first cleaning cycle ran, she folded all their still-clean clothes with military precision and laid them in the storage chest, then retrieved the now-clean items and did the same while the next cycle ran, then found places in the refresher for their grooming supplies and folded and put away the last of the clean clothes. Her primary and holdout blasters, their holsters, and her lightsaber fit snugly in her half of the chest; Luke’s sketchpad and pencils fit snugly in his. She tucked her stash of credit chips in the center of the chest and set each of their datapads on their respective stacks of clothes.

That left only the holoprojector featuring Luke’s aunt and uncle.

She hesitated over that. It didn’t seem right to pack them away, unseen, with the rest of their belongings. She glanced over at Luke’s bedside table, but it was so small. If she put the projector there, he wouldn’t be able to use it for anything else. She wandered into the conversation area, projector in hand. The only real place seemed to be the table in the center of the room, but she didn’t like that option, either. It was their only working space, and they would need it. Besides, Luke’s family deserved a place of honor in their home.

Mara set the projector carefully down on the table. She needed to go get the caf machine and mugs from the ship anyway. Maybe there was something there that she could repurpose. She picked up her now-empty carryall and headed that direction.

---

Leia left the base’s main building, stepping out into the enveloping warm humidity of Yavin IV. She missed the crisp, fresh air of Aldera, and the familiar sight of snow-capped mountains.

Stop, she told herself firmly. Reality, her father had always said, must be dealt with whether one liked it or not. Wallowing in grief would accomplish nothing at all, and there was a great deal that must be done—and quickly, if at all possible. Alderaan’s destruction had set off a determined, fear-tinged frenzy among the Alliance’s leaders.

A frenzy without a focus, though. If they hadn’t been able to match the Empire’s military strength before the Death Star—and they most assuredly hadn’t—then what possible course of action remained open to them now?

Leia was trying so hard to think of a workable option that she almost missed the lowered ramp of Mara’s ship as she walked past the landing pad. A half dozen steps beyond the ramp, the input from her eyes finally hit her brain, and she paused, looking back. Turning, she cautiously ascended the ramp and peered inside. “Mara? Luke?”

“In here.” Mara’s voice came from deeper within the ship, from the cabin she and Winter had shared on the way here, Leia thought.

She wandered back that way and stopped at the cabin door, baffled by the sight before her. “What are you doing?”

Mara stood at the far side of the small cabin, with both hands gripping one of the narrow shelves above the fold-down desktop and a foot braced against the wall. She yanked, and stumbled briefly as the shelf popped off the wall. Something small and metallic clattered as it hit the floor and bounced. “There,” Mara said with obvious satisfaction. “That last screw was stripped, couldn’t get it to turn.” She swept her gaze along the cabin floor. “Did you see where it went?”

“No,” Leia said. “Maybe under the bunk? Why are you ripping out pieces of the wall?”

“I’m not,” Mara answered. “Not anything that would compromise structural integrity, anyway. I just needed a shelf for our apartment.” She glanced at Leia, seeming almost shy for a heartbeat before her usual composure reasserted itself. No, Leia thought, she must have imagined that, surely. “I came to get the caf machine, like you suggested, and figured there must be something here I could use.”

“Oh,” Leia said. That made sense. Sort of. “I was actually on my way to your apartment to see if I could find you. Where’s Luke?”

“Training,” Mara said, picking a screwdriver up from off the bunk and returning it to the toolbox. Leia stepped aside, and Mara took the toolbox back to its compartment by the kitchen, with Leia following behind. “He’s assigned to Rogue Squadron. X-wing.”

Leia frowned in thought. “Is that Wedge Antilles’s squadron?”

“Yes,” Mara said, looking back at her. “I wouldn’t have thought the fighter squadrons would come under your purview.”

“They don’t,” Leia agreed. “But Mon Mothma was bringing me up to speed with some of the latest changes, and Antilles’s new command was one of them. His record is outstanding; I can’t imagine he’d be choosing any but the best for a squadron of his own. Luke must be an excellent pilot.”

“He is,” Mara said, with such open pride in her eyes that Leia wasn’t sure she was even aware of it. She hoisted a carryall over her shoulder and went back to the cabin to retrieve the shelf. “Since you were looking for me anyway, do you want to come back to the apartment with me? Once I set up the caf machine, we can have a cup.”

“Sure,” Leia said, trailing after her. “Do you want me to carry something?”

“I can manage,” Mara replied. “Oh, almost forgot.” She opened the drawer under the bunk and pulled out the emergency glowrods, then added them to her bag, picked up the shelf, and turned toward the exit.

Leia raised an eyebrow as they headed down the ramp. “Planning an expedition?”


“No,” Mara said. “Bedside lamps.” She locked up the ship and turned toward the base. “So why were you looking for me?”

Leia returned the nod of an officer passing them and said, “You’ve gotten an assignment. Seriously, can I at least carry the shelf? I feel ridiculous with you carrying all that and me with nothing.”

Mara looked at her sideways, but handed over the shelf. “You’re not like most of the royalty I tended to meet at the Palace.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Leia propped the shelf against her shoulder to keep it out of the way as they walked. “Did you work at the Palace often?”

“Most of the time,” Mara said, her voice slightly wistful. “I had regular assignments offworld, but those only started when I was sixteen, and even then, I still spent more time at the Palace, really.”

“Homesick?” Leia asked.

Mara blinked suddenly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay,” Leia interrupted her. “I’m homesick too. No reason we can’t be homesick together.”

They walked along silently for a few minutes before Mara said, “I didn’t mean I was homesick for the Empire—”

“Mara,” Leia said, reaching out to touch her arm. “I’m not trying to test your ideological purity, either. A lot has changed for both of us, and very quickly.” She gestured at the ancient pyramids, surrounded by thick jungle. “Yavin IV has its own beauty, but it’s very different from Aldera or Imperial City. It’s okay if it takes us a while to adapt.”

They’d reached the apartment door, and Mara keyed in the code and gestured Leia inside before following her and setting her bag on the table in the middle of the front room. “You sound like Luke.”

“Do I?” Leia asked. “Well, he seems nice. It’s probably not a bad thing to sound like him.”

“Not at all,” Mara said softly. She pulled the caf machine out of the bag and set it on an upturned crate beside the table, then turned it on. Mugs came out next, then a tube of emergency adhesive. “Could you hand me the shelf?” Leia did, and Mara held it against the wall at shoulder height above the caf machine stand. “Does that look straight?”

Leia took a step back to eye it. “Yes, I think so. Want me to hold it, or apply adhesive?”

Mara tilted the shelf down so that its underside was flat against the wall. “Adhesive, if you could.”

Leia picked up the tube and squeezed a line of the tacky liquid along the edge of the shelf that would hold to the wall. Once she was done, Mara tilted the shelf up again and pressed it into place. “Thanks,” she said, with another almost shy glance at Leia.

“No problem,” Leia said. “What did you need a shelf for?”

“This.” Mara picked up a small holoprojector from the table and carefully set it on the shelf. “It’s Luke’s aunt and uncle, who raised him. They died almost five years ago. It’s all he has left of them.”

“Oh.” Leia blinked back the sudden tears that threatened. “It must be nice for him to be able to talk to Ben about them, then.”

“I think it is,” Mara agreed, pouring the caf and handing Leia a mug. “You should have heard all the gossip they exchanged on the way here while you and Winter were playing sabacc with Tycho and Hobbie.”

Leia sat down with her caf. “Like what?”

Mara sat down across from her on the little couch with her own mug, a glint of mischief sparking in her eyes. “Camie and Fixer got married last year. Jula and Silya Darklighter have had a second daughter, Anya. The Sunber family moved to Mos Espa. The price of bantha milk is shamefully high this season.”

Leia laughed. “Scintillating.”

Mara smiled and sipped her caf. “You said I had an assignment?”

“Yes,” Leia said, leaning back in her chair. “You’re assigned to Intelligence.”

Mara snorted. “Analysis?”

“Yes,” Leia said, tilting her head curiously. “You did have experience in that area, didn’t you? I know you did a fair amount of field work, but we’re always in need of good analysts.”

“Lots of it,” Mara said with a shrug. “I always worked alone, though, so I suppose there’ll be a learning curve in being part of an actual Intelligence department.”

“Well, we can navigate our homesickness and our learning curves together, then,” Leia said. “I’ve also been assigned to Intel.”

Mara’s eyebrows lifted. “I thought you were a diplomat.”

Leia sighed. “Not so much call for that here. I’m being groomed for Command, really. Bail and Breha Organa’s daughter, you know.”

From the sympathy in Mara’s eyes, Leia thought she might in fact understand Leia’s own mixed feelings on the matter. “I’ve seen some of your Senate speeches. And your father’s. And I know your mother’s record as Queen, and how dedicated she was to education, so I can guess how thoroughly she taught her daughter to eventually succeed her. I imagine it feels like a heavy weight at times, but I think they’re right. Command is where you belong.”

“I know,” Leia said, reaching up to rub her temple briefly. “It is what I was always trained for. I just—” Her voice caught, and she raised her chin defiantly. “I just wasn’t expecting it quite so soon. Anyway, I’ll be doing training sessions in pretty much every department eventually, but Mon says understanding how the Intel department works and how to analyze the information is especially crucial for any leader, so that’s where I’m starting. We both report tomorrow morning. Want to meet up at breakfast and head in together?”

Mara smiled. “I’d like that.”

Leia smiled back. “Me too. So, tell me about the other royalty you used to meet in the Palace. I feel like there are probably some good stories there.”

They spent more than an hour comparing notes on members of royal houses they’d each encountered, as well as politicians and various admirals. It even turned out that they’d once attended the same reception for the opening of a Senate session, and though neither of them remembered seeing the other, they did both remember the rather pompous Lord Kyto taking a bite of pakarna without realizing how spicy it was, and the faces he made trying to hide his discomfort. They were still laughing at the memory when the door slid open.

“Hello,” Luke said, his smile widening considerably at the sight of Mara wiping away tears of laughter. “Having fun?”

Mara looked up at him, almost grinning. “I have an assignment. You’ll never guess what it is.”

Luke’s expression was all exaggerated innocence as he sat down beside her. “Reprogramming the binary load lifters?”

Mara slapped his arm lightly. “No gloating.”

“Me? Never. I see you got the caf machine.” His eyes drifted to the shelf with the holoprojector, and he smiled. “And did some decorating.”

“I didn’t want to pack them away with the clothes,” Mara said softly. Luke put an arm around her shoulders and leaned over to kiss her temple, murmuring something quiet into her ear. Mara smiled at him, and Leia pretended not to see any of it. “Why are you home so early?”

Luke sat back, but kept his arm around her. “Wedge got called away for some paperwork and told everyone to get lost until tomorrow.”

“Huh,” Mara said, but Leia didn’t miss the sideways glance she gave him, or the slight lift of Luke’s eyebrows in return.

She made a show of looking at her chrono, then stood. “I’d better get going. Thanks for the caf, Mara. See you tomorrow morning?”

“Yes,” Mara said, with a bright smile. Luke also sent a polite smile her way, but distractedly.

It made Leia feel a little hollow inside as she walked back toward the Command offices. Both of their lives might have been turned upside down, as she’d said earlier, but Mara had Luke to turn to for comfort and support, and the way they looked at each other kindled a tiny spark of jealousy in Leia, deep down. Her parents had looked at each other that way, she remembered, and they had always been so happy together. It might be nice to have something like that in her own life, she thought. To have someone whose eyes lit up when they saw you, someone who would stand by you no matter what.

She blew out a frustrated breath. No, there was more than enough to think about and deal with without adding a distraction like that to the mix. She had Winter and Mon and General Dodonna and Ben and many more on the base who would support her if she needed it, and as long as Palpatine ruled and the Death Star existed, she had the fate of the entire galaxy to worry about. There was definitely no time for anything beyond that, and no one she was interested in, anyway.

Leia turned her mind firmly toward thoughts of military strategy. Someday, when the Empire was defeated and the galaxy was safe, maybe she could think about the more personal aspects of life.

Maybe.

 

Adore Leia's and Mara's growing affinity! I like their mutual sympathy and confiding about naturally feeling homesick and needing time to adapt to new demands and circumstances. Mara's summation of Leia's fitness for command is very on-point and Leia's reply that she didn't expect it "so soon" very poignant.

Woohoo! At the end, I did definitely catch Leia's wistfulness about having a special someone

 

I'm here!

So totally not true but I can understand not wanting to put in the elbow grease when you don't enjoy it, because I don't enjoy it either. And the way you wrote the scene here was character-driven indeed! Mara got just enough time to display her mad skills, but in the end you showed us primarily how she manages dealing with new people, even if it's only to politely beat them up.

The moment I read this (and it's so, so Wes, perfectly encapsulated in a single sentence) I knew that I was going to like what came next However...

... I also loved this bit. Mara didn't beat Wes out of misplaced pride, she's taking her role here very seriously, and she's evaluating her new comrades' skills the same way she was automatically evaluating them as potential opponents in an earlier chapter. You found a great way to draw a thread from Mara's conditioning as the Emperor's assassin to Mara the Rebel with this.

All the little bits and pieces about how supplies are limited and things need to be cannibalised to create a semblance of a home (the shelf but also the emergency glowrods that get recycled into bedside lamps) were neat little touches about how people living on the Yavin base were operating, but the fact that you combined this with Luke's holoprojector made it all very poignant: it shows Mara being very thoughtful about Luke, but it also implicitly shows her growth in realising what she didn't have herself, and of course it shows her properly acknowledging what Leia has lost in the most cruel way.

The relationship between Leia and Mara remains my favourite aspect of this story. As you said in your replies above, this is something that the EU didn't develop quite enough, and even in fanfic I find that it's often skated over, but here you're tackling it front and centre and you really highlighted their similarities in this chapter. One aspect of that that I thought was really neat was the contrast between their conversations about Tatooine gossip ("scintillating") and then about Imperial court gossip: what they have in common is the latter, which is precisely what Luke doesn't have. It's a small element, but I find that it goes a long way to show that Mara's relationship to Leia is entirely independent from her relationship to Luke – and since they're going to be having breakfast together and taking up their new assignments together, I'm confident we'll see a lot more of that.

The last few paragraphs, with Leia leaving and musing that she doesn't have a special someone, made me laugh (even though I know I shouldn't, because it's actually sad). In a sense, it's again something she has in common with Mara, who for so long put duty above all and didn't allow herself to have someone in her life, but Mara is ahead of the curve in this specific case. I'm wondering how you'll bring Han into this story, because it promises to be very entertaining!

 

I’m so far behind on reviews for this awesome story, it’s embarrassing, but I’m going to start catching up now. I love it all just as much, if not more, than I did when you first showed it to me.


Chapter 2

lolll you’ve got Luke’s voice down pat

I just found their whole exchange so adorable, but especially Mara imagining 12yo Luke.

I see what you did there.

I love the poignant edge you give to Mara’s realization here, and the way it blends with the giddy excitement of new love. We as readers (and especially as readers of your Renewal!verse) have more of an insight into what Mara has lost than Mara herself at this point, but it’s so good to see her experiencing some of that with Luke, in being Mara rather than the Emperor’s Hand.

LOL

omg Mara STOP BEING SO CUTE

Seriously, though, you’ve really hammered home just how young Mara is here. She’s still a teenager, and one who has never been in love and doesn’t have any context for a relationship like this.

I could feel Luke’s worry and disbelief here, especially in contrast to Mara’s reaction.

This read like being doused in cold water, with the change in Luke’s demeanor and Mara’s automatic reaction to it. That conditioning… poor girl.

*shivers* You know how much I love seeing Luke’s fury when moved to defend someone he loves. That he’s able to contain it for her sake is to his credit, and shows the depth of his emotional intelligence and empathy. What happened to her wasn’t her fault, and he knows she’s not yet ready to deal with the wrongness of her upbringing, or of everything it implies about the Emperor himself and by extension, the Empire. Talk about a very tangled knot.

I appreciated Luke’s singleminded determination in this instance. After everything he’s just learned about Mara’s role and her upbringing, of course he’s going to want a way to reach her no matter what, no matter when. In a way, it even reminds me of his reaction to Owen & Beru’s deaths in canon, when he went to Obi-Wan after and said he wanted to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like his father. Yes, you could argue that he wanted that anyway, but his newfound certainty was also coming from a place of resolute anger, and that’s the feeling I got from him in this scene. He’s going to learn about the Force, but here it’s because he’s feeling angry and protective of Mara, not because he dreams of being a Jedi. And it feels completely in character.


Chapter 3

This gave me the same vibe that Rogue One did, to really highlight the terror of the Death Star and what it was capable of and how much impact it would have had on the Rebellion.

This carries even more dramatic weight because Bail and Breha are two of the only people in the entire galaxy who know the truth about Palpatine and understand the depth of his plans.

Leia!!!

That’s a great line right there.

lolll yep, you’ve captured Leia perfectly.

Again, excellent Leia characterization, which was one of my favorite things about reading this story when you first shared it with me. This feels spot-on with the Leia of ANH.

Oh.

Look at them being all comfortable and adorable with each other.

Their banter is always so fun. You do have such a natural touch with banter in your writing.

lolol

Exactly

This was all such good insight; good commentary is escaping me at the moment, but I loved seeing Luke's thought process here.

I love the simple intimacy of this gesture.

lolll just you wait, kids


Chapter 4

You know, this is dead-on honestly. Vader did exactly this with Xizor in canon, which was arguably a far riskier move given Black Sun’s connections and what Xizor knew about Vader’s history. (Or maybe it was less of a risk because of what Xizor knew, idk ) Anyway, Mara is right about Vader. Someone who already possesses otherworldly power and an unparalleled position within the Empire and who loathes himself and the people around him so completely isn’t likely to shy away from eliminating someone he perceives to be a threat or even a mere nuisance, no matter how much it might displease the Emperor. And maybe some of that confidence comes from the fact that he knows the truth about Palpatine far better and more intimately than anyone living - ultimately, there is no one to whom Palpatine is truly attached, and his desire to extend his legacy as a Sith Lord is just as important to him as his desire to rule over all. He’s not going to get rid of his current apprentice until he can find a suitable replacement, and as long as there is no suitable replacement, Vader is… not safe or indispensable, exactly, but certainly more secure than the rest of his master’s servants.

If only Mara knew how much Anakin Skywalker would have agreed with that sentiment. Have you given anymore thought to that AU idea where Vader comes to regard Mara as a surrogate daughter and watches over her as she grows into the Emperor’s Hand? (Now I’m thinking of little Mara happily taking Vader’s hand after Palpatine plummets to his toy-induced death in TEoEP… )

She sure is thorough

(and awww)

Point

You know, I was with Luke here, and then yikes, that last line. *wince*

Such a good argument, babe. I love it.

SO. GOOD.

I don’t exactly why I love a good argument in fiction so much, but I do, and this was all excellent, and dang, the barbs were flung with such precision. *chef’s kiss*

Aw, these poor babies, and Mara especially. “Please don’t let a Rebel ship take you out” sounded so small and vulnerable.

I will hopefully be back much sooner with the next round of reviews!

 

I second all of these things, I'm not even sorry.

 

Chapter One

Starting at the beginning since I'm so far behind, but I have read ahead of that and did want to start off by saying that I am wowed by all the twists and turns this ends up taking in the first several chapters!

This was such a perfect intro for Luke in this story, and I really love how you used that sunset scene from the original (one of my favorites from ANH ) in a new way while tying back to what we know of that Luke. It's sad and beautiful and it works so well here.

Aww, poor Luke. I can see how he'd feel guilty for getting his wish to leave, even though he's not in any way to blame for the epidemic.

He's so young here too, that it makes it even more tragic in a way than what happened in ANH.

As with Luke, this is just such a wonderful intro to Mara! And it makes a lot of sense that especially in her early years this kind of duty can be downright dull for her. And I really appreciated that they started off with Luke literally bumping into her, it's so funny and their reactions feel so natural for them.

Aww, that is so Luke! And so AU at the same time; I know others have commented on his more confident way of interacting in this AU and have to agree that you did a great job showing this part of his character here. It's different from early Luke in canon but spot-on at the same time and I love it!

Trouble ahead! I really enjoyed seeing her make this little mistake, one that is very telling about her reaction to Luke.

Aww, this was just adorable!

I can definitely see this being a quality that Mara would appreciate even more so at this stage in her life -- yes she's a secret agent of the Emperor and proud of it at this point, but that also means honesty from others is in such short supply in her day to day.

There are many good moments with them in the chapter, but this is my favorite of all.

Ha, yes she's probably seen her share of drama around the Imperial Palace. I really like how Luke's forthright nature pulls the same from Mara and she ends up being far more genuine than she means to be.

IT'S A DATE!

Yay, I really liked this as the close of the chapter with Mara's feelings of happiness and looking forward to seeing Luke again! Even though there are significant roadblocks (and they come up sooner than later), it's so nice to see her in this starting-to-fall-in-love state.

 

Do the boards have a character limit? I might be in trouble here

@WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

Thank you! Mara and Leia have a lot in common

I gotta get my narrative groundwork in somewhere

@Chyntuck

Heh, well, I don't enjoy it, most of the time I don't even enjoy reading action scenes, never mind writing them, but in my case I suspect it's because I have aphantasia. I'm literally incapable of forming mental images, and it's hard to follow a written action scene when you can't do that. Writing this one paragraph of Mara's combat skills required hours of watching videos of various martial arts and then a solid twenty minutes of slow-mo'ing a krav maga move and trying to describe it. I love working on improving my writing, but action sequences are agonizing and I'm going to avoid them whenever possible.

"Politely beat them up" - accurate

I've never written Wes before; he doesn't play a huge part in the story, but I love him as a character so I'm really glad I didn't mess him up

Exactly. Mara's very analytical and she throws herself fully into everything she does, and while she's still learning how to handle emotional connections with other people, she does care about them. This is a lot of big changes for her, but she's well-equipped to handle it because of who she is.

I don't know how long the Yavin base was there (and honestly, it hardly matters because this is so AU), but just from what we saw in ANH, that was a big base, and clearly established. That doesn't mean just a few squadrons of pilots were there - we saw that command personnel were also there, and all sorts of critical equipment, and to support that many people you need actual support personnel; someone has to cook and repair things and provide necessities like clothing and such. All these people needed quarters and all the stuff that goes with it: bed linens, lamps, chairs, tables, etc, but at the same time it's a secret base; they're not just going to have ships full of furniture cruising on into the Yavin system to make things comfy. So I did figure it was important to show that people were living ordinary lives here, but it's kind of piecemeal at the same time, and they're scavenging a lot of things for different uses to make all this possible.

And yes, again, Mara's new to having personal emotional connections with people, but she's learning. And she learns first with Luke, because she knows and loves him, so she recognizes that his lost family is important to him, and because she's learned how to empathize with him and cares about him and wants to make him happy, she's slowly learning how to apply those principles to other people, too.

Mine too. For all their differences, Mara and Leia are so much alike in so many ways, and they moved in similar social circles and would understand so much of the life the other has lived in ways most of their current companions just wouldn't. I think that would be comforting to both of them, to have someone who understood that huge part of their life. Luke and Obi-Wan personally knew all these people on Tatooine; news of their moves and marriages and new children is something they know and can relate to. The Imperial Court and all its adjacent social tiers is what Mara and Leia personally knew and experienced. Neither is better than the other (overall, I mean; every situation has areas that are both superior and inferior to other situations), but people need to feel understood, and in this area Mara and Leia are a rarity on Yavin, so I think that connection would be a big part of what jump starts their friendship.

One of the aspects of this story that appealed to me was flipping the relationship script and giving Luke and Mara a chance to be the stable, established couple who bemusedly watch the classic H/L courtship And I do think that in general, between the super recent loss of Alderaan and the pressing needs of the Alliance, Leia wouldn't be thinking so much about having a romantic partner right now if she didn't have Mara and Luke right in front of her being so obviously happy together - but she does, here they are, right in front of her, being so obviously happy together. It seemed a natural thought progression for Leia to see that and be at least fleetingly wistful over it; her new friend Mara is in a similar position of having left everything behind and starting a new life here on Yavin, but she has a supportive partner who clearly thinks the world of her and who Mara clearly adores in return. Leia wouldn't dwell on the contrast, but I don't think she could really miss it, either.

Plus, y'know, narrative groundwork

@Mira_Jade

I am not about to complain about getting too many reader comments, Mira

One of the differences between visual stories and written, I imagine. It makes for a much more impressive movie scene to have Vader and a bunch of stormtroopers board a larger ship and have an actual battle with the crew. And I'm sure Leia did have a cover story in place - "You weren't on any mercy mission this time" and "I'm a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission", after all, which later stories like some of the comics and Rebels picked up on, that Leia used humanitarian missions as cover frequently enough to be known for her "mercy missions." But yeah, if Leia's trying to really fly under the radar entirely like she is here, I think a smaller ship makes more sense.

She really is. For all her maturity and self-possession, Leia's still very young here. Surely it would have been an amazing thought, that she would get to meet not just a Jedi, but one that her father had known and esteemed.

Me tooooooo I remember being awed as a child, that the actual leader of the whole Rebellion was a woman. Mon Mothma's been one of my heroes since I was about nine.

One of the few new canon books I've read was Leia: Princess of Alderaan, and one of the details in it that I liked is how Mon has genuinely been a family friend to the Organas since before Leia was born, and that Leia and Mon's relationship was written that way, almost like Mon was an honorary aunt, but also a Senatorial peer and someone who helped to initiate Leia into the active Rebellion almost as much as Bail and Breha did. Leia and Mon had to have known each other very well by this time, and although it's not the main story, I do like using some smaller details to show that.

Nearly all of my work is firmly based in the EU (and OT/PT) canon, not new canon, and this story in particular is written from the mindset that I remember living after the initial release of TTT, in that brief period before any of the other modern EU was released, when aside from the OT novelizations, a small handful of out of print books, and some old comics (that certainly I'd never seen, anyway), literally all the official SW there was was the OT itself and TTT. I remember the shock of seeing HttE in a bookstore - new Star Wars book what even is this how did this happen - I remember the real time cliffhangers of HttE and DFR, and the breathless expectation that surely Luke and Mara would be an official couple by the end of TLC, right, and then they weren't, but that was okay because they definitely would be soon (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA) and the speculation of what wonderful new stories might now get published and how all these new characters like Mara and Winter and Karrde would come into play.

All this to say just that this fandom has expanded exponentially since then, but I'm old enough to have seen RotJ, at least, in its initial release and remember what it was like back then, and I was very deliberately writing this story from that mental and emotional setting of having gone for so long with only the OT and then the glorious excitement of TTT and wondering what would come next and I knew that I wanted to emulate TTT in my own small way - but also, I had basically never written an ensemble cast story before starting this, nor anything half so long, and I am winging this sucker, and if the supporting characters are coming across as an organic part of the story with real roles to play, I am genuinely relieved

It is

That was one of the things I knew I'd have to address in this story: Yes, Luke wanted to go to the Imperial Academy, but once he was in active service, just how much of an Imperial is he, really? Because I'm still definitely basing his character off the OT. This isn't TrueImperialBeliever!Luke, this is Rebel!Luke who through an accident of fate wound up going to the Academy after all. He can't have seen anything drastic yet (or he wouldn't have stuck around long enough to wind up on Coruscant and meet Mara ), but he has to still be the sort of person who's willing to defect when he does. And while obviously I thought that Mara could also convincingly be turned into a defector under the right circumstances, it made more sense to me to have Luke initiate it. So yeah, another little character arc that I'm pleased worked out

Once he realized that the Force was a thing and that him getting nudges from it was a possibility, but before he's trained enough to have any real idea when that's actually happening - it would have to be a bit confusing and frustrating, wouldn't it?

It was useful for getting Luke away from everyone else and in a position to see the destruction But also, yeah, I can't see Luke ever not liking to watch the stars.

I genuinely love Hobbie so much, I can't even tell you

Yes, yes it is

This is something that I really hadn't thought about until writing this story, but yeah. The Imperials weren't all rabidly loyal believers in Palpatine's vision; there had to be a full spectrum. And some of them had to be horrified when they realized what was going on. Look at how many former Imperials wound up joining the Rebellion, from ordinary people like pilots right on up to generals and senators.

I really did like this description once it popped into my head, for specifically that reason. Surely Luke would have strong memories of his first encounter with an ocean.

Thank you kindly

Despite the tendency of the EU to keep bringing a new superweapon, everyone's reactions in ANH seem to make it pretty clear that this was new technology that the vast majority would have assumed to be impossible, so yeah, I feel like even "disbelief" didn't quite fit; it wasn't that Luke didn't believe what he saw, it was that at first he didn't even understand what he saw.

Thank you

I have heard that! I imagine that in the GFFA where people are constantly running around in starships, they'd be quite familiar with this phenomenon Now thinking about finding a way to write someone pointing out that a ship's hull or spacesuit smells like a certain system, in a SW-sy Sherlockian style...

Is it awful of me to say I'm glad? In ANH we only see Alderaan's destruction briefly, and with only Tarkin's arrogance, Vader's silence, and Leia's desperation to punctuate the moment, and it was important in this story to show it from a much different perspective, and the aftereffects of it, not just the lead up, so it's nice to know it works.

In the EU, Tycho was actually on a HoloNet call with his family at the moment Alderaan was destroyed. He thought the dropped call was just a service interruption. So, yeah

Yeah, in ANH it's obviously a horrible thing and Leia's desperate bargaining helps to drive that home, but it's not the main point of the story, it's just there to show us the stakes if the Death Star isn't destroyed. Narratively, it makes sense. But here, there had to be more of a real reaction from Luke and Hobbie, especially because this is both the moment that incites Luke to rebel against the Empire and the moment where the shock of it caused enough of a reaction from him for Vader to catch it.

lol, probably It was just a detail that came naturally as Vader ran down that list of possibilities. These are the things that happen when your villain is confirmed to have murdered children, seriously, Anakin, seriously

I think this is in the X-Wing comics that I haven't read, but Tycho's Wook entry says that he got some taunting from other pilots about being from pacifist Alderaan. For all that, though, it's hard to imagine that Tycho wouldn't have been more respected than not, even in the Empire.

Luke and Hobbie are that sort

Aw yeah

He's still Rebel!Luke, after all

(It had darned well better be, the whole defection hinges upon it )

They have

Oh my gosh, Mira, the amount of research on hyperdrives and hyperspace travel I did for this fic, and then promptly discarded most of it because it all basically comes down to Harrison Ford's immortal words: "It's fake and in space." Someone with a physics background like Zahn can make something of it (all his mentions of travel speed and such have actual scientific calculations behind them), but I can't, and frankly, there's almost no consistency anyway. Because it's fake and in space. So I just made most of it up to align with whatever the story needed. But this small section is where the details retained from my research live: the Death Star can't travel as fast as ships because it is so much bigger and its hyperdrive simply doesn't have the same capacity, and there is a tricky bit of navigation between Alderaan and Coruscant that tends to result in a longer journey. Which worked out great for me, both for Luke's thought processes and Tycho's minimal recovery to have some breathing space before they got back to Coruscant.

I'm reasonably sure I picked up this little detail from one of the books, probably the X-Wing series, that pilots just plain didn't admit they were incapable of flying unless they were in truly dire circumstances. But as someone with a long history in food service and who has worked shifts while I was sick enough to go lie down on the filthy breakroom floor in between customers and wish I'd just die then and there because that sounded so much easier than living until closing time because there's no such thing as paid time off in food service, nor even a guarantee of keeping your job if you call out, I completely believe that the airlines are the same way

It really is. We all say that Luke is an inimitable ball of sunshine and optimism, and he is, but just as Mara shares his absolute integrity and desire to do the right thing, he shares her pragmatism and dark humor. I think that their surface differences have distracted a lot of people from the far deeper similarities between them.

Right?

T R A S H K I N G

Thank you

lol, I'll let you in on a secret: basically every time a character in Reclamation is figuring something out, so was I as the author There is so much of this story that either I was all, "meh, if I stop to figure everything out for the outline I'll never start writing, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it" or "oh crap, this is kind of a problem, how am I going to untangle this" and I literally figured my way out by letting the character do it for me. I discovered that putting a problem in front of any of the characters and just writing their reaction to it would nearly always show me the solution. Who knew

It really is

Why, thank you I fully admit that although I don't go too deep into the social hierarchies or internal politics of the Court in this story, blank101 covers them in quite a bit of detail and very well in his Son of Suns trilogy, and I drew on those overall vibes for when I do touch on the subject.

What I'm getting from this and your comments on Renewal is that I actually describe the Force pretty well, and that's an excellent ego boost, because it's something I have to put a lot of thought into Also, yeah, doesn't it just kind of make sense that someone with Vader's strength in the Force would recognize some sort of familiarity if Luke was right in front of him?

...although he didn't with Leia But you know what, we might be able to chalk that up to Luke being overall more like Padmé and Leia being overall more like Anakin, maybe he's more likely to recognize Padmé than his old self at this point

People tend to do that an awful lot, have you noticed? You can be in an objectively unacceptable situation and rationalize your way out of it quite easily. And Mara has been indoctrinated quite thoroughly.

It's so huge, Mira. We're all so used to it that we forget the original "that's no moon" shock from the characters themselves. But it was so huge.

Okay, so here we get to one of my big considerations in writing this: Mara wasn't like Palpatine and Vader; she wasn't on the dark side, she wasn't out for her own power and authority. She certainly understood that she had power and authority and didn't mind using it, but her goal was justice, and she believed that Palpatine was acting for everyone's benefit, which meant that she was too, in carrying out his will.

And yet. She didn't waver in that conviction after Alderaan. So how do we reconcile that?

Although I spun this story largely off the OT and TTT, I also drew on HoT, SQ, Allegiance, and CoO for Mara's characterization. In HoT, Luke suggests that perhaps one of the reasons that integrity was so important to Mara was that she had an example to follow, and Mara says, "Not a chance. There wasn't a single person in the inner court with a scrap of what I'd consider virtue or morality", and in SQ, Luke points out that it made sense that Palpatine would conceal his worst actions from her to keep her from developing doubt. Taking all this into account, my reasoning is that because the Death Star was destroyed so soon after Alderaan, Palpatine could pretty easily have told Mara that yes, in fact, it was Tarkin overstepping his authority, of course he himself would never do such a thing, and Mara, with her lifelong indoctrination and no real examples of morality to draw on, would have believed him. (Now, had the second Death Star not been destroyed, we might well have gotten to a point where Mara's faith was shattered and she took action to break away from the Empire, but that's a different AU.)

In this story, those two crucial aspects are changed. Mara has an example of morality in Luke, and she knows him well and genuinely trusts him before we get to this point; and the Death Star isn't quickly destroyed and therefore there's no real way for Palpatine to deny his involvement. Add to all of that the aspect of Luke himself having been an eyewitness to Alderaan's death and being the one to break the news to Mara, and we almost get to the point where she can accept how wrong all of this is.

Almost...

Thank you

Gotta lay some groundwork

Right? Luke is the best And this is one of the reasons Luke is such a fantastic character: he's a classic male action hero whose greatest strengths are his love for and faith in others and his ability to be gentle and to forgive. That is far too rare, and Luke is invaluable.

Well, dang if that isn't an accurate sentiment

Aw, shucks

It's a really good gif though Mira

Considering just how critical that journey is, I'm immensely pleased that it works And yes, yes indeed

She has no other frame of reference Except for Luke...

Yup, Palpatine can be incredibly ugly when he wants to be. Now see, in the EU he never was to Mara, not outwardly. But here he's dealing with a few crucial differences as well: namely, the Death Star was successful and he's probably feeling unstoppable on that front, and unlike canon, Mara's attention and loyalty have been undeniably compromised. I figured that was enough in-character justification for him to snap at Mara here, especially since he's convinced that he still holds enough control over her that she wouldn't dare openly oppose him.

It would feel traitorous to her, poor girl. And this relationship with Luke is, as I established way back at the beginning when Mara was so taken by Luke caring about her as Mara rather than as the Emperor's Hand, the very first time she's ever had anything outside of Palpatine's service, and the very first time anyone has actually loved her, or that she's loved anyone in return. She never knew that such a thing existed, and now that she does, she can't bear to give it up. Because people need to be loved and valued for themselves, and she's only ever been valued as a tool. And we saw how Palpatine was perfectly willing to destroy Anakin's personal connections with Padmé and Obi-Wan, and once he'd accomplished that, demand Vader's undivided service. It makes sense to me that he'd do exactly the same to Mara.

Par for the course with Palpatine, though.

And no one would know that better than Mara

She believed so completely before this that she mattered to him...

And see, this is the final component that makes defection possible for Mara while still keeping her in character: Palpatine's miscalculation at this precise moment, on top of her having Luke for a moral example, finally knowing what it is to be loved for herself, and having had Luke be the one to break the news of Alderaan to her. The groundwork had been laid, and as Luke said way back in RotJ, Palpatine's overconfidence is his weakness. He was confident that he could control Mara even if he let his true face show, but right here and now, he's wrong. He just put the final nail in the coffin of Mara's faith in him.

They're so great, Mira, I love them so much

I do love writing Mara in moments of high emotion. Mara is calm and reserved and private and will never ever wear her heart on her sleeve, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have the same emotions as everyone else. Zahn always made this plain, but very few other pro writers ever managed to get her right. I'm pretty sure that being a private introvert myself helps me in this endeavor

You and me both

I did like that one

I'm so glad, because for the zillionth time, I'm here to write character studies, not suspenseful plots

Okay, seriously, I was really hoping this part worked, so color me relieved

Dang I was so pulling all this out of my hat, Mira I really don't read or watch thrillers or spy movies or anything like that, so I was totally making it up as I went

She's not, is the thing. If you were defecting with Luke and you knew he was planning to bring multiple people with him, wouldn't you be relieved when only two others showed up? The Rebellion should have put Luke into the recruitment department; they'd never be short of personnel again

She is ngl, a good part of my reasons for writing this in the first place was just the chance to write Luke and Mara getting together much earlier than in canon, but what I discovered in the process is that Very Young And In Love Luke and Mara are freaking adorable

They're so cute I can't even stand it

It does! In most cases, Mara Jade allowing open affection in front of others means that either she's incredibly comfortable with them or she's emotionally compromised. ...or, occasionally, that she's reluctantly accepted that she married an openly affectionate person and some things are inevitable

Right? So many things have changed so quickly for her, and Luke never cared about or was intimidated by her position. It's got to be really disorienting for her to have his friends stare at her. While they're defecting, lest we forget. This girl's entire world has been turned upside down and inside out.

Poor Tycho, and poor Mara, trying to figure out how to tread softly around someone else's grief.

Bail and Breha and Leia really seemed like monarchs who not only genuinely cared about the welfare of their people, but who would have tried hard to be accessible, don't they? I imagine that the average Alderaanian felt a measure of real affection for them.

Luke always is proud of her

This is another vibe I picked up from Son of Suns; Luke and Mara played sabacc with some regularity in those stories, and iirc, Luke explained his affinity for it as being a pilot thing, that when you weren't in actual combat, you were mostly sitting around and waiting, so everyone played a lot of sabacc. Seemed reasonable to me

In all honestly, I'm both very happy and a little surprised to be complimented on balancing all these elements, because this is the first really long story or ensemble fic I ever tried to write - Renewal was finished first, but Reclamation was started more than a full year before I ever had the idea for Renewal - and it's felt a lot like keeping a bunch of plates spinning, and I'm constantly waiting for a crash

So much she just never thought about before

I'll take it

You know how I feel about Luke and Leia's adopted families: it's a tremendous oversight that we didn't see Luke and Leia thinking about them more often than we did. Admittedly there wasn't much about the Organas before the PT, but we certainly saw enough of Owen and Beru to know that Luke loved them, and Luke and Leia were both suddenly and violently orphaned. They would have still thought about and loved their lost adoptive parents.

There's the Everyone Lives fic where Owen and Beru and Bail and Breha and Ronan and Nadira all improbably wind up as friends discussing their impossibly stubborn children, but it's going to be a while, Mira. I haven't even finished this fic yet

They would. Can you imagine Owen and Mara together? Unstoppable, I say

Aw yeah Luke and Mara are just not a "normal" couple, and this is part of their charm. I like leaning into that. Besides, in canon, Luke's proposal was arguably even less conventional than this

It is

lollll

They're so great, Mira

I DON'T KNOW BUT THEY ARE

Mara and Leia are both awesome and have way more in common than people often think and I love it

I really love Hobbie

Mara may not be a "dreamed of flying since childhood" sort of pilot like Luke, but she is an extremely good pilot still, and while the Jade's Fire had more emotions tied up in it than any of her Imperial ships would have, we have ample canon evidence that Mara gets attached to her ships

Tycho was actually engaged to a childhood friend named Nyiestra until she died on Alderaan, so he'll be meeting Winter for the first time. Considering the massive grief both of them are dealing with right now, I feel like pairing them up romantically in this story would be rushing things, but rest assured they wind up together in the Reclamation!verse

I'm kind of giggling because this is another plot transition that gave me fits, how was I supposed to have Mara find evidence that pointed to Tatooine, and even as I was writing it I wondered if this was too tenuous a connection to really use, but you know what, I'm writing a story in a universe where a mysterious Force occasionally nudges people onto the right path and I might as well make use of that

She really is

Don't we all

The benefit of thirty years of living in a desert myself and knowing these things firsthand

Right?

Winter and Tycho are a lot alike, I think: both calm and capable and insightful and mature beyond their years

"We have no time for our sorrows, Commander"

There are a few things in the OT that work largely because of the extremely fortuitous casting, like Han and Leia's relationship despite the large age gap when Leia was so young, and this. In fairness, I think part of the reason for the ANH scene where Leia comforts Luke is a) Luke is undeniably the main character whose arc we're primarily following, b) all grief had to be abbreviated to keep the movie's pace going (even Luke's moments of grieving for Owen and Beru and Ben are about ten seconds each), and c) if the movie made room for Leia's actual grief over losing her entire planet, that would be it, that would be the movie, and it still wouldn't scratch the surface. But like H/L, this largely works because Carrie Fisher brought such immense confidence and poise to the role that it's easy to believe that she would be capable of this, of comforting Luke despite her own greater losses, of "we have no time for our sorrows, Commander," of being a genuinely equal match for a man ten-plus years her senior. I don't know how much of this we owe to the genius of the SW casting director or pure dumb luck, but without Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, I truly doubt that SW would have become what it is. Somehow that little sci-fi film everyone expected to fail got the exact perfect actors to pull it all off.

Hey, yeah, it is like Luke and Anakin on Tatooine! I didn't even realize

Leia brings new meaning to "single-minded," doesn't she?

Another thing that I'm glad worked

Honestly, how does anyone even begin to get past a loss like this?

She's trying so hard to keep everything together and just get on with her duty, but if Obi-Wan had turned out to not be there, I think she might just have fallen apart

There's never a wrong time for a Nick Miller gif

Individual Jedi may not have had possessions, as it were, but it's sure a far cry from the Temple on Coruscant to a hut in the Tatooine wilderness.

I love Winter, and I love her relationship with Leia, but she's another orphaned character who must wonder about and/or miss her parents, too.

Seriously, in ANH, Obi-Wan found out pretty quickly what had caused the disturbance. Here he just had to wonder. And the loss of Bail and Breha would have been a hard one for him, too

Good thing this saga gives me so much tragedy to work with, I guess

You get so much mileage out of that gif

lololol

It was kind of something I wanted to hang a lampshade on here, because so often in the movies and now the shows, people just zero right in on exactly the place they need to be, at exactly the right time, and I get it, there's frequently not enough screentime available for anything else and you want everything to be visually interesting and it's like the part in The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl where a group of computer science students has a full page dramatic hacking montage and it's just them sitting at their computers tapping away at keyboards while alternately scowling and yawning and the next page has the narrator be all, "okay, so that was pretty boring, lesson learned," but at the same time, a planet is a big place. That needs to be said.

Color me relieved again But also, they're both still so young, and Luke's had almost no training at all, and Mara's has focused entirely on skills that made her useful to Palpatine, so they're really learning as they go here. And they have so little else to go on that they really have to lean into this and hope for the best.

Even way back in HttE, as Han and Luke were leaving Myrkr, Han pointed out that Luke and Mara worked well together. These two always have been in sync, even when they had every reason in the world not to be. It's one of the things that made it really obvious that they were meant to be together. (Thanks for dropping that ball, EU )

He always has

Mara has always, always taken on responsibility without hesitation. Look at her throughout TTT: she breaks into a Star Destroyer to save Karrde. She tells Leia about Mount Tantiss; she sides with the New Republic at a time when she still hates it because she knows it's the right thing to do. At the end of TLC, it's pretty obvious that she's going to take the liaison position and become a Jedi, too. Just because the rest of the EU brushed that off doesn't negate the fact that this is how her creator sees her. Zahn's Mara is the true version of her, and wherever any characterization contradicts his, it's wrong, plain and simple. (Edit: I feel like I need to clarify this a bit: I don't mean people can't write Mara in very different scenarios than Zahn did. What I mean is that you have to keep the core personality traits intact so that she's still recognizably her. It's the same when you're writing anyone else's OC, the creator's portrayal needs to be your touchstone.) So of course she's going to take responsibility for Luke and Tycho and Hobbie here: she's the one who has the skills they need, by their very recent Imperial standards she vastly outranks all of them, and she knows that Luke wouldn't have left without her, so in a very real sense they're all in this situation because she went along with it. That makes it her responsibility to keep them safe and make this mission work.

One of the very best things about Allston's writing is that he always gives every character a sense of humor. Some of the others do this too, but no one does it as well as Allston. I think that's an important aspect to include in most writing, because it's such a natural part of life. People are going to find something amusing in almost any circumstance.

From the stories you've told, I think Captain Grant was more of a Wes Janson

They are

He does Seriously, one of the big reasons I love L/M is that Luke loves Mara for exactly who she is. It's not a threat to his ego that she's smart and strong and capable and dangerous; rather, he actively loves and admires all those things about her.

Mara's a very sensible sort of person

The cutest and the flirtiest

I love Hobbie

Once again my real life desert experience pays off I still have no idea how I managed to approximate a spy thriller at all, for any length of time, but I'm sure glad I did

It's not a popular building

Odd Kind of Honeymoon by Knight_Aragorn (deaka on ff.n) touched on this sentiment, with Luke surprising Mara with a honeymoon to Tatooine, and her getting to see all the things that had shaped Luke growing up. That was always one of my favorite fics. But yeah, Luke doesn't come from some shining cosmopolitan place like Coruscant or Alderaan or Naboo or whatever. He grew up on a small family farm in a rural area of a sparsely populated Outer Rim planet. But it's still home, and if they did have time, he would take Mara to see the farm and Beggar's Canyon and Anchorhead, and through her relationship with him, Mara has grown enough emotionally to understand how important these things and places are to him.

This just feels right for them, in a way that Union never did. And yeah, I know the entire premise of Union is that they got pressured into having exactly the sort of wedding they didn't want, and yeah, I'm glad to have gotten another L/M book at all, but Mara said outright in VotF that she wanted a quiet, private, dignified wedding, and Luke was fully onboard with that. This might not exactly qualify as dignified, but it's quiet and private, and I think they'd be perfectly happy with that.

Look at all the good points she's making!

Mos Eisley is Las Vegas. Or Gretna Green. Whatever

I agree. I think I've only actually written Luke and Mara getting married twice now, but both times it's been a quiet and private and pragmatic ceremony, and I can't imagine writing it any other way for them. This is just the sort of people they are.

I wound up being extremely fond of this anonymous janitor who was so happy for these young strangers

If anyone can pull it off, it's Mara

They're so giddy

Some things are a constant in this galaxy

I just love Obi-Wan so much

That's our Leia, nothing's stronger than she is. But all the same, there's a lot going on beneath the surface, and I'm a character study writer, that's the sort of stuff I live for

Mara looks like an easy target, let's be real. She's young and she's small. But appearances can be deceiving. And I like showing that Luke thinks she's completely awesome. And I wanted some groundwork/foreshadowing for later moments, like Mara being capable of teaching a combat class. And maybe some other things

(I'd just like to take this moment to say that I have been registered on this site for more than twenty years and still every single time I have to actually hunt for the smiley I want. I know we have a dang whistling smiley, so where the heck is it hiding oh that's right there it is)

I am honestly having a lot of fun including various callbacks with an unexpected twist

Luke thinks she's awesome, and he also finds this whole thing very funny

She would have left him alone if he'd just stepped off like she told him to

Mara was raised in the Palace. Just because she can blend into less elegant environments doesn't mean she particularly enjoys it

They are, I love them

I'm glad this worked too

ngl, I love this scene

Another callback with a twist

They are, they're going to be best friends and unstoppable together

They're so good together, I love this too

lol, the ambiguity is good, because yeah, it could really go either way here

Can you imagine Obi-Wan's feelings in that moment? Luke's startled, but it's got to be nothing compared to what Obi-Wan's thinking.

Of course she did You know, it's perhaps a bit of a tangent, but I've noticed a tendency in fandom since I've been back to assume that every character always knows everything. I just read a clickbait article the other day that stated outright that "of course" Yoda would have known about every single Order 66 survivor and every other Force-sensitive potential Jedi who would have arisen between trilogies despite his being isolated on Dagobah, and okay, that's maybe an extreme take on this, but I have seen this sort of thing said with a straight face so often, and I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. All of these characters, Jedi and strategic geniuses and whoever, every last one of them is imperfect and very very very far from omniscient and they make mistakes and have wrong ideas and are frequently missing crucial information. And exactly what sort of story does anyone expect if every character always knows everything and never messes up and is always right, anyway? When did so many people completely forget how a narrative is constructed?

Anyway. Of course Ben has sincere condolences to offer, but he did in fact totally miss all these critical things happening at the time, because he's an ordinary, non-omniscient person, and that's how Luke got off Tatooine and joined the Academy without Ben magically stopping him. (Can you tell I've had multiple commenters on the other sites complain about how Ben should have known and stopped him? )

Luke is incapable of not being adorable

Headcanon: ahrisa is falafel, lamta is prickly pear cactus pads

She was in control of this mess a minute ago...

Trying to find ways to articulate that danger sense

He's never going to let her live that down

@ViariSkywalker

He always was cocky

They're so cute

She's had basically nothing in her entire life for herself at this point; she doesn't remember her parents, she never had siblings or friends, she's been taught from earliest memory that her entire purpose is to do whatever Palpatine tells her, and because that's all she's known, she doesn't realize just how wrong it is. But if she had this experience of someone really liking her just for her own sake, with her work and rank and purpose never entering the picture, I think that would make a huge impact on her.

"Well, yes sir, I did steal a TIE fighter, but you see, this really pretty girl I was on a date with dared me to"

Exactly. And when we see her in TTT, she's about seven years older than she is here, was in service to the Empire for longer, and lived through the trauma of the Empire's collapse, the last command crammed into her head, and spending almost five years scrabbling for survival on the fringe. This Mara is much younger, has no context at all for any sort of personal life, but also isn't dealing with residual trauma and bitterness. We can see in Allegiance and CoO that although Mara is a dedicated Imperial and every bit as competent as we'd expect, she's also really idealistic and a bit naive and still very, very young.

Of course, on the flip side is the fact that in Allegiance and CoO, Luke is far less mature than she is despite being two years older, and she wouldn't have given him a second look if he'd asked her out This Luke, however, left Tatooine earlier and has been in active military service for years, so he's more mature and assured - essentially, ESB/RotJ instead of ANH. That gives him a chance

He's figured out at this point that whatever she does, nearly a month of silence might mean something awful. Mara, meanwhile, has never had anyone to worry about her and the thought would never cross her mind, poor girl

You know, TTT doesn't come right out and call it kidnapping either, though Zahn makes it clear enough that yeah, that's what it was, what with Leia's "I doubt the Emperor gave them much of a choice." But without that outright label, I do feel like a lot of fandom really glossed over that and tends to treat Mara like she willingly joined the Empire as an adult due to her own personal convictions. She didn't. She was kidnapped so young that she literally can't remember her parents' faces. She was a kidnap victim and an indoctrinated child soldier. I like to occasionally put some emphasis on the horror of that. But Mara herself - yeah, she would never, ever have thought of it that way while she was in Imperial service, because she's been taught for her whole life that her position is an incredibly elite privilege. Luke, though - he had a normal childhood and family and life and instantly sees her kidnapping for what it is. And while canon Luke would have been well aware of what Palpatine was capable of and might not have been so surprised over Mara's history, this Luke is, like her, an Imperial who mostly thinks that the Empire is a force for good and that he's doing the right thing in serving it, so the revelation that the man who leads it all is the sort who'd kidnap a small child at all, let alone for something like this, is a genuinely shocking thing.

Yeah, he can see how confused and unsettled Mara is by his reaction, and to press the matter would only add to her distress. He probably has no idea what he's going to do about all this at this exact moment, but he already loves Mara and doesn't want to hurt her, so he's going to try to shift the conversation to make this whole thing as normal as he can until he can figure it out.

Exactly. Luke did want to get off Tatooine - I mean, come on, we just saw him fight with his adopted parents about exactly that. But Ben offered him that on a platter, plus the added attraction of "you can become a legendary Jedi Knight like your long-lost father," and Luke's immediate reaction was, "I'm not going to Alderaan. I have to get home." He was never, ever going to leave Owen and Beru so long as he felt they needed him, or, apparently, even if he felt that he wouldn't have their blessing to leave. He said before that he didn't like the Empire, but it took his parents' death at the hands of Imperials to spur him to actively fight it. Here he has even less connection to the Jedi than he had in ANH, so it's not like some personally attractive goal to him. But if it gives him that connection with Mara, and maybe a way to help her - that, he'll do.

I was really trying to figure out just what impact it could have on the Rebellion; it's not like even Palpatine can just go around blowing up planets every other day, right? If nothing else, it's a waste of resources, and it's not a very effective way of fighting against guerilla cells. But if the Death Star scares everyone enough that public opinion shifts decisively against the Rebellion, and everyone's ready to inform on anyone who even looks like a Rebel out of fear of what might happen if they don't - well, that feels like it could become an effective tactic. The Death Star is utterly terrifying, so turn that terror into a weapon of its own.

Right? There are so few who ever knew, let alone who are still alive and remember.

That's right

lol, I liked it

Leia is an interesting contradiction, as someone who truly excels as a politician yet who also has little patience for it

Aw

Exactly

They're the best and I love them

I love writing banter, ngl

They're all young and flirty and snarky

He wants to fix it for her, Vi, but he doesn't know how

It's so much for him to think about and process, and he also really doesn't want to upset Mara. It's...a lot

I am a big fan of simple gestures. The grand sweeping gestures might be showy, but I'll take the simple, steady, everyday stuff over them every time.

Well, you know I had to get that line in there

Exactly. And Allegiance and CoO showed us that Vader and Mara had an uneasy relationship at best, and he was perfectly capable of lashing out at her, and he was really peeved when she ordered his officers around and demanded to see him. Mara doesn't know here whether he sees her as a potential rival, but she does know that he doesn't care for her, and that he's dangerous, and that if he does see her as a rival or even just gets too annoyed with her for whatever reason, not even her position with the Emperor might be enough to shield her.

You're relentless (I still really love that little fic )

She may be in love, but she's still going to be efficient

Right? Luke is still impulsive, and is perfectly capable of saying something cutting in the heat of the moment.

I feel the same way. It's not like I want people to argue in real life, but boy, give me a good fictional argument and I AM HERE FOR IT

They both said some really nasty stuff here, and I figure this is as close as Mara can come at this point to saying that she's sorry. Plus I think that once the anger passed, it would have horrified her in a way that she wouldn't really be able to articulate, that she'd said something like this, that would break her so utterly if it actually happened. Almost like she was wishing it on him by saying it, you know?

Loving someone means being vulnerable, and Mara's not at all used to being vulnerable. No matter how happy Luke makes her, the awareness of that vulnerability has to be unsettling for her in some ways.

They're so cute, Vi And I love the idea of being able to mentally blow kisses at each other, and even at this young age, Mara's resigned exasperation over Luke's protectiveness

@Mira_Jade

OH MY GOSH YOU TWO

@ViariSkywalker

You're not helping

@Kahara

Aw, thank you! One of my guiding principles in writing this story has been: when there's a fork in the road, take the path less traveled

Thank you! It just seemed right here

I still absolutely swear I wrote this scene and the inciting cause for Luke's departure as an epidemic a full month before I heard about covid, I cannot even believe the timing, but I never found another cause that I felt worked as well as that But yes, though it's unwarranted, it would be hard for him to not feel some guilt that he got his wish, but in this way and at such a cost.

I totally agree. It was really a practical move on my part; Luke needed to be more mature than he was in ANH when he met Mara for their relationship to work, and if Owen and Beru had died when he was this young, then really, how many options besides the Academy would there have been? But what an awful thought, for Luke to not only be orphaned at 16, but to have to find a way to handle all the legalities of selling the farm and figuring out how to get by on his own

Mara would really want to be out doing something more interesting than this, don't you think? And I didn't want to go with anything too typical or romantic for their first meeting, and did want to preserve a little of their classic farm boy/city girl dynamic, so here we are

Thank you! Remember that moment in ANH when Ben says, "I hear you've become quite a good pilot yourself," and Luke kind of smiles and shrugs and ducks his head? I always loved that, and thought that Mara would find it pretty charming, especially if it was coming from a place of confidence. She's mostly surrounded by people who are full of themselves; Luke's humility would be appealing to her. At the same time, he's been on his own and in active service for years and is well aware that he is an excellent pilot, so the confidence shines through even though he's not boasting.

Exactly. She chalks it up to being thrown off guard by her boredom with the night as a whole; we know it's actually a certain charming farm boy who throws her off balance

It's like Mara was thinking in that scene: she's used to being flirted with. She's not used to being sincerely flirted with, by someone who's genuinely interested in her as a person and not just as an attractive woman. She doesn't really know how to handle that, but she likes it

I am forever coming back to this one line from VotF: "Not a chance. There wasn't a single person in the inner court with a scrap of what I'd consider virtue or morality." Yet Mara herself is a deeply moral person who wants very much to do the right thing no matter the cost, so even though she was accustomed to the inner court and its lousy behavior, what a breath of fresh air Luke and his sincerity must have been for her.

I feel like there's a number of factors at play here: they're both fundamentally honest people, they're attracted to each other anyway, they may have just met but we know that they're wildly compatible people and that's probably evident to them both even at this point, and there may be some sort of unconscious Force resonance between them. But whether it's one of those things or a combination of them, Mara definitely finds herself saying more than she normally would here.

It is

There's so very, very little in Mara's life that's really for her; everything comes down to the Emperor's service. But this very nice and charming and rather attractive young man quite obviously likes her a lot, and is being polite and respectful instead of entitled and sleazy, and that must have been such a bit of unexpected happiness for her, to just briefly live a normal life and have an ordinary conversation and realize that she likes someone and he likes her back. I liked giving her that moment Thank you for the feedback, it's so lovely to get comments on earlier chapters this far into the story

 

(Now, had the second Death Star not been destroyed, we might well have gotten to a point where Mara's faith was shattered and she took action to break
away from the Empire, but that's a different AU.)

I have been a member of the boards a crazy looong time and I don't think I've ever read a story with that awesome plot but it's definitely intriguing.

 

You hear that, Gabri? The people want MOAR AUs.

 

@WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

I think so too

@ViariSkywalker

In the immortal words of Nick Miller:



(How much writing time do you think I have, child? And where's my Ben story, while we're at it? )

 

Chapter Twenty



The Millennium Falcon descended carefully through the dense canopy and settled onto its usual landing pad, and Han Solo—relatively recently and still to his mind rather ludicrously, Lieutenant Han Solo—powered down the engines and sat back with a sigh. “This is all your fault. You know that, right?”

The Wookiee in the copilot’s seat gave an unimpressed roar.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Han stood and stretched. It had been an uneventful mission, which was good, technically. Boring, but good.

But still boring. There were definitely times when he missed their smuggling days.

On the other hand, he didn’t currently have a price on his head. Well, other than the default death mark they all carried in this group. But not having anyone out for him specifically—that part was pretty nice, he had to admit. “I’m heading in to report, Chewie. See you at lunch?”

Chewbacca let out a series of rumbling growls, gesturing all the while.

“Well, yeah,” Han said. “I figured you’d be in the hangars. It was either that, hanging out in the jungle, or terrorizing the cooks.”

Another growl.

Han grinned. “Sure you don’t. Tell it to someone who might actually believe you, buddy.”

Wookiee facial expressions could be tricky to read, but Han had seen that reproachful look on Chewie’s face way too often to miss it now. He’d also seen it way too often to be impressed by it. He slapped the Wookiee genially on the shoulder and headed out of the ship.

Most of his life had been spent in cities, spaceports, and ships. Even after several months of working out of this base, it still felt weird to be surrounded by trees. Chewie loved it, of course.

Han dutifully gave his report to General Dodonna: they’d made contact with a group of Rebel sympathizers on Averam, and had brought back the names of a few of the cell’s leaders, as well as drop locations and code words for the next agent to make use of. There was definite potential there, especially for Supply and Procurement. With the support of an existing cell on the ground who would be expecting further contact, they could raid local storehouses and depots with minimum risk. All in all, a successful mission.

It was still, Han thought afterward, as he sat in his room finishing his more extensive written report to submit, ridiculous that he was here at all, never mind an officer. He’d already been through all of that with the Imperial Navy, and hadn’t been sorry to see an end to it when he rescued Chewie and was kicked out for insubordination. It had been a way off Corellia, a way to fly, but the more he saw of it, the more Han had realized that he wasn’t cut out for a life of taking orders from other people, especially from the sort of know-nothing blowhards who were usually promoted to officer rank in the Imperial Navy.

And yet here he was, willingly doing exactly the same thing for the Rebel Alliance. Granted, there were at least fewer blowhards here than in the Navy. Not quite so many pointless regulations, either. An underground guerrilla movement didn’t have personnel or energy to waste debating about the finer points of uniform appearance or enforcing specific standards for straight-backed salutes. And Chewie had been right when he’d argued for them to join the Rebellion: they’d both seen the cruelty of the Empire close up. The Rebellion might be a pointless fight—Han was still far from convinced they had any chance at all against the Empire, as vastly outnumbered and outgunned as they were—but at least they were frequently making some sort of difference in the lives of those most oppressed by the Empire. Not as much of a difference as anyone involved wanted to make, but still. It was something. Han could admit—to himself, not to Chewie, who would have been insufferably smug about it—that he did appreciate being a part of that much.

Didn’t mean that he didn’t have an escape plan for when this whole thing finally collapsed in on itself, though. And what with this new planet-killing battle station the Empire had just debuted, that collapse could be sooner than he’d expected. He’d have to keep an eye out for that, so he and Chewie didn’t get trapped in the fallout.

He finished his report and went to the hangar to collect Chewie before heading in the direction of the mess hall, where Han smirked to see the exasperation of the staff when they caught sight of Chewie beside him. The Wookiee definitely had one of the biggest appetites on the base, and wasn’t shy about expressing his opinion of the choices on offer. They collected their meals with only minimal grumbling from either Chewie or the mess hall staff and wandered through the crowded hall looking for an empty table. Or rather, Chewie wandered, and Han followed. Once the big walking carpet took the lead, Han couldn’t see anything in front of them anyway, so there wasn’t much choice in the matter.

A flash of dark gold hair off to the side caught his eye and he drew up, putting on a casual expression. “Hey, Iella. How’s things been around this antique market while I was gone?”

Iella Wessiri, leaning against a table a few meters away, paused in her conversation to raise an eyebrow at him. “You were gone? I didn’t notice.”

“Funny.” Han turned his gaze to the woman Iella had been speaking to. Slender, with vibrant green eyes and long red-gold hair pulled back into a braid. He definitely didn’t remember seeing her before. “New arrival, sweetheart? Name’s Han Solo. I could show you around, help you get settled.”

Those intense green eyes narrowed. “I’m married.”

Seated at the table just beyond her and Iella, a young blond man he didn’t recognize had apparently overheard and was laughing silently. Han sent him a glare. Chewie, having caught on that he was no longer being followed, had returned to tower over his shoulder and whuff his own amusement, while Iella smirked. “My mistake, ma’am,” Han said smoothly.

Iella shook her head. “Don’t let him bother you,” she told the redhead. “He’s like this with everyone. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as the case may be—he’s useful enough to keep around. Solo, this is Jade, a new addition to my department. Leave her alone, would you? We’re shorthanded enough without you scaring people off.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Jade said coolly. “I don’t scare easily.” She cast Han another narrow-eyed look.

“Name one person I’ve ‘scared off,’ Iella,” Han grumbled.

“Name one woman on this moon you haven’t hit on, Solo,” Iella countered. “This is an Alliance base, not a cantina.”

“You’re right about that,” Han agreed. “Cantinas are way more fun.” Chewie let out an indignant yowl, and Han turned to him. “I’m here, aren’t I? Catch you around, Iella. Ma’am—” with a nod to Jade.

He elbowed Chewie, and they continued on their way until they found a table empty enough to comfortably accommodate a Wookiee. Chewie was still whuffing with quiet laughter as they sat. “Hey, how was I supposed to know she was married,” Han protested. Chewie replied at some length, and Han rolled his eyes. “I am focused on the mission. The whole point is that we’re between missions right now. Nothing wrong with a little fraternization to pass the time.”

Chewie yowled, supremely unimpressed as always. “Well, good for you,” Han grumbled, and turned his attention to his meal, sighing inwardly. This was shaping up to be another painfully boring between-missions stretch on this gods-forsaken base full of earnest-faced do-gooders. Great, just great.

He definitely should have stayed with smuggling.

---

Tatooine hadn’t changed in the years that Vader had been away. He rather suspected that it never would. However many millennia stood between this moment and the heat death of the universe, Tatooine would weather them all unchangingly, barren and desolate.

In contrast to the ancient, stolid desert, the Mos Eisley garrison was awash in frantic activity. Unaccustomed as they were to any visitors above the rank of general, the arrival of Darth Vader’s own Super Star Destroyer in orbit had clearly caused a near-panic among the officers in charge.

Indifferent to the fear all around him, Vader stood in the garrison commander’s office, arms folded, looking out the window into the dingy courtyard, the early morning light reflecting bright and harsh off the sand. Across the room, the garrison’s commander fidgeted, unable to sit while Vader stood, unable to leave as long as Vader stayed. It was irrelevant. The commander was irrelevant. All that mattered was finding his son.

He sensed the approaching presence, the man’s apprehension bleeding into the Force and staining the air between them. Vader turned abruptly just as the returning lieutenant stepped over the threshold. “Well?”

The lieutenant flinched, then caught himself. He glanced at the garrison commander, then back at Vader. “My lord, I have the report you asked for.”

“So I assume,” Vader rumbled. “Otherwise surely you would not have disturbed me.”

The man’s apprehension developed edges of quivering terror, just barely held at bay. “No, my lor—”

“The descriptions,” Vader interrupted.

The lieutenant swallowed hard, then lifted the datapad he held and began to read. “Three employees were present for the civil marriage ceremony for Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade. Two claimed no memory of the incident, but the third—” the lieutenant cringed slightly, glancing up at Vader and then quickly back down at the datapad “—said they were a lovely young couple. He described Skywalker as blond and blue-eyed, wearing black pants and a brown cloak; Jade as green-eyed and wearing black pants and a blue tunic, with red hair mostly covered by a blue cowl.”

No disguises, then. Jade was an experienced and thorough undercover agent; for her to have relied on such flimsy camouflage as this when using their real names meant that she felt speed was the most important factor. Why, then, had they stopped for a marriage ceremony? They had already risked their lives to run off together, what need was there to formalize their relationship at all?

A sliver of memory intruded, of another secret relationship, years ago, formalized for no other reason than that the participants wished it. Behind his mask, Vader closed his eyes and pushed the memory away. The only importance it now held was the son that relationship had produced.

He turned his mind to more important questions: why had they come to Tatooine to begin with? And why had they left, and where had they gone?

Vader focused again on the lieutenant, nearly trembling as he stood at stiff attention. “You are dismissed. Major—” he said, ignoring the lieutenant’s salute and hasty retreat to turn instead to the garrison commander. “Send stormtrooper units out immediately, searching the city for any sightings of anyone matching those descriptions. I expect results before the day is over.”

The mask he wore made it impossible to read facial expressions with the nuances he once had, but such things were trivial for someone as skilled as he in the Force. The major’s fear blared out like a klaxon, obvious and unmistakable. “Yes, my lord,” he nearly stammered, and quickly left to relay the orders.

Vader turned away to look again at the tiny patch of sand that passed for a courtyard. Patience had never been his strong suit, but decades of living in the Core and traveling the galaxy had reduced his perception of Mos Eisley from the bustling metropolis it had seemed in his boyhood to the unsophisticated tenth-rate village that it was, and few civilians were unintimidated by stormtroopers. The information would soon be his, and so thereafter would his son.

---

He was still standing in the same place hours later, watching the sands darken to amber as the suns sank in the sky, when behind him a presence approached—still nervous, yes, but also with a purpose that boded well for the success of the day’s mission. Vader turned expectantly. “Yes, Major?”

“My lord,” the major said, coming to a halt and saluting. “We have multiple confirmed sightings.” He raised the datapad and scrolled as he read. “In the late morning, Jade was seen in a cantina, where she—” the major frowned briefly, then continued “—ordered two brandies and incapacitated another patron. No one appeared to notice when she left. In the early afternoon, both Skywalker and Jade were spotted in a small family-owned eating establishment in the Tiagra district. The owners saw them sitting at a table with three other people: a short young woman with dark brown eyes and hair, a slightly taller young woman with white hair and blue eyes, and an old man with white hair and beard. The owners knew the old man as a previous customer, and say his name was Ben Kenobi—”

The world suddenly narrowed to a pinpoint in Vader’s awareness, even his son momentarily forgotten. “Kenobi?”

The major visibly quailed. He checked the datapad, then braced himself. “So it was reported, my lord.”

Obi-Wan. That must be why they had come to Tatooine, to reconnect with Obi-Wan. He must have stayed here, watching over Luke after delivering him to the Larses. Luke must have known him—rage swelled up, hot and fierce. To all the other betrayals Obi-Wan had committed, add this: that he had not merely taken Vader’s son away from his father, but had apparently stepped into the very place of that father, that in his extremity, Luke would turn to him. Clearly he had even trained the boy, for where else would he have learned the shielding he displayed on the Death Star?

Whatever had provoked the boy and Jade to run in the first place, they had run straight here, back to Obi-Wan. It could be no coincidence.

Vader realized that the major was still standing in front of him, almost trembling. “Continue.”

It took a moment for the man to catch his breath enough to do so. “Skywalker and Jade conversed with—with the other three customers for a brief period, and they all left together. The final sighting was at the spaceport. Skywalker, Jade, and the other three all entered a small shuttle. It took off shortly thereafter, without anyone disembarking first.”

“Destination?”

Now the major was definitely trembling. “Unknown, my lord.”

For a brief moment Vader contemplated either ordering a search of the spaceport records to trace the direction the ship had gone or simply strangling the major as a warning to the rest of the garrison of the price of failure. He dismissed both temptations. A mere direction would be useless, the ship untraceable once it entered hyperspace, and both the major and the garrison he commanded were ultimately meaningless. “Order my shuttle to prepare for departure.”

“Yes, my lord.” The major snapped a salute and turned so quickly that he nearly tripped over his own feet in his hurry to leave.

Vader also turned, his gaze on the horizon. One of the suns was half out of sight already, its twin steadily chasing it, but Vader’s contemplation was elsewhere. Summoning all his focus, he stretched out in the Force, reaching for a presence that had once been more familiar to him than any other.

---

Obi-Wan was deep in meditation when he felt it. At the very edges of his awareness, something questing, searching.

Not something. Someone.

Anakin.

In that instant of recognition, he almost reached out for the connection, old instincts firing despite decades of bitter knowledge.

It was the darkness threading through the familiar sense that stopped him, a corruption that warped its bearer, the stain spreading diffusely through the Force around that outstretched, grasping consciousness. Like ink in water. Like smoke in air. Like the blackness of armor.

Obi-Wan recoiled—but not so clumsily as to be noticed, not even by one so adept and familiar as this searcher. Long years of diligent effort had given him the skill that he had begun to teach Mara, the dexterity to cloak one’s presence and slide through and past any seeker in the Force.

Like a shadow within shadows, Obi-Wan silently observed the probing sense as it went past, still searching. Slowly, carefully, he withdrew from his communion with the Force, letting awareness of the physical world creep gradually in.

The firmness of the ground beneath him, the scent of greenery all around, nearly overwhelming after decades in Tatooine’s desert. The faint reddish glow of the gas giant Yavin, taking up nearly a third of the early evening sky. The bustle of hundreds of sentients going about their business in the base half a klick behind him.

Obi-Wan gazed up at Yavin’s disk, dismay settling into his gut. Vader had been reaching out for him specifically, which could only mean that either he or Palpatine had traced Mara to Tatooine, and discovered somehow that she had met up with him. And if Vader knew that much, then he also certainly knew who else Mara had been with.

Leia’s connection was still unknown, nothing on the surface to link her either to Anakin or Padmé, but Luke’s had surely been realized. Not for the first time, Obi-Wan cursed himself for handing Luke over to Owen and Beru with his birth name intact. He’d thought at the time that with Anakin dead, there would be no one to think twice about the name, not in a tiny settlement on a distant Rim planet where the Republic had hardly been more than a vague concept. By the time he’d realized that Anakin had survived, Luke was known by the residents of Anchorhead, and it was far too late to do more than stand guard and hope.

At least Luke and Leia—and now Mara as well—were reasonably safe, at least for now, ensconced in the heart of the Rebellion. But the conversation he’d been dreading could no longer be put off.

Tomorrow, he thought, resigned. He would tell them tomorrow. And hope they wouldn’t all hate him when they knew.

 

I enjoyed Han's POV and his path to the Rebellion. Very plausible and in character. Loved the conversation with Iella ... not surprised in the slightest that he's tried to 'get acquainted' with every unattached lady on the Base and of course seeing Mara whom he never met before and didn't know was married was an instant draw.

Oooh, intriguing and worrying developments in the later scenes with Vader hot on the trail of Mara, Luke, and now Obi-Wan.

The time for major reveals is coming up and will change everything for those involved.

 

Firstly, allow me to apologize for the very stream of consciousness nature of this review.

I have to say this is a very interesting concept. I had always wondered what would have happened how Luke would've turned out had he actually went to the Imperial Academy and this fanfic promises to show me how this would've played out. And, bonus, it features one of my favorite Legends pairings: Luke/Mara. Very promising from the get go.

This was an interesting take that echoes what happened in A New Hope, but in a different fashion. I rather like it. I especially like the last line of the quote. Great evoking of that scene.

I do find myself curious as to why Obi Wan Kenobi hasn't revealed himself yet, but I suppose I shall find out.

I wonder how Luke maintained that relative openness and similar within the Imperial military. I suppose I also shall find out.

Congratulations, you've gotten yourself a fan. Keep up the good work.

 

I have to say I find this works well when compared to the explanation Obi Wan Kenobi gave Luke during Star Wars: A New Hope. I also find it quite interesting that Mara seems to be the one to teach Luke the Force versus Obi Wan and Yoda having done so.

I'm quite interested to see how this story is going to unfold, when Luke's Force sensitivity and his parentage are inevitably discovered, especially if Vader and Palpatine find out about Luke before Yoda or Obi Wan will.

I have to say that one little change with the passing of Owen and Beru are creating quite the world here that I'm eager to immerse myself in reading. Excellent work thus far...

 

I really like how you're mixing canon events and your AU well here. With the reference to the Tantive IV I can already see events as seen in A New Hope about to unfold...

I get a sense either Rogue One or the Toprawa Rebels scene a la Han Solo Trilogy is about to pop off later in this. If this is going to take place near Tatooine I wonder if we'll see the notion of Leia being trained as a Jedi by Obi Wan. That possibility seems to present itself to me.

I also adore the Mara as Luke's teacher piece, but something tells me the other shoe is going to rapidly fall downward.

This stuck out to me too. Luke as a TIE pilot aboard the Death Star? This spells disaster to me, and suspense that makes me want to read still further. Excellent work.

 

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I love the way that you are blending Legends/Canon and your own take on what would've happened had Owen and Beru passed away naturally due to illness.

This Rogue Squadron reference to Tycho Celchu was pretty nice:

I do enjoy how Tycho and Luke play off of one another here, and Hobbie Clivan is also a TIE pilot. This is a very interesting look at the universe. I now wonder how the Rebel Alliance is going to show up here.

This really sounds characteristic of Luke, even with his present Imperial service.

The fight between Luke and Mara definitely felt like they were in character, and I enjoy how Luke is the external view on what Mara does. I can't wait to see how things are going to develop in the next few chapters for this ensemble cast, especially knowing that Luke, Tycho, and Hobbie, all Rogue Squadron pilots, are Imperials at this point.

Your take on A New Hope and going forward is quite an interesting read, keep up the good work.

 

Greetings,

Theodore Hawkwood from ther Review Game yet again. Figured I'd take the opportunity to continue reading this lovely fanfic of yours and giving it yet another review.

Soldiers, both in real life and fiction, are masters at the art of complaining. I admire the realism in this line that speaks to many a time I've griped over things during my real-life military service.

The subsequent banter between Luke, Hobbie, and Mazen all feel very realistic to me. I quite enjoyed the way it flowed back and forth between them as they commented/griped about this two days ahead of schedule alert. Was a great way to show, versus tell me about what's going on in the barracks at the moment.

I snickered at Mazen being quite the jerk and I wouldn't blame Hobbie one bit for vaping him, or at least engaging in some well deserved fisticuffs with that guy to knock him down a few pegs.

Nice reveal that Luke will be serving aboard Vader's flagship for some length of time. It, yet again, provoked some thinking and anticipation how the reveal of Luke's force sensitivities and Vader's being his father are going to go through the course of this story. I chuckled at Luke's 'retirement via strangulation' remark showing us how lower-ranking members of the Empire's armed forces feel about Vader's signature Force choke.

Great foreshadowing for events of A New Hope here, though I'm also interested to see just how this story is going to turn out later on down the road. Nice depiction of Leia's adoptive family. I also enjoyed the reveal of Winter as a character, who I first read about in the Han Solo Trilogy many years ago. So that callback was very well done.

Now to the final scene aboard the Executor. I could easily imagine this happening in an actual movie, the scene with Vader inspecting the three squadrons worth of TIE Fighters assigned aboard his flagship.

Given Luke's nascent Force awareness courtesy of Mara I get the very distinct feeling that this slow inspection of the troops had everything to do with him. I suppose time will tell here.

I have to say I like how this line evokes the sensations in the famous 'That's no moon, that's a space station' scene from A New Hope. I feel this will prove to be an interesting tour indeed.

 

@WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

Yes indeed!

@Mira_Jade

I certainly never got the impression in the OT that Vader cared even a little about bureaucracy, and the PT and then TCW did nothing to make me feel otherwise I will say that I've read in some fanfic or other, I can't at all remember which right now, a line about Vader being rumored to be a stickler for proper military procedure, but I consider that entirely in character as well, so long as he holds everyone else to that standard and not himself

Thank you!

Honestly, I think the only time before this that I'd written Vader was a crack fic, and I worried about whether I'd be able to get him right. But I've found for the most part that the OT characters and Mara have been relatively easy to channel, probably largely through familiarity. Zahn has said before that when his son was young, he and his wife had recorded the audio of the OT onto tapes that they'd play for him on road trips (ah, the days when cars had no better entertainment options than the stereo, and you either listened to tapes [not CDs or streaming, children, tapes], played punch buggy or the alphabet game with road signs, or risked motion sickness by reading), and that by the time he was hired to write TTT, he'd heard all three movies so many times that way that it was easy for him to see and hear all the characters in his own writing. I do think there's something of the same thing going on with me, because I've definitely seen the OT and read TTT and HoT often enough that I almost have them memorized

I'm glad it was effective

But yeah, wouldn't that last have been a shocker? His son is alive, was right in the first place he should have looked but never did, and he just married Mara freaking Jade? It's a lot to take in

A lot to take in

For the author, too

That was one of the "channeling Vader" moments - in writing this scene, it was just instantly apparent to me that he would. Even Anakin could be pretty self-centered at times, and Vader has had many years of being immersed in the selfishness of the dark side. It's less an emotional closeness he yearns for with his son than it is ownership.

Yay! Also, the "as Palpatine would have said" detail is genuinely from the EU - I want to say Dark Lord, by Luceno? I forget for sure, but probably, because I was skimming through some book that heavily featured Vader looking for some personality insights, and came upon that little nugget of wisdom from Palpatine and thought it would work very well here.

I love the Mara-Leia dynamic. Love it. And from her point of view Leia is most certainly being practical.

Exactly. The only reason Leia has to trust any of this is Ben's word, and however much she trusts him, this is still a lot.

Everything is just spiraling out of poor Leia's control here. And ooh, yes it is

lol, yup

Only with Luke, though. She feels obligated to answer here, but she's deeply unhappy about it and probably wouldn't even have been able to if Luke wasn't right there with her. Vulnerability is something that Mara has been trained to avoid at all costs, and she certainly hasn't been taught how to be emotionally vulnerable.

This is true; they would have been. Vi happened upon some quote in one of the reference books that said that Mara's telepathic abilities were specifically approved by Lucas for TTT on the condition that it was something unique to Mara herself, not some automatic Force ability. (I personally felt deeply vindicated by that quote, I don't mind telling you, because that was what I'd always assumed Though you can see that she found that quote long, long after I'd written this, with Ben's "many such cases," because without confirmation of my own assessment, I was kind of hedging my bets and went with, "okay, certain people in close proximity and/or with certain levels of strength in the Force and/or emotional intimacy have probably done this, but Mara's talent is still extreme.")

It's just a lot for everyone all the way around in this story

Mara needs to be in control of things to feel safe. Considering her entire life up until now, I don't blame her.

Mara has had enough of living with her husband's work buddies

All true - but no one enjoys going through a deeply vulnerable, traumatic, and terrifying experience in front of other people, let alone strangers. And Mara has literally only one person in her life she genuinely loves or trusts, so it's a lot harder for her than it would be even for most of us.

Yup, and that's exactly how Zahn wrote her from the first. Even when she was still dealing with the last command and everything that came with it and wasn't personally close to anyone, she cared very much about and took responsibility for Karrde's well being, and then the Solos with the infiltration team in the Palace, and then the NR as a whole with Mt Tantiss, then Luke specifically in Mt Tantiss, then the rest of their group - Mara was always looking out for others and taking responsibility.

lol, I'll be honest - this was another thing that I hedged a bit with, because I'd been out of active SW fandom for a few years when I started writing this and I honestly couldn't remember if or to what degree anyone could track anyone else with the Force. I've since come down pretty firmly on the side of "in most cases, no; certainly not like a homing beacon," but I wasn't sure at the time, and figured that if nothing else, Palpatine and Mara's unique connection at least made such a thing possible enough that it should be addressed within the narrative. (But also, certainly Force-sensitive people can often sense each other even if they can't outright track each other, so the techniques Ben's going to teach her are still practical.)

Luke is unfailingly supportive

Thank you, I liked that one!

He is indeed

I love AU ANH Obi-Wan and his Force-sensitive ducklings, let me tell you.

Plus, Luke is empathetic enough to understand her very real emotional trauma from so much of her life. Mara needs understanding as much as she needs support for any real emotional intimacy, and Luke both understands and accepts her. These two are definitely my OTP for life

Luke will always defend her, even against herself

lol, excellent gif choice

Lasting trauma, yes, that's the sign of good angst, right there

Honestly, I intended it as nightmares; I imagine I'd have nightmares about that sort of thing, and certainly in the immediate aftermath. But Force reverberations are not out of the question

I like writing them as feeling drawn to each other but without the awkward crush of the OT (Which was entirely reasonable under the circumstances, and I think the whole ESB kiss still gets way too much traction in fandom, and every time it gets brought up Luke somehow gets blamed even though Leia kissed him, but still. When they meet for the first time and Luke's already married, it just eliminates that aspect, which I like.)

Leia merely reflects the questions of all the anti-Mara fans in this instance And just as with that example, the answer is obvious once you know and understand Luke and Mara on more than a surface level. But at this moment, Leia doesn't know them beyond a surface level, and what she sees is a friendly, cheerful, outgoing young man, and an intense, reserved, and forbidding young woman, and it seems an odd match. She'll figure it out before long.

Thank you

This is something I've been deeply convinced of for a long time, and I don't see it written about very often, tbh. I'm not saying never, but it's just not recognized as much as it should be, imo. It seems obvious to me that Zahn crafted Mara from some of the most foundational character traits of the Big Three: she has Luke's integrity and intense desire to do the right thing, Han's maverick tendencies and smuggler status, and Leia's command presence and wealthy upper class background. Obviously he threw in plenty of unique purely-Mara traits, but he just as obviously put a lot of thought into making her fit within both the GFFA and the personal dynamics of Luke, Han, and Leia. And those similarities between Mara and Leia really stand out to me, and I think they'd relate to each other in a lot of ways, and even though their interaction in TTT was brief, I think Zahn pretty clearly signaled as much in how he wrote it.

Anyway, yeah, I completely agree that they're very similar, and we didn't get enough of them being friends in the EU, and I love writing that in my own work. :mara:

That's right

lol

It's honestly one of my favorites

I can't imagine Luke ever being particularly fond of or impressed by Court manners, as it were (there's a scene in SQ where they're at a formal dinner and Mara had brought a fancy outfit along and Luke hadn't and he felt underdressed and also thought that Mara had such natural poise in situations like this and he felt like he wasn't at all pulling the whole thing off), but for Mara and Leia it would be such a natural default to fall into, especially when they recognized someone else doing it.

Like Mara - there's those similarities again - Leia is absolutely determined to do the right thing no matter the personal cost. Here that translates to recognizing Mara's worth and the courtesy that is due her, even if they haven't gotten along to this point.

And here's Luke playing mediator between them

Surely you've gotten out of bed before you're fully awake and walked into things? I certainly have. Like when I hear one of the cats having a hairball and I'm bolt upright out of bed and honing in on the sound before I even recognize that I'm technically conscious Tycho seemed too dignified for that sort of thing, but I could see Hobbie doing it

I like them, myself

They absolutely 100% do not

Yeah, in TTT, there is really no indication that Leia and Winter had grown up like sisters. Winter says that they grew up together in the Royal Court of Alderaan, and that when Leia became a senator, Bail assigned her to be Leia's aide, but that and the fact that Winter at no point calls Leia anything other than "Your Highness" does not imply actual sisterhood, or that Winter had been adopted by the Organas. But whether this was an overall fanon that got adopted into canon or other books afterward assumed more intimacy than Zahn originally intended, it's now more generally accepted than not that they were essentially sisters, to the point that I felt that if I did otherwise in this fic, it would raise a bunch of reader questions. But this meant that I had to explain why Leia's adopted sister is constantly calling her "Your Highness," so here we are

I suspect they'll all be too busy for that, but it's a nice thought

She's not wrong

Giving Mara and Leia's friendship more time and emphasis than I usually see - certainly more than the EU gave it - was one of my main goals with this story. Becoming friends with Leia is going to be nearly as important a relationship for Mara as being married to Luke is.

Living in a desert myself, it's an easy sort of detail to remember

THAT'S RIGHT

Straight from TLC, as you know. Mara did exactly this instantly when she learned that Luke was Vader's son, and what that meant for the last command in her head and Palpatine's motivations.

It certainly would, no doubt about that.

She is very determined

They are

In the context of the OT and TTT, there was no particular reason that Mon Mothma should have raised an eyebrow over someone surnamed Skywalker joining the Rebellion. After the PT and TCW, there's no way she wouldn't. Plot hole, George, plot hole. But this was one OT/TTT-centric mindset detail I couldn't possibly stick to; if I didn't have Mon Mothma recognize it, I'd have readers grilling me over it. So here we are

I liked that detail myself You know what, Mira, all of this was written well before Andor was even announced, and I can't even tell you how pleased I was when her characterization in that turned out to be so like my own. Between that and having been a huge Mon Mothma fan since childhood, Andor has just been a gold mine for me in that aspect. (And all other aspects as well, it's basically perfect SW, I have to watch it again)

I love writing Obi-Wan, Mira. And I love writing him with Mon Mothma. (Another dead giveaway that I'm an old school fan: it's still hard for me to refer to her as simply "Mon," the old general assumption was that "Mon Mothma" was one singular name rather than a given and a surname )

Obi-Wan is also not one to shy away from what must be done

Luke and Mara are a team in the truest sense of the word, and always have been. I just love them

It's a big change to think of herself as married

You shush

I think Tycho and Winter became a thing in the X-Wing comics, which I own but have never gotten around to reading. One of these days

That's a daunting thought, Mira

@Theodore Hawkwood

Not at all! I'm all about the stream of consciousness writing Allow me to apologize in turn for taking a while to reply; back in the old days the expected etiquette was to wait at least a day before bumping your own thread with reader replies, and that's a habit I can't shake. I feel very rude bumping my own thread too often. Plus writing replies takes me a long time, so I tend to put it off, and then a few more replies come in (which I love! It's genuinely rewarding to get new comments!) and I realize that it's going to take me even longer to reply, so I put it off even longer, and you see where that gets me In truth, it's very kind of you to reply to each chapter like this. Much of the time once you've posted more than a handful of chapters of a longer fic, new readers wait until they're caught up and then just leave one comment (which I totally understand! I've done it myself!), so it's extra nice to get new comments on the older chapters

Thank you! L/M is my OTP of OTPs, and I've been intending to write a "Mara joins the Rebellion" AU for about twenty years now, actually This specific scenario for that, wherein Luke did go to the Academy and met Mara when she was Emperor's Hand, is probably fifteen years old. How time flies

Thank you!

Yup, that'll come up

All will be revealed in time

probably

Thank you!

That's what I based it on, just changed the wording. I could hardly have Mara quote Obi-Wan, after all I did like the idea of Mara teaching Luke at least the basics of the Force. Allegiance and CoO show Mara as having more specific Force training than TTT did, and I'm leaning a bit more toward the TTT side, but she certainly did receive a measure of formal training no matter how you slice it, and here Luke hasn't.

Thank you!

After what we saw in ANH, with Obi-Wan offering Luke passage off Tatooine (and Jedi training, and information about his long-lost father, and helping a princess) and Luke immediately saying, "I'm not going to Alderaan. I have to get home" - I didn't see how Luke would ever have left without either Owen and Beru's blessing, or their death. Still made me sad to kill them off. One of these days I'll write an AU where they survive.

Thank you! My overall philosophy with this story has been when there's a fork in the road, take the path less traveled. There are a lot of OT AUs out there, and I decided from the beginning that I needed to bring something new to the table if I was going to add to that already large number.

Well, I haven't read the Han Solo trilogy, so any similarities to those are entirely coincidental Other than that, I feel that I should keep quiet to avoid spoilers

Luke and Mara are so cute together; I love writing their scenes so much

Honestly, I appreciate this compliment. Like I said, I'm trying to take this story in directions I haven't seen before, while keeping everyone in character and the plot development plausible, so it's lovely to hear that it's working for you

Here's where I admit that I haven't read Stackpole's X-Wing books either Allston's, yes, love them to bits. Stackpole - well. I've met and spoken with him at cons and he's exceedingly nice, but his writing style doesn't work very well for me, and I hate Corran Horn, unpopular opinion though that is. But I adore Tycho as Allston wrote him, so that's my foundation.

Since in Legends canon Hobbie defected with Biggs, and Tycho was also an Imperial pilot, I kind of just brought them all together and slotted Luke into Biggs' place. It felt right. And Tycho canonically being engaged while he was a pilot did work well for his dynamic with Luke here

Luke is pretty much always Luke, no matter the circumstances. In fact, that's one of the big draws of AUs for me, the challenge of putting a character into a very different situation and keeping them recognizably themselves, while also maintaining any intrinsic changes that naturally develop from the AU scenario itself.

I really do love writing arguments like this. I don't do it a lot, because most of the characters I write aren't super argumentative naturally, but sometimes under tension people snap and say things they don't mean, and that sort of pointed back and forth is really fun to write.

I've already said this multiple times about this fic, but since you're new perhaps you haven't seen it yet : a fundamental detail from Zahn that I'm using in this story is from VotF, when Luke and Mara are discussing whether or not Mara's acts as Emperor's Hand opened her to the dark side, and Luke suggests that maybe she had an example of morality to follow, and Mara says, "Not a chance. There wasn't a single person in the inner court with a scrap of what I'd consider virtue or morality." So canon Mara had very little up close and personal exposure to virtuous or moral behavior until she met Karrde. Part of what I'm very deliberately playing with here is how Mara changes if that circumstance does, in that Luke is now that example of virtue and morality, and a contrast to Palpatine and his court. I won't say more now because spoilers, but it's a crucial part of her personal character arc in this story.

Thank you!

*waves* (This is where I figured I'd better actually respond before you thought I was ignoring you )

This is such a nice comment to receive, because I have no military experience and very, very little knowledge of it. I did try to research at least a little about Imperial military ranks and culture and stuff before I started writing, but it's all piecemeal and contradictory and not something I'm particularly interested in on a personal level, so I'm mostly winging it It's nice to know that at least some of it wound up ringing true.

Thank you!

lol, there's always that one coworker

Vader's tendency to murder underlings who fail would have to be widely known in the Fleet, don't you think? Even if he didn't actually murder people all that often and what we saw in the OT was a more rare occasion than not, I think that would spread like wildfire and while some might be happy to take the risk when it also comes with the possibility of a fast track to promotion, surely plenty would rather stay away altogether.

Thank you! I always liked Winter, from her first appearance in HttE, so I definitely wanted to include her. She really wasn't depicted as Leia's actual adoptive sister in TTT, more a close childhood friend, but as I told Mira (though you might not want to read my replies to Mira; they're full of spoilers), it's just so accepted now that they were sisters that I felt it was better to go along with that. And Winter has been retconned as the daughter of Bail's assistant Sheltay Retrac, and I don't at all doubt that Bail and Breha would have taken in the orphaned daughter of someone who had been close to them like that.

Oh, yay! I'm so glad it rang that true

Thank you again!

 

I've seen this story being upped so many times since the last time I visited this thread that I expected to have to catch up on half a dozen chapters. It's kind of reassuring that there was only one I hadn't read, because it's so jam-packed with developments that I would need a whole week to review several of those! (And as a bonus, I can be hopeful that there will be a new chapter soon!) So, without further ado...

Loved the introduction of Han – pardon me, Lieutenant Han Solo – in this 'verse. Okay, so he joined the Rebellion willingly instead of finding himself there by chance, but he's still very much the Han we know and love, putting up this cocky persona to hide his heart of gold. His introduction to Mara was everything I could have wished for ("I'm married" ) and I could just hear Chewie's whuffing. Han expects this to be a boring time in-between missions, but methinks he's about to meet someone who is going to change his outlook on life and "fraternisation"; he just doesn't know it yet.

Then: Vader on Tatooine – suitably intimidating as Vader should be (that poor lieutenant!) but somehow twice as intimidating because of his thoughts on the planet. Surely this is the last place he'd ever want to revisit, and yet he's standing there, in the sandy courtyard, waiting for the information he wants about Luke. I can just picture the ominous aura of the scene, especially at the beginning of the second section, where he's still standing in the same spot as the suns go down. But the most vaderesque moment for me was the fact that he jumped to conclusions about Obi-Wan, assuming (correctly) that Obi-Wan delivered Luke to the Larses, but then taking a logical leap and deducing that he had also trained Luke. If only he knew who had taught Luke how to shield his mind! (As a side note, there's an interesting parallel to the Emperor here, who is no doubt also wondering how Mara could shut him out.) And the last line of the Vader segment was supremely creepy: he can't reach out through the Force for Luke, but he can find Obi-Wan...

Which brings me to the final section of this chapter and to your beautiful description of the sensation of Vader's Force probe in Obi-Wan's consciousness. I loved how you described the push/pull effect here, with Obi-Wan wanting to reach out for Anakin but recoiling from Vader. And, while Vader jumped to conclusions in his reflection of Luke's reasons for being on Tatooine, Obi-Wan is very clear-headed. He understands how Vader found his way to Tatooine, although he can't possibly know the why.

Now that I'm caught up, I'm very impatient for the next chapter, because Obi-Wan has a big conversation ahead of him, and I'm eager to see how it will go!