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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Beyond - Legends The Jade Chronicles - Jade Despair posted 1/15/16 (L/M, Tahiri)

Discussion in 'Fan Fiction- Before, Saga, and Beyond' started by Stone Jade, Feb 27, 2013.

  1. taramidala

    taramidala Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 18, 1999
    Oh, that was awesome. Nice use of the Exonerated material, too!

    Now to go dry my eyes. ;)
     
  2. Demendora

    Demendora Jedi Knight star 2

    Registered:
    Apr 9, 2010
    I looked in the forum just in time! Great challange response. [face_love]:_|
     
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  3. Hazel

    Hazel Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Nov 9, 2010
    Wonderful piece, Stone Jade! Truly!!
     
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  4. ginchy

    ginchy Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    May 25, 2005
    I feel like I start every review this way, but I was sick the other day when I read this (still am) so I didn't get to review at that time. But it stuck with me. I love Mara's internal struggle here, and how Luke is there for her, as always, showing her another way. But it was heart-breaking the way she said that five years of passing in the night are not enough. She's right, and he was right, and it's all so sad and lovely and well done.
     
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  5. EmeraldJediFire

    EmeraldJediFire Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 23, 2012
    That was wonderful.
     
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  6. Stone Jade

    Stone Jade Jedi Knight star 1

    Registered:
    Feb 27, 2013
    Thanks for the comments everyone. It's been awhile, but I'm glad to be back writing and adding to the L/M story. (I would totally go for Mara if she weren't taken and I weren't already married, along with that whole fictional character thing...)



    Thanks. I find Mara really easy to write for some reason. Luke is more difficult, I think because he is so inconsistently characterized in the novels. I'm never quite happy with how I write Luke. I feel like I'm always going back to the same (slightly cliche) well. (By the way, I still haven't gotten used to your new name.)


    I think this story loses a bit of emotional impact given that everyone knows that it all turns out ok (at least for awhile). I didn't start out looking to write a sad holiday piece, but I wanted to use the 5 year anniversary, and that would have happened right around the time that Mara first got sick. When I was thinking about that time period, it struck me that they had likely been apart more than together even after their marriage, and Mara would have bitterly regretted that when she thought she had weeks or months left at best.
     
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  7. WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

    WarmNyota_SweetAyesha Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Aug 31, 2004
    Congratulations on all your nominations! =D= [face_dancing] Oh, this year's awards are hard! LOL [:D]
     
  8. Jedi_Lover

    Jedi_Lover Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Nov 1, 2004
    Congrats! =D=
     
  9. EmeraldJediFire

    EmeraldJediFire Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Feb 23, 2012
    Congrats!


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
     
  10. Stone Jade

    Stone Jade Jedi Knight star 1

    Registered:
    Feb 27, 2013
    Thanks everyone! It was quite a surprise to be nominated, especially in so many categories.

    Yeah, the competition looks tough this year. And a ton of L/M stories in beyond.
     
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  11. Stone Jade

    Stone Jade Jedi Knight star 1

    Registered:
    Feb 27, 2013
    I'm excited to pick these stories back up and to start contributing again.

    I've been sitting on this next one for a long time. I started to write an expansion of Anakin Solo's funeral scene from Dark Journey featuring Luke and Mara several years ago, but I put it aside because I couldn't quite resolve it. Reading @pregnantpadme's excellent Fragile inspired me to pick it back up again, though, and the following is the result. I'm sorry in advance for this one.



    JADE DESPAIR
    27 ABY
    During the beginning of Dark Journey

    Hapes


    Mara watched as the flames spread over Anakin Solo’s corpse, a soft glow that belied the destruction of the fire emitting it. She fought to hold back her tears as the fire rapidly consumed her nephew’s body, one which only a few days ago held the spirit of perhaps the most promising and talented of the newest generation of Jedi. Anakin had been strong in the Force, perhaps more like his uncle Luke than like either Han or Leia, and the boy had been the closest thing Mara had ever expected to have to a child before Ben had been born.

    Circumstances since Anakin’s death had prevented her from properly grieving the loss, and her residual discomfort with emotional displays was preventing her from fully descending into grief now, at a time when such a display would be most appropriate. She bitterly disliked her inability to really channel her emotions in a positive way, but that part of her identity had not wholly been wiped away despite her new role as a loving wife and devoted mother.

    She had listened quietly to the words spoken by Tahiri, by Han, by Kyp Durron, and the others, but could not quite bring herself to participate. Anakin had saved her life too, but something inside her prevented her from sharing the story. She could feel the anguish around the circle. Mostly Jedi, their emotions raged unchecked past their usually-strong self-control. Mara could sense the sadness in Luke, a vague and discomfiting feeling of despair and impotence emanating from her husband. She could feel the grief and the shock from Leia, festering under her sister-in-law’s outward expression of quiet sadness.

    Mara could sense the deep feelings of lost love in Tahiri, the quiet respect of Kyp Durron, and similar feelings of regret and loss from the other Jedi around the circle, most of whom had been involved in the mission to Myrkr. Curiously, despite an initial spike of grief and rage from Jaina, she felt little now from her apprentice. Mara’s mind briefly drifted away from Anakin for a moment as she considered Jaina’s reaction to the death of her brother. The young woman was clearly teetering on the brink of something dark, and Mara wasn’t sure how to help pull her back.

    As the flames dissipated into a brilliant display of light, Mara felt her own profound sense of loss building. The bier that had once held Anakin’s body now stood empty, the last remnants of the young Jedi’s worldly form washed away by heat and by flame. Tears filled her eyes as she considered the hole that the loss had left in her own life. She reached out for her husband, her arm finding Luke’s waist, and she buried her head into his shoulder for a long moment, sobbing softly as Luke kissed her forehead.

    Finally she was able to regain control, and looked up to see the expression of quiet sadness in Luke’s face, a look that concealed strong emotions that were buried deep, impenetrable to all but those closest to him, as Mara was. His emotions, and the look on his face, threatened to set her off again, and she turned away for a brief moment to compose herself.

    She felt Luke move off toward Han and Leia, and quietly looked around at the rapidly-dwindling group, now consisting mostly of the Jedi who had been closest to Anakin and to the Solo family as a whole. Her eyes briefly fell on Jaina, and she nearly walked over to speak with her apprentice, but something in the young woman’s demeanor stopped her cold. She watched as the young Jedi Zekk moved to talk to Jaina, only to be stopped by Kyp Durron. Although she could not hear the interaction, the import of it was clear. Jaina did not want to talk, and she respected her apprentice’s wishes, even as Kyp left and a group of young Jedi mobbed Jaina.

    Instead, she looked around the group again, her eyes sweeping past Leia and Luke to settle on Tahiri, crying quietly alone a few feet from the Solos. The girl had been Anakin’s closest friend, and had known the youngest Solo child as well as any of the boy’s family members, if not more so. Mara also knew that the friendship between Tahiri and Anakin had grown into something more significant in the past year.

    Tahiri looked up to meet Mara’s eyes across the bier, and Mara gave the girl a supportive smile. The look on Tahiri’s face broke her heart. Tahiri was clearly devastated by the loss, and was trying but failing to put on a brave face for the gathering of Anakin’s closest friends and family members. Mara had never considered herself well-equipped to comfort a grieving friend, but Tahiri at the moment had no one else, so she went over to the girl anyway.

    Tahiri broke down again as Mara put an arm around the younger woman’s shoulders. Mara murmured some vaguely-comforting words as the girl cried, acutely aware that she was doing little good. As Tahiri’s sobs abated a little, Mara spoke quietly.

    “I’m so sorry, Tahiri. I know how much you cared about Anakin.”

    Still quietly sobbing, Tahiri nodded. “I loved him. More than anyone else in the galaxy…” Her voice trailed off.

    Mara let out a soft sigh. “I know you did, Tahiri. And he loved you, too.”

    Tahiri’s green eyes, still glistening with tears, went wide as she reacted to Mara’s words. “Did he tell you that? He never said it to me, and I never told him. I wish I would have, now, if only I had known…” She broke down sobbing again.

    Mara shook her head sadly. “He never told me, Tahiri, but he didn’t have to. I could see it in his eyes when you two were together, and I could hear it in his voice when he talked about you. We all expected you to become a Solo someday…”

    Mara’s voice broke at that. Reminding the girl of a future she would now never have may not have been the most comforting thing she could have said.

    It did not go well. Tahiri’s knees buckled as the girl’s quiet sobbing intensified. It was all Mara could do to keep Tahiri upright, but she managed to hold on to the young woman through the worst of it.

    Tahiri’s face was buried in Mara’s side for long minutes, but finally the girl’s tears were spent. With the group mostly broken up, Mara helped Tahiri back to her temporary quarters, then returned to those to which she and Luke had been assigned.

    * * *
    It was lightly raining as Mara returned to her quarters. She found a sleeping baby and a husband who was wide awake. Mara could tell that Luke was a million light-years away at the moment, although his attention refocused on the here and now as Mara entered their quarters.

    She curled up beside Luke on the oversized plush chair and rested her head for a long moment as neither husband nor wife spoke. Finally, Luke broke the silence.

    “Did Tahiri make it back to her room okay?”

    Mara hadn’t been sure that Luke noticed her interaction with the girl, but it was clear now that he had. “Yes, I made sure she got back safely. She was pretty broken up…”

    Luke sighed softly and was quiet for a long moment before speaking again. “We need to take her back to Eclipse with us, I guess. It will be a long time before she’ll be able to move past this.”

    “She seemed so different to me. So full of regret, and so quiet. It used to be that she never stopped talking. The only thing I could get out of her tonight was that she loved Anakin and wished that she had told him that before he died.”

    Luke nodded. “You were away while Anakin was at the Academy the first time, weren’t you?” Mara nodded, and Luke continued. “Tahiri took to Anakin the minute he showed up. None of the other students wanted to be around her, but Anakin could just sit and listen to her talk all day long, and he never seemed bothered one bit by it.”

    Luke sighed again before continuing. “I was never more proud of any of my students than when Anakin and Tahiri found that globe in the Palace of the Woolamander and freed all those Massassi.” He chuckled a bit, joylessly. “Granted, I wasn’t particularly happy with them for sneaking off so many times on their adventures without telling anyone, but Anakin was never one to let rules get in the way of something he thought was right.”

    Mara’s brow furled in sadness. “He always was like that.”

    Luke looked thoughtful for a moment. “When did you first meet Anakin, anyway? It’s been so long now that I don’t remember.”

    Mara frowned. “Drall, I guess, during the whole Centerpoint fiasco about a year before Nirauan. I never really got a chance to talk to him, though, since he was so young and so exhausted from that whole ordeal. Our paths crossed a few times after that, but I didn’t really get to know him until you took him on as an apprentice, now that I think about it.”

    “I didn’t really know him well until Dantooine. I was gone most of the time when he was at the Academy, and you remember what the first part of the war was like.”

    Luke nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve never forgotten how he kept you safe on Dantooine when I couldn’t be with you. If I hadn’t sent him with you…” He looked away for a moment. “I owed him more than I could have repaid.”

    Mara looked at him sadly. “Everyone in the galaxy owed him. Centerpoint, Ithor, Myrkyr. He was a hero, Luke.”

    A sudden burst of anger from Luke surprised Mara, and he let out a quiet growl of frustration as he punched the adjacent wall with his right hand, leaving a small dent.
    Hero. I’m so tired of that word. He was sixteen. He had no place being involved in the war like he was. And I was the fool who let a child lead the mission that killed him.”

    Mara waited calmly until Luke’s rant was over. Her husband rarely lost his temper, and she knew he needed to vent. It was a reversal of their usual roles, but that did not mean Luke’s feelings of anger were any less valid than hers.

    “You were only eighteen when you blew up the Death Star, Luke.”

    “And I killed a million people that day. That was a responsibility that I never wanted.”

    Mara frowned a bit. “Yet you were given that responsibility. You walked into the briefing room on Yavin 4 and walked out in command of a flight of pilots with far more combat experience than you had. They had no good reason to put you in a leadership role, and Wedge and Biggs had no good reason to want to fly under your command. I would have been irate if someone with no experience was put in charge of me, but they went with you without complaint. Because that’s the kind of leader you were, and still are. Anakin was just like you in that way. There was no one else that could have succeeded on Myrkr.”

    Luke was still upset. “And that got him killed. That’s all being a hero gets you. If it’s not you, it’s a friend, or a loved one. All my heroism”, he said, “ever amounted to was death.”

    Mara pulled him into her arms and looked deeply into his eyes. “Being a hero earned you the admiration of a galaxy of beings, Luke. It earned you the ability to develop and lead a new generation of Jedi. It allowed you to defeat numerous threats to the safety of trillions of beings across the galaxy. And,” she smiled sadly at him, “don’t forget that it earned you my love, Luke.”

    Luke looked at her, and his blue eyes pierced her as he shook his head gently. “Those circumstances only made you despair for me. I was aimless and had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I had to change all that before you could love me.”

    A single tear ran down Mara’s face. “I loved you from the beginning, Luke. Palpatine might have screwed me up too much to realize it, but from the minute you agreed to break into a Star Destroyer with me to rescue someone you didn’t even know, I loved you. From the minute you took it upon yourself to train me in the Force, even as I promised to use it to kill you, I loved you.”

    Her voice cracked as she continued. “You were my best friend, Luke. That holo of us on Coruscant after Thrawn was defeated, the one you gave me when I left you at the Academy? I carried it around for years afterward, you know. Everywhere I went. It was a reminder to me of my best friend.

    “Every time your name popped up in the holonews, or we heard stories of the latest threat to the galaxy, I pulled out that holo and I thought of you. And then I waited for you to call. I waited for you to tell me that you needed me, that you wanted my help. That whatever you were going through, you needed someone to stand by your side and face it with you. That’s all I ever needed from you, Luke. I waited, desperate to drop everything and stand with you. But you never called.

    “You just went it alone. And we were just wanderers occasionally passing in the night. We never saw each other by design, only by chance. You were my best friend, my only friend, and you were a stranger. I lost you, Luke. Maybe my defense mechanisms and your stubbornness made it impossible for us for all those years, maybe neither of us really knew what we wanted or what we had in each other. I couldn’t tell you what I needed then.

    “I feel desperately sorry for Tahiri. I had to wait ten years before you came back to me, Luke. She will have to wait a lifetime. Anakin’s the only thing she had in the galaxy, and he’s never coming back. Anakin was a hero to everyone else, but to Tahiri he was just Anakin. He was her best friend, her confidant, and the only one who every really cared for her, especially after everything she went through when the Praxeum fell. He was the only thing that mattered to her, and she told me tonight she never truly told him much she loved him. And now he’s gone, and he’s never coming back for her.

    “I loved you because you were a hero, Luke, but not because you were Luke Skywalker, the galaxy’s greatest action hero and most eligible bachelor. I’ve known a lot of heroes in my life. All of them were the same in one way. They were all heroes because they had some ulterior motive. They wanted fame, or fortune. They wanted to impress someone, or prove their worth to someone. More than one ‘hero’ I ran across just wanted to impress me.

    “But you were my hero because you weren’t that person, Luke. You did what you did because it was your burden, and because it was the right thing. You never did anything that made me think you were trying to impress me. At the beginning I hated you. I wanted to kill you, and you walked through darkness, fire, and ice for me. There was no one else in the galaxy that would have done that. Things changed after Wayland, and maybe you lost your way a bit, and maybe I did too. But underneath it all there was always that man who just did what needed to be done because he was the only one who could.

    “Anakin was just like that. The galaxy lost a hero on Myrkr, but there are many heroes to take his place, because there will always be individuals willing to fight for others’ benefit, whatever their motivation might be. His family lost something more than that, sure. We lost someone we loved, someone we knew would be there for us, and someone who would have one day taken up the Jedi banner and been the same kind of leader that you are, Luke. Anakin would have led the Jedi ably and well, and he would have been the mentor I’d have wanted for Ben.

    “But the Jedi will find other leaders, and Ben will someday find a different mentor. Han and Leia will grieve for a long time, but eventually they will be okay. So will we. But Tahiri,” she looked down, sighing lightly, “will have to get over the loss of the only thing in the universe that truly mattered to her. That’s something she might not come back from.” She looked up at him. “I’m not sure I could have.”

    The rain continued to fall, and Luke was silent for a long time. Mara’s speeches were rare, for several reasons. Her personality was still such that she was uncomfortable talking about her feelings. That would never change. And everything Mara said was something Luke already knew. Their still-frequent Force bonds meant that each was intimately familiar with the feelings, dreams, and hopes of the other. It wasn’t mind reading, and they were both occasionally private people, but Luke and Mara knew each other in ways that few married couples could match. Despite all of that, sometimes they needed to talk. Tonight, for Luke, hearing Mara’s words was what he needed. Mara, too, needed to speak the words, for all her usual discomfort at the discussion of feelings.

    Luke finally found his voice, but it was still laced with resignation and sadness. “I don’t know how we’ll come back from this. Han and Leia and Jaina, especially, but me too.”
    Mara rose and pulled Luke to his feet. “Come to bed, my love. We both need to rest.”

    Luke resisted slightly, and looked at Mara, his blue eyes moist and unfocused. His voice was hoarse, and barely a whisper. “What do we do, Mara? I don’t know where to go from here.”

    Mara silently dragged him to the bed, and pulled her husband down next to her. Rolling over, she looked into his eyes. “Tonight, we mourn Anakin. We cry the tears we’ve suppressed until now, and we let him go with our love.”

    “And tomorrow?”

    Mara sighed, softly and sadly. “Tomorrow is a new day.”

    As Mara pulled her husband into a tight embrace, the rain fell harder.
     
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  12. WarmNyota_SweetAyesha

    WarmNyota_SweetAyesha Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Aug 31, 2004
    This was. Stunning! =D=

    Even though Mara thought her words/nonverbal comfort of Tahiri fell far short, I know from personal experience being on the receiving end - it is just, just what is needed and deeply, warmly appreciated!
    @};-

    Great insight from Mara about everything: what Tahiri and Anakin meant to each other; what makes a true hero and does not; and how she has always felt about Luke and why. ^:)^
    She is right about what drew them together and kept them apart all those years. [face_thinking]

    A beautiful, thoughtful, and very much in-character moment.

    [:D]
    !!!!

    I know that Demendora & JadeLotus & ginchy will just. Eat this up like chocolate. [face_batting]
     
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  13. ginchy

    ginchy Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    May 25, 2005
    Very interesting talk on the meaning of a 'hero'. What a hard loss in the EU, and everyone had to deal with the fallout in their own way. I like Mara's uncharacteristic speech--she had something that needed to be said.
     
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  14. Irish_Jedi_Jade

    Irish_Jedi_Jade Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 19, 2007
    Love this!!!! [face_love] Will you tag me when you update? I like Mara providing solace for Tahiri. In a way, they're both...outcasts, and they both are not part of the Skywalker/Solo tangle, so I like them being together in their grief.

    [face_good_luck] Irish
     
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