Archive of Our Own

4 ABY

The unease has been hanging over her all day, a distracting fog that she has to fight through to concentrate on her search. Mara pushes aside her empty cup of caf and glares at the table on the computer screen, scraping her fingers through her hair in frustration. There is a pattern here, if she can just see it –

Then the screen is gone, and she’s watching a flash of red and green lightsabers through the Emperor’s eyes. Two blades slash down into his body together, and it feels like a thousand strands of barbed wire yanked out of her head at once, ripping through her mind and leaving shattered scraps of thought crumbling into a useless heap.

YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER.

Her throat closes around itself and she convulses forward onto the desk, clawing at the surface despite the cringing pain of her nails bending backwards and snapping, splinters digging into the raw flesh.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t kill her. She wakes up aching down to her bones, with dried blood crusted around the splinters in her fingertips and a concussed silence at the center of her mind where the Emperor used to be.

“Luke Skywalker,” she says – or tries to say; it comes out as a scratch with the outlines of a name. She coughs, tastes blood, and ignores it. Staggers out of the chair and barely makes it to the fresher before she vomits bright-yellow bile flecked with red, and turns the mirror around so she won’t have to see her own sunken eyes as she washes the blood off her hands. Her body doesn’t feel connected to her. She tries to turn away, but stumbles over her own feet and blacks out.

Mara struggles in and out of lucidity for an indistinct amount of time that could be days or weeks. She wakes up not remembering how to speak and stares dumbly at her own face in the mirror without recognizing it; the world goes gray and she wakes up again on the floor and takes 20 minutes to identify the feeling in her throat as thirst. Sometimes, she feels almost sane for hours at a time; more often she can’t tell if she’s sane or not.

Slowly, the hours of sanity stretch into days, and the memory blackouts get rarer and rarer until she’s sufficiently alive and coherent to realize that her entire world died with the second Death Star, and that she has to start over from scratch.

Luke Skywalker.

12 ABY

Mara switches off the video screen, leaving her and Dankin alone in one of the comm rooms on board the Wild Karrde. The ship hums around them with the familiar engine rumble that marks this particular combination of metal and plastic and wiring as home, and for a few seconds, they gather their thoughts in the comforting almost-silence.

“Well,” she says finally, “thatwas interesting.”

Three years after the end of the Thrawn campaigns, the Smugglers’ Alliance is still on shaky ground with the New Republic military, and Cravvach (who either has no other name or refuses to circulate it) is one of its very special problem children. Tall and lanky almost to the point of scrawniness, with a deep tan and shoulder-length hair dyed a faded blue, he radiates an aura of casual shabbiness, but underneath the façade, he’s also the head of an organization large enough to be a significant rival to Karrde’s own.

When he’d called to express concerns about the New Republic, Mara had been expecting to hear about customs inspectors who were just doing their job and ran across a sloppily-hidden illegitimate cargo, or possibly an overly officious sector governor who didn’t quite understand the unwritten rules of not inquiring too minutely into where this new source of information was getting his tips.

She hadn’t expected a mixture of political speculation and blatant personal animosity to Luke Skywalker building up to a prediction that the New Republic’s admittedly toothless response to Kyp Durron destroying the Carida system was a sign of its impending collapse. Her mind supplies the memory of Skywalker, his face drawn with fatigue and grief, tenaciously clinging to Durron’s potential for redemption, and suddenly she feels vaguely guilty for not defending him. As much as she has to criticize him for, she can’t imagine him deliberately trying to take down the New Republic (and given his sister’s history, especially not by ordering anyone to destroy a star system with a superweapon).

She glances at Dankin. She would have preferred to have Karrde there, but he’d been tied up in a particularly delicate series of negotiations, and they’d been talking about promoting Dankin to a larger role within the Smugglers’ Alliance anyway. He was unusually tense for the whole conversation, which Mara had put down to beginner’s nerves, but he still looks distant: his mouth is turned down at the corners and his face is pointed down at the display of his datapad, but his eyes aren’t moving to follow the flicker of information across the screen.

“You’re usually more talkative than that – do you two have a history I should know about?” The obvious thought occurs right as she’s finishing her sentence: “Or – you didn’t know anyone on Carida, did you?”

“Oh, uh…” Dankin shakes himself. “No, I didn’t know anyone. Sorry. It’s just a pretty upsetting thing to think about, so many people just – ” he snaps his fingers “ – dead like that.”

He’s going to have to learn to telegraph his emotions a little less, but for now Mara lets it go with a sympathetic nod, and watches with something like a teacher’s pride as he pulls himself back to the immediate problem. You don’t always have to scream it from the rooftops, but compassion itself isn’t a weakness, says the memory of Skywalker’s voice in her head, and she looks down at her own datapad so Dankin won’t see her rolling her eyes at herself for remembering it word for word.

“Do you think he’s onto anything?” Dankin asks.

“If the New Republic was going to collapse every time Luke Skywalker or one of his baby Jedi did something dumb, it would have fallen to pieces long ago.” She looks down at her datapad. “Which doesn’t mean he called for no reason, just not the one he’s saying. While he was talking, I looked up what he was actually doing at the time Carida was destroyed, and by all our numbers, his business took a huge and inexplicable nosedive. My guess is that he lost either a lot of assets or an important client or both”

It could mean almost anything – he could have moved assets into a shadow company somewhere else, or invested in some kind of long-term scheme that hasn’t been paying off yet, or any number of other things, but the most plausible explanation is the obvious one.

She waits a minute for Dankin to catch up. “Okay, and since he’s not legally allowed to be there, he can’t file for damages,” he finishes. “But that only explains the grudge against Skywalker, not the political stuff. I mean, does it?”

“To me, that sounded like he was trying to give us a pretext to pick up his grudge. Offer the excuse that Skywalker is a threat to our stability and see if we bit. Maybe he had some kind of plan for getting whatever revenge he thinks he deserves, or maybe he was just testing the waters.”

“That makes sense, I guess. Are you going to tell Skywalker?”

“I don’t plan on hiding it from him, but I don’t see it turning into a giant issue,” Mara says carefully. “Plenty of people hate Skywalker, and plenty of them are more important than some mid-size smuggling group he’s never heard of.” She reins in her thoughts, refusing to let herself wander off into thinking about Skywalker and his maniac genius protégé and their entire incredible saga of bad decisions. This is going to be a very interesting conversation with Karrde.

Karrde suggests that Mara might try to probe Skywalker about it the next time she’s at the Academy: she honestly doesn’t think he’ll know anything, but it can’t hurt. Unfortunately, visiting Skywalker also means that Mara has to deal with everyone else on Yavin IV, and for pure irritation value, Skywalker is nothing compared to some of his trainees.

“You know, I don’t like prying into other people’s personal affairs.” Corran Horn is at the very top of her list of petty enemies. Her only consolation for sparring with him is that she can usually win, and it’s not because Mara is particularly good with a lightsaber.

“So don’t?” Mara spins to block his downward chop and dances away from the follow-up slash.

“And I know your work with the Smugglers’ alliance is very important to you.” Strike, parry, duck – now that she’s learned how to read him, she can always tell when he’s going to play the blade extension trick. “But it seems like you’re really having trouble training consistently.”

Sure, because she’s too busy running around the galaxy putting out fires that Skywalker started. With an effort, Mara keeps her mouth shut, and wishes for the millionth time that she had Skywalker’s talent for projecting serenity no matter what.

“I know it’s something I really struggled with, too – ” he breaks off to charge at her with all the finesse of a tipsy rancor. Mara’s blade blurs into a pane of light as she flicks his attacks off to one side and the other, making the most of the size difference to duck a flurry of strikes that would have been much more dangerous to someone 20 centimeters taller.

“- and – ” a pause to catch his breath as they circle each other slowly. “In the short run, it’s so tempting to want to do everything, isn’t it? But in the long term, letting go of that – it’s the only way to really develop, as a Jedi.”

He frowns at her defense, searching for the opening that will let him punctuate his point by dramatically disarming her. Mara feints a hole, not even bothering to hide her grin when Corran lunges for it and she bats his saber back in a huge, useless arc over his head, the momentum sending him completely off-balance. When he recovers, the point of her blade is hovering almost close enough to singe his throat.

Mara gives him a minute to process it, but when it becomes abundantly clear that his own ego is still too well-developed for him to yield like a normal person, she flicks off the blade with a wordless arch of her eyebrow and heads for the showers.

But the most irritating thing about Corran Horn is that he has a way of wrapping all his arrogance and condescension around a kernel of accuracy that rankles at her all the more because the delivery was so profoundly obnoxious. She doesn’t want to let it get under her skin, but the rest of the day is overshadowed by a lingering self-doubt.

She has no idea why the unsettled feeling makes her itchy to talk to Skywalker, but she really does have an actual reason to go find him, and she might as well do it while she’s enthusiastic about the idea. He’s taught them all how to reach out to him if they want to talk, so she sits back and reaches out with the Force. There’s a clear invitation at the other end, and a mental image of…the roof?

Mara shrugs, and heads for the stairs. Sure enough, Skywalker is up there, almost invisible in his black clothes. “Mara. I’m glad to see you.” He’s sitting with his back against a thick radio wand that juts up vertically from the roof, ending about five meters above their heads. Up here at the top of the Temple, she can barely hear all the nocturnal insect-noises of the jungle below. The air is hot and still, and the sky is cloudless: with none of the light pollution of Coruscant, the stars look unusually bright. 

“Skywalker.” He shows no sign of moving, so she crosses the roof to sit next to him. Up close, Skywalker looks better than he did the last time she saw him; at least some of the strain is gone from his face. He looks at her, and raises one eyebrow. “Something tells me you’re not bringing good news.”

Maybe it’s a habit he picked up from hanging around with Han Solo or maybe it’s just a generally congenial personality trait, but Skywalker never tries to cross-examine her on what she’s been doing when she’s not at the Academy, and every time she visits she has a renewed appreciation for it. “Have you ever heard of a man called Cravvach?”

“I don’t think so. Should I have?”

“He’s a member of the Smugglers’ Alliance.” For now, at least. “Operating out of Elom, mainly. And I can’t tell you the whole story, but – ” Mara runs her hand through her hair and sighs. “Basically he has a personal grudge against you in particular and he’s potentially strong enough to be dangerous about it.”

Luke’s eyes are piercing even in the low light. “Is this about Kyp?”

Her silence is enough of an answer, but before he can ask, she cuts him off. “Look, Skywalker, you know I’m not exactly overflowing with praise for how you handled Kyp Durron, but you don’t need to sit here and listen to me repeat one more person’s incoherent ranting about how you’re destroying the fabric of galactic civilization and setting up a Jedi hegemony. You’ve heard it; there’s no point wallowing in it.”

He tips his head in acknowledgement. “Thanks, I think. Is he likely to come looking for me, or do I only have to worry about him if I go hunting him down?”

“Hopefully the latter.” She sighs. “Sorry to give you another enemy.”

Luke shrugs. “If what you’re saying is true, he was already an enemy. At least if he tries anything now I’ll be forewarned. I think that counts as a favor.”

It sounds unsettlingly like something Mara would think. She shifts uncomfortably. “The advantages of part-time students,” she says, carefully casual. “Sometimes our day jobs come in handy.”

“More than sometimes,” Luke says. “Your ability with the Force isn’t as well-developed as it could be, but on the other hand, you do have an impressive handle on solving problems without it.”

“Come on, Skywalker. I can’t even meditate properly for any length of time.”

“That just takes practice. If you wanted to practice a little more when you’re offplanet, we could always try making a training bond.”

Mara still doesn’t completely understand why she agreed to this, and she strongly suspects it has more to do with proving Corran Horn wrong than anything else, but the next evening, she finds herself approaching one of the temple’s meditation rooms, and refusing to let herself hover like an awkward teenager before she opens the door.

The meditation room is dimly lit and palpably more humid than the hallway outside: Skywalker has foiled the efforts of modern climate control by cracking open the window to let the jungle air in.

Mara shuts the door behind her and pulls up a cushion, dropping down to sit cross-legged in front of him. She rolls her eyes a little on principle at Skywalker and his Living Force, but it actually does smell pretty nice. “Leave it,” she says, when he reaches over for the window control.

Skywalker takes a deep breath and returns to his cushion. “So, your training bond.”

She hadn’t realized that the cold anxiety in the bottom of her stomach had vanished until it reappears. “Right.” Her perfectly normal, utterly terrifying training bond that she’s supposed to be forming with him for completely logical reasons. This is routine, she tells herself sharply. There’s absolutely no reason to be afraid of it.

Skywalker reaches out to her; she can feel the pull in the back of her mind, and for a moment the sucking emptiness of an older bond aches so fiercely she nearly slaps back the tentative thread of this one out of reflexive pain.

“Mara?”

“Sorry. Give me a minute.” She breathes carefully and lets the pain crest and ebb until nothing’s left but the familiar hollowness – and that, at least, she’s lived with for the past 12 years. She’d felt this pain the first time she tried to use the Force, afterwards, and then every time since that she tried to stretch her powers out to something new. Every time it eventually faded. This is nothing different, and nothing to be skittish about, dammit.

She reaches back for the bond again, feeling Luke’s vague worry at the other end. “Just reach back for me,” he says. “It’s just a training bond; the connection doesn’t have to be deep at first. As long as it’s there, it’ll grow on its own.”

It’s a slender thing, almost fragile – she could almost imagine snapping it clean away with nothing but a headache afterwards. Good. That means if Skywalker dies of Idiot Hero Disorder on some crazy stunt, at least she won’t have to deal with another psychotic break.

The connection stretches weirdly, at first; after so long alone in her own head, it’s strange to have a formal bond like this. Maybe it takes an adjustment; hadn’t Tionne said that –

Mara frowns, because the fragile thread between them is getting brighter and less fragile by the minute; she can feel it filtering through into the cold hollow spaces that Palpatine had left, and she’s very sure Tionne didn’t say anything about that.

“Luke?”

“I don’t know what it’s doing.” He’s not holding it out to her any longer; she can tell that, but the bond keeps growing anyway, warm and bright and utterly terrifying, filtering into her mind.

“No,” Mara whispers, “no, no,” and she slams shut everything that’s left of her shields, spasming forward in panic and barely even caring if she has to reach out to the Dark Side to do it. 

Too late. The bond is already too strong for her, but she’s still fighting with the useless fury of the totally desperate as she feels her mind subsumed into it. It’s not so much falling as opening: the universe spangling out into the vast, bright expanse of another person. Half-realized impressions tumble past her mind in a stream of nonsense: she’s sitting across from Luke, and she’s also sitting across from Mara, and she’s angry and lonely and hurt but trying not to show it, and she’s crushed under an unbearable weight that she’s trying to appease and trying to evade. She’s not even sure which thoughts are hers and which are Luke’s – or whether there’s even a her left to not be sure in the first place. If she couldn’t see Luke sitting across from her, she wouldn’t remember that he’s a different person.

“Can you – ” There’s a voice that doesn’t feel like it came out of her throat, but it tingles in her mind a half-second before she hears it. “Can you sort through it?”

She breathes, and tries not to shake.

Then there’s a different touch – deliberate intent. Let me help you, Luke says through the bond, and slowly she feels his mind start to separate from hers as the jumble of impressions clarifies into something more like two beings instead of one. It’s a little frightening to realize just how powerful he is underneath the disarming earnestness and the terrible decision-making. He slides through her mind with casual precision, untangling the threads of their thoughts. Goosebumps prickle on her arms at the intensity: heat like fever-sweat, with an edge of cold underneath and the raw exposure to the overwhelming expanse of another mind all at once.

She realizes belatedly that she’s standing up (when did she stand up?) and is that her lightsaber? It is. She’s holding it in a low guard. The blue blade hums between them, throwing harsh shadows on Skywalker’s face in the dim lights.

Mara reaches for the edges of her own shields, pulling them back up around herself as much as she can. Her mind feels raw and scraped, and the bond is still tugging at the edges, trying to pull her back into it. Something still feels off, like her borders are blurry and indistinct, or some parts of her got rearranged wrong, or maybe she’s still got something that ought to belong to Luke – she can’t put her finger on it. It doesn’t feel bad, just weirdly unfamiliar.

 “What did you do?”

Luke pulls in a shaky breath. “I think it’s a soulbond,” he says hesitantly, echoes of confusion and hurt rippling back to her from his mind.

Well, it’s certainly not the training bond they were trying to make. Her head throbs. A tentative probe towards the edge of her own shields jolts her with the adrenaline-spiked dizziness of peering over a sheer cliff face, and she flinches back. “It found – ” Her throat sticks, and she swallows. “The – where the Emperor used to be. It found the…spaces.”

Luke’s face slides into something like compassion, and Mara feeds the stab of irritation straight back into the bond – the last thing she needs is Skywalker of all people trying to analyze her psychic well-being.

Mara wonders how far he has to be pushed before he flips over from “unflappable Jedi calm” directly to “crippling self-doubt,” and whether their new soulbond is edging close to “I broke up with my girlfriend” territory or whether it’s still in the kiddie pool with “a Sith Lord is preying on my students” and “My protégé just blew up a star system.”

She’s still standing over him with a lightsaber. It feels very satisfying, which is a sign she should probably stop. Reluctantly, Mara thumbs off the blade. On the bright side, at least there’s enough of her left to be satisfied by it. “Sorry,” she mutters, hooking it back on her belt.

Unfortunately, trying to approach the bond in any direct way appears to be out of the question. She has to edge around it on her own end; she can’t even look directly at it (or whatever the mental equivalent of “looking” is supposed to be; Luke is always trying to tell her to stop shackling her mental abilities to literal constructs, but Luke is also the one who apparently can’t tell a basic training bond from a supposedly mythological soulbond when he’s actually creating it, so she informs his voice in her head that she’ll call it looking if she damn well wants to).

“It’s funny; I never thought you’d be so attached to the physical imagery.”

“I wasn’t, until you started telling me to expand beyond it,” Mara snaps back automatically, and then stops as a horrible wave of realization hits her. “Wait, wait. I didn’t say that out loud.”

“I felt it,” he muses, and he looks a little hurt, probably at the undisguised horror that must be pouring through the bond. “You can’t hear me?”

Mara tries and fails to keep the hysteria from creeping into her voice at the thought of tiptoeing around this aching, nagging thing forever, with Skywalker constantly in the back of her head more invasive than even Palpatine had ever been. At least Palpatine could and did keep it turned off most of the time, and hadn’t given a damn about prying into her mental health in the name of her own good. (And at least Palpatine had given her a place in the galaxy and something she could fight for and belong to.)

She spins on her heel and does not run out of the meditation room into the familiar maze of the Academy’s hallways. She has nowhere else to go, so she ends up back in “her” room – for some reason, Skywalker insists on keeping it for her even though she’s rarely here long enough to really unpack.

The bond throbs at the base of her skull, in tune with the angry thump of her heartbeat. With a glower in Skywalker’s general direction for good measure, Mara throws herself down at the computer to do some research. She can’t focus though; the room is too hot and her body keeps humming with something that feels like a pre-battle adrenaline spike.

The thermostat is set to 20 degrees. There’s absolutely no reason to be too hot in nothing but a jumpsuit.

Mara shifts irritably, and out of nowhere she suddenly, desperately wants Luke’s hands on her hips and Luke’s teeth hot and sharp over her jaw. She sucks in a breath and holds her body rigidly still against the desperate flare of arousal, riding it out until it’s settled back into the background pain of the headache.

Well, that’s new and horrifying. Did Skywalker just get the same thing? Did it come from him in the first place? It’s certainly not something she ever would have considered before now.

Mara resists the urge to bang her head against the table and glares at the computer with the renewed focus of a woman in dire need of distraction.

One hour and two more horrifyingly sudden shocks of want later, she’s forced to admit defeat. Jedi soulbonds have been responsible for several lyric operas, more than a handful of trashy holodramas, and quite a few deluded suicides from non-Jedi who couldn’t accept that they’d never experience one (they’re more than welcome to hers, Mara thinks sourly). But if the Jedi of the Old Republic had even known about them in a non-fictional capacity, they’d either kept it too well-hidden or not well-hidden enough. Unlike training bonds, which are reasonably well-described even in the scraps of Jedi literature Skywalker has managed to turn up, soulbonds are the subject of myths and stories more than anything else.

Her computer beeps with an incoming message from Karrde, and she leaves the notification hanging in the corner – it’s almost certainly about the internal political machinations they’re both currently trying to tame, and being this distracted is not likely to help her make any kind of intelligent decisions.

She knuckles the back of her head, lines of tension aching along her jaw and at the base of her neck. Probably if she stopped fighting on her end, it wouldn’t hurt this much. She hears the suggestion in Skywalker’s voice, and that’s enough for her to refuse it on principle, glowering at the desk and making a mental note to see if she can abuse her position as quasi-legal Smuggler-In-Chief to finagle some prescription-strength painkillers from whatever backwards corner of the galaxy that particular market lurks in. Some treacherous part of her mind wishes it were Luke’s hands rubbing her head instead, warm blunt fingertips careful not to pull her hair, and she recoils in disgust: sex is bad enough, without Force-imposed sappiness on top of it.

Mara? Comes the voice in her mind. It’s wordless, but somehow just as clear as if he’d been standing next to her talking.

How is he even doing that? Mara mentally edges a little closer to the bond, to see if she can pull it off herself, but it’s just as dangerous as ever and she edges back.

I think I can just control it better, or maybe I’m fighting it less.

With a sigh, Mara thumbs on her comlink. “Stop showing off. What?”

“I found a record you might want to come take a look at – there’s this old poem…”

Skywalker’s personal rooms are uncluttered almost to the point of emptiness, in a way that feels less like deliberate minimalism and more like transience. She can see his sister’s taste in the furniture – well-made and as expensive as it needs to be – but there’s no art, no holos of his family, none of the idiosyncratic knickknacks that even Karrde’s crew manages to haul with them from one end of the galaxy to another.

The main room features a kitchenette in one corner, a door that presumably leads to the bedroom, and a computer terminal, where Skywalker waves her over to look at a screen full of gobbledygook.

It’s more than a little unsettling that anyone, much less Skywalker,has better information than she does, but Mara has to be impressed that he apparently cared enough to go chasing down some sect of librarian nuns in the Dalonbian Sector to get a half-corrupt ancient datachip full of pre-Clone Wars Jedi legends.

Less amusingly, C-3PO is required to actually translate the damn thing.

“Oh, how fascinating,” he gushes, “it appears to be a dialect of Old Helskan, probably an offshoot that developed…”

Mara makes the mistake of looking at Skywalker – the mess of hair sticking out around his ears, the tiny upward curl of his lip silhouetted against the computer screen – and bites down a gasp at another overwhelming wave of desire to crawl over his lap and kiss the thoughtful half-frown right off his face. She grabs the seat of her chair and digs her teeth into the inside of her cheek, staring stupidly at the meaningless, backlit words in front of her.

“…after the Reemian Split, but the adjectival declension is…”

Luke turns to look at her, and she can see everything she just felt on his face. He gives her a sympathetic half-smile, and her mouth twists up in response despite herself. 

“...remarkably similar to the participle forms in Old Riiski, which developed – ”

“Threepio,” says Luke, and even his patience sounds a little strained, “could you just tell us what it says, please?” His voice is impressively steady.  

“Certainly, Master Luke.” Either Mara’s imagining it, or the stupid droid is actually miffed at having its monologue on linguistics cut off.

According to the legend, soulbonds are permanent once they’re formed (“good going, Skywalker”) but they can be blocked, which, they are helpfully informed, is accomplished through a special process of meditation and typically proves an effective way to silence any “verbally specific telepathetic communications, unintentional emotional transfer, and uncontrollable feelings of affection or sexual attraction.” Threepio cocks his head. “Master Luke, might I inquire if – ”

“No,” Mara cuts him off, “You mightent.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Luke biting back a grin, and wrenches her eyes away from the way his teeth dig into his lip.

Threepio primly returns to his translation. The meditation is apparently supposed to be done at dawn or sunset; there are a couple typical Jedi mantras to memorize and repeat – nothing major.

“Unless the Emperor taught you anything we could use?” His voice is almost hesitant. Unfortunately, that’s also the first thing that occurred to Mara.

“Nothing I can remember. He made it when I was a child, and he always controlled it; he never told me what he was doing or why.” She keeps her voice perfectly even.

Luke opens his mouth as if he’s about to comment, then thinks better of it and closes it again. Mara doesn’t even bother to try hiding her gratitude. He looks out the window, where sunset has obviously come and passed. “Dawn, then,” he says.

She nods, and then pinches herself. Skywalker, not Luke. This is temporary. The bond is temporary, the selective telepathy is temporary, and the recurring urges to push him against the nearest convenient surface and shove his pants down had betterbe extremely temporary. Mara takes a steadying breath. “Around 0530?”

Luke nods, still looking a little shell-shocked, and Mara half-runs out the door before she can do anything even dumber. She’s halfway back to her room before she realizes how incredibly aroused she is and nearly turns around to go strangle Luke – Skywalker, dammit – after all.

She heads directly back out for the gym, on the theory that wearing herself out might at least give her an outlet for the frustration, and she doesn’t remember Karrde’s message until she gets back thoroughly irritated that the Force-induced arousal screwed up her form enough for Corran to butt in with a completely unnecessary lecture on stance and pelvic tilt. But as soon as she sits down to read it, she forgets about Corran immediately:

Dankin vanished mysteriously last night and all signs point to a coerced departure…

He’d been on vacation, heading home on civilian transportation. Karrde attached holos of his cabin: the room is a mess; the lock is broken, but the only fingerprints anywhere are his. The only reason they know about it now, instead of assuming that he’s still happily enjoying his time off, is that his girlfriend called the transport corporation to check in when the ship landed without him, and Karrde has permanent alerts set up to let him know when any of his people wind up in a police report.

Mara takes a deep breath: if he really was kidnapped, someone is going to pay for it. Karrde, of course, wants her to track the man down, which would be fine except that she’s stuck here being soulbonded at least overnight, and potentially more if that doesn’t work.

A quick calculation tells her that it’s the middle of the ship’s night on the Wild Karrde, and she doesn’t have anything to say that can’t wait until morning. Sleep, on the other hand, isn’t particularly appealing either, mostly because she’s afraid of what Skywalker might catch her dreaming with her shields down. So she settles down to wait it out with stimpills and multiple cups of over-steeped black tea, turning her jittery energy into as much research as she can reasonably do from here.

Luke’s thoughts aren’t intrusive, but they scratch at the back of her mind, draining away her concentration into steadily-increasing mental blocks in a desperate attempt to give them both some privacy. But nothing she does seems to work right – all her shielding is ten times harder than it ought to be, and Luke’s (Skywalker’s, Skywalker’s, Skywalker’s) hero complex guilt keeps seeping through them: it’s like trying to shut out fog with a screen door.

Mara tries to focus. Her concentration wavers, and her shields dip lower, just for a moment, but it’s enough to catch the wave of self-flagellation from Luke’s end.

Mara’s not even sure what she’s thinking until she’s picking up her comlink to flick it on: “Dammit, you had to rebuild the entire Jedi Order from scratch; no one’s expecting you to do everything perfectly.” Guilty realization that she hasn’t exactly been setting an example of nonjudgmental understanding herself follows before the tail end of the sentence leaves her mouth.

“Remember what happened the last time I screwed up a training bond?”

“Skywalker, I am not about to go destroy a damn star system.” And even if she were, precisely none of it would be Skywalker’s fault. Mara squashes the urge to hunt down Kyp Durron and feed him to a wampa. “You know, you’d do a lot more actual good if you weren’t endlessly caught up in this cycle of trying to be omnipotent and then drowning yourself in misery when you aren’t.”

Luke’s side of the bond twitches a little, and for a long moment he doesn’t say anything. Mara looks down at the floor, suddenly uncomfortable. This new level of mental commentary really isn’t making conversations with Skywalker any less draining. “Sorry,” she says, more gently this time, “that wasn’t fair.”

“But probably accurate.” Luke’s side of the bond is heavy with fatigue and residual guilt, and she can feel the echoes of his own headache compounding hers. She wants to reach out and run her fingers through his hair and rub it away – no, she doesn’t.

Dammit, yes, she does. “Yeah, well, take it with a grain of salt. It’s not exactly like I’m the poster child for mental health.” She flicks back to the gallery of pictures in her inbox. “Want to trade off shielding? I’m already wired; I can keep it up for a while so you can get some sleep.”

“Thanks,” Luke says, “Wake me up when it’s my turn.”

It’s easier to keep the walls up when he’s asleep, but it’s still weirdly intimate feeling Luke’s dreams, even as hazy images on the other side of her shields. They come in flashes, some of them bizarre and some of them laced with a cold, inexorable dread. The occasional rushes of arousal are easy to ignore compared to the urge to reach through the bond and smooth out the painful edges for him.

She really does intend to wake him up, but somehow it’s easier to let him sleep and trade the work of shielding both of them for the relief of solitude. Her work keeps her busy through the wee hours of the morning until her brain feels hollowed-out from the inside and her eyes are scratchy and swollen with fatigue. Mara power-types search string after search string in the silence, fighting off the need to comfort Luke like an addict holding off on her next hit for just another minute at a time until the sky starts looking paler black and the earliest of the jungle-birds start hooting away outside her window.

Just before dawn, she finally comms to wake him up, and rolls her eyes when his first coherent thought comes through the bond, not the comm, a groggy you should have woken me up so you could sleep. But the mental relief when he reaches out and takes the shielding for himself is glorious, and after a quick shower she feels almost ready to face whatever exciting new adventures the Force has in store for them today.

Just before sunrise, they settle down cross-legged in front of the window – Luke probably looks better than she does at this point, but his face is still pale and puffy, and his hair clings flatly to his head.

“I’m sorry,” he says out loud, his voice rough in the silence.

It catches her by surprise, and for a few seconds she’s afraid he’s belatedly made his trademark about-face from serene omniscience to wallowing in pathos, but his expression is more exhausted than woeful.

She’s not sure why she squashes the urge to channel all her sleepless frustration into some scathing retort. “Don’t beat yourself up,” she says finally, “it could – well, okay, it couldn’t have happened to anyone, but.” She chews her lip. “Just let it go, all right?”

It’s the closest thing to forgiveness that she can offer him, and he seems to take it as intended. Or maybe he’s just distracted by the first few rays of sunlight poking up over the trees, sitting up straighter and reaching for her hands.

The bond flares when their skin touches and she has to concentrate again to hold herself separate from him as they start the mantras. But surprisingly for Jedi-related voodoo, it actually goes pretty smoothly this time, the barrier slowly materializing between them with increasingly comforting solidity.

Except that it’s not all comforting – as they slowly untangle, the impulse to tear it all away starts tickling at the back of her mind, growing more and more frantic as they get closer to the end. It’s a survival instinct, some hindbrain terror of being left alone, but when they’re finally done and the opportunity is gone, it subsides into resigned defeat. The bond is still there the same way some of her older, long-healed injuries still twinge a little when she lands wrong or stretches too hard. It’s not all-consuming the way it was, though and the throbbing in the back of her head is already fading.

Without changing her expression, Mara thinks it’s pretty sad that a random half-destroyed legend is better at the Force than you are, Skywalker as casually as she can.  “Did you sense that?”

“What?”

“Excellent.”

“Oh.” Luke rolls his shoulders. He lets go of her hands, and the last residual headache abruptly disappears. “Huh.” Frowning at him, Mara grabs his fingers: her reward is an instant flash of pain, and she drops them.

“I remember the legend said something about this.” Luke scrubs his hands over his face – he really does look awful, and he’s the one who slept last night. “I don’t think it’s going to go away.”

“I bet most people who end up suppressing their soulbonds don’t want to be around each other much afterwards.” That’s going to make it hard to train, she thinks, and she’s surprised to notice how much the idea upsets her. Somehow when she wasn’t looking, she’d actually gotten invested in Skywalker’s weird determination that she become a Jedi, and it almost certainly has nothing to do with anyone’s sanctimonious guilt-tripping.

“There are some interesting stories,” Luke admits, but his smile is more sad than amused, and it doesn’t hold. He reaches for her hand, but stops himself. “You’re always welcome here, though, if you want to be.”

With an effort, Mara refrains from goggling at him. “You’ve been inside my head, and you still want me within five light-years of children you’re responsible for.”

“The inside of your head isn’t nearly as terrifying as you think it is,” Luke says mildly.

The extent of his savior complex, Mara thinks, is truly astonishing. “I have to go,” she says, “I got a message from Karrde last night.”

“And you can’t tell me but it’s important.”

Mara smiles grimly. “It’s a very noble cause. You’d approve.”

She heads off straight for the transport ship that Dankin had been on, but after two days of police investigators tramping all over the scene, there’s almost nothing there, and she’s left with a suitcase of his personal effects and the stifled frustration of wasted time that she couldn’t afford. The colder the trail gets, the more time whoever-it-is has to burrow into some forgotten corner of the galaxy and destroy the evidence, the less likely they are to ever find him (assuming, of course, that he’s still around to find).

It’s hard to think through the urgency and the fatigue and the headaches, which don’t seem to go away no matter how much distance she gets from Skywalker. They’re not even the normal kind behind her eyes or around her temples; these feel like her entire brain is aching, punctuated by spikes of sharper pain at apparently random intervals. She would quiz Skywalker about it, but almost as soon as she leaves, he sends her a message that he’s taking off to follow one more lead on some kind of bond-breaking method, and Mara pushes it to the back of her mind in the face of her more immediate problems.

At least headaches are one problem she knows how to fix without waiting around for Skywalker to find some mystical Jedi ritual. Thapifan is a controlled substance for a reason, but it’s one of the few effective drugs that doesn’t also make her groggy and stupid, and Mara knows much better than to let the drug start controlling her, so she snags a little translucent-blue pill bottle to use when she needs it with nobody the wiser.

Well, nobody except for Karrde, of course. “I hear you’ve picked up Thapifan,” he says mildly.

She really should have known that it’s impossible to sneak anything under the man’s nose. Not that she was technically doing anything wrong by Karrde’s rules, and it’s not like she’s going to get hooked on the stuff. She shrugs. “Remember how Skywalker and I had that weird Force-connection?”

“How could I forget?”

“He tried to fiddle with it in the Force, and in true Skywalker fashion, he charged on in without knowing what he was doing, and ran into some…unpleasant stuff.” It’s not quite a lie, and it’s not like Karrde is interested in the details of her weird atrophied soulbond anyway. Vaguely, she wonders what Skywalker is doing about the headaches – heroically refusing all pharmacological intervention, most likely.

“You seem fine,” Karrde says carefully. It’s a question as much as a statement.

“I am. But the psychic shock decided to rebound as cluster headaches.”

“Hence the Thapifan.” He sighs. “Well, I’m sure you know how to keep it under control.”

She nods, and Karrde is apparently satisfied. One of the many things she likes about the man: he understands how to manage his subordinates and even care about them without getting obnoxiously preachy about their personal lives. Mara’s painkillers are her own business.

“So,” he continues, “Tell me about Dankin.”

“I didn’t find anything in his room. It was trashed, but anyone can trash a room. But then I looked at the Wild Karrde’s video camera records and had Ghent do a bit of poking around on the ship’s computer. He’d been getting Palomb messages – you know, the kind that self-destruct 10 minutes after you open them? From relays all over the galaxy, traced back to all different planets. As far as Ghent can tell, they’re mostly from burner comms or false IDs. I did some digging into his background - ”

“ – and you found the arms smuggling.”

“Well, yes.” She doesn’t bother insinuating that it made him untrustworthy – Karrde obviously knew, and Karrde obviously hired him anyway, and that’s good enough for her. It’s not like Mara’s own past is squeaky-clean. “But that’s not the interesting part. The organization he used to work for made a deal with a man called Moran about eight years ago that went sour. As far as I can tell, Moran now works for Cravvach’s gang.”

Karrde sighs, suddenly looking five years older. After apparently failing to get the response he wanted out of Mara, Cravvach has been stirring up increasing trouble with the New Republic, flaunting suspicious activity in front of immigration inspectors and then getting into pissing contests with them when they call him out on it. It certainly looks like he’s decided to try tearing up the Smugglers’ Alliance from the inside out, and the suspicion of kidnapping one of Karrde’s people on top of that only adds to the tension knotting up in her shoulders and at the base of her jaw.

“So your theory is that Moran wanted something from Dankin, and when Dankin didn’t play nice, Cravvach’s gang kidnapped him instead.” He rubs one hand over the back of his neck. “This would also be why you said Dankin seemed so upset in that first call?”

“Well, it’s one explanation.” Why he wouldn’t just tell her that is another question: maybe he thought he could handle it on his own, maybe he was embarrassed to admit it. She pushes the speculation down; it won’t help anyone now.  

“Do you have any actual proof of that?”

“None besides speculation,” Mara admits. “But do we have anything more plausible? And considering Cravvach, I don’t think an official visit would really go amiss in any case.”

“Do you want to send someone to talk to him in person?”

“I want to go myself.” She barely even realizes it until she says it, but as soon as the words leave her mouth, she knows it’s exactly the right thing to do, the same way she knew they needed to leave over Myrkyr.

“Gut feeling?” At her nod, Karrde smiles a little, but it’s quickly replaced by the worry that’s been hanging over his face for the whole meeting. “All right.”

“He’s a big boy,” Mara says, and she’s not sure whether it’s more for Karrde’s benefit or her own. “He knows not to do anything really stupid, and he knows how to get hold of us as soon as he can.” Hopefully.

As she’s packing, her hand closes around the bottle of Thapifan and she weighs it in her palm before grabbing for an empty container and tipping a few of the pills into it. She scrawls a brief note to Skywalker – This is Thapifan. I can get you more if it helps the headaches. – and reminds herself to give it to one of Karrde’s couriers in the morning.

It’s just the decent thing to do – she’d do it for people a lot more annoying than Skywalker, if only for the sake of all the other people who have to deal with them.

Cravvach’s primary base of operations is on Elom, where he’s quasi-legally involved in the Lommite trade, and more than likely tangled up somehow with the Elomin’s obsessive drive to accumulate defensive weapons against the Empire.

Mara takes the Jade’s Fire in, mostly because it’s her ship and gets to fly it rarely enough as it is, and partly because if it comes down to that, it has more firepower than just about any other one-man ship in Karrde’s collection. But she makes her welcoming committee wait in the hangar while she puts on a Smugglers’ Lock, one disconnected wire in the power supply to the engine that will stop the ship from taking off or firing any weapons until it’s fixed.

The hardest part about this kind of visit is the waiting, talking and swallowing and moving around the pushing edge of urgency, because if she shows any hint that she knows what’s going on, she’ll never find it. She’s in a meeting with Cravvach on the second day of her visit, trying to figure out exactly what he’s hiding, when a sharp snap of mental emptiness hits her, accompanied by a swoop of nausea and a cold sweat prickling up along her spine and around her hairline. She breathes through her mouth, profoundly grateful that Cravvach likes to hear himself talk and rarely pauses to see if his audience is still engaged.

It’s not nearly as disabling as it was with Palpatine – thanks to the suppression, no doubt – but the similarity is unmistakable. Her tongue is thick in her mouth. The world feels incredibly distant, as if everyone is talking to her through a lousy comm relay, voices echoing around without resolving into words. Her head hits the table.

She wakes up in a hospital bed, alone in the room with a medical droid and a bank of monitors gently flashing in different colors. The sickening nausea has faded to a dull ache.

She’s woozy when she sits up, but it subsides quickly, and the droid obligingly inclines the bed for her.

“What – ” She knows what happened. “How long have I been here?”

“Seven hours, thirty-two minutes.” The droid glides around, checking the displays. “Please hold out your arm.” It takes a blood sample and busies itself analyzing it. “You became very ill this morning. Do you remember?”

“I passed out,” Mara says impatiently, looking around the room.

“Do you have any pre-existing medical conditions that could – ”

“No.”

She’s not helping herself by being rude to the droid, but there’s something restless and angry just under her skin, the void where the bond used to be and where Skywalker isn’t anymore.

“There’s no reason to be distressed,” the droid says, and Mara scowls at it.

The droid insists she stay there overnight for monitoring, and refuses to let her use anything with a screen; apparently, its theory is that she has a seizure disorder and it’s afraid the light will trigger her. It’s maddening – for all that she’s ostensibly on the same side, the reality is that she’s essentially helpless, left to wonder what Cravvach is up to, what he might be doing with Dankin, what he is or isn’t telling Karrde right now…

And Skywalker. Her first, insane, thought is that he’s dead, but that doesn’t feel right somehow. There was no pain, no surprise, no Force-backlash. But her only other theory is that he somehow found a way to block the bond so thoroughly that she can’t feel him at all in the Force…and that he just went ahead with it without consulting her.

There’s no reason to be upset. It’s exactly what she wanted. Why would he waste time hunting her down all across the galaxy when he already knew what she would say?

It’s about agency, Mara, her brain supplies in Skywalker’s voice, and she squeezes her eyes shut and flops over from one side to the other, trying to will away the unexpected ache of betrayal. Since when had she started expecting anything from Skywalker?  

The hospital is quiet, leaving her alone with her restless frustration, and Mara eventually gives up on sleeping. Someone’s changed her into a flimsy hospital gown, but her real clothes are tucked away neatly under the bed, along with the lightsaber still clipped to her belt, and she changes back into everything, abandoning the bed in favor of running through some quick stretches before she sits back against the wall and makes a list of plausibly Dankin-related things she’s seen and heard. She tries to arrange them into categories, fails, tries to articulate why some of them struck her more than others, mostly fails, and then for lack of a better plan, tries meditating on it.

She makes a mental note never to admit it to Skywalker, and it takes her a good 30 seconds to remember that in all likelihood, it won’t ever come up.

She hasn’t really gotten anywhere when the noise level in the hallway picks up, this time, the familiar synchronized stamp of guards. The chrono reads 0200. Mara’s skin prickles: if they’re going to attack her, this is the perfect time to do it. But her thoughts snap to a halt when the boots come close enough to hear voices, and the Force abruptly disappears. Either she’s going insane or there’s a ysalmiri outside in the hallway.

She slides off the bed and presses herself against the wall, pulling her lightsaber off her belt without turning it on. But the boots thump on right past her door and on down the hall – and sure enough, a few minutes later, the Force is back.

Mara counts to 10 and slides the door open, ducking back behind the doorway in hopes that the truly trigger-happy will shoot too soon. As expected, an alarm immediately starts wailing, but no shots come flying through, and when she eases her face around the door, the guards are ten meters down the hallway, apparently completely flabbergasted by the sudden noise and milling around uselessly, half in formation and half out.

And in the middle of the cohort, handcuffed and looking as confused as the rest of them, is Skywalker.

The relief is staggering, mostly because it’s completely unexpected. Mara had thought she’d made peace with the idea of Skywalker just breaking everything off without warning. Sure, there was the minor sting of not being consulted, the lingering feeling of violation at having her head summarily messed around with again by a Jedi more powerful than she was, but nothing that deserved this all-consuming, almost desperate relief at finding out it wasn’t true.

Mara doesn’t have time to stop and think about it. She puts on her best confused expression (not exactly a challenge, under the circumstances) and waves haltingly. “Just wanted to see what all the fuss was about,” she calls down the hallway, and hopes desperately that Skywalker has half an ounce of common sense. Fortunately, it looks like he does: he’s edging towards the side of the group, where there’s another door to another bedroom.

“Nothing you need to worry about, ma’am.” The head of the group rolls his eyes. “Rish, can you shut that damn alarm off?”

“Working on it, sir.” Rish is tapping away at his datapad, his attention on anything but the Jedi currently eyeing his gun. “Ah, there we go.” The wailing falls silent, and as the group turns around to head out, Luke makes his move, kicking out Rish’s knees from underneath him and grabbing his rifle with both bound hands as he tucks and rolls. He gets five meters down the hallway before anyone in the group reacts, and it pulls him out of ysalmiri range just as he ducks into the third doorway down from hers, crouching low in the frame to avoid the sudden spray of blasterfire.

Mara sucks in a breath as the bond comes crashing back – still suppressed, thankfully, but reverberating against the shields they’d put up against it with an almost concussive force. The ache in her head is staggering. She reaches back inside the room for anything heavy, grabs a bulky X-ray scanner wand, and throws it in the general direction of the guards. The impact knocks one of them backwards into another and draws at least enough of their fire for Luke to dodge around into the doorway next to her own.

“Shoot it,” she screams at him over the bullets, and suddenly the rifle comes skittering along the floor towards her, propelled by the Force.

She frowns, but grabs it and hits the ysalmiri on the third try, standing back inside the room as the group of guards temporarily stops shooting to make a line of blaster shields and Luke crashes into her doorway headfirst.

“Skywalker.” She slaps the door closed. It won’t hold them for long, but it’s something. He holds out his hands; she grabs her lightsaber and slashes through the cuffs. “Alive is a good look for you.”

“Mara – what are you doing here?”

Blaster bolts start thudding against the door. “Business,” Mara says shortly. “Catch up later?” An intensified thudding at the door underlines her point.

“Right.” Luke starts looking around with her for anything they might be able to use, and Mara relaxes into the simplicity of having one problem to solve and a person she trusts to solve it with her. “Can we get out the window?”

“Into a couple thousand kilometers of freezing desert on every side, sure.”

“Wonderful.”

The footsteps are coming from both directions. Mara looks over at the medics’ cart – it’s two-tiered, with the lower shelf about ten centimeters off the floor and the higher at her waist. Stacked on the bottom are a couple of boxy monitors and a heavy-looking oxygen tank; the top is covered in the typical medical clutter: boxes of gloves, syringes, disinfectant swabs, bandages, gauze. She gives it an experimental rock and nods, considering. It’ll work as a kind of makeshift rolling projectile if the line of guards is relatively thin, and how many Security types would they reasonably be able to pull together anyway?

“Wait.” Luke grabs the bulkiest box from the middle of the bottom shelf and hauls it off the cart. “Can you fit in there?”

She can, just barely. Luke reaches in to drape a piece of translucent plastic sanitary sheeting over her body to hide her, tucking it in under her hands and feet. He’s careful not to actually touch her, but his hands are careful and deliberate even through the sheeting, and Mara has to stop herself from leaning back into them in absurd relief that he didn’t actually suddenly snap the bond without telling her. 

Luke opens the door, and the arrival of their first set of new friends forestalls her inexplicable moment of delayed adolescence.

“Stop there! Put your hands up!”

“Okay, okay.” Luke’s voice – and then the card shoots forward all on its own, rattling crazily on wheels designed to go a fraction of the speed. Mara grits her teeth as she shudders forward completely blind, the plastic bits and pieces above her flying down around the edges and the startled yelling of the security team getting closer and closer until she can see blurry legs through the outline of the translucent sheeting.

She jumps, shucking off the sheet and kicking the cart out behind her as she crashes sideways into three pairs of legs, her momentum pulling the guards down around her in a tangle of guns and body armor. Her leg catches on the edge of the cart, and she feels a snap in her knee, but the pain is dulled by adrenaline and the rush of blasterfire around her ears. An elbow drills into her thigh and she yanks away the gun attached to its hand in retaliation, bending the man’s wrist backwards until he screams and lets go, and smashing the butt of the gun into his face to shut him up.

She’s behind the main line, and they’re completely discombobulated, half-turning to deal with her and half-focused on Luke. Three quick shots to the back take care of the closest threats, and Mara spins around to see another gun flying into Luke’s hand and the remaining two guards scrabbling at each other to get away. One of the bodies on the floor is wearing some kind of special insignia on his shoulders: she scrambles over and grabs around on his body until she comes up with an identity card and a personal datapad.

She stands up just as Luke gets there, half-falling onto her injured leg when the knee refuses to straighten all the way. He pulls her arm over the top of his shoulders – it hurts, but the knee hurts more – and with a breathless nod at each other they take off in the direction their attackers came from. Pain flares up from her knee into her thigh at every step: she won’t be able to run like this for very long. Mara slaps the ID card against the first reader she sees, and they pile into what looks like a mechanical room, hoses swaying from the ceiling over a maze of massive metal pipes.

They stop just long enough for Luke to put a quick shot into the lock and Mara to destroy the ID card just in case it has some kind of tracking chip, and take off again into the narrow walkways between pipes large enough to hold a small landspeeder in a pinch. The room is enormous, stretching out back perpendicular to the hallway as well as parallel to it in both directions, in a maze of tubing dotted with workstations and observation platforms.

At first they turn almost randomly, spurred on by the noise of what’s presumably a search party behind them. Their bodies jostle together: Luke is half-carrying her now while she hops along on her good leg. Two people running to ground in such a huge, cluttered space have an inherent advantage even considering that they don’t know the terrain: it doesn’t take long before the shouts of the search party fade into echoes, and their footsteps are the loudest sound around them.

Mara hates to admit it, but she’s about to pass out. “You think we could find somewhere to hunker down?”

There are plenty of potential hidey-holes in the huge maze of maintenance equipment, but they wind up clambering into a cramped emergency containment locker, a tiny room intended to shelter workers during a chemical spill or leak. The small space is easy enough to check for bugs while Luke wires the door shut after them to at least give them some warning if anyone decides to wander in. And it’s big enough for them to sit without touching, if they’re careful.

Mara lowers herself down on her good leg, wincing as the injured one refuses to stretch all the way out. She unlaces her boot, rolls up the leg of her pants, and probes around experimentally, wincing at the flare of pain when she touches it.

“What happened?”

“It caught on the cart when I jumped off.” The patella is obviously pushed off too far to one side, and now that the endorphin rush of the firefight is draining away, the pain is showing up in force. She takes a deep breath. “It’s dislocated. I don’t suppose you cover this in Jedi training, too?”

“We did in Rebellion first aid,” Skywalker says. “It’s going to hurt.”

“It already hurts.”

Luke shrugs in acknowledgement. She twitches reflexively when his hand lands on her ankle, but the touch is strangely calming even though her head immediately protests. His other hand lands just above her knee. The focus makes her skin prickle.

“Deep breath.”

Mara obediently breathes, and feels the pain flare as Luke pulls upward on her ankle while his thumb digs into her patella, pushing it back over the little bump of bone and into the groove where it’s supposed to be.

The pain recedes like a wave off the beach after the bone slides back into place and Luke pulls his hands back: the relief is almost dizzying in itself, but somehow there’s a loss along with it.

“Better?”

She nods, and bends her knee around a little. “Thanks.”

“Hang on; don’t move yet.” Luke glances around their closet. “It’s better if you wrap it up a little.”

There’s a medikit on the wall with a tiny roll of bandage wrap; he grabs it and tosses it to her.  

“Thanks.”

Mara leaves her leg stretched out in front of her and lets her head thunk back against the wall. She’s exhausted, and her temples throb with an aching headache from the sudden snap of the bond disappearing and reappearing within the space of a few hours. Skywalker looks almost as bad as she feels. “Please don’t tell me Cravvach’s working for the Empire.”

“Sorry,” Luke says, and Mara tips her head back against the wall. “That’s how they got the ysalmiri. I overheard the guards talking about it.”

“Fantastic.” She rolls her leg from side to side tentatively, pleased to notice that there’s barely any residual pain.

“Is that what you were here for?”

She shakes her head. “Remember how I had to run off after we broke the bond? One of Karrde’s people went missing, probably not by choice.” She sighs. “I had a feeling about this place – I really wish the Force could be a little more specific about its bad feelings.” It’s important to know about Cravvach collaborating with the Empire, but now she’s in another dead end as far as Dankin is concerned, and if he really was kidnapped, they’re running out of time to find him.

Luke must see the agitation in her face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Was this your only lead?”

“More or less.” Mara takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Dwelling on it won’t do anything for her or for Dankin. “How’d they get you?”

Luke winces. “I wasn’t expecting the ysalmiri, and I was…concentrating on something else.” He straightens. “Actually, it’s about the bond.”

“That thing you went to look for?”

“Exactly. Tionne found some kind of ancient song-cycle that she thinks might have a way of breaking it.”

Somehow, the prospect isn’t as thrilling to her as it would have been even a week ago – and why did she ever think that Skywalker would have just gone charging into that without asking her first?

“I found it,” he continues “In this orbiting merchant conglomeration in the mid rim, Kag Station.”

Mara has rarely heard a story that started at Kag Station and ended well, and she has a feeling this one isn’t going to be the exception. “Yeah, I’ve been there.”

“I was trying to plug it into Artoo’s translation program when they caught me, a whole gang of them. I don’t think they knew what it was, but they took it somewhere, and as soon as I heard the name Cravvach I figured out who they were.”

“They took the droid, too?”

Luke nods.

“Is it smart enough to get into their computers?”

“He should be, if we can get hold of him. They took my comlink, though.”

Mara, on the other hand, still has hers – whoever had undressed her in the hospital had still been trying to persuade her that they were all on the same side. And possibly simply hadn’t realized what her lightsaber was. But just in case they’re scanning for her frequency, she ignores it and pulls out her backup, the tiny miniature version she’d hidden in the sole of her shoe.

She waits for him to set up a scanner, rewiring it so it’ll passively listen for a particular frequency that the R2 unit is trained to broadcast as soon as it wakes up.

“When he powers up, Artoo will broadcast that,” Luke explains, “Even if they’ve stuck him with a restraining bolt. And that way we don’t have to risk sending a continuous transmission.”

“Clever.” Mara knuckles at her forehead, and belatedly remembers the First Aid kit. She grabs it and starts rooting through the supplies. “Nice to see we dragged it halfway across Myrkyr for a reason.” She finds the painkillers – not what she’d prefer, given a choice, but they’ll do. She tips a couple into her hand and offers the bottle to Skywalker, who waves it off, but his eyes follow the bottle. “You’re still getting headaches?”

“Only a little. I got the pills you sent me, but mine are nothing that would call for black market prescription drugs.” He frowns. “I think I might just be fighting it less; I stopped really getting them when I stopped trying to push it away and just let it be.”

Of course. Maybe her own headaches are draining her patients, maybe she’s still frustrated about completely failing in her attempt to save Dankin from whoever kidnapped him, but Mara’s really not ready to listen to Skywalker being passive-aggressively serene at her. “Great, well, I’m happy for you, but stop getting all high and mighty at the rest of us –”

“I wasn’t. I don’t care what kind of painkillers you’re using and you of all people can handle them; I just wish you didn’t need to use them in the first place.”

Oh. She doesn’t really know what to say to that, mostly because he actually seems to mean it, but before she has to come up with a response, he’s talking again. “You know, there are ways to use the Force for that…”

Better living through the Force: it’s typical Skywalker, but he does actually have a point: the pills in this particular medikit are notorious for causing stomach ulcers in doses anything like what she’s going to need.

An hour later, the headache has faded almost to an afterthought, and her stomach is still intact, if alarmingly prone to twisting up in knots at the sight of Skywalker earnestly expounding his theories of Force-induced pain reduction.

“Better?”

She nods. “It didn’t even hurt you when they hit you with the yslamiri?”

“Not really – wait, is that why you were in the hospital?”

“Count your blessings. We skipped right over the gibbering psychic shock stage.”

“Is that what happened to you when the Emperor died?”

She nods, warily – it might be hypothetically important for the Jedi history rolls and all, but she’s really not sure how much of this she wants to discuss with Skywalker. On the other hand, she’s just as likely to get herself killed one of these days as he is, and the least she can do is forewarn him. “A couple days of unconsciousness. Intermittent amnesia, dissociation. I think at one point I tried to kill the bed because I thought it was you. It wasn’t much fun.”

“Do you think it was the Force-storm or the bond itself?”

Mara hadn’t actually considered that. “I’m not sure. You think this might be the way it is when one party isn’t a maniac Sith lord?”

Luke shrugs. “Can we know? Maybe it was just that I didn’t die. The bond would still exist in the Force, even if I’m personally covered by the ysalmiri.” He chews his lip, staring at the angle where the wall meets the floor, just to the right of her hip. “You know I really have no idea what I’m doing with this.”

“Oh trust me, I know.”

Skywalker ignores the jab. “Even if there is something on that datacard, and even if we figure out how to do it, what if it’s always going to be as awful as it was for you and Palpatine? What if it’s worse? The Emperor knew so much more than we do – what if he was actually protecting you? For all we know, it could be fatal.”

He’s starting to look overwhelmed. “Look, we don’t even have the datacard yet, all right?” Mara cuts in. “Maybe it’s corrupted so badly it can’t be decrypted. Maybe it’s in a language nobody understands. Maybe it’s a recipe for Gundark Soup.”

Luke doesn’t quite laugh, but his eyes close briefly as he smiles, and Mara has the sudden and intensely inconvenient revelation that she’s relievedhe’s not dead – but almost more relieved that he hadn’t somehow changed so much that he would just snap the bond and vanish back into his own life without so much as a warning. “Anyway, whatever it is, it’s not something you’re going to have to figure out alone, okay?”

“I’m glad.” It’s a typical earnest Skywalker response, but his eyes are strangely penetrating, and Mara looks down at her chrono so she doesn’t have to meet his gaze.

“I think we should get some sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”

He nods and curls up on the floor of the tiny room; it’s so small that there’s barely enough space for both of them to fit, but Skywalker seems to have the knack of sleeping anywhere – within ten minutes, he’s either passed out or doing a great job of imitating it.

How does he look even younger when he’s asleep? That shouldn’t even be possible. Mara stands up and stretches – she’ll fall asleep if she stays sitting – and looks briefly around their sanctuary. There’s an emergency showerhead with a button she carefully avoids, an eyewash station, a big poster of instructions for chemical burns, the first-aid kit.

She looks from the kit to Luke: it’s not worth waking him up for if he’s already asleep, but…she looks back, and carefully unfolds the tiny, crinkly aluminum emergency blanket. Very gently, careful not to touch him, she drapes it over his body, tucking it in around his shoulders and telling herself that if he wakes up stiff and screws up in a fight because of it, they could both end up dead.

Four hours later, just when she’s considering waking up Skywalker to have a nap herself, her comlink buzzes and he wakes up on his own, frowning from the blanket to Mara before he evidently decides that the comlink is more important. When he answers, it immediately starts clicking strangely at him, not in the language the droid usually uses to communicate.

“It’s blink code; it’s what he uses to comm when he doesn’t want to make noises out loud.” Mara nods, and settles down to listen to the droid’s clicking and clacking while Skywalker frowns in concentration. The slight furrow between his eyes makes him actually look his age, but the effect is lost when he abruptly bites his lip to suppress a laugh, looking incredulously at the comlink as if the droid could see his face.

The comlink is still beeping. Luke frowns at her, and Mara realizes she’s staring, fascinated by the way his laughter lights up his eyes. Shit. She raises one eyebrow, daring him to ask, and Luke holds her eyes for a long moment before he looks back down at the comlink, focusing on whatever it is the droid is trying to tell him.

Mara grabs the medkit, opening it up and poking through its contents for whatever they’re likely to need. She works mechanically, refusing to let herself focus on anything but the bottles and pouches and bandage tape in front of her.

The droid finally finishes, and Mara forces her mind back to the problem of getting out of here alive. “They’re apparently trying to break into his programming, and their guy is pretty good, so he had to shut down again to protect himself,” Skywalker translates, “But he says he’s in Containment Room A, which is right off the detention center, and they took all of my other things to the same room.”

The obvious question hangs in the silence, but Skywalker has apparently decided not to push it, and Mara seizes the chance gratefully.

“I know where that is.” The advantages of doing a little familiarization of her own when she’s arrived – not for the first time, Mara thanks the spy’s instinct of learning her territory that never really left her. The only problem is getting there. “I wonder…”

The massive maintenance area they’re currently in is probably dedicated to the climate control necessary to keeping the base habitable at Elomin temperatures. If whoever designed the place had any sense of organization, the cleaning droids should be parked somewhere relatively nearby…

It doesn’t take long to find them, and they’re everything Mara had hoped for – big, old, clunky droids with barely-encrypted instructional programming. It takes her all of ten minutes to plug in a routine that will take them past Containment, while Luke hollows out the insides of two of them by removing the hazardous materials bins. Luckily Skywalker is pretty small for a man; if she’s been trying to break out of here with Karrde, she would have needed another plan

Mara climbs into hers, wincing at the accumulation of dust on the inside. “See you on the other side, Skywalker.”

The next hour is loud and hot and humid, as the droids slowly buzz their way down the corridors and towards Containment, cleaning out three unoccupied rooms before they finally reach Room A. The sleepless night catches up with her, and she spends most of the time in a half-awake stupor, the noise making it impossible to fall properly asleep but also impossible to really be awake.

She knows they’ve arrived, because the buzz of the servos stop as the droid pauses, waiting for further instructions. Mara reaches up through its head and yanks the wire from the power supply out of its socket. The droid goes dark, and she climbs out the back to see Skywalker already brushing himself off.

The room is dim and low-ceilinged. Luke’s lightsaber, clothes, boots, and equipment are spread out over a low table in the back, with R2 shut down in an opposite corner, a restraining bolt stark against his plating. He heads for the droid while she grabs his clothes and gear – lightsaber, boots, cloak, and that must be the artifact: it’s an ancient datacard type, bulky and flimsy at the same time, and scratched from years of neglect. She clips it into a pocket on her belt and hands Luke his lightsaber.

The R2 unit rolls up cheerfully behind him, beeping away, and Luke nods quickly at her.

“I guess we’d better head for the hangar, unless you have a better idea for getting out of here.”

“Sounds just peachy.” It rankles to just leave behind her hopes of finding Dankin, but she can’t exactly go back and resume negotiations, and they’re hardly equipped for a long-term infiltration rescue mission right now. It still feels like a personal failure.

“Hang on.” Luke turns to the droid. “Artoo, can you plug back into that computer and tell me if you see anything about another prisoner, other than the two of us?”

She waits for an agonizing minute while the droid burbles to itself, but finally it bleeps out a sad negative.

Luke offers a sympathetic smile.

“Thanks,” says Mara, nodding to include the R2 unit as well. At least now she knows they’re not leaving him behind here when they could have saved him. And with that done, there’s nothing left but getting out themselves.

It doesn’t take long for Security to find them once they’re out in the actual hallway, and Luke and Mara take off running, followed by the little R2 unit, who can apparently hustle along at a pretty fair clip when he doesn’t have to slog through actual terrain. Her knee is twinging, but it doesn’t snap out of place again, and as long as she’s careful with it, it should be all right – and then there’s a flurry of blaster bolts coming at them, and Dankin, barreling towards them at a flat run just ahead of a pair of guards.

“Mara!”

She wheels around, yanking her lightsaber off her belt to deflect the blaster bolts spewing at her, grinning fiercely through the barrage. He hadn’t been in the prisoner records, because he hadn’t been a prisoner. “That’s him,” she yells at Luke over her shoulder.

She hadn’t realized how distracting the worry was until it’s gone, and she slides easily into the rhythm of the fight, pulling Dankin behind her and shoving her gun at him with her spare hand. He’s a horrible shot with it, but at least he manages to avoid hitting her or Luke, and she’s happy to keep deflecting bullets for him so he’ll be able to practice later.

“This way,” Dankin gasps, and grabs her hand, pulling her into a narrow, doorless hallway to the right. Luke and the droid crowd in behind them. It’s a decent choice of escape route, since the incredibly narrow passage makes it impossible for more than one person to attack them at any given time. How he knew it was there she has no idea (how long has he been on the run in here?) until suddenly the passage opens out into a wide, low room lined with pipes and hoses, and Dankin is disappearing behind a semicircle of armed guards.

He looks back at her with something like regret in his eyes, but even then it takes her a minute to process what’s going on as the elation of finally finding him safe and still fighting curdles into the reality of the guards closing in around them to block the tunnel behind them. Privately, Mara curses herself – with anyone else, she would have immediately considered the possibility that they trashed their own room to make a voluntary departure look coerced and throw everyone off, but it had never even occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to trust a member of Karrde’s crew.

She doesn’t have time to let the betrayal sink in. “You first.” The commander jerks his chin at Luke. “Hands above your head and come out here.”

Mara snaps back to the present, keeping one eye on Luke and the other on the guards – he’s taking forever to hobble over, feigning some kind of injury in his left leg. Buying time, but for what?

Dankin slides sideways out a door behind the line of guards, his face set in miserable lines, and Mara hates the sudden relief that she probably won’t wind up shooting at him, whatever she does. She glances around the cramped space – insulation panels, pipes, a few wires but not enough to really set off an electrical show.

Luke stumbles with a reasonably convincing grimace, and the captain waves two of the guards over to help him. One of their heads brushes against a swinging hose dangling from the ceiling…

…a swinging hose with the ubiquitous Fahx Gas and Vapors stamp on it. Mara makes a mental note to thank Lando for his insufferably endless business talk, reaches up with the Force, and rips the hose straight out of its mooring in the ceiling, flooding the whole room with a blue-gray mist.

“What the hell – ”

The guards start shooting, but Mara’s already three meters away, hauling herself up through the ceiling into the tiny pipe crawlspace and reaching out with the Force to pull Luke in the right direction. He clambers up after her, and they scramble between pipes and wires, knees and elbows banging on the pipes and catching on stray scraps of metal. Now her knee really is hurting, but she ignores it: there are things worse than a busted knee, and getting shot is one of them. Noise follows them – the guards are smart enough not to actually start shooting in the enclosed space, but they’re perfectly capable of setting up an ambush at the other end.

Ten meters down, Mara finds what she needs – another hose full of reasonably harmless vapor, at least enough to cover their tracks for a minute or two. She slashes through it, dragging Luke along with her, and unlatches the access hatch beneath her, risking a quick peek down before she jumps.

It’s an alcove of some kind, with various switches and screens that look like they go to something like door controls, and better yet, she can see the hangar through the open door. She barely has time to hit the floor and roll away before Skywalker is coming down on top of her.

They skid around the corner, and Mara tugs Luke’s attention towards her ship. The ramp is still up, with a startled tech looking up from his attempt to slice into the access codes, and she gives herself a triumphant smile at the futility of their efforts to crack Ghent’s encryptions.

“Get it started!” Luke’s lightsaber is out, flashing back and forth and sending a spray of deflected blaster bolts back at the guards. Mara heads for the ship as fast as she can – she has to hold her injured leg mostly stiff, so it comes out as more of an urgent wobble, but between that and the lightsaber, it’s enough to scare away the tech on the ramp, and she slaps at the access panel herself – thumbprint, retinal scan, codes. The door slides open, but when she looks across the hangar, there’s another handful of guards spreading out around Luke, and he can’t block them all.

“Skywalker!”

Green flares around him; he’s moving so fast his lightsaber looks like a thick streak of light. She can feel the way he’s fallen into the Force, and for a moment, she watches half-convinced he’s going to pull off the impossible. Then the lucky shot hits him in the thigh. He goes down on one knee, his saber snapping back up, but there’s no way he can run for the ramp now even if Mara could get the ship going on time.

“Dammit,” Mara growls. She reaches out with the Force and pulls, and Skywalker comes flying across the hangar towards her, and then crashes into her when her control isn’t good enough to stop him in time, knocking the wind out of her in the collision of his shoulder and her solar plexus. She wheezes, slapping the ramp control, and a last splatter of bullets hits the wall above their heads as the door slides shut.

The contact-pain of the bond throbs and flares behind her eyes, blurring her vision with static for a moment. When it clears, Luke’s face is two inches from her own. Blood is beading up along a scrape on his cheek, and for a moment all she can do is feel the push of his chest against hears as he keeps breathing, her mind somehow taking longer than usual to process the fact that he’s still alive. Mara sucks in air as the relief and the urgency hit her all at once, pushing him off of her and offering one hand to haul him up to his feet. 

“Can you walk?”

“Mostly.”

Mara nods, and winces as the sound of a portable blaster canon starts thudding against the door. Her ship.

There’s no way Skywalker can make it down to the maintenance bay to undo the Smugglers’ lock. “Give me one minute; then start the engine,” she says, pushing Luke in the direction of the cockpit, “and put the damn shields up.”

She’s barely settled the drive connector back into its socket when Luke starts the ship cold, tearing out of the hangar with a whine of protest from the engines and immediately veering off into a twist that swoops uncomfortably in Mara’s stomach. She scrambles up into the cockpit just in time to see a spray of blaster cannon-fire spit out of the bay into the space they just left. And then they’re out, scraping up and over the base in a sickening loop before veering off through the atmosphere.

Mara slides into the copilot’s seat as Luke slumps into his own. For a moment, they stare out into the starlines together.

“Stay there. I’ll get you some bacta patches.” She nods at his leg, and Luke looks down.

“It’s not very deep; it just surprised me.” But he stays put anyway, while she awkwardly favors her twisted knee all the way down the hall and back with a big pile of bacta for him and a brace for herself. It gives her enough time to get a handle on the confusion and betrayal, tamp them down enough that she can talk about other things.

She’s only half-surprised that she’s not crawling out of her skin with the desire to take back the controls. Skywalker really is impressively good as a pilot. “Just out of curiosity, what was your plan if I hadn’t discovered the gas hose?”

“That was the plan.”

“You couldn’t have told me that to begin with?” Mara’s Force communication isn’t as good as Luke’s, but even a physical nudge to look in the right direction –

“Oh, not the pipe. Just to buy you time. I knew you’d come up with something,” Luke says casually, using his teeth to rip open a tube of bacta gel and squirt it over the charred wound.

Mara doesn’t know whether to be flattered or incredulous, but she doesn’t have a lot of luxury to think about it: beside Skywalker, the R2 unit is bleeping away, nudging into Skywalker’s hip urgently.

“What, Artoo?”

Mara reaches over to open a socket for him. He scoots over to plug in, and as text starts appearing on the screen, Mara feels her stomach slowly twist itself together. Most of the information is familiar – shipping schedules, manifests, information that Dankin obviously brought with him. But some of it isn’t theirs: schedules for unfamiliar ships, records of bribes and tips to customs officials…

“Dankin was there to help plant something on Karrde,” she says, finally. “On one of our shipments through the system. Look at this; it’s all Imperial weapons. We’d thought he was trading arms to the Empire, but we didn’t really have any proof…”

“So he was going to bring the New Republic down on you and blow up the Smugglers’ Alliance from the inside. Clever.” Luke’s mouth flattens.

“He’d blow his cover by taking us down, and then officially switch sides.” It’s a strange feeling to be so angry she’s cycled all the way back around to calmness again. “You were probably his honeymoon gift to the Empire.” So he’d come to her ranting about Skywalker to feel her out for any signs of dissatisfaction with the New Republic, to see if she might be interested in coming with him, and when she hadn’t, he’d moved on to Plan B.

“I’m so flattered. Why would Dankin want to defect like that though?” Luke looks at her face, and abortively reaches for her shoulder before remembering that an instant migraine is unlikely to improve her mood.

“I have no idea.” Had he actually been kidnapped and then forced to lead them into the ring of guards to save his own life? Or had he gone willingly after all? Karrde might be able to figure it out, given enough time, but the uncertainty is almost worse than any possible explanation she could imagine.

“Mara, I’m sorry; I know – ”

“We’re smugglers, Skywalker. Loyalty is for sale. What we really need to worry about,” she talks over him, before he can say something even more uncomfortably Skywalker, “is getting this back to Coruscant before Cravvach’s group gets there.”

Luke’s mouth says he’s not going to let it go, but the promise of heading off an additional political crisis for his sister at least gets him off her back for the immediate moment.

Mara sends off a brief comm message to Karrde, and Luke winds up debating something with Leia for almost an hour, but that barely cuts into their hyperspace time. With nothing else to do, Luke makes himself busy setting up an adaptor for the ancient datacard supposedly bearing their ticket out of the soulbond.

It’s actually a perfect problem to solve, comfortingly mechanical and completely devoid of thorny questions about loyalty and betrayal, but complicated and fiddly enough to be engrossing. The datacard is so old that they have to patch it through a few different readers just to get the computer to understand it: Mara’s tiny communications room is quickly covered with a spiderwebbing of wires with Luke crouched in the middle, an electrosplicer held delicately in his mouth and frowning down at his hybrid creation.

Mara resists the urge to smooth down his hair, which is sticking up in all directions in a mild haze of static electricity. “So?”

Luke starts to say something, remembers he has a thumb-sized metal tube in his mouth, and takes it out before he tries again. “It should work. Can you hit the blue button on that thing?” He jerks his chin towards a gray box spilling its guts out through an open access panel. Mara delicately tiptoes over to the box and hits it – she’s rewarded with a row of blinking lights.

“Is that good?”

“That’s perfect. Here – ” Luke uncrouches and pulls out the actual datacard, sliding it into one of the semi-dissasembled readers.

“So?” Mara picks her way across the floor to look over his shoulder. She feels his shock before she can process the actual words, a burst of cold low in her stomach. “What is it?”

Luke turns the display towards her. “It’s a method of breaking soulbonds, all right,” he says grimly, “for Sith adepts.”

Mara stares at the text: for once, it’s an ancient Jedi artifact written in the Basic alphabet, but the letters refuse to cohere into words. “Please tell me you’re not even thinking of trying that.”

He doesn’t answer, staring at the display and chewing his lip, so she reaches out and turns off the monitor, telling herself that she’s irritated and not afraid. “Stop being an idiot, Skywalker. No.”

He frowns at her. “I wasn’t going to say we should try it. It’s just disappointing.”

“It’s a big galaxy. Something else might turn up, and if it doesn’t…”

“You’ll live with this for the rest of your life?”

“There are worse things,” she says, and to her surprise, she means it. She shoves down the memories, staring fixedly at the tangle of motherboards in front of her and refusing to acknowledge the dull ache at the thought of Skywalker turning to the Dark Side, an ache that has absolutely nothing to do with galactic political consequences or the balance of the Force.

Luke reaches out for her hand, then evidently remembers the bond and thinks better of it, and pulls his hand back. Mara grabs it anyway, bracing herself for the pain, and squeezes.

Mara ends up staying on Coruscant for a week to deal with all the fallout – the only thing stopping the New Republic bureaucracy from throwing the Smugglers’ Alliance under the bus for the crimes of a few members is the fortuitous fact that Mara was the one to finally rat them out.

The days pass in an endless series of hearings. From a close examination of everything R2 pulled out, they find scattered facts that might someday add up to a reason why Dankin decided to defect, and she has no doubt that Karrde will be following up on all of them, but for the moment, it’s still a mystery. At least Ghent is there too, imported to testify about his special encryption protocols, and he makes for sympathetic if absent-minded company, at least one other person who understands that Dankin wasn’t just a random colleague who decided to switch jobs mid-career.

“I just – Karrde is so good to everyone, even when, I know I’m not the most…I’m not all competent like you are, but he just…” Ghent trails off miserably, his shoulders hunching forward in confusion.

Mara puts her arm around his shoulders and takes him out to a comfortingly disreputable bar, and listens patiently to his rambling tipsy explanation of the hopeless crush he has on some junior member of the Wild Karrde’s navigational staff whose name she doesn’t even recognize. To her surprise, she feels better afterwards, and not just because Ghent is entertaining when he’s being woeful about his hangover.

She’d told Skywalker their loyalty was for sale. She’d lied.

When it’s over, Ghent dives back into his beloved computers with palpable relief, and Mara’s left to pack up and take off. She’s heading home, but somehow it feels more like leaving again, and it isn’t until she looks up and realizes she’s spent 10 minutes staring blankly at her (Skywalker’s) lightsaber that she realizes why.

Her first instinct is to shove the lightsaber down into the bottom of her travel pack and ignore it, but somehow she ends up knocking on Skywalker’s door instead. The old datacard is still sitting on his desk, surrounded by flimsy printouts. He notices her looking at it and shrugs. “It’s actually very interesting, from an academic point of view. Tionne can’t wait to get her hands on it.”

Mara’s eyebrows quirk. “Well, I’m glad somebody’s happy.” There’s nothing more for her to do here – nothing but this useless deadweight of resistance that won’t let her leave. The dragging regret is a familiar feeling from a hundred other decisions that she made in the face of a second thought or three and stubbornly followed through against the increasing friction of realizing she chose wrong. But when she looks at the datapad, none of the regret feels attached to it: she isn’t having any misgivings about not looking for answers in the Dark Side.

She looks at Luke, and half-wishes the resistance was actually a physical pull, some kind of human-sized tractor beam: she’d look at him, he’d look back, and they’d fall into that easy cooperation where they barely need to talk…

Abruptly, she realizes what it is she was regretting. Mara freezes for a moment, and then decides to hell with it. She pushes Luke back into his own desk, batting his hands out of the way, and kisses him. Pain explodes somewhere in the middle of her brain; her fingers tingle with pins and needles, and then Luke’s fingers are in her hair, pulling them closer together.

The hurt is so bright she can’t stand it for long, even for Luke, and when she lets him go with a choked noise of pain, she steps backward so they’re not touching, blinking the dizziness out of her mind.

“Mara – "

“When they got you with the ysalmiri, I thought you were dead, but then I thought you’d just broken the bond by yourself, and that was even worse. I’m glad you’re not – I’m glad you’re okay.” If Skywalker was harboring any illusions about her sanity, he can let go of them now, but somehow he isn’t looking at her like the insane rambling idiot she sounds like to her own ears. He looks amazed, his fingers over his mouth like he can’t quite believe she kissed him.

Mara takes a deep breath. “You know, I’d really like to touch you without wishing my head would pop off to end the pain.” It’s the closest she can actually come to saying what she means; somehow her mouth won’t make the required words, so she waits hoping that Luke’s gift for hearing the best in people will kick in.

He blinks, and she sees the exact second when he realizes what she’s asking him. His smile is almost overwhelmingly happy, like a light too bright to look at directly. “Yes,” he says through the grin. “I’d like that, too.”

Mara can’t just drop her job for the sake of a soulbond, and for that matter, neither can Luke. Extracting herself from something as complicated as Karrde’s organization and the still-nascent Smugglers’ Alliance takes several weeks of wrapping-up, reshuffling, and fielding endless good-natured jibes from the bridge crew.

For the first week or two, she finds herself constantly watching her own emotions for any signs of second thoughts: without Luke actually there, somehow it’s so much easier to be afraid that she made the wrong decision again. But the regret never materializes, and after the third time she catches herself looking forward to the end of her duty shift so she can call him, she almost forgets to worry.

Karrde isn’t terribly happy, but he’s almost annoyingly unsurprised, as if he’d been expecting this all along and just needed to know when it was happening. He is very gracious about helping her wrap everything up though, so she can’t even be properly irritated at the knowing grin when she explains everything from the beginning.

She swaps tidbits of soulbond research with Skywalker, and fields an inevitably uncomfortable call from his sister with reasonably good grace (it helps that she has no intentions whatsoever of hurting him and fully intends to join the offensive against anyone else who tries). And then, with at least the majority of the ends wrapped up, she’s heading back to Yavin IV and trying not to panic.

Luke likes his hot chocolate sweet enough to destroy all of Mara’s teeth on the spot.

“It doesn’t have any specific instructions?” Luke leans forward, his elbow drifting dangerously close to his mug. Mara reaches over to move it out of the way. “Oh – thank you.” His eyes crinkle up with a quick, genuine smile, and Mara bites her lip so she doesn’t do anything stupid.

“No, Master Luke.” Threepio glances from him to her. If Mara’s ever met a nosier protocol droid, she can’t recall it. “The only mention of undoing a suppression is here, in Line 612, where the text merely specifies that both parties must be willing participants. Of course, “willing” might have carried a specifically-defined meaning at the time, or perhaps – ”

“Okay,” Mara cuts him off. “We get it.” She tries to keep the smirk off her face when she turns to Luke. “Does that mean we’re relying on your infallible powers of Force-bonding again?”

“Once. Once!” Luke grins through his put-upon sigh.

“You got us into this in the first place, Skywalker. You think you can help get us back into it?

“Well, here’s hoping.” Something in the back of Mara’s mind notes that Luke’s eyes are really attractive when he’s amused at himself. He must have caught her staring, but this time she doesn’t even have to pretend. “I was meditating on the original bond and then on the suppression and I took down some thoughts; I think the best way would be…”

Barring any actual instructions, Luke’s plan is to just work backwards through everything they’d done when they suppressed the bond in the first place, undoing it. The pain of the touch is expected by now, a bruise that she’s been re-bruising for long enough that it’s desensitized. Luke’s thumb strokes over the lifeline on her palm, and the predictable headache flare barely registers against the smooth, warm pressure.

There’s no reason to be nervous about this – she’s even already done it, and both of them lived to tell the tale.

“It’s different, this time,” Luke murmurs. “Admitting that you want it.”

“You’re hearing my thoughts already?”

He shakes his head. “Your shoulders get tense when you’re nervous.”

She flips her hands over so they’re palm to palm and she can squeeze his fingers. “C’mon, Skywalker. Let’s do this.” Tentatively, Mara closes her eyes follows the thread of the Force from her constant, throbbing headache back to the pinched-off bond.

Loosening, she thinks, and edges toward it, expecting it to be tender and painful and pleasantly surprised when it’s only a little sore. You can do this, Mara. She swallows. Her fingers tighten around Luke’s palms, and he squeezes back.

It ought to be simple, but apparently suppressing the bond in the first place was easier than reopening it. Her mind keeps resisting, refusing to go where she orders it, edging off into tangential worries about whether or not they’re doing it wrong and both going to end up in psychic shock and whether or not Aves and Chin would be able to pick up with the Smugglers’ Alliance if she suddenly went into a coma, and – bond. Right. The resistance only grows with every tiny bit of progress, and every time she lets herself get frustrated her mind seizes on the frustration as something to concentrate on instead.

It’s maddening. She can feel Luke waiting for her on the other side, – because of course Luke is perfectly calm about the whole process. She bites back the irritation and tries to focus on the bond, not the man on the other end.  

And then the last remnants of the block disappear all at once, and Luke is right there: bright pressure on the edge of overwhelming, the terrifying depth of another human being. Breath catches in her chest and she jerks backward with reflexive shock, riding the swell of panic until it subsides. Whatever Luke did before, to help separate their minds, it’s still obviously there because she’s not having any problems identifying herself, but the rush is overwhelming.

Mara sucks in a deep, shaking breath. “Luke.”

They both freeze, on the edge of something but she doesn’t know what. The bond is bright enough to be painful, like a light that makes her eyes water to look at it. She startles when Luke moves, drawing his hand up to slide his fingers along her cheek without looking away from her eyes. Without the pain, it’s impossibly gentle, the kind of touch she never thought she could want, much less have. 

“Mara.”

The touch is an anchor against the overwhelming intensity of the bond. Mara takes a slow breath, minutely aware of every tiny shift in her chest and shoulders. Tentatively, she leans forward to kiss him.

Luke’s soft noise of surprise is muffled between their lips as he relaxes into it. Joy sparkles through the bond – she feels him smile into her mouth before he’s tugging away the hand still holding hers, sliding it up to cup the back of her arm and pull her closer. Mara half-leans, half-falls into him, uncoordinated and almost dizzy, throwing out one arm just in time to stop him from crashing backwards onto the hard floor.

“Mara, Mara – ” She kisses him again to make him stop talking, because he’s really a damn good kisser when all physical contact isn’t immediately punished with a migraine, but it’s not enough. She wants to push her hands underneath all the layers of cloth over his chest, feel the curve of his shoulders and the heat of his skin underneath.

At the back of her head, Luke’s fingers tense and curl, and she wrenches herself away, standing up and pulling him up with her, almost falling over him when she starts tugging at his clothes before he’s properly standing up.

They can’t stop distracting each other with frantic kisses: Mara finally gets all the layers off Luke’s chest only to get completely derailed when he accidentally discovers that one spot on her collarbone that makes her shiver when he bites it and she can feel her own arousal reverberating between them.

Clothes and boots get lost on the way – Mara’s utility belt makes a strange crunching noise when she tosses it off to one side but she just can’t be terribly concerned when Luke picks her up, her legs around his waist, to carry her over to his bed because neither of them can let go of the other. But halfway there, she figures out that he really likes having his hair pulled. It sends wonderful tingles up and down their spines, and when she twists harder he makes a helpless noise, his lips falling open against her neck and her back colliding with the wall as he staggers sideways.

Mara’s feet hit the ground so she doesn’t fall, and his thigh lands at the perfect angle for her to grind down on – fuck, that’s good, even through his pants and her underwear. Luke’s weight pins her to the wall; he’s obviously hard under his pants. It ought to feel frightening or at least annoying to have him all over her like this, like this, but it’s not. It’s not even enough. The need for it is terrifying, even under the relentless drive to push her hips back up into him for more

The bond is hazy and insistent with want, but Luke’s end is bleeding into overwhelmed; he looks dazed, and his heartbeat flutters under her palm. Pushing him back and away from her is almost painful, but the skittery panic of his overstimulation is worse. “Luke, hey.” She doesn’t know if touching him will help or hurt, but she can’t not, so she slides her hand up to cup his cheek. “You OK?”

“It’s so much.” His fingers play around her hair almost unconsciously, skimming over her shoulder and collarbones, trailing down her arms.

“I think you might be more sensitive to it,” Mara says, only dimly aware of what words she’s actually saying. She wants him with a punishing intensity, but the thought of hurting him is almost impossible to even understand, so she talks to put words between them, to push the bond back into some kind of controllable limit. “Remember how you could talk to me even when I couldn’t talk back?”

“I remember.” His eyes are clearer, and pulse of too much, too much, too much is fading. He pushes a stray hair back behind her ear.

Remember how I was so pissed about it? She thinks at him, and Luke smiles a little shakily. “Now who’s showing off?”

Mara rolls her eyes, but before she can get back at him for that, a sharp edge creeps in around the edges of his smile, and it’s so unexpectedly beautiful that she almost doesn’t notice his hand move until he’s pushing her underwear out of the way and sliding two fingers between her legs.

Her head drops back against the wall but she barely feels the bump, rocking her hips up into the perfect, blunt pressure and biting into her own lip when he presses two of his fingers up and into her, his thumb circling over her clit.

“Yeah, yeah, keep doing – oh – ” he finds exactly the perfect angle, and she breaks off into a gasp, reaching up to leave bruising, biting kisses down his neck.

She’s flooding the bond with pleasure, and she worries momentarily that she’s overwhelming him again, but Luke shakes his head against. “You’re not, just let me – I want to feel you,” he says all in a rush, and she shakes against him, grabbing blindly for his free hand with hers and squeezing until her fingers ache. The bond dissolves into pleasure when she comes, panting open-mouthed against his neck through the intensity of it.

“Oh wow,” Luke whispers, but as soon as she can actually support her own weight and walk in a straight line, Mara is pushing him backwards towards the bed, his arousal making her almost more desperate than her own. She miscalculates, and he falls back onto the mattress underneath her in a tangle of thighs and knees and hands, but at least it gives her the chance to finally get his damn pants off him.

“Here, hang on.” Luke sits up momentarily to pull them all the way off, but almost before he’s done, she’s pulling him back on top of her, not even bothering to hide her moan when he pushes into her almost immediately.

“Fuck.”

Luke’s breath is hot against her neck, his teeth catching the skin just at the top of her shoulder. She can feel the muscles at the small of his back trembling.

“Skywalker,” and Mara jerks her hips up into him meaningfully because there is a place for slow and gentle, dammit, but this is not it. Luke takes the hint and moves, finally, and Mara trembles in the mental wave of yes, yes, yes - she's not even sure if it's his or hers before she realizes that it's both. It’s almost too much, feeling everything from two bodies at once and half of it so disconcertingly unfamiliar, but if it’s too much, then it’s just the perfect edge of it. She wraps one leg around his waist, pulling him closer, and she's rewarded with a low moan and a sharp jerk of his hips. She loses herself in it. 

“Ah – ” Luke’s orgasm hits her through the bond so intensely it’s almost painful: she twists their fingers together, breathing through it with her face pressed into his shoulder. He falls forward onto her, and she slides one hand shakily over his shoulderblades, her fingers tracing back and forth over the curve of the bone under his skin.

“Oh, sorry,” Luke says after a moment, and he tries to push himself up, but Mara holds on.

They stay like that until they’re both cold and a little bit gross with drying sweat, and even then they end up in the shower together with a terminal case of inability to untangle. Living on a jungle planet means everyone can take as many real water showers as they like, for as long as they like, and they spend an absurdly luxurious amount of time making out under the hot water and floating in the feeling of the bond between them.

“We’re going to have to figure out how to turn that down a little,” Mara says reluctantly as she towels off her hair. “What happens if one of us is sleeping and the other one needs to be awake?”

Luke shrugs. “Forced cosleeping wasn’t a plot point in any of those awful operatic holodramas, so I’m sure it can’t be that insurmountable of a problem,” he deadpans, and he even manages to keep a straight face until he makes the mistake of looking at her at the end of the sentence. Mara's trademark 'I can't believe you survived to adulthood' face is robbed of all its intimidation power by the way she can't resist backing him up against the wall to kiss him again, but all in all, that's a pretty fair tradeoff.

On top of the standard blankets that everyone in the Academy seems to have been issued, Luke has found an actual duvet somewhere, comfortingly heavy and smelling of real fabric, not the weird non-smell of synth material. It’s luxurious against her bare skin, and she catches the vague echo of Luke’s amusement through the bond.

“And they say the Jedi are ascetics.” She sprawls out comfortably against his chest.

“They also say we take vows of celibacy.”

Mara laughs, already half-asleep, and kisses the warm skin of his neck. She falls asleep with her head on his shoulder and Luke’s fingers tangled through her damp hair.