Chapter Text
The path to the house felt longer than it was.
Mara kept her breathing deliberately steady, controlled – a rhythm she'd used on a thousand missions, one that kept panic at bay and fingers steady on triggers.
Except this time her fingers weren't on triggers. This time she was walking unarmed toward a caged Sith Lord who used to be a Jedi, who used to be Luke Skywalker, who fifteen years ago had –
The pain lanced through her ribs without warning, sharp and vicious. It started low in her abdomen, a deep electric pain that traveled outward like shrapnel. She staggered, pressed a gloved hand against the nearest tree trunk, breath coming shallow.
The coomb spores were spreading faster now. In the Force-dead hush of Myrkr the sickness had teeth. No web of energy to draw upon, no warmth rising through her limbs to burn the fever out. Just meat and will.
She counted to sixty, breathing through the fire in her bones. The humid air pressed against her skin, thick with the scent of olbio bark and decomposing undergrowth. Somewhere in the canopy above, a vornskr howled: that distinctive, eerie keen that marked them as Force-hunters. But there was nothing for it to sense here, not in this bubble of dead space. Just her heartbeat, too loud in her ears, and the soft crunch of her boots on the forest path.
When the worst of the pain subsided, she kept walking.
Inside the perimeter the air smelled faintly of ozone and damp soil. The gardens startled her. Rows of meticulous order, gravel paths lined with pale stones, vegetables cultivated in beds cut with mathematical precision. A single burst of color – an imported Naboo flower, stubbornly thriving in alien soil – caught at the corner of her vision. Someone had been tending it carefully, almost reverently.
He gardens, she thought, and the idea twisted strangely in her chest. The galaxy’s most dangerous man reduced to pruning leaves. Then again, what else was there to do when you’d been amputated from eternity?
Turrets tracked her approach from the perimeter wall. Automated, but someone at Republic Intelligence would be watching the feeds. Recording this.
She wondered if they'd assigned a pool on how long she'd last inside.
The house itself was squat and utilitarian, stripped down to essentials. Prefab duraplast walls, narrow windows with impact-resistant transparisteel, a door that had probably been battered by fists and desperation in those early years.
Another wave of pain, this one rolling through her chest and stealing her breath.
She stumbled, caught herself against a tree that had been planted too close to the path. It was a young thing, maybe ten years old.
She had a sudden, absurd mental image of Luke Skywalker – fallen Sith Lord, Imperial war criminal, prisoner – carefully digging a hole and patting soil around fragile roots.
The bark was rough under her palm. Real. Solid. Not like the Force, which had been her constant companion since she'd first learned to touch it, and which now sat silent in her chest like a void.
The ysalamiri blanketed the entire compound. She'd felt their influence descend the moment she'd crossed the perimeter – that sudden severing, as if someone had cut the strings holding her together.
She'd forgotten how cold it was, being alone in your own head.
She reached the door and hesitated. It was ridiculous: after everything, the notion of knocking on a door to see him again. She flexed her fingers once, twice, then rapped her knuckles against the metal.
For a long moment, nothing. Then footsteps, and the door swung open.
Luke stood in the doorway, and his eyes widened in genuine surprise.
He looked – older. Weathered. His hair had grown longer, pulled back in a tail that did nothing to hide the silver threading through it. He was still lean, but there was a wiriness to him now that spoke of someone who'd learned to do a lot with very little. He wore simple clothes, a tunic that had been mended more than once, pants that were clean but faded.
His eyes were blue. Pure, clear, summer-sky blue; the color of Tatooine skies he'd never see again.
But of course they were. The ysalamiri saw to that.
The sight of him unarmored, almost domestic, was somehow worse than the memory of armor and red blade.
“Mara,” he said, surprised, as if the word itself were an artifact rediscovered. His face cycled through shock, disbelief, something painfully close to hope – all of it naked and unguarded in a way that made her chest tighten. His voice had roughened with disuse. "I didn't expect company. Or am I hallucinating again?"
"Depends," she answered, steadying herself against the doorframe. "If I'm a hallucination, you're talking to me out loud, and that's not a great sign."
He smiled faintly, the expression settling into something more controlled, more careful. "It's been a long while since I worried about great signs.”
He stepped aside with a theatrical flourish, gesturing her into the house. "Please, make yourself at home. Don't mind the lack of amenities – when they stripped out the tech to keep me from hacking into the security systems, they were annoyingly thorough."
The interior matched the exterior. Sparse. Functional. A small kitchen area, a table with two chairs that didn't match, a narrow bed in the corner. Actual physical books everywhere – stacked on shelves he'd clearly built himself, piled on the floor, lying open on the table.
"Sit," Luke said, already moving toward the kitchen. "I'll make tea. Or – well, I only have one mug, so I'll make tea and you can have the mug and I'll use a bowl and pretend to be a civilized person hosting unexpected guests."
"You don't have to –"
"Mara. Sit."
There was no force behind the command, but she sat anyway. The pain was building again in her chest, radiating outward, and she didn't trust her legs.
Luke moved through the small kitchen with practiced efficiency, filling a kettle, setting it on a heating element that had seen better days. He kept glancing at her, quick looks that he probably thought were subtle.
The absurd normalcy of the moment pressed against her composure. Outside, the turrets hummed softly, and beyond them the jungle breathed.
"So," he said, his tone deliberately light. "Fifteen years of ominous silence, and now the infamous Mara Jade shows up at my door. Should I be flattered? Terrified? Both?"
"Depends on your perspective."
She watched him move, the calm precision of his hands, and wondered how much of that calm was discipline and how much was the hollow left by fifteen years of silence.
"My perspective is that I'm a man who's been alone for a very long time, and visitors tend to herald bad news." He found two containers of tea leaves, considered them both, selected one. "How bad is it?"
"How bad is what?"
"Whatever brought you here." He turned to face her fully, leaning against the counter. "You wouldn't come just to check on me. You'd have sent someone else – Leia, maybe, except Leia's never forgiven me. Han, except Han would probably shoot me on principle. So it's bad enough that you need something from me, and it's bad enough that I'm apparently the only option left."
Mara said nothing. Let him talk. Let him spin out his theories. He'd always been good at reading people, and all these years of solitude had clearly honed that particular edge.
"The Vong," Luke said softly. "It's the Vong, isn't it?"
Her silence was answer enough.
He exhaled slowly, turning back to the kettle as it began to whistle. "I've been following the war as best I can. They give me newsfeeds – heavily edited, I'm sure, but I can read between the lines." He poured water into a mug, into a bowl, set them both on the table. "The Republic is losing."
Mara's eyes lingered on the bowl for a moment – rough-hewn wood. There was something quietly absurd about it, this domestic artifact in the cell of a man who'd once commanded star fleets.
Luke caught her looking. "It's not so bad," he said lightly, wrapping his fingers around the bowl. "Yoda once served me gourmet Dagobah swamp stew in a similar bowl, you know. This is an improvement – no sentient moss growing on the rim."
She didn't say: They gave you unbreakable wooden bowls to keep you from breaking ceramic ones and slitting your own wrists.
Instead she picked up the mug he'd offered, felt its solid weight. Duraplast, not ceramic. Everything here designed to be suicide-proof.
"We're not losing," she said finally, the denial thin even as it left her lips.
Luke raised an eyebrow. Sat down across from her, cradling his bowl between his palms. "Mara. Please. I spent years in war councils. I know what 'strategic withdrawal' means. I know what 'acceptable losses' means. The Vong are cutting through you like a vibroblade through silk, and you have nothing – no one who understands how to fight something that alien, something that doesn't exist in the Force."
"And you do?"
"I've spent fifteen years cut off from the Force." His smile was sharp, edged. "I'd say that makes me uniquely qualified."
The pain hit again, harder this time, and Mara couldn't quite suppress the gasp. The mug slipped from her fingers, tea sloshing across the table.
Luke was moving before she could think, crouching beside her chair, hands hovering uncertainly near her shoulders. "Mara – what –"
"Coomb spores," she gritted out. "Vong bioweapon. Degenerative disease. It's – it's fine, I've been managing – "
"By drawing on the Force to hold it back." His voice had gone flat, toneless. "And you just walked into a Force-null zone."
"I said I've been managing."
"That's not managing,” he snapped. “That's dying slowly. I know it when I see it."
He stood abruptly, the chair scraping dissonantly against the floor. Paced to the window, then back to the kitchen counter, movements sharp and restless. The small room made his agitation more pronounced – three steps one direction, pivot, three steps back.
"There’s no one who can help you out there. Just medics throwing painkillers at something they don’t understand. No one who even knows the theory behind Force healing.”
He stopped mid-step, shoulders rigid. "Because of me. Because I – " He cut himself off, jaw tight.
Mara thought, for the first time in a very long time, of those few short months between Thrawn's defeat and Luke's fall. The breathless, fragile hope of it – Luke talking about finding other Force-sensitives, rebuilding what had been lost, creating something new from the remnants of the old Order. She'd watched him sketch plans late into the night, seen the light in his eyes when he talked about teaching, about passing on what he'd learned.
It had been real. It had been possible.
Briefly.
And then Palpatine had returned, and Luke had gone to face him, and all that fragile hope had burned to ash.
"Because you fell," Mara finished for him. "Because they locked you up. Because the galaxy decided a Sith Lord in a cage was better than a Jedi trying to rebuild."
Luke returned to the table, sank back into his chair with deliberate control. His hands wrapped around the wooden bowl again, steadying. "They weren't wrong."
"Maybe, maybe not. But I'm not going to relitigate that." She straightened in the chair, forced herself to meet his eyes. "You think I want to be here, Farmboy? You think this is my first choice? But the Republic is bleeding out, and the Vong are coming, and someone had the bright idea that maybe the feral Sith in the cage might have some useful insights."
Luke was very still. "Reminds me of a holo I saw once," he said slowly. "Old pre-Republic thing. Law enforcement agent consults an incarcerated serial killer about another serial killer. Plays into his ego, his expertise. Gets useful intelligence." His smile was thin, sharp. "Uses the monster to catch the monster."
"Didn't take you for a connoisseur of classic holofilm," Mara said, taking a sip of her tea. The words came out flatter than she intended, but she was too tired to inject more life into them.
"Fifteen years is a lot of time to fill." He raised his bowl in a mock toast. "I've watched everything in the Republic archives. Twice. Some things three times. That one stuck with me for obvious reasons."
"Obvious reasons," she echoed back at him, dry and pointed.
It was easier to hide behind sarcasm than to acknowledge the creeping sense of familiarity settling over the conversation. Like they were colleagues trading gossip over caf, not a dying spy consulting a caged Sith Lord.
"Well." Luke's smile widened, though it didn't reach his eyes. "I am the monster in the basement. Seemed relevant to my interests."
"Your words, not mine." But she felt a flicker of irritation – at him for making her almost smile, at herself for falling into the rhythm of their old banter so easily.
Fifteen years, a war, his fall, and somehow this still felt natural. She resented that more than she wanted to admit.
"But accurate." He took a slow sip, eyes never leaving hers. "So what do they want? Tactical advice? Strategic planning? Or do they want me to tell them how to think like the Vong – outside the Force, outside normal galactic morality, driven by pain and conquest and religious fervor?"
Like a Sith Lord who's been Forceblind for a decade and a half, he didn't say. Like the monster in the basement.
"All of the above,” she replied.
"And what do you want, Mara?"
The question hung in the air between them, weighted with years of silence and guilt and choices neither of them could take back.
"I want you to help," she said finally, surprising herself with her own honesty. "I want you to be useful. And then I want – “
Another wave of pain. This one brought spots to her vision, made the room tilt sideways. She heard Luke swear, felt hands on her shoulders – strong, steady, warm – guiding her forward until her head was between her knees.
"Breathe," he said, and his voice had dropped into something older – that particular cadence he'd used when teaching in those brief halcyon months before Byss. Patient, grounding, stripped of all the language about the Force but still carrying the same steady certainty. "Slow breaths. In for four, hold for four, out for four."
He slipped into it more easily than she'd anticipated, like muscle memory divorced from context.
She followed his count. The spots gradually receded.
When she lifted her head, Luke was watching her with an expression she couldn't quite name. Something fierce and furious and protective, the kind of look he used to get when someone threatened his friends.
Then, gently, after a beat: "They're coming here, aren't they? The Vong." His voice was soft, almost conversational. "And you're supposed to assess if the feral Sith in the basement can be useful, can be trusted enough to be let out before they get here. Or if a mercy killing is the better choice."
Mara froze. Her hand, which had been pressed against her ribs, stilled.
She met his gaze, searching for mockery or anger, but found only calm understanding. The kind of understanding that came from fifteen years of reading everything the Republic would give him, piecing together intelligence from heavily redacted newsfeeds, watching the patterns.
"That's – "
"Accurate?" He walked the few steps back to his chair, picked up his bowl of tea. "I'm not stupid, Mara. They wouldn't send you alone unless this was more than a consultation. They'd send a handler, a military escort, someone to make sure the monster stays caged." He paused, took a slow sip. "But you came alone. Which means either you're here to recruit me, or you're here to decide if I'm too dangerous to let live when the Vong arrive."
She said nothing. Her silence was answer enough.
Luke's expression didn't change, but something flickered in his eyes – not hurt, exactly. Something colder. More resigned. "How long?"
"Before they reach Myrkyr?" Mara calculated quickly. "Three weeks. Maybe four, if the Republic can hold the Corellian Trade Spine. Which we can't."
"And the assessment?" His lips quirked slightly. “Am I passing?”
"It's mine to make." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "If I think you're salvageable, they'll consider extraction. If not – " She cut herself off.
"If not, you put a blaster bolt through my head and call it a strategic necessity." He said it so casually, like they were discussing the weather. "Cleaner than letting the Vong take me. They'd probably enjoy having a Force-user to vivisect."
"Luke – “
"It's a reasonable plan," he interrupted, and his tone was still gentle, still calm. "I'd have made the same call, once. You don't leave weapons lying around for your enemies to claim. And that's what I am now, isn't it? A weapon." He set down his bowl with careful precision. "The question is whether I'm your weapon or theirs."
Mara opened her mouth to respond, but the pain lanced through her again – harder this time, a white-hot spike that stole her breath. She doubled over, gasping.
Luke was beside her again in an instant, hands hovering near her shoulders but not quite touching. "How long do you have?"
"Six months." The words came out between gritted teeth. "Maybe seven. Hard to say when you're – " Another wave. She clutched at the table edge. " – dying slowly."
His voice went very quiet. Very cold. "You're running out of time, too."
She forced herself upright, met his eyes. "We're all running out of time."
"No." Luke stepped back, and something in his expression had shifted. The resignation was gone, burned away by something sharper. Hungrier. "You are. The Republic is. But me?" He gestured at the walls, the garden beyond. "I've already been dead for fifteen years. The Vong can't take anything from me that hasn't already been taken."
"That's not – "
"True?" His smile was sharp enough to cut. "Mara. They – the Republic I helped build, mind you – took everything. My Order, my purpose, my family, my freedom. They locked me in a Force-null cage and threw away the key. And now they’ve sent you here because they're desperate."
He leaned forward, and his blue eyes were burning. "So here's my proposal for you: I can help. I can teach your forces how to fight in a Force-null environment. I can develop strategies against an enemy that exists outside the Force. I might be the only person in the galaxy who can."
"And the price?"
"Let me out." His voice was soft, deadly serious. "Let me out, put me back in the Force, and I'll fight your war. You can't do this alone. And I'll hunt the Vong. I'll do whatever you need. But I'm not doing it from a cage, and I'm not doing it while you die from a disease I could have cured in five minutes if I had access to the Force."
Five minutes. Pure hubris.
Or, that particularly, achingly Luke mixture of old Skywalker bravado and Sith arrogance.
"Healing isn't a Sith art, Farmboy." Mara's voice was flat, cutting. "And you're not a Jedi anymore."
His face flickered through a dozen micro-expressions – pain, frustration, something that might have been grief, settling finally into resignation. He'd never been particularly good at hiding his emotions from her, and fifteen years of solitary confinement had left him badly out of practice at concealing them.
"Well," he said lightly, though the word carried weight, "I'll just have to find someone else who can do it and walk them through the theory."
Mara stared at him. "So your proposal is – what, exactly? To pick up where you left off fifteen years ago. Find Force-sensitives, train a healer, rebuild a Jedi Order. Within six months. All while fighting off an extragalactic invasion force."
He shrugged, a casual roll of his shoulders that was utterly at odds with the enormity of what he was suggesting. "When have impossible tasks ever stopped me before?"
She cast a significant look around his prison – the bare walls, the hand-built furniture, the gardens visible through the window that might as well be a viewport into his isolation.
He followed her gaze and waved a hand dismissively. "Other than this."
"It's a pretty big exception."
"Maybe." Luke leaned back in his chair, and that old confidence – the audacity that had let him destroy a Death Star the first time he’d stepped into a starfighter – glinted in his eyes. "But the clock is ticking, isn't it? And this is still the best hope you've got."
She wanted to argue. Wanted to laugh. Wanted to tell him he was delusional, that fifteen years in a cage had broken something fundamental in his ability to assess reality.
But he wasn't wrong.
“You know what this feels like?” Luke said, tilting his head. “There's a dejarik move: castling. You keep your rook locked in the corner, boxed in behind your own defenses – until you finally break it out alongside the king. Suddenly, the whole board’s changed. High risk, but sometimes it’s the only move left.”
"And I guess that's what we're doing," Mara said, arching a skeptical brow. "Castling."
He spread his hands. "I'm a rook in the corner, Mara. And the Vong are about to flip the board."
"Think it'll work?"
Luke's smile didn't falter, but something flickered in his eyes – uncertainty, maybe, or just bone-deep exhaustion disguised as confidence. "Only one way to find out.”