Fic: "Remembrance" -- Mara, Lando, G (1/1)

Jul 23, 2009 20:32

Title: Remembrance
Author: deaka
Rating: G
Characters: Lando Calrissian, Mara Jade
Warnings: None that I can think of
Pairings: Vaguely Lando/Mara
Timeframe: Somewhere between Children of the Jedi and Darksaber

Summary: Forgiveness can be a troubled gift, difficult to ever repay.



Lando was looking for Mara, so finding her couldn’t be said to be a complete surprise. He was surprised, however, to find her sitting unmoving and quiet in the falling dusk, facing a view of the span of Tres V’s horizon.

“Hey,” he said. “There you are.”

She glanced at him, but didn’t say anything. That didn’t surprise him either; she wasn’t retiring, Mara Jade, but she didn’t waste words. Her face was strangely still, her fingers loose and open.

“What’s wrong?” Lando said. He sat by her, grimacing at the rock dust that would surely leave powder on his expensive trousers.

Mara shrugged, lifting a hand to push back her hair. The dying sun over the ancient crater pit sprawling out before them was orange, painting her hair with a deep glow. “I hardly know what to feel on this day, anymore.”

“Today?” Lando cast around quickly. Had he missed a special occasion? His extravagant gifts had become a running joke. They’d begun in an attempt to flatter and woo, but somewhere over the past couple of years had shifted to something else as he’d realised just how few gifts she received and how much, despite her professed exasperation, the ridiculous presents and the thought behind them actually meant to her. She’d kept them all, even the ones he’d bought back when he’d barely known her.

He came up with nothing and was about to give up in puzzlement when his eye caught on the flash of silver in her hands: the lightsaber she carried occasionally. Then, belatedly, it clicked. Endor. The Empire’s most crippling defeat. Palpatine and Vader.

The New Republic celebrated the event a couple of days later, the dates having been skewed somewhere along the line. He’d heard that the official formation of the New Republic had run late, and the dates had been surreptitiously shifted so that the anniversary still matched up for appearance’s sake.

He’d barely thought about it, this year. It had never been his favourite holiday. He found that nostalgic reminiscence of the day of the Rebellion’s greatest victory bore decreasing resemblance to the events he remembered. And with Leia, Luke and Han off on the other side of the galaxy…

“It used to be a day of mourning for me,” Mara said. “I’d think about what I’d lost. About how Palpatine had been killed. It would play over and over in my head, that memory he planted in me, that command to kill. All the rage and the loss and the pain.” She closed her eyes, running her fingers across her eyelids. “Now I don’t know what to think.”

“Luke marks off the day, too,” Lando said. “It’s a mourning thing for him, I think.”

Mara looked at him, confused. “Why - ?”

“Vader.”

“Ah. Of course.” A line appeared between her eyebrows. “He mourns for Vader on this day? Really? The day they won?”

“Yeah, I don’t think he sees it that way. Don’t ask me, I was delighted when I heard Vader was dead.”

Mara shook her head briefly. “I didn’t realise he mourned him that way.”

Lando shrugged. He’d never experienced the cognitive dissonance in that association; other people tended to forget Luke was Vader’s son, or be surprised when reminded of it, as though they’d never comprehended it to begin with. He’d first known Luke through Vader’s obsession, a faceless Rebel shadowy beyond the closing vice of Vader’s manipulations and his own mounting panic. Even when he’d met the man finally, Luke had been strange and withdrawn and not amenable to altering Lando’s initial impression of him. In hindsight, of course, he’d been dealing with the loss of Han and Leia’s distress, not to mention pressing issues of his own. Still, that old taint had coloured Lando’s view of Luke for a long time. For a while he’d even entertained the notion that the Jedi was some kind of double agent, hence Vader’s desperate effort to get hold of him.

“I think he does something privately,” Lando said. “Some memorial thing, Han said. For the dead. I don’t think it pleases Leia.”

“Oh.” Mara tugged at a strand of hair absently. The sunlight was almost gone now. Lando glanced upwards. There were a couple of scattered stars, winking briefly.

“He was part of this day, too,” Mara said pensively. “Loving the Empire, hating him.”

Lando looked over at her, staring out at nothing. He glanced in the other direction. “Do you want to go visit? Yavin 4 isn’t that far away. Week or so.”

“No,” Mara said, scornful. “Why would I want that?”

“I don’t know,” Lando said.

“No,” Mara said. She looked at him for a moment, then, more softly, said, “No.”

Lando caught the look, then quirked a grin, flashing his teeth, all charm.

Mara laughed and stretched. “I wonder what she thinks of it all?” she remarked. “His new girlfriend. She wasn’t around through any of it.”

“Han said Leia likes her,” Lando said, not particularly interested.

“Her? Leia would.” Mara got to her feet, holding a hand down for Lando. He took it and came smoothly to his feet, brushing rock dust from his cloak with displeasure.

“Walk?” Mara said, and set off without waiting for an answer.

“What does that mean, Leia would?”

“You know,” Mara said.

“I don’t,” Lando said. “Haven’t met Callista.”

Mara screwed up her nose. “She’s… amenable. Highly so.”

“Isn’t that harsh? Luke’s not the type to go for ego-flattery. He’s dodged that kind of attention for a while now.” It got old, Lando found, surprisingly fast. It was all right for him, because he knew how to use notoriety. It would be different for someone like Luke, who righteously refused the opportunities that twisting that kind of infamy in your own favour could afford.

“I don’t know.” Mara tucked her hair back. “Anyway, she’s got that connection thing as well. She’s from the same time as his father. She lived in that world.”

“If you say so.”

“You don’t agree?”

Lando shrugged. “I think you might be selling Luke short.”

“And you know him so well.” Mara turned, eyes hard.

“Longer than you.” Lando opened his palms. “What do you care, anyway?”

Mara conceded the point, tilting her head. There was a particularly bright star behind the clasp holding back her hair. Belsavis, Lando thought. He’d won the stormhold eye there, years ago. Lost it again a week later in a bad hand of sabbacc. It had been more trouble than it was worth, anyway. He’d heard the Rellians had made a claim for its return to the traditional rook a couple of years ago.

“Do you ever find it hard when you’re around them?” Mara said.

“Who?”

“The Solos, Skywalker,” she said. “It’s like they have their own language.”

Lando shrugged. “I was there for some of it.”

“But still…”

“Yeah, I know.” He frowned down at the crater. The wind caught his cloak, so he shifted, half-consciously. Lights glittered at the bottom, crawling up the walls of the canyon. “Han complains Luke and Leia do the Force thing and it’s like hearing half a conversation, but he doesn’t realise he’s the same, sometimes.”

“It’s easy to stand on a pedestal when you were born on the right side,” Mara said, unexpectedly savage. “When you grew up with the right parents, or parents at all. When you were taught morality rather than obedience.”

Lando watched the patterns below. Mara’s hand moved from the lightsaber to her holster, thumb hooking through the sideloop, long fingers draped casually over the metal. Lando counted the shape of the distant lights, watching without real attention as they weaved into a circle. He said, “When you never had to choose between the lives of a city full of people you were responsible for, and a stranger you’d never met.”

Mara released a breath of air. Lando ignored the hitch within it.

“Sometimes I hate it,” Mara said at length, almost apologetically. “I hate being forgiven, when I didn’t ask for redemption at all.”

“Hard to have redemption applied externally, with no say, for a choice that was applied externally in the first place.” Lando’s cloak billowed, dragging at his shoulders. He thought of Leia’s reddened eyes, Chewie’s vice-like grip, of always being slightly apart. He’d blown up a Death Star and led battle after battle, but nothing was ever enough to shake the clinging shadow of unreliability. He was always Lando, friendly scoundrel, the one who sold out his buddy but made good. He was volatile, slightly ridiculous, scrupulous as far as you could see him; no amount of good work could erase the damned and damning forgiveness that no one ever forgot. He’d eventually stopped trying, resigning his commission with the New Republic to pursue his luck elsewhere.

“You’d expect Han to understand better than Leia and Luke,” Lando observed absently. “But he’s always been an up-and-down blind stickler for principle.”

“Don’t you find it difficult?” Mara said. “Don’t you find yourself being shifted into that slot they make for you, the repentant sinner?”

“I do have regrets,” Lando said. “I just can’t say I would choose differently again, because I had no choice at the time.” He lifted his eyes to the stars above, scanning for patterns in the scattering of dead light. He remembered a veteran he’d met in his youth, who’d sworn he could count his fallen allies and enemies in what he called the ground above. Lando had never been able to forget it, mostly for the reverence in the man’s shadowed upward gaze. “I suppose you just have to find space to allow their forgiveness while making your own peace.”

Mara was silent, as the winds sang down in the canyon below. “I believe you’re a wise man, Lando Calrissian,” she said. The look she gave him was thoughtful, but a faint, bitter shade of the Empire’s passing still lay within her eyes.

“Don’t spread it around,” Lando said, with a toothy smile, a tilting of his head.

She laughed, a sound he liked to hear, because it was so rare from her. She laughed like she argued, with ferocity and truth.

Her hand closed around his arm, her slender fingers warm through the glittersilk sleeve of his overtunic. Her touch had the careful, conscious gentleness of someone accustomed to using their hands for weaponwork. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

“I thought it was my excellent taste in gifts.”

“Hah. That wine you gave me was an early New Order at best.”

“Late Republic, I tell you.”

“You could not be more wrong, I’m sorry to say.”

Lando laughed. She leaned against him, and he touched his hand to the small of her back, glad to be in her company, even if he knew it would only be for a while. She would move on, and so would he; there was always another job, another world, another challenge just a hyperspace jump away. It was fine. Whatever happened, whatever came, it was fine.

Sometimes there was more need for silence than answers, for forgetting than forgiveness, and that was something they both understood.

The Core shone down over them against the press of the darkened sky as they walked on.

[end]

length:vignette, era:new republic, author:deaka

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