DISCLAIMER: Star Wars and all publicly recognisable characters, names and references, etc are the sole property of George Lucas, Lucasfilm Ltd, Lucasarts Inc, 20th Century Fox, Timothy Zahn, Barbara Hambly, YKW and the other writers of the expanded Star Wars Universe. This fan fiction was created solely for entertainment and no money was made from it. Also, no copyright or trademark infringement was intended. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Any other characters, the storyline and the actual story are the property of the author.
Luke blinked. Okay, something was wrong. He was just sitting her, and he shouldn't be. Staring at that block had done something to him, but for some reason, like a switch, it had been turned off.
He straightened. How long had he been sitting here? And where were Mara and Callista?
Then he reached out with the Force and---------
*LUKE!*
It was so familiar, like a dream he had forgotten but treasured dearly. Someone was there with him, someone he had met before in this same way. On a ship, a long time ago.
She was everywhere, filling the cave, only this time not the ghost of a Jedi Knight who had sacrificed her body and cast her spirit into a machine, refusing out of some sort of pride to go into what lay Beyond.
This was Callista--as she truly was. She glittered like Ben, like Yoda, like his father, Anakin, but she was different. She did not stand before him, he could only see her face amist the dark of the room. She was the only light other than the stasis block. Even that seemed dim compared to her.
"Callista," he whispered.
*Luke, you have to help Mara.* No tearful reunion, no mourning over her death. She was simply there, with a purpose and a strength he had once known. Where had she been, if not inside Cray's body? Taking flesh again had corrupted her. This was purity, this was the woman he had once loved.
That a part of him still loved.
*She's dying, Luke!* Callista admonished him. But it was only to get him moving. The panic that rose in Luke's chest the longer the Force was normalized around him was held back only by his wonder at the spirit before him.
*And the baby?*
*Vayia is well, but she won't last long without her mother.*
*Help me find them,* Luke begged.
*I don't have long. You'll have to hurry.* The face disappeared and he saw the currents of light swirl down the tunnel. He followed at a dead run.
With Callista gone, there was only her own pain to think about. Their Force connection had made Mara only aware of the deathpain that Callista had been experiencing, therefore blocking her own. Now it was just the two of them.
It was overwhelming.
What had gone wrong? Had she ruptured something? Had a rock hit her in exactly the wrong place? Or was it just the plain and simple fact that this was how her body worked? Childbirthing would be impossible again, if that was the case. If she even lived.
She lay down on the rock, feeling the hot sticky blood on her thighs. It pooled on the ground beneath her, tricking down the jagged curves of the boulders around her. Luke would find her--she had to stay alive long enough. Not for her sake, or even Luke's, but for Vaiya's.
Vaiya. The stonelifter. Her Jedi Knight of a daughter who was not even born yet. Mara shut her eyes, touching the mind that was not so small. Vaiya responded, her brain functioning on levels that were impossible. But because of the Force, it was possible.
Either that, or they were both dying.
Mara felt her eyes sting with tears. That would NOT happen. Her daughter would not die. She would live. She had a future to face. Mara had done her job. She had brought her into the world. She would stay alive, Vaiya would be born, Skywalker would have a piece of immortality and a piece of her. He would make a wonderful father.
So Mara shut her eyes and concentrated. She didn't want to go into a trance, for fear that she would lose touch with the baby. Who knew what a Jedi trance would do to a pregnant woman? The entire body shut down--she had to keep her body alive. Maybe a healing technique...she focused all her remaining energy on her womb. She wasn't far from giving birth. Her water was about to break. Maybe it would wash away some of this blood.
She felt so tired. She hurt so much, and it was so unfair. Why couldn't she be alive to see her child? Why did destiny have to be so cruel? It brought Luke and her together only to separate them again. It gave them a future only to take away the present. It was all so twisted and wrong!
In those few moments, Mara felt her grim determination start to give way to self-pity, and then despair. She slipped into a partial trance, simply because she lacked the energy to stay awake. Only the child mattered. Only that thought would keep her alive.
Luke knew he was out of breath, and if he didn't stop to catch it he was going to pass out. There was a real light now, at the end of the tunnel. It was daylight. It was a back exit that those low- life slave-trading smuggler, bless their paranoid hearts, had installed for quick getaways.
Callista was still with him, but she was getting faint. Luke panted and reached for her.
*Which way?*
*Around that boulder. You'll see a path to the front. It's a bit of a climb, and I can't stay with you. Mara is slipping away.*
*You're leaving me? Now?*
*I have to, Luke.* He could see her again, this time more definite in shape. She looked like she had in his vision, the one time he had been with her as she truly was, before she had taken Cray's body. She smiled at him.
*You do remember.*
*Of course I remember.* In that moment, it all came back to him. That one perfect memory, that one tragic lost love that was never meant to be, that feeling of sorrow and joy mingled together.
It was the only thing Callista had truly wanted from him. Just to be remembered as she really was.
*I love you, Luke,* she told him.
He wanted to reply in kind, not wanting to spoil the beauty of the moment. He had loved what they had shared, had loved what they had, but he did not love her. Not like he loved Mara. Mara was everything, Mara and his daughter. But Callista did not seem at all expectant. Her presence was oddly warm.
*Don't worry. I understand. In a way you don't yet understand, I love Mara, too. Goodbye, Luke.*
She vanished, leaving only her memory.
Luke reached the mouth of the cave, a heap of cuts, scrapes, and thick drops of sweat. His clothes were ragged and tearing, and his hair was mangled with dirt and grime. It had been a little over a half-hour since he had started over that mountain, but he had made it, not losing his focus once.
Now that he stood before the mouth of the cave and was totally exhausted, he had to face the biggest trial yet. He had to get Mara out of there.
He stumbled to the shuttle and called for help. He wasn't sure who he got. For a minute, the guy had sounded like Han, but Luke wasn't paying attention. Just bring help, he told them. Just bring help because Mara's trapped and she's going into labor, but she's hurt....
No, Callista said she was dying.
Luke ran back to the cave and began digging. Then he stopped because he could hear the vibrating of the beams. If they gave out completely, they would completely crush Mara and their child.
He reached for her. Maybe if he could rouse her, she could help him. It was a vain hope--he only touched her comatosed mind, just a shadow of the woman he knew. He pushed, but there was nothing. She had shut him out.
Shut him out!
Luke backed away a bit, Mara's feelings of despair and self-pit lashing out at him like the leftovers of a stingtail's attack. What was going on inside her head?
But there was little time for that. He had to concentrate on the task at hand. Yoday had told him that size mattered not. He had to believe that now. He had to, if he wanted to get Mara out. Because he had to hold up the entire roof of that abandoned mine if he wanted a snowball's chance on Tatooine of getting her out of there alive.
He shut his eyes and concentrated. He had to do this. He would do it, and while everyone had tried to tell him that the dark side was filled with the love of power, no one had given much thought to the fact that the light side was filled with the power of love. His love for Mara would move that entire mine if it had to.
It had to.
Mara didn't know where she was. It wasn't dark or cold here, but there was a discomfort here that made her ache. She could see pictures, but they were distorted and choppy, like pieces of a holovid strung together but in no order that made any sense. The strange part about them, they were of herself, and she felt none of that queasiness that most people experience when having to view themselves. It seemed perfectly natural to sit here and watch her play out her life as if she wasn't even a part of it, as if she were someone else and herself at the same time.
Luke was there, too. In some he was courting her in the days long before the Caamas Document Incident, as it had come to be known historically. In fact, it was in many. It should have seemed odd to her, or at the very least, touching. These were romances in the truest sense of the word--his heartbreak over Callista and then his discovery of feelings for Mara that he didn't know were there.
*Can we say, rebound?* she thought to no one in particular.
They weren't all bad. In a few, there was real love there. She could see how their relationship could have been so normal, so average. Their sparks and passion similar to any other two young heroes in love. They dated in some, in others Luke simply confessed that he loved her and declared that he wanted to marry her. In some she tried to run, in others she embraced it whole- heartedly. In nearly every one, she was with him. It seemed inevitable. For Mara, it only confirmed the obvious.
There were others that were not so easily stitched together. In one, it came too soon and she utterly rejected him, never to speak with him again even after she realized how wrong she had been. In another, something terrible happened to Luke, and Mara had rescued him from a life of doomed emptiness only to find herself at the center of his heart. Still in another, it took a whole lifetime for her to come around, and even then she had been forced into it by the rescue of a child that would never be. Mara didn't know if there was more sorrow over the wasted time or the child that didn't exist. He seemed like such a handsome lad, a rebel who couldn't overcome his boyish orgins. He was no hero, or any Jedi Knight, but he had such potential.
Some were downright amusing, pictures of a future that didn't seem so alien, or paths that completely sidestepped history to find that the last ten years had all been one big dream. Others were mockeries, but all with happy endings. Some didn't touch her and Luke at all, merely kept them separated, sometimes hostile, sometimes with potential for more, but the line never stretched that far, and it would leave Mara wondering--how now?
Then there was one where Luke betrayed her. Mara wanted to scream as she felt the pain tear through her doppleganger. Couldn't the dumb farmboy control himself? She had been so understanding, and this was how he treated her?
And then there were those where she didn't exist, they had never met, and Luke lived happily ever after with someone else.
What was wrong with him anyway?
She tore herself away from the kalidescope of visions. She had seen enough.
"Don't you know what they are?"
Mara didn't turn to face the voice. She wasn't sure she had a head to turn at that point. But the owner wasn't trying to hide herself.
So this was the real Callista.
"I give up," Mara said, her harsh sarcasm kicking in.
"Alternate paths. Futures that could have happened but never did. In nearly all of them, Mara, Luke is with you."
"Not all of them."
"More than not. Even those futures where you didn't see yourself present, you were still there in some of them." She grew distant, sad. "I cannot claim more than a few myself."
"Yes, but you got what you wanted, didn't you?" She felt the anger make her surroundings darken a bit. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew that something had happened. "Your one perfect memory, something I can never touch."
"This is tiresome," Callista said, obviously irritated. "Mara, Luke is killing himself over trying to get you out of this cave. How can you be so insecure? Don't you believe that he loves you?"
Mara wanted to shake her head. The darkness was so close, it felt so much easier to give in than to fight it. All the old rage, all the old hatred for Skywalker and his arrogant Jedi-Masterisms...
"You're despairing, Mara," Callista warned. "Your injuries are not that bad. You can survive them. You don't have to die if you don't want to. You can fight...I've always been told that you're a fighter."
Mara wanted to shut her eyes, but wasn't sure she had eyes to shut. "Go away, Callista. They'll save Vaiya, that's all that matters. I'm just so tired...I want to rest so much." She felt so weary that her being seemed to stoop.
*Mother.* That woke her up a bit. That hadn't been Callista.
Then she saw her again. All strawberry blond hair and eyes the color of Mara's new lightsaber--that pale teal blue-green. She was full grown, but her features were vague, as if she were a pencil drawing that hadn't been given defined features yet. But she was alive...so much alive, and so very filled with emotion.
Vaiya had called her Mother.
Mara wanted to embrace her, and found that she had arms to do so. Vaiya was so close...why was she here with her? *The doctors will come soon and take you with them,* Mara assured her, although she wasn't sure if Vaiya understood. She would certainly never remember this, unless something triggered her. This would probably be the only memory of her mother she would ever get. Mara was so weary, the urge to give up was closer now. She hugged her daughter tighter and reached out with her mind. There had to be some place in her daughter's soul for her to carry something with her, and someday remember her mother as she truly was.
In that moment, everything Mara knew of herself was poured into Vaiya, and locked away deep in the back of Vaiya's mind. Perhaps the trauma of being born would wash it out, but at least Mara had tried.
She had given Luke his daughter, who would have a glorious future. She was done playing this game. She could offically retire, like she would have eventually done from the trading game if Luke hadn't come along like that....
Then Vaiya was gone. Mara could hear a cry--rich and deep, beautiful and moving in nature. Vaiya had been born.