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The doorbell chimed. And chimed and chimed.
Luke jerked awake at the first tone, blinking blearily in the dim light of their bedroom as he tried to process the sound into something that made sense. Another chime.
Oh. The doorbell.
Beside him, Mara lifted her head with a grunt, but when Ben didn’t stir, she settled back down again. She had always been a light sleeper, but after Ben’s birth she seemed alert to any noise, no matter how soft the sound or how deep her sleep. Apparently, the doorbell chime wasn’t worth her attention.
It continued to ring.
Luke rolled to his side and heaved himself up, fumbling for a robe to throw on over his shirt and sleep pants. A quick glance at a chrono confirmed that it was mid-morning. Luke wasn’t in the habit of sleeping in, and had been accustomed to rising much earlier in the day—but that was before Ben was born. He groggily made his way through the apartment to the door, suppressing a yawn and slapping the button to mute the chime before he opened it.
Ralrk stood on the other side of door, wearing his usual pilot’s cap and crafty expression. He was flanked by two other Ewoks that Luke didn’t recognize, both of his companions weighed down by a woven basket shaped like a large egg.
“We come bearing gifts for Mara on the birth of her first wokling,” Ralrk said, gesturing grandly at the baskets.
Luke stared down at him for a long moment. “...Do you owe Mara a debt?” he asked.
Ralrk jerked back his head, as though he was offended at the very suggestion. “Of course not! I am simply observing the human ritual of bearing gifts for their newborns.”
“...That’s all.”
“...and showing my respects to an esteemed and honored member of the Empire Killers.”
Luke hadn’t known a time when Ralrk wasn’t up to something, but he was too tired to work it out. “Mara’s sleeping,” he warned Ralrk, “but you might as well come in.”
The Ewoks followed him like a small parade down the hall and into the living room. “Um, you can put them the table over there,” he said.
Ralrk held up a hand. “We must see the wokling first,” he said.
Luke almost laughed. Trust Ralrk to demand proof.
He returned to the bedroom to fetch the “wokling.” On the bed, Mara had curled onto her side and thrown his pillow over her head. He unlocked the controls on the hovercradle, pushing it carefully into the living room and lowering it so that the three Ewoks could see inside.
“This is Ben,” he said.
One of Ralrk’s companions took one look at Ben, gave a dismissive snort then wandered off, poking at the odds and ends that had been left on the table and examining the all of furniture in the room. They were probably casing the place, if Luke knew the company Ralrk kept. The other Ewok leaned over the cradle and stared at Ben for a long time, head tilting to the side as they gazed at the sleeping baby.
“Is it a typical human baby?” Ralrk asked.
“Yes,” Luke said, letting his relief seep into his voice. It had been Mara’s fourth pregnancy, and she’d taken the three previous miscarriages hard. That Ben was healthy and safe was enough for both of them.
“So they’re all that ugly?”
“Don’t let Mara hear you say that,” Luke said.
“I did hear that,” Mara said, appearing the door to the bedroom, looping the belt of her robe into a knot.
Ralrk pointed at Ben. “Good job!” he said, giving her a short nod of approval.
Mara snorted. “Nice save.”
She sat down on the sofa, within arm’s reach of Ben’s cradle, and Luke sat beside her. He stretched an arm along the back of the sofa, his hand resting at the back of her neck, thumb stroking the curve as it joined her shoulder.
The Ewok hovering over the cradle ever so gently brushed the top of Ben’s head and said in broken basic: “Like mother fur. Very beautiful.”
Mara beamed. “Thank you.”
The Ewok launched into a longer speech and when they had concluded, tilted their head expectantly at Ralrk.
“Wenta wants me to tell you that even though the wokling looks like a tree grub, his hair is the color of the leaves of a flame tree at sunset on the shores of Dreaming Lake back home on the Mother Forest.” Ralrk made a sound of disgust that Luke had only ever heard him reserve for the Coruscant sector police and the most hapless members of the Empire Killers. “He’s a poet.”
The other Ewok said something that sounded cutting and Ralrk snorted. “Tepkar says that poetry is as useful as rugger spit,” Ralrk translated. “If Wenta wanted to be a poet he should have stayed on the Mother Forest. She also wants you to know that she can get you a deal on that display case, if you’re looking to sell.”
“No, thank you, Tepkar,” Luke said.
“I appreciate your poetry, Wenta,” Mara said.
“You can write Mara poems about Ben whenever you want to,” Luke said, grinning at Mara.
Strange wicker ware and impromptu poetry hadn’t been the only unusual gifts they’d received after Ben had been born.
They’d made every effort to keep Mara’s pregnancy quiet. The miscarriages had been hard enough to bear without outside speculation and unasked for sympathy. The secret had been limited to family and friends, and the still relatively small Jedi community.
Mara and Talon took an almost vindictive delight in thwarting the sludge news and had skillfully managed to kept her pregnancy out of the press. There had been a few inquiries from reporters, triggered by the usual rumors about their personal lives, and in response, Mara had written several obtusely worded press releases that revealed absolutely nothing, a practice she seemed to find hilarious.
Though Mara wasn’t technically Talon’s Second anymore, she still remained closely connected to his organization. A smuggling organization, Luke had learned, that was both a place where sensitive information was handled with the utmost discretion, and a prodigious rumor mill where news of Mara’s pregnancy had spread like shisti locus through a grain silo. While Coruscant at large remained ignorant of Ben’s arrival, it seemed as if the entire Fringe knew, from the lowest spice smuggler in Mos Eisley to the Kajidic crime lord who ruled Hutt space.
Gifts began to arrive from well-wishers, sent from far-flung ports across the galaxy, from people (and sometimes places) Luke had never even heard of before. At first, he’d had been alarmed that so many underworld contacts knew their Coruscant address, but Mara informed him that Talon had arranged for any packages intended for them to be delivered to one of his bases, and then sent on to their apartment via his own couriers.
It had been fascinating to discover how much a present revealed about a giver. There was usually a story behind the gift, though it wasn’t always obvious, and Luke was learning all sorts of things about gifting practices across the galaxy.
Or not learning, in some cases. “I give up,” he had said after a full ten minutes of examining a strange silver cylindrical device. “Any ideas?”
Mara shrugged a shoulder, frowning. She leaned awkwardly around Ben, sleeping in her arms, to look at the package. Her frown deepened as she read the digital signature. “Udo Seki.” She snorted. “He tried to have me killed two years ago.”
Luke turned the cylinder over in his hands again. “This isn’t some form of revenge, is it?” The device, whatever it was, was harmless. Perhaps something culinary?
“I have no idea,” she said. “Maybe it’s art.” She seemed unconcerned, so Luke put the cylinder of unknown purpose back into the box and put it aside.
He assumed the gifts from the Fringe held meaning that he wasn’t entirely privy to, and he figured that Mara and Talon were keeping careful track of who had offered gifts and what those gifts meant in the language of exchange and obligation on which the Fringe ran. He might never understand why a contact from Sullust sent them a set of windchimes for Ben’s room, for instance. To Luke, they were simply a lovely set of chimes, made of blue Rinado steel, with a near-silent motor that allowed them to ring sweetly in a windless Coruscant apartment. It was likely that Ralrk’s visit might fall along those lines as well.
“Should we open the baskets now?” Luke asked Ralrk. He had learned the etiquette varied, from culture to culture.
“You do want to inspect it first, yes?” Ralrk asked as though it were obvious.
He leaned across the table and helped Luke open the first of the two baskets. There was an ingenious hinge woven along the side that allowed the top half of the basket to swing open once it had been unlatched. The first basket was filled with food wrapped in individual alimplast packages, and Ralrk pulled them out of the basket one by one and laid them methodically across the table, listing them as he went.
“Pickled pikobi eggs, spurak, dried yom, smoked yom, spiced yom, boosa, sunberries, thrantcill pie, mynock jerky—good for new mothers.”
Having grown fond of Ewok spurak, Luke peeled open the alimplast and dug into a portion. Mara wrinkled her nose at the smell of the spurak, set aside the mynock jerky Ralrk had offered her, and picked at a portion of baked boosa instead.
When Ralrk had finished accounting for all the portions he unlatched the second basket. Luke had expected more edibles, or perhaps toys, which had been popular gifts, but Ralrk didn’t treat the items in the second basket lightly. With the closest thing to reverence that Luke had ever seen Ralrk display, he carefully lifted a wooden figurine out of the basket and set it on the table. It was a wooden idol of Threepio, about 30 centimeters tall and painted bright gold. Ralrk placed five lumpy black stones on the table next to the idol.
Mara nudged his knee with hers, and Luke saw her eyes cut across to Wenta, who had stopped cooing over Ben to watch Ralrk unpack the idol. Perhaps Ralrk’s unexpected respect was just for show after all—it could be hard to tell with the Ewok, and Ralrk loved an audience. Luke could guess which conclusion Mara had drawn, but he knew she enjoyed Ralrk’s antics and wouldn’t interrupt a performance. Just because Ralrk enjoyed making a show of appearing devout, it didn’t mean he didn’t have faith in his people’s religious beliefs, though Luke was sure they’d never get a straight answer either way.
“A paktar,” Ralrk said, pointing to the odd collection from the second basket. “From the Mother Forest. Wenta will show you.”
Wenta marched over and scooped up the idol and the stones in his furry hands. He asked Luke a question in Ewokese, and Luke looked over at Ralrk for translation. “In what room do you hang the wokling’s hammock?” Ralrk asked.
At this age, Ben slept wherever they parked his hovercradle, which was almost always within Mara’s reach. The first few weeks it had stayed beside their bed or wherever else Mara happened to be in the apartment. They did have a room furnished with a changing table and a larger crib for when Ben was a little older, but for the time being it was mainly being used to store the many gifts that they’d been sent.
Wenta followed him down the hall and Luke watched, bemused, as he surveyed Ben’s room, peering into every corner and apparently finding it lacking. Wenta shouted back down the hall, and a short time later, Ralrk appeared, dragging a small end table that had once stood in a corner of the living room. Ralrk groused in Ewokese as Wenta gave him instructions, and together, they pushed aside a stack of gift boxes so they could place the table in a corner that Wenta deemed appropriate. Once the table had been put in just the right spot, Wenta placed the Threepio idol in the center of the table. He began to chant, a groaning sound Luke recognized from Endor, as he arranged the stones in a semi-circle around Threepio.
When the chant ended Wenta fussed with the stones for a few more minutes, pushing them this way and that until they were arranged in a pattern that pleased him. The lumpy stones and the gaudy wooden idol made for an odd little shrine, but Luke was touched that the Ewoks chose to share their religious traditions with his family.
“Is this a tradition in the Mother Forest?” Luke asked Ralrk.
“A paktar altar?” Ralrk replied. “Etch, no one on the Mother Forest makes paktar altars anymore. They’re an old tradition. Very old.”
The cult-like worship of Threepio wasn’t that old a tradition, Luke knew, but it must have merged with other, older religious beliefs. He marveled that it persisted even on Coruscant, among Ewoks who now had daily contact with droids of all kinds.
“On Coruscant, we keep the Ways to remember,” Ralrk said, with uncharacteristic seriousness. “I know you are Jedi and worship the Force, but the tribes have decided that a little paktar azar won’t hurt.” Ralrk added in a condescending tone, “your wokling will need all the help it can get, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Luke said dryly.
A familiar crafty expression slid across Ralrk’s face. “Perhaps good fortune will encourage her to race again.”
Luke raised his hands. “That’s between you and her, Ralrk.” It had been a long time—at least two years, Luke thought—since Mara a participated in a swoop race.
When they returned to the living room, they found Tepkar standing in front of Mara, who still sat on the couch, Ben in the hovercradle beside her.
"—Kusha eafee ta theesa ota iru e veekheetin?” Tepkar spoke slowly and clearly, and Mara, her forehead creased in concentration, replied.
"Den. Theea… oheeh..." Mara said. "Na hutar-hutar."
"Oppa, ma-ewok theesa nitha iru i'shodu enah."
Tepkar turned and spoke to Ralrk, reverting back to quick-fire Ewokese.
“She says your accent is terrible,” Ralrk told Mara. “But she will still buy the couch from you at a reasonable price.”
Luke raised his eyebrows at Mara, and she rolled her eyes.
A small, indignant cry rang out in the dark of their bedroom.
Beside him, Mara groaned and rolled over, burrowing into him as though she wanted to merge with his ribs. Luke instinctively reached out to brush against Ben’s mind—he wasn’t in danger, he was only hungry and annoyed.
"—’mm get him,” Luke mumbled. Mara’s response was a nearly unintelligible negative.
Ben continued to squall. Luke meant to get up, but he was leaden with sleep and moving seemed an insurmountable task. After a few moments had passed and it was clear that Ben wasn’t going back to sleep, Mara hauled herself up and climbed over him to reach the side of the bed where the cradle hovered. Luke grunted as her knee dug into his thigh.
The lights, set to muted nighttime levels, slowly brightened, washing the room in a soft glow. Ben settled down once Mara picked him up and moved over to the round chair they’d put by the windows for middle-of-the-night feedings. His body protesting, Luke got up as well and went to the ‘fresher to get her a glass of water.
“Go back to sleep,” he said when Ben had finished, lifting the baby out of her arms. Mara didn’t protest.
“I have reports to review in the morning,” she mumbled as she sunk back into bed, already half asleep. “Have’ta work.”
“I know,” he said. He wished she would take more the time to relax, but idleness never suited her, and she insisted that she was perfectly capable of reviewing reports from home while Ben napped.
Filters over the large windows that ran along one side of the apartment let in just enough light from the outside city to see by, and Luke didn’t bother to activate any of the overhead lumas as he made his nightly circuit from room to room. Wandering around the apartment with Ben at his shoulder had become one of his favorite things to do in the evening. He held this miraculous being that Mara and he had made close to his chest, feeling the bright light of his son’s presence in the Force as he moved through the darkened rooms.
At first, they had struggled with the decision to have children at all. Luke had wondered if it was selfish to bring a child into their lives, considering the busy and often dangerous lives they led. Mara had her work for Karrde and with the Smuggler's Alliance, he was training apprentices and trying to keep the fledgling Jedi Order afloat, and they were both liable to get drawn into critical missions whenever someone decided their specific talents were required.
There had been long discussions and debates before they came to the conclusion that yes, bringing a child into the world was a dream that they both shared, even if they had different reasons for that dream. He worried, at first, that Mara was willing to try for a child because he wanted it so badly. Her own troubled childhood and lack of experience around children made her wary of them, and she seemed to have zero interest in other people’s children, even admitting that she sometimes struggled to relate to the twins and Anakin.
He came to realize that she craved something that belonged to them, something that wasn’t tied to the Jedi Praxeum or their work for the New Republic, which consumed so much of their lives. She teased him about the gaggle of Jedi orphans at the Praxeum, who followed him about like a small flock of bantha calves, but the children they cared for under the auspices of the Praxeum weren’t theirs alone in the way their own child would be. Mara wanted something she could hold separate, just for them.
They’d celebrated when she became pregnant for the first time. There had been months of hope and anticipation—they’d moved back to Coruscant, reorganized their schedules, and began to talk of baby names—before they discovered the fetus hadn’t developed properly. It was shocking how quickly things changed—the day before they’d been full of hope for the child she carried, and the next he was holding her hand tightly in the emergency wing of the medcenter as a doctor explained the procedure that would follow to remove the fetus.
After Mara had recovered, they tried again. The second miscarriage had happened so early that they hadn’t even had time to get their hopes up, and Mara said that it barely counted, though the weeks that they’d spent waiting to see what would happen had been tense and unhappy.
These things happen, the doctors said as they explained the medical causes of the miscarriages. It’s not your fault. There was nothing you could do. Next time, we’ll try…
He knew that Mara blamed herself in spite of the reassurances of their doctors, and he was ashamed that in spite of having the Force’s miraculous powers at his fingertips, it seemed that all he could do to help was hold his wife’s hand. Her face was pale and expressionless as she sat beside him, though he could feel the pain seeping through her Force presence. All her planning and determination couldn’t will a baby into existence. Luke would have been happy to adopt, but Mara seemed to take her body’s inability to carry to term as a test, and Mara Jade didn’t fail. For reasons he didn’t think even she could comprehend, she had to see this through.
He’d had his own anxieties. He worried about her health and about the emotional toll the repeated losses were taking on her. On top of all of that, it still smarted that with all his skill, there was nothing he could do as Mara’s body rejected first one pregnancy, and then another. And another.
The third miscarriage, like the first, happened late in the second trimester. For the second time, they’d had just enough time to hope—to start envisioning the child that could come into their lives.
“A girl,” he told Mara, who shook her head.
“It’s going to be a boy,” she said.
“Or maybe they’ll be neither, or both.”
“A boy,” she insisted.
And then, it was over.
They knew that the pregnancy had failed before they’d even made it to the medcenter. Feeling life fade from the fetus had broken his heart, and devastated Mara. It had been a boy.
“This isn’t a punishment,” he remembered saying to her. “The Force doesn’t work like that.” He’d said it over and over as she lay curled in a tight defensive ball on their bed, and he sat beside her, stroking her hair. She hadn’t been sleeping well. Most days she threw herself into her work, letting it consume her in order to distract her from her grief, but if she hadn’t managed to work herself to the point of exhaustion she had trouble sleeping.
“You say that,” she said softly, “but that’s not how you feel.”
He winced, his eyes closing and a breath gushing out from between his lips. It was so hard not to rail against the universe; to let bitterness seep in whenever he wondered why them? Why did they struggle at something that came easily to so many beings in the universe? What were they doing wrong?
“I know I’m not being rational about this,” she said. Her eyes closed as his fingers brushed along her hairline.
“It’s alright,” he said. “You don’t have to be.” He hated that she resented herself for wanting a child so badly. It was a desire that had been alien to her, and no matter how many times he reassured her, she was ashamed at the intensity of that desire, and the extremes she drove herself in pursuing that dream. It was another dialogue they’d had over and over.
He leaned down and kissed her temple, and sat with her until she finally drifted off to sleep.
The future is always in motion, Yoda had told him, and that axiom had never seemed more cruelly accurate than during Mara’s pregnancies. Whenever he focused on Mara through the Force, trying to determine if the pregnancy would fail and when, it was as if she was blurred with all the possibilities of what could come. No matter how often he meditated, he never found a clear answer.
When she became pregnant with Ben, he’d thought he felt a hopeful note threading through the Force, though Mara remained cautious. She used phrases like “relentless optimism” (she used the Bocce expression, which was somehow even more cutting), and accused him of saying the same thing about their previous attempts. Perhaps she was right. He didn’t want to expect the worst, though Mara planned for it obsessively, scheduling an endless list of check-ups and bullying doctors into ordering extra tests.
Things had shifted the moment Ben had been born. Other parents had warned him that the bond might not be instantaneous, but Luke fell among those who felt like his world had shifted on its axis, now destined to revolve around the miraculous little person they had made.
Mara was incandescent.
“Don’t think I’ve ever seen Mara smile so much,” Han had said, with a bemused expression on his face. “Not even when she married you.”
It was true. Luke couldn’t help beaming himself, though after the long delivery and the sleepless nights that followed, it was something of a dazed, glassy-eyed grin.
“I do feel sorry for Ben, though,” Han continued. “You just know Mara’s not going to let him out of her sight until he’s thirty.”
“We’ll deal with that when we come to it,” Luke said. At the moment, he felt much the same way about Ben. His son was so small and defenseless—now he had a whole new set of fears to keep him up at night, and he knew that worry would never really go away as long as he lived.
His aimless pacing through the apartment led him into Ben’s room, and as he made a loop through the open space in the center of the room, a glow coming from a corner caught his eye. He turned and gasped softly as the Ewok altar came into view. The small stones surrounding the wooden Threepio had sprouted a forest of tiny filaments topped with round caps, glowing a soft green in the dark room. The Rinado wind chimes on the wall let out a series of gentle tones, and as if in response, the mushrooms shifted from green to blue, with a ripple of pink along the edges of the largest caps.
“Look, Ben,” he said softly, shifting the infant in his arms. “Look what our friends brought you all the way from Endor.”
Ben squirmed, small fists waving about and his face twisting into an unconcerned yawn. The blue shifted back to green again, the soft light remaining steady as the bioluminescent mushrooms changed colors.
“One day we’ll go to Endor,” he promised, placing Ben back on his shoulder. “I’ll take you to see the Mother Forest. It’s so green, Ben, you can’t imagine how green it is.” There was something about all that green that always took his breath away, no matter how many verdant planets he’d set foot on in the years since leaving Tatooine.
Endor held personal significance as well; a connection to the family story that Ben would inherit. “We’ll visit the place where your grandfather was laid to rest. It's a beautiful spot in the forest—quiet and peaceful.” Ben wriggled, rubbing his face back and forth on Luke’s shoulder. Luke stroked his back until he settled again.
“And when you’re just a little bit bigger, we’ll go to Yavin, to our other home, and you’ll get to meet everyone at the Academy. They’re all so excited to meet you, Ben.”
Ben sighed, his tiny ribs expanding and contracting under Luke’s hand. Luke could tell he was beginning to drift off. He began to head back to his and Mara’s bedroom, where the empty hovercradle waited. “And one day we’ll go to Tatooine to see where your daddy grew up,” he said. “And we’ll visit Corellia and Naboo, Kashyyyk, and maybe even Dagobah—or maybe not, if your mother has anything to say about it.”
He carefully tucked Ben back in his cradle. “There’s a whole galaxy to see, Ben,” he said softly, so as not to disturb Mara. Ben sighed again in his sleep, hands curled into loose fists on either side of his head as Luke tucked the blanket around him. He paused a moment before he went back to bed, looking down at his son—so small and vulnerable and infinitely precious to him.
“I can’t wait to share it with you.”