She frowned, glancing out at the rolling clouds, a sheet of rain visible rolling over the city now, sweeping toward the Palace. Lightening forked again, closer, making Mara flinch, "You should step back."
"Why?"
"There's a chance you can get hit by the lightening."
He turned away, dismissive, head on one side as his eyes remained on the closing storm, the sky overhead dark now, the thunder a constant bass rumble vibrating through her chest.
"I like the storm." He said at last, still withdrawn and contemplative, "We used to have them on Tatooine."
A massive rumble split the sky, making him smile as two forks of lightening came down in perfect unison.
Mara stepped back, curious. "Rainstorms?"
"Once every five or six years. You could feel it building for weeks before- like a charge in the air. Then the storm would just... explode overhead and the skies would open. Raindrops so big you could hold out your hand and five or ten drops would fill your palm. You could drink water from the sky, still stood in the desert."
Mara was transfixed by the intensity of the memory he recounted, his words barely a whisper. "I didn't know."
He nodded, looking up as the lightening forked again, grinning into the fury of the storm, "Maybe four or five hours, that's all. But it was just... unbelievable - a solid sheet of water. Sometimes, if it'd been really hot beforehand and the stone was warm, you could hear the canyon walls pop and crack in the deluge. You'd see huge chunks shear off the rock face..."
"It must have been amazing."
"It was nature in the raw- incredible. There was water everywhere - so much that it pooled on the ground in places; if you went up to the stone rifts, it would actually sit on the surface of the ground... it changed the shape of the dunes- bluffs that had been there for months were gone overnight, beaten away to nothing in a matter of hours. Then by the next morning the Piri were out."
"Piri?" Another grating rumble vibrated through the room, slicing the air, incredible in its power.
"They're little blue flowers- tiny. They come out only when the rain comes, for just a day or so, then they're gone. Bright, azure blue. At dawn, there'd be a mist over the dunes, like low cloud, then when it burned off the piri were there- millions of them. Your whole world is changed - everything you know so well is carpeted with this incredible rush of colour and all the dust and the grit is gone. There's a place close to where I used to live called the Dune Sea. Offworlders and people who don't know the desert think it's because of the sand dunes, but it's because once every five years, when the rains come, it's filled with the densest mat of piri and it looks... it looks just like a deep blue sea. The piri-covered dunes look like an ocean and everything's moving, rolling in the wind, like ocean waves. Just for a day, there's a sea in the desert."
She studied him, enthralled; watched his face lifted to the fury of the storm and wondered whether the incredible piri could ever compare to the blue of his eyes...
He still held his arms wrapped about him, the rising wind whipping his hair up, tousling it. "Sandpeople - Tusken Raiders - they judge their age by how many times they've seen the storms."
The first drops of rain began to fall on the dry, pale stone of the balcony, leaving large, dark roundels where it hit. Luke glanced down, watching them multiply until they began to merge, "I wonder if my father ever saw it."
My father... Mara frowned; "Was he... did he grow up there?"
"Yes. His mother's grave was just outside the farmstead I grew up on." Luke answered her unspoken question before it had formed in her thoughts, for once allowing some small part of his past to be seen- more than she had ever known before. "I thought he was a navigator on a freighter. They told me he was long dead."
Mara felt her heart crumple at the raw emotion which he tried so hard to hide behind that casual, distant tone, his eyes still on the sheeting rain, the skies rumbling ominously.
"Is there... nothing to salvage between you?" She knew this wasn't what the Emperor wanted, but the veiled pain in his voice made her ask anyway - how could she not?
He leaned back against the door frame, eyes lowered. "I don't know. How could I trust him- ever?"
"Is trust necessary?" she pushed.
He shook his head, remaining silent for a long time. It was the most vulnerable she had ever seen him, torn by doubts and desires.
"I thought I wanted to kill him. When I first... when I saw him again after... after Palpatine." He shook his head, the sky beyond the window lighting up momentarily about him, the storm directly overhead, "I had lost everything and it was his fault. He could have helped me... so many times he could have helped me... and I couldn't understand why he didn't. I should have- I knew by then what Palpatine could do, how he could twist everything to suit himself. How he could warp your mind and tie you down. But I thought everything was Vader's fault- all I knew was that I wanted revenge. I wanted to show him that I wasn't weak and couldn't be used by him again. Wouldn't be."
The rain was torrential now, almost drowning out his quiet words, the chill which trickled over Mara's skin part reaction to the storm and part empathy for her lover.
"I thought I wanted to kill him- I was so sure."
"But Palpatine stopped you." The rain suddenly thinned to nothing as she spoke, the skies stilling as the eye of the storm passed overhead, the air electric.
"No, Palpatine didn't stop me. I went in there intending to kill him despite Palpatine's order. Nothing he said- nothing- made the slightest difference in that moment."
Mara blinked. "Then...?"
"I didn't kill him because..... I couldn't. In that moment, when I had the power, when I held the saber up..." Luke shook his head, sliding slowly down against the edge of the doorframe until he hunched in a huddled crouch, arms wrapped about himself, lost in the memory. "I couldn't kill him. I couldn't kill my own father - how could I? No matter what, how could I?"
Mara's stomach constricted at that; at the incredible, far-reaching implications. Palpatine had hung his control of Luke on the fact that he had broken that link between father and son. On the fact that he held the power to constrain and contain Skywalker even in the heat of battle, even when his fallen Jedi wanted- needed to kill...
But this... this meant he had nowhere near the control he believed over Skywalker.
This meant everything he'd built after that point had been based on a lie!
A massive crash of thunder ripped the sky open, rain pouring in a solid curtain again, Mara's world, her life, everything turned upside down by this one admission.
Every fibre of her being told her to run - run to her master and tell him the truth; that Skywalker was a threat, a danger.
The lightening flashed, blinding, and just for a moment... for that instant, Mara saw in the hunched, dark-clothed figure silhouetted against the roiling sky something wild and portentous, a momentary image from a vision long ago when the Rebel pilot had first been imprisoned in the Palace; when he had first flexed his mental muscles and thrown the Force against the reinforced, monofibre-threaded windows, shattering them to a thousand crazed shards. She remembered the wolf from her vision, hunched and brooding, sitting out the storm, waiting his chance...
But something else pulled at her heart and her soul now and held her to a torn, indecisive stillness. How could she - how could she betray him?
Yes, he was a wolf... but he was her wolf. He was wild and unpredictable and capricious but he was hers...
He turned, hair whipping about his face as the warm wind drove the storm past overhead, the rain trailing to drizzle now, distant shafts of brilliant sunlight lancing through the darkness.
"Mara?" he asked, uncertain, sensing the change in her, as sudden as the storm.