Under The Cover Of Darkness

Chapter One

The lock on the cell door shunted into place with a dull, clanking thud. With a sigh, Luke put his hands down and relaxed the surrender posture he'd been forced to hold against the back of the cell, the ridge of the bench digging into the backs of his knees. He could feel the metal beneath him humming in time with the engines of the ship, the vibration just quiet enough to avoid being uncomfortable.

"So what're ya gonna do now?" Volyn, the bounty hunter, scoffed, her eyebrow raised and her body reclined on the bench of the opposite cell. Her frame was taut with muscle and danger. "Moralize at us?"

Their captor's reply, however, remained completely smooth. "You'll be interrogated and brought to trial at the Temple. And we'll see what we can sort out here in the meantime.

Volyn—only Volyn, no last name, rumor was she had blacked out an entire continent just to destroy the records of her original life—only scoffed again, but the nameless Inquisitor slammed up against the bars. "We'll never give you anything," he hissed, his eyes narrow and nostrils flaring.

Luke forced himself not to roll his eyes. However much the Inquisitor's melodrama tempted him, he was a bit busy pretending the Force binders had rendered him too incoherent to say anything.

He was also a bit busy thanking the Force they'd locked him up with the sabotaged binders Mara had discarded at his feet, rather than using their own.

Mara herself was not so lucky.

"Well, I suppose we'll see," their captor said, one hand slowly stroking his beard, his lightsaber glinting on his belt.

Because, somehow, they had been captured by Jedi. Impossible Jedi—

Luke took the distraction to shore up his shields and quietly, oh so quietly, reach down along his bond with his wife.

Luke, he immediately heard, her mental voice tense and determined. You okay?

He nodded ever so slightly, then raised the eyebrow most angled toward her in a silent question. Neighboring cells didn't make for the most inconspicuous angles of addressing each other, but then again, the past ten days, they'd had it harder.

Except that the past ten days, they'd both had the Force.

Luke kept his eye fixed on the bantering Jedi and bounty hunter. With Mara in real binders, he could still hear her, but only by delving in and picking up surface thoughts as he would with a non-sensitive. With the bond blocked on her end, she wouldn't be able to hear him back, although she was trained enough to feel his mental presence even without the Force.

I'm okay, he heard next. Not thrilled, this was thought with the mental equivalent of a grimace, though her expression didn't change. But I'm unharmed.

Luke felt his shoulders un-tense ever so slightly. Good, he thought, but she couldn't hear, so the thought was nearly interrupted—

I want to stay undercover, the thought came. I know what they said, I know what you think might be going on, but there are too many variables. There was a fast, flitting sense of potential deceptions, of who might have jumped times, of the other prisoners, of what would happen after, of the kidnapped children they were desperately trying to rescue. But I won't ask you to stay undercover with me. I know how hard it would be for you to stay undercover as a Sith in the Jedi Temple.

Luke caught an undertone of Especially if... He didn't follow the trailing thought. He was trying not to think too hard about it himself, because what if—

He couldn't think about that.

Trying to keep his motions as confined as possible, he casually shifted positions so his real hand was draped off the edge of his thigh, visible to Mara but not the others. He put up one finger, nodded minutely, then put up a second and nodded again. Yes to both.

Not that it would be fun. But if the bounty hunter and Inquisitor realized that he had been faking his Fall, the only remaining conclusions were that Mara knew, or that she was too incompetent to notice. And Mara Jade was anything but incompetent.

The next sound he heard was a slow, throaty chuckle. Eerie and malicious, it built in volume until the Jedi and the bounty hunter stopped talking, until even the Inquisitor had turned to look. Mara's head was leaned back against the wall of the cell, one leg propped up on the bench and her elbow resting on top of it as she lounged, seemingly not a care in the world, even as her eyes screamed a desire for violence.

Finally, the laugh came to an end. "Please," she drawled. "As if you could hold us."

"Oh, I don't know," said the man who had claimed to be General Obi-Wan Kenobi. "You seem to be pretty held at the moment."

For all the Inquisitor was the one who actually went around murdering innocent civilians, Mara made him look like a child throwing a tantrum. All eyes were on the former Hand as she tilted her head back just an inch and smirked. "For now."

The Jedi narrowed his eyes, but Volyn spoke first, her lips edging into a smirk. "My dear fellow prisoner isn't wrong, you know. Isn't your acclaimed Jedi Temple just a hut in a field somewhere? I doubt you even have holding cells. Not to mention," her smirk widened as she jerked her thumb forward, "we've got him."

Luke slumped a little bit further against the wall and tried to look as dazed as possible. He gave what was intended to sound like a confused moan.

The Jedi just raised an eyebrow. "You know, I do find it unlikely that out of three Force users, you're the only one so drastically inhibited. Not that I'm sure how you're supposed to put the Temple at a disadvantage, but you can stop pretending."

The Inquisitor slammed his fists against the door of his cell again. "Pathetic. I congratulate you on not visibly panicking, but surely you're not so stupid as to—"

Fuck. Time to commit, or time to wait and watch their captor's reaction?

"—not notice that you've captured Luke Skywalker, whom we've managed to Turn—"

"I'm sorry, who?" Maybe-Obi-Wan's look could possibly have been drier, but Luke kind of doubted it. But having known Obi-Wan as an old man, however briefly, let him see the quickest flash of what looked like surprise.

Well, time for his best evil, corrupted Sith impression, because somehow all of the kneeling at Mara's feet as she pretended to be evil had never quite convinced the bounty hunter.

Which—fuck him—they needed to change.

Luke thought of his anger on behalf of the kidnapped children—Force sensitive children kidnapped from his Praxeum, his responsibility to save from Volyn and the Inquisitor's people, by admittedly desperate means—and let his emotions fuel his expression. He didn't let the negative emotions control him, hardly let them touch him at all, only channeled them into the angle of his growing smirk.

"Luke Skywalker," he said, projecting as much malice as he could manage. "What, haven't you heard of me?"