Chapter Text
They leave after dusk, when the evening sky is streaked with lavender and the wind is only a warm brush on the back of Luke’s hand.
He’s blindfolded as he’s lead out—a compromise, he’s told, after the Mando spent the entire day arguing for leave to take him away—and is only allowed to remove it when they’re miles away on a speeder, his arms clasped around the Mandalorian.
The window grows from cool to cold as the speeder eats away the miles. Luke can adjust his body temperature, but only by so much and only for so long, and the speeder doesn’t shake enough for his shivers to be excused.
They stop, and Luke’s brow furrows in confusion until the Mandalorian pulls a cloak out of the back of the speeder and hands it to him without a word.
“I can drive,” Luke offers, the cloak settling against him like a second skin as he folds it around himself.
The Mandalorian nods, and when they set off, Luke can feel the vambraces pressed against his ribs, the chest plate pressed to his back.
The moons rise, and under them, the dunes turn from grey to a luminous silver, as if the depths of Tatooine were nothing more than light incarnate and there, under the moons, it had finally begun to find its way out.
The Mandalorian doesn’t suggest they stop, and neither does Luke, even as the moons finish rising and fall back under the horizon, turning the desert to charcoal and slate.
In the darkness, the stars are clear above him, each constellation a name he could call out blind. A’aleiar’s jug, pouring into her oasis, the lesser bantha drinking from its waters, Lukheva standing over, letting the bantha stand in her shadow.
Luke has seen those stars up close, touched the earth of the system that makes up Lukheva’s belt buckle, floated in front of a drop from A’aleiar’s jug. Now they are small enough to be plucked from the sky.
He almost likes them better that way.
He spots the furthest generators—the weak ones that make more of a fence than a true shield—just before first light. The sight draws him up short, the vaporators in the distance growing larger and clearer as his heart rises into his throat.
He half-expected them to be covered in sand by now, abandoned to the desert as their repeller fields fell apart. They’d take longer to be covered by the sand than the ruins of the house, which was mostly underground already, but not too long. The sands devour anything, given enough time.
The sight of them, scratched and dented, draws out a terrible ache in his chest. It could be any night—Luke going out late and getting back later, the vaporators chugging along in a promise that he’ll be out working on them within an hour or two—only Luke’s right hand is covered in a leather glove, and there is a Mandalorian at his back.
Time has passed, so much heavier than the hours whiled away stealing secondhand kisses from the mouths of beer bottles and firsthand kisses from anyone who could get him to sit still. Time has passed, and if his uncle were to appear right that instant and tell him to fix the vaporator that’s screeching like a canyon krayt, Luke’s fingers would not remember how to slip between the wires.
This is not his life anymore. There is nothing for him here—only death, and pain.
Luke breathes out, and forges on, waiting for the sand to turn black with ash, become streaked with the last remnants of his old life.
The sand turns golden instead.
There is lamplight streaked across the dunes, thrown in the shapes of small windows of light in the midst of an ocean of grey. There is lamplight, and there are windows through which it streams, and there is a house for the windows, squat and domed, built into the ground.
It is the homestead, half-rebuilt, half-restructured, but it is the homestead. It is his house. And someone has kept it from the desert—from the inexorable march of time. Someone has kept it, and lived in it, and it is not gone.
Luke brings the speeder to a slow stop a hundred meters from the door and steps off it as watches someone pass in front of the window, blotting out the light for a brief second. Something slots into place, his bones aching with the truth of it.
He has forgotten the first rule of Tatooine. Before survival, before strength, before anything, there is one law, one truth: there is nothing that does not shift, no path that does not change.
The homestead he left was in ashes, his life burned down around him, and it has stayed that way in his mind for almost ten years. The home was gone, so the house followed, his old life smoking ruins.
But—it is not buried beneath the sands, not scoured and broken and disappeared. It is someone else’s now. His home is gone, but not lost, not broken, not irreparable.
Luke feels his armor crack, and split. There is a vise on his chest that he does not remember a life without loosening, and with it comes the first cracked sob.
It is foolish to waste water in the desert. No native would be so stupid as that.
Luke doesn’t care.
He can feel his body breaking apart beneath him, bones and tendons splitting as his lungs contract, too full to know where to go. He can feel his body breaking beneath him, can feel himself sinking down into the sands, and then he isn’t. There is someone holding him up, armor pressed to his chest and around his ribs, and he still can’t remember how to breathe but at least he’s not shattering under the impact.
Luke knows how to face grief. Grief is familiar. He knows the way it tears into his chest, rips out his ribs and then his vital organs and leaves him gasping for breath on the floor. This is not grief—not for anything Luke can name—but neither is it relief, or joy, or regret, or shame, or sorrow, or anything else. This is something that steals his lungs, and gives him back the ability to breathe.
It hurts to breathe in. But he’s breathing.
The Mandalorian still holds him, Luke’s breath coming steadier with each passing moment. The man is near-motionless against him, but he shifts when Luke does, muscles tensing and untensing to adjust. He is alive, and Luke is alive, and it is almost too much to bear.
“Thank you,” Luke says into the place where the Mandalorian’s helmet meets his shoulders, because he has to, because he can feel the man’s mind thrumming against his, can feel sorrow and kindness and that strange split beginning to knit itself together, can feel the way the currents have shifted once again, can feel the way the river of time froths at their intersection before turning clear and placid downstream, “thank you—”
He means to say Mando’s name here, wants to name him and call him and let him claim the connection, but he stutters. He doesn’t know the Mando’s name, doesn’t know why he hasn’t been told, doesn’t even know if there’s no reason at all.
There is a reason, the secret part of Luke’s brain whispers, there must be . Luke can feel the place where the Mando’s mind should be beating against his, can feel where they’re supposed to mingle, to become greater than two but not quite one, and he knows, knows that bonds like that may be forged in grief and anguish, but they cannot stay that way. He and the Mandalorian are more than that—are more than hopelessness, more than fear.
“Din,” the Mando says. “My name is Din,” and Luke feels the thrum of his mind a little closer, a little stronger, and thinks Oh, you feel it too.
The room feels quieter when they get back, for all that it’s unchanged.
They stayed in Anchorhead the day of the visit, spending the long, hot hours inside, sleeping. Luke had woken once to see Din asleep, curled up on the bed across from him. His face had been covered by a spare blanket, but his armor was piled on the floor between them, and the image of his hands, glowing a soft yellow-orange in the indirect sunlight had stayed in Luke’s mind long after he’d turned over and forced himself to close his eyes.
Now the light of the moons shines directly through the small room, the single, small bed still taking up half of it, but the energy thrumming under Luke’s skin, the roar of Tatooine, Tatooine, Tatooine in his veins is dissipated. He will see Clio again soon—he knows it. The waiting settles against him, and he lets it sink in.
Neither of them are tired, the long ride back not enough to diminish the effects of the long rest during the day. Luke can feel Din’s alertness, despite the fact that neither of them have moved.
“Want to spar?” He offers. Mandalorians are supposed to be into that sort of thing, and besides—he hasn’t had a decent spar in too long.
There’s a long moment where Din stays still—or maybe it just feels long to Luke—before he nods and gets up, leading them to the same courtyard as he had that first night.
The stars are already beginning to fade in the east, grey filtering up and turning A’aleiar’s train hazy, though Lukheva still stands bright and proud. Luke breathes in, lets the cool night air scorch his lungs and turns to Din.
Before they start, before either of them move, there’s a long moment where both of them freeze, unsure of how to adjust their bodies to the other. Were this a real fight, Luke would throw Din against the wall and be done with it. Were this a real fight, he’d have his saber in his hand. Were this a real fight, Din would have already tried to shoot him in the head.
Instead, Din unbuckles his blaster and places it carefully to the side, and does something complicated to his vambraces as well.
Flamethrowers, Luke remembers, and that alone would have been enough to make him glad Din is on his side.
There’s another moment of stillness, then Luke bites the bullet and swings.
He can feel Din block before it happens, can feel time bend itself into a single current as Din makes his decision. The physical impact comes a second later, impact jarring all the way up Luke’s mechanical hand and into his arm as his fist strikes beskar.
Din swings back with his other hand, and Luke can feel it coming before it does, feel the way Din’s action tangles with Luke’s mind, Luke’s future, before anything changes. There’s a headiness to the feeling—every movement twisting another part of the current around them, threading them into a single stream, clear and fast-flowing.
Din alters the movement just as Luke shifts to avoid it, pulling their future together in a new way, and Luke nearly laughs with sheer giddiness. He can feel Din in his mind, reaching through the place they’re tangled, and reaching into the Force, touching and moving each strand without thinking.
Wonder floods Luke’s mind. Whatever Din can feel of what he’s doing—whatever he knows of it—it’s bright, a joy so clear and sharp it’s barely joy.
Luke does laugh then, and floods the bond on his own end, chasing through their connection to the edges of Din’s mind, bringing the Force closer.
Touch, he might say, and it would mean nothing in comparison to what he’s doing.
They move faster, limbs a blur as they move and move again, shifting three, four, five moves in advance as each counters the other. They are in each other’s minds now, in each other’s futures, and every choice offers a thousand more.
Din is pressed flush to him, in mind and body, and Luke doesn’t believe in fate—can’t, not when he can feel the spread of time tumbling beneath him—but if he could, if he could trust for a minute that there was only one destiny, true and certain, he would believe it would be him and Din.
Luke twists, one hundred versions of them twisting with him, pushing them downwards. He can feel the split in Din as easily as he can feel Din’s ribcage under his hands, the terrible aching wound pressed against his mind.
And he can feel it knit together a little more.
There’s one shining moment where the universe stills, where the push and pull of their choices balances out and their futures settle—one shining moment where he can feel Din, and he is almost certain that Din can feel him too.
“I yield,” Din says, rough and soft and slow and like it means a hundred things that there aren’t words for in any language.
Luke lets out a breath, not wanting to disturb the equilibrium, that perfect stretch of space where time becomes placid and still, but overhead the sky has turned rosy with the dawn, and even Lukheva is melting in the warming sky.
“Thank you,” Luke says, and moves, letting ripples cloud the clear water. Thank you, he says, and he means every word.
Luke watches Din wake, feeling the slippery, dreamlike nature of the man at the other end of their bond solidify against him, crystallizing until it’s strong and solid and rough. Luke doesn’t know how he’d put it into words if he had to— it’s not things slipping into place, not things finding where they’re meant to be, because they’re already there. It’s... finding a new way to be, an ongoing metamorphosis, tied to the rhythms of their lives, a thousand little adjustments in the day to day so that they fit together as each of them changes.
It’s strange and wonderful and unique, this new type of being— existing with someone, not just being connected to them. A part of Luke wonders if it would be possible with anyone else, if this is a quirk of Din and his unshakable self, if somehow, he fits together with Luke in a way everyone else cannot.
When he was small, Luke had seen an image of a box that fit together with no nuts and bolts, the joints sliding into each other and staying, perfectly molded together. Perhaps, this is how Din fits with him— not his mirror, but a corresponding part.
Din shifts in the afternoon light, filtered sunlight bouncing off his helmet, and Luke pokes at him through their bond, seeing what Din will do.
Din fixes him with a puzzled silence, and there’s a breath, another twist that means another change, but his com beeps before the current changes.
“He’s here,” comes a voice with a crackle, and Luke reaches out, searches for that familiar glimmer in the Force that means Han’s arrived, and finds it just outside.
“Let’s go,” Luke says, and stands up.
The Mandalorian gives him a strange look, like he has been thrown off course again, but adjusts in seconds, lets the reality of it overwhelm the shoulds and stands up.
He’s lead out through a side door—a tiny metal hole of a thing that even Luke has to duck through, and when he gets out, when he sees the circular stretch of the wall, and moreover when he sees who is waiting—everything clicks into place.
“Boba Fett,” Luke says, because it is Boba Fett who is standing between him and Han, between him and the children, but it is also Boba Fett who housed and fed and clothed him all these days.
“Skywalker,” Fett returns, even and dangerous, and on his belt is Luke’s lightsaber.
Luke almost doesn’t wait for permission, hand twitching to summon his lightsaber to him, but if Fett wanted him dead, wanted him to suffer, he would have done it already.
“You have something of mine.”
He can sense rather than see the flat, not-quite-murderous stare. “What’s to stop me from keeping it?”
Luke very deliberately doesn’t raise an eyebrow. “Nothing, of course.” And it’s almost true, because he is standing between Luke and the children and Luke would give Boba Fett one thousand sabers if it meant they all walked out of this safe, but Han still has the Falcon running and it wouldn’t take more than a thought for Luke to summon it when he’s nearly all the way up the ramp.
“Take it,” Fett says instead, and Luke’s not sure if they were imagining the exact same scenario, but it must be close.
The saber flies into his hand, neat and still, and Luke tucks it away.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he says, and means it.
“Thank you,” he repeats, softer, turning to Din, and he reaches out with his mind too, to untangle them, to say goodbye (to tell him about Yavin, to give him the star charts, to fill his head so thickly with the scent of the purple clusters of flowers that he cannot rest until he finds their source).
Instead, a torrent of emotion swamps him, poisons his veins and makes his lungs sick with feeling, full and shriveled and broken and bound. All at once, the rush of relief, pure and sweet, that had filled him when he sensed Clio, is washed away.
He reaches in to—to do something, to quiet the storm, to pull it apart until they can breathe again, until he can touch without feeling as though his very being is eroding under the onslaught. He reaches in, and is rebuffed. He reaches in and the howl of feeling pushes him out again, keeps him from touching, from helping.
But worst of all, beneath the hurricane, he can feel a tearing, a ripping of everything that had been reknit, and Din splits in two—and their bond with it.
When Luke built it, threaded it through himself as scaffolding, he’d made it easy to pull out—a painless operation.
It’s not painless now.
Din slips out of his mind with ease—and that, at least, doesn’t hurt—but in his place he leaves a nothing, an absence so thick it’s tangible, a void that pulls at Luke’s mind from the inside.
Luke claws out automatically, the pain radiating out from his center, but Din doesn’t pause in his exit—doesn’t even feel him under the storm—and Luke is left tearing at a retreating wall as the void grows.
“Goodbye,” Din manages, and it is managing, because Luke can feel how he’s barely breathing, can feel it all, centered around them and—there is nothing he can do.
“Goodbye,” Luke chokes out.
He walks up the ramp, leaving a storm behind him, and forces a wall down on the bond.
He takes a detour before Yavin, bullies Han into giving up the controls and sets a course straight across the galaxy, almost into the unknown regions.
Ahsoka showed him the way to Ilum, once, right after Endor. He’d thought at the time that it was her way of telling him he didn’t have to keep the saber he’d cobbled together from spare parts and the green crystal in Ben’s house, hidden under the floorboards but singing so strongly of life and growing things that Luke had known where to find it before he’d opened the door. Now, he wonders if she’d seen this coming all along—if she’d known he’d need to show someone else the way.
It’s freezing when they land, an icy wasteland wrapped in permafrost, but Luke can feel the kyber at the planet’s core, a steady melody that reverberates through his bones and envelops his lungs.
They’re at the doors when Clio feels it too, her gasp freezing to ice crystals in the air. She looks back towards the ship, where Han and the rest of the kids are hiding from the air.
“Do they—”
Luke shakes his head. “They will. When they’re older.” He turns back to the doors. “Ready?”
Clio stares at the stretch of white blocking their path, streaks of the black metal the Empire had installed peeking through the layers of ice. She lets out a breath. “Yes.”
Luke reaches towards her in the Force and she does the same, shields parting, unweaving themselves from their intricate patterns to bind a thousand threads to Luke’s.
The doors don’t ring in the Force, not like the kyber beneath their feet, chanting, calling to them, come, children—come and seek me out. Luke lets it drift over him, skating over the surface of his shields. Instead, he and Clio push, delve further in, calling to each atom in the doors, the long chains reverberating, their crystalline structures holding out just enough for them to pull, and have the doors creak open.
When Ahsoka had told him of the first chamber on their way to Ilum, she’d described an immense open space with vaulted ceilings of ice and a waterfall frozen in motion.
There’s nothing like that now, just the blue-grey of old imperial mining equipment covered in ice and two pairs of footsteps echoing in the horrible dark chasm of a room.
Still, underneath it all is the kyber—not unscathed, but not irreparably damaged.
Luke breathes out. He knows what he has to do—has known what he has to do since they set out for Ilum—and Clio knows too.
“Ready?”
Clio mirrors Luke, breathing out until the tension melts from her limbs and is replaced with steady determination. “I’m ready.”
Luke watches her walk away into the gloom, following the call of the kyber at the planet’s core until her footsteps fade into nothing.
He finds a vantage point atop one of the old lifts, abandoned after the destruction of the second death star. It creaks underneath him menacingly but doesn’t give, so Luke sits cross-legged and tries to meditate.
With the kyber tugging at his bones, it’s almost like Yavin—the same heavy cloying peace worming its way into him. Luke’s mouth creases as he forces himself to do nothing, to let himself drift deeper into the Force—to let the planet weave its way into himself.
It works. The peace settles over him, still too-heavy and ill-fitting, but not smothering him. In return, he is allowed to drift—to do what he has not done since Dagobah, and let the Force take him where it wills.
It takes him to Din.
Their bond is still dust, less than dust—more a memory of a memory, a space where there was once a space where something once was, and yet in the darkness and the stillness, the howl of the wind outside dimmed by the intractable thrum of the kyber in his limbs, Luke finds him from half a galaxy away.
Oh, Luke thinks, brushing over his mind, hello there.
And Din—Din brushes back.
Luke pauses, the slow spread of his consciousness in the Force stilled as he tries to process, to align with the horrible storm, the terrible rending, with this, with Din reaching back.
He reaches out again—tentatively, this time—and leaves a thread of his presence there, wrapped around Din’s outer walls.
There’s a moment where Din stills too, and then he swamps Luke, every fiber of his being pulling Luke in. That’s when it starts. So quickly Luke can’t even feel it coming on, an ache grows in his chest, dull and sharp and achingly, achingly empty.
Luke knows what it is—it’s thousand iterations that swirl in clearings filled with untouched snow, in huge rocky gorges too dry and cold for anything to touch, in the sands of Tatooine’s equator, burning with heat and radiation so intense no living thing has touched it in one million years.
Loneliness, sharp as one thousand needles, heavy as one thousand worlds.
Din is lonely.
Luke thinks back to the very first split—to the lightcruiser, grey and dead, with the stars on all sides, and the tear that had formed in the man as love ripped him apart. He hadn’t been close enough to feel the storm then, but now—now, with his mind half-void, half emptiness that screams for Din’s presence—he can. Now, he cannot bear it.
Come with me, he offers, begs, pleads. Come back. Do not tear yourself apart.
(I could not stand to watch you do it.)
Come, he offers, and feeds Din the scent of the purple blossoms in the air, the great orange giant of Yavin prime hanging in the sky, the temple with the jungle creeping up the sides and its still pool of the Force. Come.
Clio emerges with a piece of kyber that burns like blue fire and rings in tandem with Luke’s, the guilt that’s been constant since Tatooine melted from her black eyes. When they finish her saber, she takes an opening stance, facing Luke, and he guides her through the first movements of the very first kata he’d ever learned, the Force deepens around them, crystallizing.
It’s summer by the time they return, and the temple is covered in bright clusters of purple flowers, the vines crawling up the sides turned a deep emerald. Yavin Prime hangs in the sky at night, a glowing orange globe blocking out half the sky, and some nights Luke takes the kids up to the very top of the temple and they all lie on their backs, watching storms of white gas drift across the its surface.
Luke waits as summer waxes, the weather growing hotter and hotter until the humidity breaks, and storms wash across the face of the planet for a week straight. Han leaves when the weather clears, the sky a bright blue as the Falcon disappears into the atmosphere. In the afternoons, the kids sit on the grass outside, stretching out languidly as they breathe in the scent of growing things.
Summer starts to wane as Clio begins learning the second kata, her movements smoothing every day, radiating out into the deepening pool of the Force. Jirii and Mira-ki watch her in the mornings, beginning to mimic her open handed, and Luke starts thinking about a second visit to Ilum as he continues to wait.
The first chill of autumn is in the air, the coolness of it turning Luke’s mouth to liquid gold, when the ship appears in the sky.
He knows who it is before they land. The river of the Force swirls around the two of them, the divide between them narrowing as the currents finally, finally intertwine. Luke can feel the moments it finally melds, the final twist pulling itself taut, and lets the feeling drift through him, settling in his bones, even as he runs to the pavement in front of the temple.
Din’s armor is glinting under the morning sun as he turns around, and they’re not connected—not anymore—but Luke can feel the terror-hope-joy rising up in him
“Hey,” Luke says, breathless, and it’s only partially because of the run. “You came.”
“You asked me to,” Din says, and it’s an epiphany as much as it’s a promise. Of course I came. You asked me to.
Luke smiles, easy as anything. “Come on, Grogu’s gonna want to see you.”
Din freezes, like he can’t bear hope for breathing, and Luke offers his hand.
Din takes it.
Summer turns to autumn, and the temple grows colder. The skies alternate between bright blue and slate, the clouds flying across the sky in swirling patterns under the compulsion of the winds. Some mornings, Luke wakes up with his toes having gone numb. Others, he wakes with Grogu curled into his chest, and Din asleep in the chair by the window, an extra blanket over his feet.
Din is good with the kids—good at sending them off on quests and scavenger hunts and setting them to work on other strange, incomprehensible games and good getting them to sit down and do the coursework Luke pulls from old schooling modules and teaching droids. He’s good at getting them into bed at night, too, leaving him and Luke alone in the kitchen with the velvet darkness creeping in around them as mugs of tea steam invisibly in front of their hands.
Time slips on, and frost begins to creep up the sides of the temple in the mornings. It spreads out in delicate sparkling fractals, each morning staying a little longer under the light of the rising sun.
Luke finds Din in the main hall one of those mornings, when the cold has clouded over the shine on his armor and the wind outside whistles against the ancient stone.
He can feel what’s happening before he speaks, before either of them open their mouths—feel the river splitting again, pulling each of them in different directions.
“You’re leaving,” Luke says, and he can’t help the shock reverberating through him nor the quiet horror flooding his tone.
Din turns in surprise, guilt coloring his every action. “I am.”
“Why?” There is a catch in Luke’s voice he can’t disguise.
Din is silent, but the currents shift around him once again, frothing in their turmoil, unable to straighten out. “This isn’t—my place. I don’t—fit.”
Luke can feel the tear in Din, the seam that threatens to pull apart, to split him in half once again. And he can feel the river frothing too—futures crashing against each other and breaking apart over and over and over again, the future brought to a standstill by a decision not yet made, a fate not yet carried out.
Din doesn’t want to go. Luke doesn’t want him to.
Luke steps forward and presses his hand to the mudhorn on Din’s pauldron. “Stay,” he says. “I want you to stay.”
He reaches out, then, slashes through the edges of his own shields and lets the pieces come loose, the threads weaving together again around Din, pulling at the corners of his mind, begging him to listen.
Stay, Luke says, and he means Grogu needs you and I need you and You need this too.
Stay, he says, and he means Please, for as long as you can and You do not have to tear yourself apart and This could be your home too—I could make it one for you.
Stay, he says, and he means just that.
The river freezes, stilling for one infinite moment, the future and the past and the present caught in motion.
Din turns back, and the river falls back, twisting into one long, silver string, stretching out further than Luke can reach as it wraps around them, pressing them so close no current can run between.
“Oh,” Din breathes, hand reaching up to cup Luke’s cheek.
“Stay,” Luke repeats.
Din nods, and the bond crystallizes between them, hard and shining as diamond. Luke can feel it in the Force—the low, steady thrum of Din’s mind against his own.
Feel me, he pleads, and rips open his shields, the bond crystallizing through him, until Din can see into his very center. “Feel me,” he repeats out loud. “I’m here.”
“Oh,” Din breathes again, an endless beat of love.
Din leans in, pressing his helmet to Luke’s forehead, and Luke knows that he is home.