Work Text:
Luke spits blood. There’s an armoured hand grasping his hair, yanking his head back to the sky.
“Get off him – ” Uncle Owen starts, but there’s the thick, meaty sound of someone being punched, a grunt, and he doesn’t continue. Beside Luke, Aunt Beru’s breathing heavily, and he can feel her worried gaze on him.
“We,” one of the stormtroopers says dryly, “don’t have to do anything you say at all.”
“And I strongly advise you to – ” Luke tunes out when another fist slams into his temple, and he chokes on air. Uncle Owen must have said something the troopers didn’t like, probably interwoven with swear words, but the blows sound harder than they did before, and Luke has a feeling at the back of his mind that Uncle Owen won’t try to speak again. His knees sink deeper into the blood-spotted sand, and then it’s silent.
“Did you or did you not recently buy Imperial droids?” the officer demands, tapping the barrel of his blaster to the palm of his hand. “And I want you to think very carefully about this question before you answer.”
Uncle Owen carefully wipes his bloodied nose on the shoulder of his tunic, and stares at the officer with the kind of look that had always made Luke quiver in his boots as a small child. “We bought droids from the Jawas yesterday. Didn’t know they were Imperial.”
“Unfortunate,” the officer continues with a nasty curl to his lip. “If you’d known they were stolen, and had reported it, you wouldn’t be arrested for theft.”
“Theft?” Beru lies. “We’d barely touched them! We hadn’t even had them cleaned up, that was set for this afternoon. We’d’ve reported the theft if we’d found any evidence on them suggesting that!”
Luke absently thinks of how good it is that Obi-Wan has the droids, and not them. The princess will surely be rescued. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll get out of this and –
“And where,” the officer asks coldly, “are these droids now?”
Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen don’t say anything. And then –
“They’re gone,” Luke says. The trooper with a hold on his hair pulls his head up to look the officer in the eye.
He has cold eyes. Cold as his voice.
“And what exactly do you mean by ‘gone’?”
Luke licks his split lip, and tries to continue. “The small one, the astromech, ran off last night. We didn’t go out to find him; worried about the Tuskens. I went this morning with the protocol droid to find him.”
“And did you?” The hand in his hair twists.
Luke shakes his head, or tries to, at least. “No.”
“Then where is the protocol droid?”
He swallows. There’s no saliva in his mouth, just blood. It goes down his throat all sticky, making it hard to croak out the words. “I got jumped by Tuskens. They knocked me out and smashed the droid up. I don’t know what happened to the astromech. Prob’ly the same.” He dug his hand into his pocket and produced a small handful of wires that he kept in there for spare parts. “I picked up a few bits of it, but that’s really all I could find.”
The trooper looks down at him, his expression suddenly unreadable. “So,” he begins again after a long silence. “You mean to tell me that you purchased stolen droids, carrying valuable information, and you just … lost them?”
“Yes,” Uncle Owen agrees, and Luke dares to look at him. He has a black eye swelling, but defiance burning in his eyes that makes him look far, far younger than he ever had. He looks back at Luke, with no blame or anger towards his nephew, and Luke feels his throat close over and his eyes burn.
“That’s … very unfortunate,” the leader says. And the troopers all pull out their blasters, and Luke closes his eyes.