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“Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss:
Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scoped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite
But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.”
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 90
When Luke comes back from Dagobah and Bespin, he very nearly gets court-martialled three times. All three times, he’s saved by a superior officer looking in his eyes and then backing away nervously.
It’s getting old real fast.
The first time, just after they re-join the rebel fleet, Leia and Lando board the Home One with him in tow. Mon Mothma waits for them in the hangar.
“Princess! We’re so relieved to have you back!”
Her gaze falls on Lando, who gives her a charming smile. Chewie yells something Luke can now understand as a greeting. And then, Mon Mothma recognises the tired, worn out figure trailing behind them.
“Lieutenant Skywalker!” Her face falls. “I’m… I’m going to have to report this.”
She looks at Leia hesitantly, as if expecting protestations. When none follow, she addresses Luke.
“If you would follow me?”
She’s going to arrest him, Luke realises, and it seems almost comical to him. She’s going to arrest him for deserting.
Leia looks at Luke and then back at Mon Mothma. Of course, Leia doesn’t know he didn’t re-join the rebel fleet at the rendezvous-point, and how could he explain it now? Dagobah seems far away, like a bad dream. This is the grim reality: Just the Alliance, badly decimated, with worn-down spaceships, tired soldiers, grime and dirt. No old Jedi Masters, no Force. His destiny is of little importance here. More than that: It is selfish.
“It’s alright,” he says to Leia.
“No, it’s not,” Leia says, “He needs medical attention. He lost his hand!”
It’s a testament to Mon Mothma’s battle experience that she doesn’t flinch. Still, she gives Luke a second look-over, and when her eyes find his, she blanches.
Luke wonders what she sees in his eyes. He wonders what he looks like after weeks in a swamp and the fight over Bespin, losing his hand and losing Han. He feels like he hasn’t slept since before the battle of Hoth. He lowers his gaze self-consciously.
“Alright,” she says, “But you are not to leave sickbay until you’ve been interrogated. Alliance command wants a full debrief.”
The second time is just after Chewie and Lando leave.
Luke has his hand replaced with a mechanical one, and it almost doesn’t feel strange. The med-droids give him an array of painkillers and an appointment with a psychologist to work through the trauma of losing a limb. They don’t know that’s really not the worst trauma he is wrestling with right now.
It is after the surgery that Commander Willard comes to interrogate him.
“You do realise your disappearance will have consequences,” the Commander says, and Luke can only nod. He’s too tired. He hasn’t really slept since he left Dagobah. Despite the bacta and the painkillers, his wound is still throbbing. And Darth Vader, thirty-six hours after the confrontation over Bespin, is still his father.
“I know, Commander. I apologise.”
Some part of Luke wants them to demote him all the way down to maintenance so he’ll never have to face Vader again. He doesn’t think he can. He can’t go back to Dagobah, either. He failed both Yoda and his friends.
“Lieutenant Skywalker, why did you fail to rendezvous with the rest of the Alliance fleet at the agreed time and place?”
Luke thinks of visions in the snow, of Ben and of Yoda, and of Yoda’s warnings not to leave before his training was completed.
“I have no explanation, Sir,” Luke says.
Willard, despite his age and experience, has never dealt with a Jedi before, and it shows. He wants to give Luke a stern look, to force and explanation out of him, but as soon as he meets Luke’s eyes, he has to look away.
“Where’s your lightsaber, son?” Willard asks.
“I lost it,” Luke answers, “Along with my hand.”
Willard’s gaze falls on Luke’s right hand. The exoskin does a marvellous job of giving it the appearance of a real hand, but there is a faint whirring noise underneath. Luke tries to hold the hand very still but does not succeed.
Willard doesn’t state the obvious – that only a wound inflicted by a lightsaber could cut and cauterise at the same time, allowing Luke to survive – but he must come to the conclusion nonetheless.
“I understand you knew how to use it quite well,” Willard says.
“Master Kenobi taught me what he could before he was killed. I’ve been teaching myself since.”
Ben… Luke used to miss him. Now, after Bespin, Luke isn’t sure how he feels about him – after all, he warned Luke of going, but he also would have let Luke’s friends die if that had ensured the survival of the Jedi. And Luke doesn’t believe that anyone is expendable.
“We could let you off with a warning this time, Skywalker, and file your unexplained absence under Jedi business.”
Commander Willard closes his eyes for a long moment, then sighs. He must feel like he’s letting Luke off the hook. Luke would really much rather receive the punishment he deserves.
“We cannot give you back command of Rogue squadron. That is out of the question.”
Well, speaking of punishment. That one hurts, Luke is not going to lie, because he hasn’t even thought about Wedge and the rest of the squad yet. He doesn’t even know if Wedge is still alive.
“The Admiral will be here later,” Willard says, getting up, “He’ll inform you of Mon Mothma’s decision.”
Unsurprisingly, Admiral Ackbar wants to court-martial him.
“Most irregular,” the Mon Calamari admiral mutters, “Most irregular! Absent from the fleet for this period of time! And no explanation!”
Luke got some sleep, but all his dreams are visions now. He saw the swamp again, saw the cave, and despite Yoda’s warnings, he took the belt with his weapons. He faced Vader, cut off his head, but when the mask melted away this time, it revealed Leia’s face.
“I apologise, Admiral,” Luke says, repeating the words he said to Commander Willard earlier.
For a second, it seems as if Ackbar is going to give him a dressing-down for that – he takes a deep breath, turns to face Luke… and stops.
“What happened to you, Skywalker?” he asks. Clearly, he is not used to feeling sympathy for deserters, no matter how horrifying their fate.
None of his superior officers have dealt with a Jedi before, Luke thinks wryly. He doesn’t want this, he wants out of the fight, but he also has a responsibility. It’s like Luke has been catapulted out of the Alliance command structures, like his time on Dagobah has made him an outcast. A creature of the swamp.
No.
A creature of the cave.
“Jedi business,” Luke says.
Ackbar snorts. “Commander Willard told me as much. You know what Mon Mothma said to that?”
Luke doesn’t know.
“He is exactly as insufferable as Kenobi,” Ackbar finishes, not waiting for Luke to reply.
“Here is our proposal, Skywalker, and you better take it, because you’re not going to get a better deal: We’ll promote you to Commander and move you away from Rogue squadron. You’ll be Jedi advisor to the Alliance from now on, but without an official command. Understood?”
It’s somehow a promotion and a demotion at the same time. They’re pushing him up high enough so that his insubordination can’t hurt him anymore, but they’re also taking away anything meaningful that comes with the rank. And they’re taking him out of the squadron.
Luke just feels empty.
“Understood.”
“Hey, Antilles!”
Wedge is climbing out of his X-Wing after a nine-hour scouting mission ahead of the fleet when Wes comes jogging into the hangar, out of breath. Wedge has never seen the man so agitated outside of his cockpit.
“What’s wrong, Wes?”
“Skywalker,” Wes says, and Wedge’s heart sinks.
For the past weeks, he has stoically refused to face the facts: That Luke Skywalker was killed in action in the aftermath of the battle of Hoth, which is unfair but also just how their life is. No pilot is promised a tomorrow. Not even a pilot that matters to Wedge in ways he can’t even speak now.
No debris of his X-Wing was found, Wedge’s best guess had been that Luke’s ship had been blasted by a Star Destroyer right as he was jumping to light speed. Still, he hasn’t called it yet. With Han and Leia disappeared, pursued by a Star Destroyer themselves, and Luke’s aunt and uncle dead, Wedge knows there really isn’t anybody to inform of Luke’s death anyway.
He climbs down from the ladder, makes sure his R2 unit will be unloaded correctly, then takes off his flight helmet and turns to face Wes. He’s had several weeks. He can do this.
“Yes?”
He’s proud of himself: his face is calm, he’s squashed down every thought of what Luke meant to him. He is facing the asteroid field of his emotions and doesn’t even think about how it’s going to tear him apart in a few seconds.
“He’s back, Wedge.”
That is the one sentence he didn’t expect. Wedge can’t process the words. Luke Skywalker was killed in action in the aftermath of the battle of Hoth. He can’t be back.
“What do you mean, he’s back?”
The words come out sounding more irritable than Wedge would have thought. He doesn’t need this, he decides, he doesn’t need the false hope or whatever this turns out to be. He’s clutching his helmet tightly in his hands, his knuckles white.
“He came in with the Princess a couple of hours ago.”
Wedge’s heart sinks further, so he decides to reach for the lifeline.
“The Princess is back?”
He can cling to that. When they’d lost track of the Falcon, they had assumed the worst, just as Wedge had privately assumed the worst about Luke.
“Apparently the Falcon lost hyperspace capability, just as we thought, but they managed to escape the Star Destroyers.”
“Thank the Force!” Wedge exclaims. There is some good in this universe, after all. “So Luke was with them all this time?”
Wes shrugs. “Nobody knows.”
“Nobody knows?” Some ugly thoughts rise in Wedge’s head. “Wes, he’s been gone for weeks! If he doesn’t have a good explanation, they’re going to demote him faster than he can say bantha poodoo. Forget that, I’m going to court-martial him myself!”
“About that…” Wes says, “I think the Admiral is in sickbay with him now.”
Wedge does a mental check of his rooster and decides he can leave the clean-up on his X-Wing for a little while. Technically, he can’t, he’s busy covering for all the pilots that died and doesn’t have Luke to share the command with anymore but this… this can’t wait.
“I’ll be back,” he says to Wes.
Ackbar is not there when Wedge gets to the sickbay, but Luke is, pale for a desert farmboy and bent over his right hand. Wedge pauses in the door for a moment, trying to compose himself. He can’t tell whether he’s feeling angry or relieved, and whether he wants to punch Luke or kiss him.
“Wedge,” Luke says without looking up. Wedge flinches in surprise.
“You better have a damn good explanation for this, Skywalker.”
They’re not the words he thought would come out but saying them feels good nevertheless. He knows that anger is a bad advisor, but he can’t take that wisdom to heart right now.
“Wedge…”
Luke looks up, and the look in his eyes is still the one he used to give Wedge – eyes wide, full of love and wonder, not yet touched by the horrors of the galaxy. But Wedge can’t bear it anymore.
“Where were you,” he demands, hands clenched tight, jaw set. He cannot move closer until he hears it out of Luke’s mouth.
“I had to go,” Luke says, “Ben…”
Wedge resents the mention of Luke’s late mentor. He doesn’t want mystical Jedi explanations. He wants the truth. He wants something that makes up for the fact that Wedge thought Luke was dead.
“Did you desert?”
“I…”
Luke looks crestfallen. Wedge notices how Luke is clutching his right wrist tightly, as if he is afraid it might fall apart if he doesn’t.
“Do you know how many pilots we lost, Luke?” Wedge steps closer, until he is facing Luke. His anger is burning in his throat, making it hard to force out words. “Do you know?”
His hands are shaking. “I thought you were one of them.”
Luke closes his eyes as if bracing himself. “I’m sorry.”
“You better be,” Wedge says coldly.
Suddenly, Luke surges up, grabs Wedge’s wrists and kisses him. It’s desperate, so desperate, but for a moment, all the anger falls away from Wedge and he is left with only the desire to map every inch of living skin on this miracle man who came back to him. Luke.
He twists his hands out of Luke’s grip, wraps one arm around Luke’s waist. The other hand finds its way into Luke’s hair. He’s still shaking, violently so, but Luke’s body is familiar, his lips warm, and Wedge can’t forgive him, but he can forget – for now.
Luke is the one to break the kiss, breathing hard.
“I love you, Wedge,” he says.
The wrong words. Wedge lets go of Luke.
“No, Luke, we’re not doing that again.”
The anger is back, but it leaves his head clear this time. Luke is a Jedi. That means he’s going to leave again, some day. Even if he loves Luke, Wedge is not sure that’s something he could bear.
Luke is about to retort something when a med-droid rolls into the room. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Lieutenant-Commander Antilles, but Commander Skywalker needs to rest now. He’s received rather stressful surgery.”
Wedge blanches. “Commander?”
Luke avoids his gaze.
“They promoted you for this?”
“Lieutenant-Commander Antilles, I really must insist…” the med-droid interrupts.
“Leave it,” Wedge says, “I’m done here.”
After all this, the Alliance somehow manages to find another cold planet as their temporal hideout.
Wedge is informed that despite Luke’s promotion, he will not return to his command post in Rogue Squadron. Instead, Wedge gets a promotion of his own, and rarely sees Luke after that. He screens new recruits, tries to make them into passable pilots, doesn’t think too hard about the empty seats at briefings.
The Millennium Falcon is gone. Word gets to Wedge that Han was kidnapped by a bounty hunter – not unexpected, Wedge knew the price on the man’s head – and word is that Chewbacca is now travelling in the company of a gas miner. If he’s anything like the miners Wedge did business with back on Corellia, it’s not really a step up for the Wookie.
When Wedge steps outside the base to get to the airfield now, he has to wrap himself up in layers and layers under his flight suit. They try to do most of the maintenance inside, but their makeshift hangar has precious little space. So sometimes they still get stuck outside with fingerless gloves and scarves wrapped around their faces, trying to fix damage from the last encounter with Imperial TIEs. The days are always too short, the nights too long, and Luke’s absence is more noticeable in the rec room now that the pilots all know he’s still alive. Sometimes Wedge sees him pass by the door, but he never stops to check in. That speaks volumes in itself.
Luke keeps at his exercises.
He didn’t think he could, in the days after his return to the fleet, but soon, he notices the absence in his life where his meditations and training used to be. Where he used to only think of the Force when he was actively using it before, he can now sense its presence constantly. He walks through the base and feels the energy, the streams connecting every living being and every living thing. He steps outside and feels life even under the frosty ground and in the forests around the base. Everything is bright. Everything is connected. Everything is so, so much.
Leia sits with him sometimes. She seems untethered now that Han is gone. Luke misses him, too, but he’s only beginning to realise just how much Han meant to Leia. How much he still means to her. The bickering was only ever a façade, he realises, of two souls who were never allowed to be soft before. He wishes they could have had more time, but vows to give it to them.
When Leia sits with him during his meditations, she watches him intently, but it never disturbs Luke. He feels her presence clearly, like a pool in winter, too full of bustling activity to be frozen, alive and sharp and clear. When Leia sits with him during his lightsaber training, she comments and gives him advice. She used to train with the Alderaanian guard and knows her way around combat styles. When Luke tries to lift objects with his mind, she tosses things at him to distract him. It improves his focus enormously.
The hours spent in training unfortunately still leave him enough time to realise that he is no longer sharing command of the Rogue squadron. Wedge had to step up quite a bit since the battle of Hoth – Leia showed Luke the loss rates of their pilots one day, and it still sits like a stone in Luke’s stomach. Luke misses Wedge, but he feels that every apology he could make would only worsen matters. After all, Wedge has reason enough to be mad at Luke. Luke just wishes Wedge would see that life is too short to hold on to those reasons sometimes.
“Lando made contact.”
Luke looks up at Leia, who just dropped her tray on the table across from him and sat down. He finishes chewing.
“Good. What’s the word?”
They haven’t heard from either Lando or Chewbacca in the last few weeks. It’s dangerous enough for both of them, not being native to Tatooine, but to make matters worse they are tracking a Mandalorian bounty hunter. They have to take great care.
Leia looks down at her food as if it personally offends her. She’s wearing one of her sensible outfits again – dark pants and a flight vest – as if trying to make a point. She will not be a princess again until Han is found. She is fighting now.
“He says that Boba Fett is too thorough for his liking. Jabba the Hutt is the most likely buyer, but other people put out a bounty on Han’s head and they don’t want to infiltrate the palace just to find out that Fett sold to another buyer.”
Luke is dead sure Han is with Jabba, but he understands the precautions they’re taking. After all, in this plan it will be Lando who will have to spend the most time in Jabba’s palace. He’ll have to call the shots.
“Why can’t he just be incompetent bounty hunter scum like all the others?” Luke sighs.
Leia gives him a small smile. “Because Han couldn’t be brought down by anyone but the best of the best scum. He’s too damn lucky for anything else.”
Her smile disappears quickly enough. Luke can see how dearly she loves him, doesn’t need the Force to tell him it hurts her more now that she finally admitted her feelings. He reaches out, covers her hand with his.
“We’ll find him. We’ll get him out.”
That is their mantra, their prayer. They repeat the words to each other almost daily. Neither Luke nor Leia know what Jabba (or another buyer) might do with Han once the transaction is completed, but they know that they can’t afford to be late.
Wedge is in his quarters late one night. He just got back from another scouting mission, trying to find safe supply routes without alerting the Empire. What guts him most about these kinds of missions is that he cannot go up in his X-Wing, but instead has to take old junk ships in order to disguise his allegiance. The other Rogue pilots hate these missions, too.
Tired to the bone, he slips out of his flight suit, tying the arms around his waist and walking over to the cabinet in the corner. The mess is closed around this time, but he has some snacks stashed away for these kinds of situations.
He flinches when he notices the sleeping figure in the chair on the far end of the room.
“By the Force!” he exclaims, which wakes the figure. Wedge would recognise that blond shock of hair anywhere – Luke. The young man rubs his eyes.
“Wedge! I must have fallen asleep…” Luke mutters, and his voice is unfairly raspy and soft. Wedge tries not to be moved by it. He will be stern. He will be strong.
“Looks like it. What are you doing in my quarters?”
This had been their routine before Luke’s disappearance. Those blessed months on Hoth and before, when they had stayed over as often as they could, sometimes sleeping in each other’s quarters even when the other wasn’t there.
“Waiting for you,” Luke replies. He gets up and stretches. “Long mission?”
Luke is way more casual about this than Wedge. Wedge, whose anger had simmered over the weeks, but without a real target, without Luke around, it had slowly disappeared. He feels empty, now. Wedge isn’t sure how he feels about Luke.
“Yeah,” he says carefully. Since Luke is not making any motions to leave, Wedge sits down on the edge of the bunk.
“I’m sorry, I really didn’t want to ambush you at a time like this,” Luke says, distractedly. “It’s not good form. I’ll go.”
“It’s alright,” Wedge finds himself say. “Stay.”
He realises he wants to hear what Luke has to say. And there’s still love enough to enjoy Luke’s presence, even if Luke’s apparent betrayal makes him wonder just how sound his logic is in that.
Luke leans back in the chair, rubbing his eyes. “Thank you. That’s very kind. I really didn’t mean to fall asleep, I guess I must have been more tired after the training than I thought.”
“Jedi training?” Wedge asks.
“Yeah,” Luke says, “I’ve been trying to recreate moves from some old holos Leia found, but the stance from earlier…”
He catches Wedge’s eyes and trails off with a rueful smile. “I’m sorry. That’s not why I’m here.”
Wedge waves his hand. “It’s alright.”
Silence falls, and they sit like that for a while. Wedge moves over to the cabinet eventually, digging out his snacks. Then he decides to put them back again. He leans against the cabinet and focusses on Luke.
“I wanted to apologise to you for making you believe I was dead,” Luke says, “I could give you all kinds of convincing explanations, including but not limited to the fact that I crashed my X-Wing into a swamp, but that’s not the point. The point is that I understand your anger. I just want to know what you need me to do right now.”
Somehow, Luke always just misses the right thing to say. It’s like the intention is there, but he takes a wrong turn at the last minute, leaving Wedge’s anger flaring up again.
“Luke…”
Wedge can’t even speak right now. He waves a hand in front of his face, trying to force out words instead of a scream of frustration.
“I hate you so much right now,” he says between clenched teeth, and it feels good and justified, but the pained look on Luke’s face makes him regret it right as he’s saying it.
“I know,” Luke says, “I get it.”
And says nothing more. He sits there, arms to his side, his face calm like a still pool. He is… disarming. But not in a charming way.
“What happened to you?” Wedge asks.
That calls a rueful smile to Luke’s face.
“You really, really don’t want to know.”
“You said to tell you what you could do to apologise,” Wedge says, “So tell me, and I’ll take that.”
Luke chuckles, like he used to when he caught Wedge at a particularly good card trick. Luke always knew when he was beaten, but never held a grudge. Wedge was never quite so forgiving.
“I can’t say I didn’t warn you,” Luke says with a distant glance past Wedge that only holds for a second and then disappears. Wedge wonders what ghosts Luke is seeing. Is it Biggs? Is it Han?
Wedge is still standing up by the cabinet, but Luke gets up and moves over to the bed, sitting cross-legged, and motions for Wedge to sit next to him. Wedge wants to refuse, but this seems important to Luke, so he goes. He tries to keep a distance between them, still. He has a feeling he doesn’t quite succeed.
Luke tells him about visions, about Jedi masters, a swamp, and a city in the clouds. He tells Wedge about how he couldn’t abandon Han and Leia, all while detailing how he felt their pain through the Force. As he does, he leans forward and looks at Wedge with an intensity Wedge finds hard to bear. He is grateful when Luke takes his hand, because at least that contact feels human.
As it gets to the point of the rescue of Han and Leia – or, well, attempted rescue – Wedge feels Luke hesitating.
“Well?” Wedge prompts.
“Vader was there,” Luke says, “Just as Ben and Yoda foresaw it.”
Wedge knows that Luke has faced Vader twice before, if not in physical combat – once on the Death Star, and once in the trenches above it. Both times, Luke miraculously came out alive. Now it seems he has managed this feat a third time.
“He wanted me, Wedge. He wanted to bring me to the dark side, so I would fight for him and the Emperor. I refused. We battled. I… lost my hand.”
They both look down at their entwined hands. Wedge hadn’t even noticed the exoskin. He knows replacement limbs are nearly as good as the real thing, if not better, and truly, he can’t even begin to guess which one Luke lost until Luke frees one hand to pull up the sleeve above the other one. Small, pale scars line his wrist, almost invisible except to the trained eye, when pointed out. Luke pulls the sleeve down again.
“His use of the Force, Wedge, it’s... it’s terrible. I’ve never felt such anger before, such power to destroy. Just being near him felt like it was polluting me. The darkness was so tempting.”
Luke’s hands are shaking, just barely, a tremor that seems to run through all of his body. Unthinking, Wedge pulls him into a tight embrace, then kisses him when Luke breaks loose.
The kiss is unlike others they’ve shared before. Luke seems to savour something, while Wedge wants to pour apology and regret and love into it at the same time. Wedge can feel tears welling up behind his closed eyelids, thinking about how he almost lost Luke. Funny how that feeling is almost more intense than when he’d thought he’d actually lost him. It seems more urgent.
Luke breaks the kiss, as he broke their embrace before. Wedge chases after him, a little pathetically, maybe, but his sympathy for Luke overshadows his self-respect in that moment.
“Wedge, I don’t want to take advantage of you. You have a right to be angry. You asked to know what happened, and if that’s what it takes to make you understand and maybe forgive me, there is one last thing you need to know.”
Wedge wonders what could possibly be worse than all of this, but Luke is shaking again, and so he says nothing.
“He is my father, Wedge. Darth Vader is my father.”
It might be true, of course, Wedge thinks. Behind all that machinery must have been a human man once. Maybe somebody who had loved and been loved enough to father a child, though it seems far-fetched. That Luke, however – gentle, caring, soft-spoken Luke – should be that offspring, is impossible to Wedge. He can’t even begin to understand the implications of it.
Luke smiles wryly. “I told you you’d wish you hadn’t asked.”
Wedge’s grip around Luke’s hands has slackened, and Luke pulls his hands free. “I hope you understand now,” he says, getting up. Wedge is still too stunned to react, though he follows Luke with his eyes as the man crosses the short distance between the bed and the door and doesn’t even pause as he opens it and leaves. Wedge stays on the bed for a long time.
They relocate, again.
The current plan of action is staying as far ahead of the Empire as possible by never staying put long. It untethers Wedge.
The day before he’s scheduled to escort out some of the transporters, he sits outside of the base and thinks about bad timing.
The winter sun is bright for a change, though seasons mean very little on this perpetual ice world. Nevertheless, the sky is clear, so much so that Wedge has to squint permanently as he leans against one of the metal containers. He just got used to gravity again, he muses, just got used to regular day-night cycles and changes in the weather. Now he’ll have to leave it behind.
He hasn’t thought much about Luke since Luke came to him that night. It has proven a good survival strategy in the upheaval of relocating all of the Alliance, but Wedge knows he’ll have to face it eventually. Not least of all because he needs Luke to deal with the constant stress he’s under nowadays.
Wedge Antilles is a freshly minted Commander in the Alliance against the Empire. Wedge Antilles is also a cock-sure space jockey from Corellia who has a hard time admitting he sometimes can’t sleep at night from the constant threat of battle. He’s only mad at Luke because he was too much of the former while burying the latter, sometime after Hoth.
He’ll have to rectify that soon.
Luke is sitting in a civilian skiff, staring at his hands. His mind is Force-clear, long hours of meditation having driven all thoughts from his tired, overtaxed brain. His nails are clipped. He wears a simple black tunic over black pants, a belt over the tunic that has a space for a lightsaber to clip in. This space is empty so far.
His hands look remarkably alike.
With the help of Jedi training, he can consider the hands before him like they don’t belong to him, without the trauma and flashbacks, without Bespin lurking at the back of his mind waiting to burst forward. In this state of mind, he can wonder how the med droids managed to make his hand look so human, so much like the old hand he’d lost.
He flexes both hands at the same time, and they both move in synch – one powered by neurons fired from his brain, the other aided by make-do electrical impulses on the last few steps. It makes no difference.
He knows what he has to do.
Lando has not called yet. Maybe he will not call for another few months. But Luke, the Alliance’s only Jedi, knows that he has to become more than just the scared farm boy he was when he joined them to help Han and defeat the Empire, and for that, he has to return to his roots.
Tattooine.
Leia already knows of his plan, and she approves of bringing him near position as early as possible. Luke told her of his plans, of what he hopes to find in Ben’s hut. She understood some of it.
He has clearance to leave before the next shift rotation.
Luke thinks of Hoth, of the first time he had to leave his place in the Alliance for a nebulous larger cause. It had been scary then – the Alliance was his first home away from home. If he could, he would have begged Ben to absolve him of his terrible duty: to let him be nothing more than a pilot with reflexes too fast and luck that never ran out.
But Luke is a Jedi. And though he feels these desires that his human form holds and sympathises with them, deep in calm meditation, he knows he cannot follow them. The Force lays out his path before him, clear as crystal.
He doesn’t know where it leads. But he knows where he has to go next.
With a sigh, Luke drops his hands. Untangles his legs and rises.
Wedge is asleep in his quarters when Luke makes his way there. Luke still knows the access code, takes it as tacit permission to come in that Wedge never changed it. If Wedge were truly still mad, he would know how to shut Luke out.
Luke sits on the edge of Wedge’s bed for a while, just stares at the sleeping form before him before he eventually reaches out and runs his human hand through Wedge’s tangled hair.
Wedge shifts, then jolts awake. When he recognises Luke, he relaxes back into his bed a little bit. The look on his face is resigned.
“What is it?”, he asks calmly.
Luke moves his hand from Wedge’s head to the other man’s hand, clasps it tightly. Takes in the picture before him – Wedge, soft and a little tired, shirtless and beautiful – until it hurts his heart to look.
“I have to go,” Luke says. He could explain, but he knows that this will probably just be the first of many instances where he will have to go without a sufficient explanation because he is the last Jedi and they have a war to fight. Best to raise no hopes when he cannot hope to live up to them.
To Luke’s surprise, Wedge just nods. He closes his eyes for a second, runs his hand across it.
“Yes. I understand.”
A little pang of pain twists Luke’s heart. Maybe he misjudged the situation – maybe he pushed Wedge too far and the man cannot actually forgive him. The acceptance in Wedge’s voice seems to indicate he has resigned himself to the fact that this is what Luke will do.
Suddenly, the grip Luke has around Wedge’s hand is reversed, and now it’s Wedge who is gripping Luke’s hand. His voice is tight.
“Just promise me… promise me that you will come back?”
His voice is small. The look in his eyes is desperate, haunted and full of terrible love.
Luke leans forward, gathers Wedge up in his arms and buries his face in the crook of Wedge’s neck. The man smells of comfort and home, his skin bed-warm and soft.
“By the Force, Wedge, if it is within my power, I will always come back to you.”