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Luke reaches Aldera in the middle of the night, hidden away in the back of a ferrier’s eopie-drawn carriage. Old Ben paid the man in Mos Eisley, on the edge of the desert, five copper pieces to get Luke into the city and not ask questions, and it’s a good thing, because Luke doesn’t have a single cent to his name. All he owns is the shirt on his back--which is really a poncho. He wanders the rest of the night, after the ferrier kicks him out, up and down steep, winding streets, until he finds a place high on the wall around an empty grain reservoir where he can sit and watch the sunrise.
As light breaks over the horizon, the Twins rising in concert, the entire city turns into an emerald. Luke heard the trees in the nighttime, the wind whispering in the leaves, but he couldn’t see them as more than shadows--now he gazes out, dumbstruck, at the most greenery he’s ever seen, a whole city like the hothouse box that Aunt Beru used to keep by the window in the kitchen. It steals his breath, makes him dig his fingernails into the sandstone under his hands, and in that moment it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from, or where he’s going to sleep tonight, or how to begin looking for this ‘Yoda’person that Ben sent him here to find. All that matters is the intoxicating buzz of life that he can feel in his chest, so different from the dead, empty waste of Tatooine.
It only takes a few nights sleeping rough to instruct Luke that no matter how nice Aldera is during the day, the night is another matter entirely. The temperature doesn’t drop quite as low as it does in the desert, but there’s a plague of shady characters in the low town and packs of stray cats that look like they’d scratch his eyes out for the protein. Luke gets it from a motherly woman at one of the soup kitchens that some of the ships in the port are left unattended at night, that as long as he chooses wisely and gets out before dawn no one should ever know he was there.
Having spent his entire life in the desert, Luke doesn’t know much about ships, but he picks out what looks like the biggest hunk of junk in the harbor, watches it for long enough that he’s reasonably sure there’s no one aboard, and as soon as the sun goes down slips inside.
The hull and deck might be in terrible disrepair, but down here, as much as Luke can see in the halflight the ship almost seems homey. There’s a small crew quarters, two bunks and an enormous hammock hanging opposite, and a locked door at the end of the hall that Luke assumes must be the captain’s quarters. Luke takes the top bunk in the crew quarters and shoves himself up in the corner between the bulkhead and the ceiling. It’s colder down on the water than it is up in the city, but at least there’s no wind, at least Luke feels safe here; he pulls his poncho tight around him and falls into the deepest sleep he’s had in what must be years.
His dreams are fraught, haunted by the same dark figure who’s stalked his unconscious hours since Old Ben found him in the smoking wreckage of the homestead, sitting next to two charred skeletons, somehow survived without so much as a singed eyebrow. He wakes in the early hours of the morning to the sound of boots on the deck overhead, a male voice and an answering grumble that sounds almost like a wookiee. It takes a few moments for his mind to catch up, but when it does he freezes, paralyzed by panic.
The boots come down the stairs. Luke starts to move very, very slowly, hoping he can find some sort of window to bolt for freedom without making the whole kriffing ship creak around him, but of course because it’s built like it cost a penny, the second he puts his hand down on the bunk the wood moans like a dying animal.
Luke watches with wide eyes as the door opens, and it is a wookiee.
His stomach leaps to his throat. Luke’s never met a wookiee, but he’s heard the stories. They’ll rip your arms off just for beating them at chess--there’s no telling what one will do if they find a tresspasser. But this wookiee only tilts his head, looking at the top bunk like Luke is a curiosity, not a hint of mindless rage in his expression.
Well, Luke’s not waiting around for the rage to show up. He leaps down off the bunk, squeezes past the wookiee into the hall, and makes a break for the stairs. He expects to hear pounding feet and roaring behind him, but there’s nothing--he makes it up into the clear salt air without so much as a touch on the shoulder, jumps down onto the dock, and runs for dry land. There’s a shout behind him when he’s halfway there, that man’s voice again, saying, “Hey, kid! Get back here!” and he glances back to see a figure in a dark vest on the deck of the ship, but he doesn’t stop. Why the hell would he stop? He might not be the sharpest tack, but he’s not an idiot.
Never mind that the same strange gut instinct that told him to choose the ship in the first place is telling him go back. It’s already led him wrong once tonight--he’s not about to trust it again.
Luke, of course, knows about Bare Witnesses. Even living in the middle of the Tatooine desert, he had occasion to meet one--or a fake one, at least, a gypsy wandering the wastes peddling fate-readings and thread-tracing services.
He’d never stripped down for her; Uncle Owen had warned him against it, the first time they were wandering the sands with their drowser, trying to divine a new well, and had seen her lonely bantha over the crest of a dune. “Real Bare Witnesses,” his uncle said, “don’t sell their services. And they sure as hell don’t sell ’em to folks like us. Give her a silver piece and she’ll follow your thread to someone who paid her twice that to rope in a virgin.”
Luke had mostly been embarrased about his uncle assuming--rightly, but still--that he was a virgin, and didn’t remember until that night, helping his aunt with the dishes after the evening meal, to ask how anyone ever found the person they were supposed to be with, if Bare Witnesses were so rare.
“Oh, Luke,” she said, in that slightly patronizing tone that he’d railed against while she was alive and missed desperately as soon as she was dead, “you trust your heart, dear. Not every love is fated by the stars.”
Now, he sits naked in a line of new recruits in the barracks of the Red Squadron, waiting for his turn in front of the queen of Alderaan’s Bare Witness, and wonders if a man sent to make sure that none of the palace guard have murder or treason in their futures might be willing to tell him who his thread connects to. Probably not--he knew some guys back home who’d blown their whole life’s saving on the gypsy for a thread-tracing, and if that’s how much it costs for a bad reading he can only imagine how much gold would be required for a good one. This Bare Witness is hardly going to toss a free reading to some nameless new recruit.
The door at the end of the hall opens, and the guard at the door calls the next name on his clipboard. “Skywalker!”
Luke hasn’t quite gotten the hang of walking confidently while naked, so he sort of shuffles into the room. The Bare Witness--an older man in a pure white cloak--looks at him with a crease between his eyebrows as the door closes behind him. “Skywalker?” he repeats.
Bewildered, Luke nods. “Luke,” he says, voice cracking. “Luke Skywalker.”
The man stares at him for another interminable moment, then says, “Luke. I’m Bail.” He steps aside, gestures toward the draped black cloth behind him. “If you could stand here for a moment, I’ll take a look at you.”
Luke shuffles over to stand in front of the black cloth. He turns his head to the side; his recruitment officer warned him, before sending him up here, that you weren’t supposed to make eye contact with a Bare Witness, that it was much easier for them to discern the truth of your life on your skin if they weren’t distracted by your eyes.
Luke finds it very unlikely that this man--Bail--is capable of distraction; he can feel his eyes on him like he’s a book Bail’s been tasked with reading, opened to a particularly dense page. The air moves against his naked skin. He’s suddenly hyper-conscious of his skinniness, the dip of his stomach and the clear definition of his ribs. What if Bail judges, just from looking at him, that he doesn’t have the fortitude to be a palace guard? What if he can sense the dark figure that Luke sees in his dreams, if he sees that same darkness in Luke?
What if, what if, what if--Luke’s mind runs wild with questions, and he’s sure he must be standing there for hours, but it’s only a minute later that Bail speaks. “Luke. Here.”
Luke looks up to find Bail holding a robe out to him. He takes it and puts it on, grateful. “Did I pass?” he asks.
Bail chuckles like he knows something Luke doesn’t. “Yeah, son,” he says, “you passed.”
By ‘you passed,’ Bail means, ‘for some reason which I will repeatedly refuse to explain, you have to follow me back to the palace under armed guard.’ Luke feels less like he’s about to be permitted to enlist and more like he’s about to be banished from the kingdom, heart beating faster than it did racing eopies through the canyons of the wastes.
Still, it’s not until the guards at the palace doors incline their heads and address Bail as King Father that Luke really begins to get a sense of how much trouble he’s in. Having grown up with ears and a brain, he knows a little about politics: seven kingdoms, none of which is Tatooine, one of which is Alderaan, ruled over by queens like its neighbor Naboo, recently inherited by Queen Leia after the untimely death of her mother Queen Breha, both wildly popular with their subjects in a way Luke hasn’t been able to decide is propaganda or genuine love. He knows that Queen Leia is married and he knows that it was a bit of a scandal, because the merchants at Tosche gossipped about it for weeks when it happened, Leia--still a princess, then--breaking a marriage contract with the first son of Corellia to marry some ruffian she’d met in transit, very nearly creating a war on the scale that hadn’t been seen in a hundred years, until the sudden death of the queen had inspired everyone to make nice.
Luke had always thought Queen Leia must be pretty snooty, to risk the lives of her entire kingdom like that, to shirk duty, and he’d told the merchants at Tosche as much--while privately harboring a second opinion: that Leia must be kriffing brave and have balls the size of a bantha’s. Now he just wonders if she’s the sort of queen who’d execute a man on a Bare Witness’ reading of future crimes. He hopes she isn’t. He doesn’t want to die a virgin.
He expects Bail--the ex-King Organa--to take him to the throne room, but instead he takes Luke to a small solar with a breezy, open balcony. They walk right into the middle of what appears to be a knock-down argument between the queen and a man who--if the ring on his finger is any indication--must be her ruffian Corellian husband.
Queen Leia is dressed in flowing silk and has her hair up in a braided configuration so intricate it makes Luke’s eyes cross, and as they step through the door she’s jabbing a finger in her husband’s chest and yelling, “--you made a commitment!”
“I was drunk!” the king explodes. “And don’t pretend you weren’t drunk too, princess! When that droid of yours asked if you’d take me for your husband you put your hand in my pants and said, ‘Oh, will I--’”
Bail clears his throat. “Leia?” he says. “Han?”
They turn to the door, the queen red-faced, the king with a look like he expects to he hanged by his wife’s father. Leia recovers first, straightening her shoulders into a more regal posture. “Father,” she says. “This is unexpected. I thought you were Witnessing the new recruits today.”
“I was,” Bail says, at the same time that Han’s abject terror manifests into something slightly more intelligent and he jabs a finger at Luke, accusing, “You. You’re that kid I chased off the Falcon two days ago!”
Now Luke recognizes him--he remembers that same silhouette standing in the morning light, shouting, “Get back here!” He gulps. Of all the ships in the port, he had to choose the cutter that belonged to King Solo.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he tries. “Your Highness.”
“Don’t ‘Your Highness’ me, kid.” Han stalks closer, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “I still haven’t been able to figure out what you stole--”
“Nothing!” Luke insists, insulted. “I didn’t steal anything, I just needed somewhere to sleep.”
Han’s face goes abruptly soft, but before he can say anything else, Bail cuts in, a knowing twinkle in his eye. “This is Luke Skywalker. An hour ago I Witnessed him down in the Red Squadron barracks.”
Luke notices Leia watching all three of them with a quiet, calculating look. “And?” she asks.
“His thread,” Bail says.
Luke’s stomach drops straight through the floor. His thread? He shoots a questioning look at Bail, but the old man just smiles at him, warmly, like Old Ben smiled at him in Mos Eisley, and pokes his finger into Luke’s chest.
Then draws it away, like he’s tracing a thread through the air, and pokes Han.
For a long moment, the room is completely silent. Han stares down at his father-in-law’s finger on his chest like it’s a knife sticking out of him. When he finally looks up at Luke, Luke feels like he’s been punched in the solar plexus. Han’s gaze is wide open, wondering, astonished, as if someone’s just offered him a kindness he never expected to receive. Luke feels exactly the same, and it suddenly made sense why he knew he’d be safe on that ship, why that strange tugging in his gut drew him to it, and he’s about to reach out and touch, except--
“Oh, Force,” Queen Leia says, sounding exhausted, and the moment shatters.
Later that night Bail seeks out the quarters Luke’s been assigned--sparse, the droid who’d led him here had said, but the furnishings were more lavish than Luke would’ve been able to conjure even in his imagination. Luke kind of expects Bail to sheepishly inform him that the whole thing has been a joke and Luke an unwitting pawn, hey, no hard feelings, but instead Bail sits him down at the table on the balcony, pours him a stiff drink, and starts saying things like, ‘I knew your father’ and ‘separated at birth’ and ‘oh, you’re looking for Yoda? he lives in that awful swamp near the Dagobah river.’ Luke holds tight to his drink and feels like the room’s spinning and eventually has to excuse himself to puke.
“What?” he says emphatically, when he returns.
“Maybe I’m not explaining very well,” Bail allows. “Siddown, let me try again.”
His second try isn’t much better than his first, as far as Luke’s concerned, because he starts talking about an ancient order of knights called Jedi who were sworn to protect the seven kingdoms against the forces of evil--evil which he swears is behind the sudden meteoric rise of the Coruscanti Empire. Yoda, he claims, is a Jedi, and so is Old Ben, who’s real name is actually Obi-Wan Kenobi, and so was Luke’s father, a man named Anakin Skywalker, before their order was wiped out by the dread Sith Darth Sidious and his hound Vader. Luke--through the valuable grapevine of gossip at Tosche--has heard about Darth Vader and the Empire’s raids on outlying villages. He’s also seen their white-armored infantrymen marching through Mos Eisley with loaded crossbows, which everyone said they couldn’t shoot worth a damn but which Luke figured were plenty dangerous with or without marksmanship, when there were two dozen of them pointed at you.
What he doesn’t know is: “What’s any of this got to do with me?”
Luke’s standing at the end of the bed, staring at it, mourning the fact that the one night he finally has the opportunity to use a real pillow is the same night he’s wide awake because Bail decided to unload his destiny on him, when, for the second time in as many hours, there’s a knock on the door.
His heart leaps into his throat. Han, he thinks, and feels like he might puke again.
When he opens the door it’s not a charming ruffian waiting in the hall, but the Queen of Alderaan. Her hair is down, falling in soft waves down her back, and she’s in a dressing gown. Luke feels the abrupt urge to avert his eyes, but before he can she meets his gaze.
“Sorry,” she says. “I know it’s late, but I think you and I should talk.”
Luke’s rarely had occasion to play host to a girl his own age, let alone the queen of an entire kingdom, so he does his best to guess at the etiquette. He lets her in. He pulls out her chair, offers her a drink, and when she refuses says, “I’ve never met a queen before, so you’re gonna have to tell me if I’m doing something wrong.”
Leia smiles. “Don’t worry about it. If what my father tells me is true--and I’ve never known him to lie--you’re my twin, and the queen’s brother hardly needs to stand on ceremony.”
“Alright,” Luke says, relaxing a little, and joins her at the table.
In the candlelight, he decides that tales of the queen’s beauty have really, truly, not been exaggerated at all. Leia has fine features, the lovely unblemished skin of a noblewoman, and a sharp shine of intelligence in her eyes that suggests to Luke that tales of her ruthlessness in statesmanship have not been exaggerated, either. His twin, he thinks, amazed, and wonders how it’s possible, how it can be true, that such an ethereal, perfect creature as Queen Leia can be born from the same spark as Luke, who grew up taking sand baths and picking at sunburn and fixing junk droids from the Jawa nomads who peddled scavenged clockwork. And now he’s showed up out of nowhere with a thread that connects him to her husband--What must his sister think of him? Presumptuous, unworthy, a womp rat in stolen clothes--
“Han and I aren’t in love anymore,” Leia says.
Luke stares at her.
She ducks her head, blushing faintly. The queen, blushing. “We haven’t been since our wedding night, I don’t think. When we met it was--well, you know how it is. You mistake lust for love, but in the light of day everything looks a lot different.”
Luke nods, even though he doesn’t really know how it is at all.
“That’s not to say--“ she breaks off, running her finger over the rim of Bail’s empty glass. “I’m not saying I regret marrying him. I don’t. He’s good for the country, and I do love him, even still. Just not…not the way a wife should love a husband. He doesn’t love me like that, either. I guess we both know why, now.”
“Why?” Luke asks, barely daring to breathe.
“Because of you,” Leia says, with a smile of the same flavor Aunt Beru used to give him--fond, a little patronizing. “It’s you he’s meant to be with, not me.”
Luke’s never been one to look a gift eopie in the mouth, but this is his sister, so he feels like he has to say, “I’m sure that’s not true, Leia. Not all loves are fated, you know. You and Han could still…”
He trails off, because it makes him feel sick even as he’s saying it, and because Leia’s shaking her head. “Even if I wanted to, Luke, this isn’t the kind of thing you can fix.”
“But what about earlier?” Luke makes himself ask. “You were talking about commitment--”
“Commitment to Alderaan, not to me,” Leia clarifies. She sounds more tired than anyone her age should sound, and now that Luke’s really looking, not just blinded by her beauty, he sees the bags under her eyes, the frown lines. “He might’ve been drunk for the wedding, but he wasn’t drunk for the coronation. He stood right next to me while I took my oath, he held the Sun Scales.”
“Oh,” Luke says. He can suddenly picture it in perfect detail: Han, somber-faced for once in his life, holding the scales representative of the Twin Suns that sit on every altar in every Sun Shrine in the seven kingdoms, standing beside his young bride in full regalia as she swore to uphold the laws of the land, to put her people first, to never waver. Han, realizing maybe for the first time that his wife had greater and loftier commitments than the care and keeping of their marriage, that in marrying her he had assumed those commitments as his own, and above all, that he was now tied to this place, to Alderaan, in a way that Luke knew instinctively he had never been tied down before.
“Han wanted to come here,” Leia says, into the silence. “He wanted to come right over. I don’t want you to think that he’s waiting patiently for you to go to him, because that’s really not the kind of man he is.”
“I know,” Luke whispers.
“It’s my fault. I told Chewie to keep him in his room until he calmed down a little. He never makes good decisions in the heat of the moment.” She gestures to herself. “Case in point.”
Luke feels like he’s missing something. “Chewie?”
“Han’s friend, and the only guard he’ll accept,” Leia clarifies. “The wookiee.”
“Right,” Luke says dumbly. “The wookiee.”
When he heard the door crash in at the homestead, Luke’s first thought had been Tuskens. Like every other sand-weathered denizen of Tatooine, he knew the many dangers that roamed the wastes, had been weaned on bedtime stories about Krayt dragons and slavers and Tusken Raiders, the mummified creatures who would cook you over an open fire and eat you piece by piece. And there had definitely been fire involved, but it wasn’t Tuskens setting it; it was white-armored soldiers from the Empire’s army, razing the Lars homestead like they’d razed all the others in the area, turning Tatooine into a vast swath of uninhabitable, uncrossable scorched earth between Coruscant and their enemies.
Luke remembers little of the fire, just an unbearable heat and a flash of awful certainty that he was never going to breathe the thin desert air again. The next thing he was aware of, after the intial blinding flare of the blaze, was sitting in the scorched sand a hundred feet from the homestead, only a tatter of cloth remaining of the clothes he’d gone to sleep in, watching the lantern lights of the Empire’s eopie caravan disappear into the absolute darkness of the desert. He’d had tears on his face, clean lines through the soot, and smoke thick and gunky in his throat, but he’d still tried to run back inside, and when the fire had proved too hot, pulled bucket after bucket from the family well, tossing lifewater over the flames and sobbing, the only living human for a hundred miles, knowing long before he’d managed to put the fire out that there was no one left alive. That he was as alone in the world as he was that moment in the desert.
Old Ben had found him shortly after dawn, wrapped in the canvas from one of the outlying tents that hadn’t caught, sitting next to the corpses of his aunt and uncle, which he’d pulled from the house. He put Luke on the back of his bantha and spent the two-day ride to Mos Eisley not talking much, speaking, when he did, in cryptic riddles about glowing swords and destiny and the importance of Luke getting to Aldera to find someone called Master Yoda. Luke, who had hardly processed the fact that the home he’d grown up in for nineteen years was burnt to the ground and that the only family he’d ever known had been murdered by the Empire, mostly stared at the dusty horizon and said nothing.
At daybreak, Luke considers his options: go looking for someone called Yoda in the ‘awful swamp’ near the Dagobah river, or go try and track down Han for a re-hashing of the apparent romantic destiny. Both seem terrifying on a level that Luke’s rarely had to deal with before, but in the end he chooses the potential rewards of love and affection and possibly not dying a virgin over the generous portion of vague but intimidating responsibility that Yoda promises to heap on him.
He runs into Chewie first, who if Luke is interpreting the pantomime and warbling growls correctly, which he probably isn’t, apologizes for scaring him the other day and waves for Luke to follow him as he heads down to the palace courtyard. Luke reminds himself, as they head down a cramped spiral stair, that Chewie’s shown no emotion more dangerous than curiosity so far, and that despite what he’s heard about wookiees, this one probably isn’t taking him into the cellar to break his neck, but in a few short minutes he’s so turned around he probably couldn’t find his way back to his rooms if he tried. He didn’t sleep much last night, so he’d probably give up and sleep on the way there, but still--the issue stands. He’s about to ask how much further when Chewie pushes open a door and leads him outside.
The courtyard is an explosion of color. All this must have gone up over night--stalls and carriages laden with vibrant fabrics, spices, dyes--because even though Luke was pretty out of it yesterday, he thinks he would’ve remembered this.
“Wow,” he says, before he can stop himself, “I’ve never seen so many colors in my whole life!”
Chewie tilts his head at him and makes a soft, questioning noise.
Luke’s saved from having to guess at an interpretation by the arrival of someone very loud in a blue cape who says, “You must be the famous interloper! Pleasure to meet you, I’m Lando Calrissian.”
The man shakes Luke’s hand without waiting for Luke to participate, then yanks him towards one of the stalls. “You’ve gotta let me get you some new clothes, Luke. Come on, something with a little color. You like blue? Purple? Orange?”
“Uh,” Luke says, still reeling from being called an ‘interloper.’
“We’ve got a new color we’re trying called ‘chartreuse,’ kind of like yellow, but greener. You like that?” Lando grins down at him, all shiny teeth and salesmanship. “Anything you want, any cart, they’re all mine. It’s a gift, kid, that rag you’re wearing is an insult to high society, you have to let me get it off you--”
“You’re not getting anything off anybody,” says a voice behind Luke.
Lando’s arm disappears from Luke’s shoulders. Luke turns and sees--his stomach swoops--Han, glowering at Lando with his hands on his hips. “You got a lot of nerve, showing up here,” he says.
Luke looks between them warily.
Lando has on a perfectly innocent expression. “Wasn’t my idea, old buddy,” he says. “The queen missed my beautiful face. Not my fault your scruffy mug leaves something to be desired, aesthetically.”
Luke’s thinking that Han’s face leaves nothing to be desired in any category, aesthetically or emotionally or religiously or otherwise, when the king and the merchant break out in identical grins and seize each other in a hug. Luke blinks. He feels like he has whiplash.
Han says something to Lando in a voice low enough that Luke can’t hear, and Lando walks off to entice some of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting to part with their coin. Han stalks back to Luke, looking dour and serious, and jerks his head toward the stables in an unmistakable ‘follow me’ motion.
When they’re inside the dark, eopie-smelling space, Han closes the door on the courtyard and turns to face Luke. Neither of them says anything. Suddenly the millions of words that Luke felt piling up in his mouth all night--nineteen years’ worth of stories and jokes and fears and hopes--have all abandoned him. Han seems like he’s having much the same problem, mouth hanging open slightly, a furrow between his brows, and looking at him--standing across from his soulmate in utter silence except for the eopies snorting and stomping behind them, his hands at his sides and his fingers like they’re being tugged by an invisible force to reach out and touch--Luke can’t help but laugh.
For a second Han looks like he’s thinking about being offended, but then he breaks into a rakish smile and starts laughing, too. Luke’s the one to take a halting step forward, to try to bridge the gap.
“Can I--?” he starts, not sure how he’s going to finish the question.
But it doesn’t matter, because Han says, eyes fond and quiet, “Yeah, kid, of course.”
Luke doesn’t know what he wants except Han and closer, so he settles for grabbing the front of the king’s shirt and hauling him into a kiss. Han goes willingly--more than willingly, hands coming up to hold the sides of Luke’s face as he turns and backs Luke into the door, crowding him with his entire body. Luke’s always known that he was gay, and he’s been kissed before, but he realizes in a rush that those past dalliances were all boys, fumbling, inexperienced boys. Han, who’s doing things with his mouth that make Luke feel so weak he has to cling for balance, is a whole lot of man, and in fact a lot more man than Luke feels equipped to deal with.
They break apart, but neither of them go far. Luke realizes one of his feet isn’t even touching the ground. He’s breathing hard, and Han’s face is very close, and Luke says, with feeling, for the second time this morning, “Wow.”
Han huffs a laugh. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Luke grins cheekily. “What, I don’t get a ‘wow,’ too?”
“You can have all the ‘wow’s you want, kid,” Han murmurs, and kisses him again. Luke manages to keep his wits about him this time, at least until Han pulls back to add, “You can have a ‘wow’ every day for the rest of your life.”
Much better than a swamp, Luke thinks, and then loses his wits completely.
It’s not five minutes later, when Han is latched onto his neck and Luke has zero feet on the ground, that Queen Leia throws open the door that they’re not attempting to have carnal relations against and says, “Han, war room, now.”
Han thunks his head against the door over Luke’s shoulder. Luke laughs and uses his hand in Han’s hair to pull him back to his mouth for another quick kiss, which turns into another long kiss, which turns into Leia yelling, “NOW, HAN!”
“I’m coming, Your Highness!” Han yells back, right next to Luke’s ear, but he hangs around long enough to set Luke back on his feet and give him a short, deliberate kiss. “Chewie’ll show you where my rooms are,” he murmurs. “I’ll be in there an hour, two hours tops.”
“That’s a long time,” Luke warns him. “I might get bored and let Lando strip me.”
Han’s face flickers through a rapid series of emotions: fury, bemusement, resignation, affection. “Of course,” he says, almost to himself. “Of course you’re a sarcastic little shit. You’d have to be, wouldn’t you?”
But he takes the time to drop another kiss on Luke’s bruised mouth, before he opens the door and slips out.
Luke does track down Chewie, and does let him herd Luke back to Han’s rooms--separate from the queen’s rooms, Luke notes, and that’s not something that gets set up over night--and does wait two hours, which turns into three hours, which turns into the rest of the day, wandering amongst Han’s things, trying to learn the man by his possessions, an exercise which Han will never be able to reciprocate, since all of Luke’s things went up in a blaze in the Tatooine desert. Han has a lot of knives, a few crossbows, and an entire chest filled with star charts and navigational devices. He has two entire armoires of clothes, one that seems to be ceremonial garb, rich red velvet and purple capes with fine embroidery and furs that look like they’d keep a man warm even through the punishing winter of the Hoth mountains, and one that houses his everyday wear, the shirts and fitted pants and vests that Luke has seen him in. Luke, because his clothes are sort of a lost cause, swaps out for some of Han’s after Chewie informs him emphatically--Luke thinks--that Han won’t mind. They’re too big on him by a couple sizes, but Chewie helps him find a belt.
When the knock comes at the door, well after sunset--Chewie and Luke finishing the end of an epic meal--it’s not Han, but Bail. “I’m sorry,” he says, face drawn, “but we must go to Dagobah at once. Come with me.”
“I told Han I’d wait for him,” Luke says, with a piece of cheese halfway to his mouth. “He said he’d be--”
“He won’t be back tonight, Luke,” Bail says, not unkindly but in a tone that invites no further questions. “We’re at war with the Empire. A war we’re going to lose, unless you come with me now.”
Luke exchanges a look with Chewie, a lump of stone sinking in his stomach, and goes with Bail.
In the Dagobah swamp, a tiny green imp hands Luke a sword that glows when his hand touches the hilt and says, “To your father, it belonged.” The same imp touches Luke’s stomach with a clawed hand and says, “The Force, you feel, do you not? Guide you, it does, yes?” And, when Luke nods, “Trust it, you must,” which sparks a memory in Luke’s mind, hidden by exhaustion and grief: Old Ben, putting him in the back of that ferrier’s carriage in Mos Eisley with a fleeting hand on his shoulder and his only advice another of those cryptic sayings, Trust in the Force, Luke. Now he supposes it’s all much less cryptic than it seemed. Trust that feeling in your gut, Luke. Trust the wind when it whispers to you, Luke.
During the day--what scant light passes for day on Dagobah--Yoda teaches Luke to move stones with his mind and makes him do headstands in the muck and the pungent swamp water, makes him cut through tree branches with his sword and run through the twisted bramble of the forest with the imp on his back, until he’s too tired to go on and sits down on a root to listen to Yoda’s tales of the ancient Jedi order, knights chosen by fate who swore allegiance to nothing except what was good and just. When the sun goes down, Luke and Bail duck into Yoda’s hut, which seems much too small given the size of the tree it’s been carved out of, and Bail tells Luke of the war, of Leia’s army mobilizing and the Empire closing in on Naboo and the weapon they’re building in the deserts of Tatooine. Luke tells him about the soldiers who razed the homesteads, and Bail agrees that they were likely getting rid of potential eyewitnesses, that any word of an effort this large could be enough to bring the seven kingdoms into an alliance.
Leia offered aid to Naboo in hopes that we might stop the Empire before they make it to Alderaan, he says, and, If that weapon is what our scriers say it is, none of that will matter. They’ll wipe Naboo off the map completely.
Luke, Bail claims, is the only one who can destroy the weapon. He read it on Luke’s skin.
Night in the swamp is quiet and lonely even amongst the heartbeats and noise of millions of living things, and in the darkest hours, Luke desperately misses a man he barely knows. He wonders if Han is with Leia’s army on the frontlines, if he’s given up on his soulmate entirely and returned to the familiar comfort of his wife’s bed, if he hates Luke for leaving, if his plans for their reunion involve brushing Luke aside and pretending he doesn’t know who he is. Or if his plans for their reunion involve pushing Luke into bed and caging him in with his body and murmuring things like Hey, kid and easy there and I got you and Luke can murmur back what he forgot to say in the barn, that Han’s face isn’t just aesthetically pleasing, but that all the other parts of him are pleasing in lots of other ways, that Luke wants to sit up and listen to him talk all night about anything or nothing at all, that he wants Han’s hands all over him, that he wants to kiss Han’s knees and his ankles and the fluffy top of his head and his chin and any other part of him he can reach.
When he falls asleep he dreams of the dark figure in the long cape and the black helmet, holding a sword just like Luke’s that glows red instead of blue. The more Luke learns about the Force, the clearer his vision of the figure gets, until he can hear its inhuman breathing and the clang of its armored boots, the howling of a dark, wicked wind…
He shocks awake most nights to find Yoda crouched on a rock next to him, watching him with a troubled expression. Yoda never speaks to him in those moments, but Luke knows that he’s done something wrong, something so wrong that the tiny green Master won’t even speak of it.
One night, a few weeks after his arrival, Bail returns from the city with an extra eopie in tow, and a strange little droid he calls Artoo. “Our scriers say they’re nearly finished construction of the weapon,” he says. “You go now, or never.”
Never, Luke knows, isn’t an option. It’s time to go back to Tatooine.
Luke realizes, as the verdant landscape of Naboo gives way to desert, that he has no idea how he’s going to destroy the Empire’s great weapon. Yoda told him to listen to the Force, but so far the Force hasn’t even suggested to him what sort of weapon he ought to use, and as he stops off in Mos Eisley to water his eopie, he shelters his face in the hood of his cloak and looks around at all these people just living their lives, ignorant of the dramatic mission he’s been tasked with, and feels a slap of inadequacy so strong it nearly buckles his knees. He’s not a Jedi. He’s not a swordsman, or a mage, or even a kriffing Bare Witness. He’s barely even a man.
For a few minutes he has half a mind to turn around, and then he hears a familiar voice say, “I knew the Force would bring you back here, Luke.”
He turns, wide-eyed, pushing off his hood. “Ben?” he says incredulously.
Old Ben smiles. “Hello there. You wouldn’t happen to want some company in the desert?”
Luke feels a rush of relief so strong he’s surprised it’s not audible. He doesn’t have to go alone.
When he looks back to say yes, Ben is greeting Artoo like an old friend.
It takes them five days of hard riding to reach the Empire’s weapon. Luke knows these parts, used to race eopies through these canyons, so he guides them up onto a ridge with a good vantage point of the plateau where the weapon sits behind four layers of heavily-armed guard. Luke doesn’t know what to make of the weapon itself--it looks like a regular old tower to him, with a strange apparatus on the roof--but he knows what to make of all those soldiers.
“We’re screwed,” he declares, in a tense whisper.
“Ah,” Old Ben whispers back, “I wouldn’t speak so fast, my friend.”
Luke follows his gaze to the heat-hazy horizon, where what looks like the entire Alderaanian army--and most of the army of Naboo--are marching in formation. He takes out his spyglass and spots the Red Squadron banner, Gold Squadron, Blue Squadron, and the Queen’s crest, a braid of flowers almost as intricate as her hair. They’re too far away for him to see faces, but he breaks out in a laugh, barely remembering to restrain himself from an ecstatic whoop lest he tip off the Empire’s army on the other side of the ridge. He need not have bothered, because a second later a strange creature at the head of the Naboo army raises a horn to its mouth and sounds an unmistakable battle cry.
“That’s our cue,” Old Ben informs him, as the Empire’s army streams into the canyon, heading to meet the invaders. “Come along, Luke, no reason to sit here and wait for Darth Vader.”
Oh, Luke thinks, revelatory, Darth Vader. That’s who’s in my dreams.
And then he follows Ben up and over the ridge, down towards the kingdom-killing weapon.
I AM YOUR FATHER, Vader booms, as Luke clings to the tower’s ramparts, cradling his missing hand against his chest, his whole body like a raw nerve. No, he shouts back, no no no no no, building to a wordless yell, and Vader says some more stuff about joining and ruling that Luke barely hears, because he’s judging the distance to the ground.
Old Ben is dead, the weapon is on fire, and Leia’s army is surrounding the Empire’s camp. Luke decides that his job is done, and shoves himself away from the ramparts. Air rushes around him, a sickening lurch, and then everything goes dark.
Somewhere in the void, Luke thinks he probably should’ve asked Bail if he was going to die.
Luke wakes in the Alderaanian army’s medical tent with vague memories of screaming his way through surgery and a raspy throat to prove it. He spends a long minute staring up at the canvas of the tent before he manages to make a noise loud enough to get someone’s attention.
Someone, as it turns out, is Han. Han, who cups the back of Luke’s head and says, “Hey, easy there, kid,” and supports him while he takes a drink of water. “I got you. I got you.”
Luke’s so buzzed with leftover adrenaline and so deliriously happy to see him that he gulps water with his eyes wide open and locked on Han’s face. Han holds his gaze, amused but tired, humoring Luke’s antics, until the cup is empty. Then he sets it aside and helps Luke carefully into a sitting position, his touch gentle but firm, then settles in on the cot, one hand braced on the bed and the other still on the side of Luke’s face.
“You scared me,” he says, after a long moment. “You scared me so damn much, kid,” and draws Luke into a hug, careful of his bandaged arm, his fingertips trembling until he digs them into Luke’s shirt.
Luke clings back. “Sorry. I was pretty sure jumping off the tower wouldn’t kill me, if that helps.”
Han draws back slowly to stare at him. “You jumped?”
“Uh,” Luke says dumbly.
Han gives him a disbelieving, furious look that turns into an argument that’s mostly just Han yelling and pacing and waving his hands around. Luke tries to explain, in between explosive accusations of recklessness and idiocy, that he once survived a fire and so he was pretty sure he’d survive falling off a tower, but that only makes Han yell louder that if he knew he was fireproof he should’ve just walked down the kriffing stairs!, which Luke doesn’t really have a rebuttal for except that he didn’t think of it. And maybe--
“Oh yeah!” he cries, remembering, “Darth Vader was on the stairs!”
“Darth Vader?” Han repeats, voice low and dangerous. “You fought Darth Vader? Alone?”
Luke’s saved from having to answer that by the surgeon on duty, a serene woman in all white, coming to tell them that they’re being hideously loud and disturbing the other patients, that Luke is fine to recuperate in one of the squadron tents, and that That’s not a suggestion, gentlemen.
“You’re kicking us out?” Han says, sounding wounded.
“Yes,” Mon Mothma agrees.
“But I’m the king!”
This does nothing to endear her to their case, and in short order Luke’s being carried by Chewie through a camp full of the walking wounded, Han at their side, feeling the burn of thousands of stares on him. He’s never seen Han in front of his subjects, and the shift is a little jarring, how Han goes from easy and casual to stiff shoulders, reassuring smile, quiet confidence. It’s not a look that fits him, and Luke is relieved when they make it to one of two royal tents at the center of camp--relieved to see Han turn back into Han again, relieved to escape the people’s scrutiny.
But he can’t forget the burn of their invasive stares, so after Chewie deposits him on Han’s enormous bed and excuses himself, Luke asks, “Am I an interloper?”
Han, who’s been gearing up for a continuation of his yelling, comes to an abrupt stop. “What?”
“I know what Leia told me, when I first came to the palace, but you and me never…” Luke swallows. “I guess I never really asked you if I was ruining your marriage. If you want me here.”
“Hey,” Han says, crossing to the bed with quick strides. He takes Luke’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing Luke to meet his gaze. “Let’s get one thing straight, yeah? I want you with me. You belong wherever I am. You are the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me, Chewie included.”
“Don’t let Chewie hear you say that,” Luke teases, but his heart’s not in it.
“Chewie knows,” Han declares, and kisses him.
Luke tries to grab his head, realizes he only has one hand, and dedicates that hand to hauling Han onto the bed by the back of his shirt. Han laughs against his mouth and decides to cooperate, which helps things along considerably, so that soon enough Luke has the leverage to hook a leg up around his waist with a great deal of enthusiasm if not a great deal of skill.
“Stars, kid, slow your roll,” Han breathes, in the private space between their faces. “You’re injured.”
“Haven’t you heard there’s a war?” Luke whines. “Come on, Han. I don’t want to die a virgin.”
Han swears and drops his head on Luke’s shoulder. “You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? You were sent as punishment, for my past crimes, to kill me--”
Luke turns his head and sucks Han’s fingers into his mouth, effectively silencing further argument.
Come dawn the armies pack up, preparing to leave the desert. Luke, freshly kriffed and wobbly in the legs, finds Bail Organa standing on the edge of camp, watching the Twins rise over the horizon. There’s some sort of symbolism there, Luke things, but he doesn’t feel up to parsing it out, so instead he folds down to sit at Bail’s feet. He’s watched thousands of sunrises just like this before on the homestead, but somehow this one feels different. Maybe it’s because he’s not lost anymore. Maybe it’s because he’s just been through an extreme emotional ordeal and gone to bed with his soulmate all in one day.
Maybe it’s because he’s missing a hand.
When the suns are up, Bail sits down next to him, groaning about his old, aching joints, and says, “Someone in Red Squadron started a pool on who the Jedi is. I sent Artoo over to put a hundred silver pieces on you. Your odds are very, very long. When all’s said and done, that droid may be able to buy the Empire.”
In the fresh, new-day light of the Twin suns, Luke laughs, and laughs, and laughs.