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Luke regards his comlink with suspicion as it informs him that a private number is sending him a live holo.
Exactly four people have this com code. None of them should have any reason to call him that doesn’t involve danger, mass destruction, or near-death experiences.
When Luke answers, no one appears on the other end for a long moment. The connection crackles. Then Boba Fett’s face appears.
“Is Din okay?” Luke’s asking within the second, trying not to imagine how many pieces his partner must be in to convince Boba Fett to call him for help. Sure, they are both doing something that approximates dating with the same man, and something that approximates co-parenting over the same child. But they do both go out of their way to avoid doing it at the same time.
“The baby’s on the ceiling,” Fett says, despairingly.
“The… Grogu’s what?” Luke asks.
“Floating. On the ceiling.”
“Okay… Can’t you just, you know, jetpack up there?”
“First, a smart man never uses a jetpack indoors. Second, I tried a step ladder. But he’s…” Fett gestures helplessly, “stuck?” He wiggles his fingers in what Luke guesses must approximate Force nonsense.
“Stuck,” Luke repeats.
“Can you please just help me get the baby off the ceiling? Din has at least two broken ribs and I just got him to sleep. We’re at his place.”
“Din didn’t tell me he had two broken ribs,” is all Luke can think to say. The second it’s out of his mouth he realizes how petulant it sounds.
Fett just hangs up on him.
So that’s how Luke Skywalker, hero of the galaxy, sole living Jedi Master, guardian of the New Republic, finds himself attempting to peel a Force-sensitive little menace off the ceiling as a murderous bounty hunter shushes them both.
At first, Luke tries to use the Force like a shovel and gently lift Grogu from the ceiling. The ceiling gives a loud crack, all the displaced Force energy bursting outward.
Luke and Fett freeze, glancing towards Din’s bedroom. They both let out a sigh of relief when the only reaction is a quiet snuffling.
“You’re going to wake him up,” Fett whispers sternly, pointing a finger at Grogu. “Don’t you want your dad to sleep?”
He wonders, not infrequently, if Grogu is Master Yoda’s son. It would explain a lot. But that line of thought leads him to the dark, dark possibility that Yoda procreated, so he tries to avoid it.
Fett is teetering on a ladder, armorless, arms outstretched toward Grogu. “Come on,” he mutters, coaxing over and over again. “Don’t you want to come down? It’s better down here…”
Luke tiptoes to the kitchen. “Cookies?” he mouths at Fett. Fett points at a cabinet near Luke’s hip. He retrieves the snacks and holds one up invitingly.
Grogu belches and stretches his arms out wide.
Grogu just blinks at them with wide eyes.
Luke sighs. “Don’t pretend you can’t understand him.”
That gets a grin out of the gremlin.
Luke has dealt with a non-zero number of Grogu’s mischiefs in the few months that he and Din have stopped dancing around each other and started doing something that resembles communicating openly and honestly about their wants and needs.
The key is, you have to figure out what the kid wants. More often than not it’s just snacks: easy enough. But occasionally there’s a more emotional need, which Grogu will staunchly refuse to state.
The kid can speak directly through the Force. That doesn’t mean he likes to.
Luke reaches out tentatively. He feels… worry, mostly. Care. A desire for — something. Small tables, spread with food. Smiling faces. A fullness, a wealth of warmth. A flash of emptiness, and coldness. A large apartment with a tired, slumped Din sitting alone, holding a bloodied rag to his nose, one hand pressed over his ribs.
“Oh,” Luke exhales, when he puts it all together.
“What is it?”
Luke weighs his options. He and Din mostly spend time together on the Razor Crest, during missions. Occasionally they meet in Luke’s senatorial apartments, when their timelines fall together between Din’s work, and Luke’s missions, and Fett’s own comings and goings.
Fett and Din have something stabler, quieter, and more unspoken than what Din and Luke have. Luke could never share a home with him, he’s pretty sure. They have too much of the same troubles — the flashes of terror, the days that just feel like endless anniversaries to bad memories. And there are so many things about Din — his culture, his creed, his boundaries — that Luke doesn’t quite understand. That he feels like a stranger peering in on.
Plus, as Leia delights in telling him, Luke talks too much.
Fett and Din have an easy way about them. In their home, it’s like they’ve meshed together. Luke has never quite felt like he fits into that.
He doesn’t like intruding.
But.
“Grogu wants us both to be here,” Luke says slowly. “When Din wakes up. He thinks he’s going to be lonely.”
“Hm,” Fett says.
Luke meets Fett’s eyes, trying to get some sense of what the other man’s thinking. “I won’t invite myself. I’m happy to just —”
Fett turns away, rustling some papers someone had left on a surface in the living room. “No,” Fett says shortly. “It’s fine.”
Okay, Luke sends through the Force. I’ll stay. And hey, maybe we can practice that healing bit you do. Walk me through it, when he wakes up?
Grogu sniffs and begins his descent into Fett's waiting arms. Fett descends the ladder, somewhat perilously.
“What a new and alarming trick you have there,” Luke coos at the kid, who just gives another faux-innocent blink, like, who, me?
The Jedi and the bounty hunter collapse onto the couch, side by side. Grogu nestles between them. Luke feels a pulse of contentedness through the Force.
Luke raises an eyebrow at Fett. “Want to watch a holodrama while we wait?”
“I’m choosing,” Fett says.
Luke blinks awake, feeling warm and safe and bleary. The light from the windows has dwindled from early evening glimmer to near-pitchblack darkness. His cheek is squashed against something warm and solid. That’s when he realizes, to his utter mortification, that he’s been drooling on Fett’s shoulder.
Normally in this situation Luke would flirt mercilessly. But this is Boba Fett, the man who nearly killed him and all his friends, but now loves and cohabitates with the man who is currently also Luke’s boyfriend.
Luke sits up quickly. Fett looks straight ahead and acknowledges nothing.
“Uh,” Din says from the doorway of his bedroom, looking absolutely bewildered. He’s frozen halfway through scratching his stomach. “You’re all here? What’s wrong?”
Din is delightfully disheveled, hair sleep-mussed, clothes askew, eyes soft. Luke's still not quite used to seeing Din without the helmet; he's only been privy to the sight for a few months, after years of knowing each other. Luke feels a rush of fondness.
Grogu echoes the sentiment with a happy blurp.
For a moment, Luke wants to put it off on the kid: Grogu Force-glued himself to the ceiling and wouldn’t come down until I agreed to wait here, and Boba didn’t want any more trouble so he went along. It lets all of them escape with their dignity — without vulnerability.
But he’s been trying to be a bit braver in his personal life, lately.
“I wanted to be here for you when you woke up,” he settles on.
“So… everything’s fine?” Din doesn’t sound like he believes it.
“Everything’s fine,” Fett says. “But you’re not supposed to be walking around.”
“Mm,” Din grumps.
Before Luke can totally process what’s happening, Din lurches unsteadily toward them, hand over his ribs. Fett lifts Grogu up from the couch. Then Luke has a nose-full of Din’s musky, sleep-woken scent, and the man has pressed himself between them on the couch, then pulled Grogu onto his lap.
Din sighs happily. “I’m just going to…” he starts. But his head is already lolling, falling against the back of the couch, and his body is listing sideways.
Fett gives Din an amused look, not even looking at Luke. “I gave him a lot of painkillers.”
“Should we move him back to bed? I can, you know —” Luke reproduces the Force-fingers gesture Boba had made earlier on the holo message, but sarcastically.
“Not just yet,” Boba says, his voice softer than Luke has ever heard it.
Luke grins in return and settles in for the night. It feels, for the first time, like there could be something besides animosity between them.