Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was at first no one. Just Luke, sitting on the ground, surrounded by wood. Surrounded by wood that would one day hold stone—one day a temple, but not this day.

This day it was just wood. Scaffolding. It was warm and the air was humid and the ground was dirt, and upon it, stood a child as green as the outside jungle.

The child who wore the face of Luke’s Master.

The first student.

Luke was ashamed to bring him to this place, but the child did not need to know this. Instead, Luke could set the little one down and whirl around with his arms in the air and call the hovel a masterpiece in the making. A future temple, Grogu, one that would serve generations of people like them to come.

What do you think, Grogu?

Luke smiled down at his first student who wore the face of his past Master and what he saw there was unmistakable.

Tears.

They didn’t fall the way that human tears fell. They didn’t leak out of the corners of Grogu’s eyes. But they did gloss over them and a profound feeling of sadness radiated off the child and burrowed into the recesses of Luke’s heart.

His arms fell to his sides. The shame drove forward in a crashing wave behind the sadness.

“I know it’s not much,” Luke admitted, wringing his right wrist with his left hand. “But we are few and far between these days—jedi, I mean. So the main architect, I’m afraid, is me. For now.”

Grogu looked towards the space between the wood, out into the hazy, hot night. He looked back to Luke.

He wanted the one he’d just left behind.

He wanted this person more than anything and anyone in this moment.

Luke felt his own heart start to recede into itself.

“Do you want to go back?” he asked quietly. “You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to stay with me.”

Failure always felt the same. He should be used to it by now. It shouldn’t affect him like this anymore.

Grogu’s head came up and his ears went down and Luke huffed a miserable laugh. He came over and stooped down to gather the child into his arms.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “He won’t be angry.”

And I’ll be okay.

The child braced hands against his chest and stared into his sternum between them. Luke held still. He held his breath.

He held out hope.

Grogu leaned forward until his cheek laid there against the fabric of Luke’s tunic. His head sunk in closer, listening to Luke’s heart. Feeling it. His fingers curled.

Luke curled around him in turn.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The child trusted him as a teacher. He did not want Luke as a parent, but in many respects he had no choice. It was just the two of them in this shelter growing its moss.

At first, it was a little awkward—which Luke had expected it to be. There was a language barrier. There was Luke not knowing how to teach a soul. There was so much infrastructure needing to be built—more scaffolding to be put up by Luke’s unsteady hands.

He could build a home on Tatooine. He could build Tatooine structures—dens, storerooms, fences—but this shelter was not one of Tatooine. It was a place for the Jedi. A temple.

It had to look the part.

He got the feeling that his incompetence and swearing and frustration really stripped away all of the Jedi mystique for Grogu. Within days of Luke dropping wood and pipe on his head, mislaying blocks of cement, and flopping on his back on the floor, drowning in sweat and aggravation, the kid started to try to help him.

It was sweet. It was warming.

Grogu was a person filled with kindness. His presence made the previously empty structure feel slightly more like a home.

Luke liked to see him poking around curiously through tool boxes and sacks of cement. He liked to look up from banging his forehead into the hearth in frustration to the sound of a chirp.

When he did, Grogu was usually pointing at something, asking what it was, where it came from, what it was doing here.

He started drawing pictures in the dirt by the third day. Luke peeked over his head and found them unintelligible, but he asked about them anyways and Grogu led him through them by the hand. He drew things that he had seen in his travels. There were mountains and deserts and scribbles of skies full of clouds. He showed Luke brilliant colors through the Force and his doing so brought the scribbles and sketches to life.

He would be an artist, this one, Luke told him fondly. Oh, how he wished he himself could draw. He could only build. Build planes. Build stables. Build hovels. That was what he was good at.

Upon receipt of this information, Grogu looked from him to the ceiling and its many, many holes.

“Hey, now, it’s a work in progress,” Luke scolded him. “You just wait. My vision will come to light and then one day, you’ll be sorry to have ever mocked the likes of me.”

Grogu chirped at him.

“You don’t know that,” Luke scoffed. “And anyways, if it does, we’ll just go to the other side with fewer holes.”

Grogu blinked at him.

And sure enough, it rained that night.

Two months in and Luke had a student and the beginnings of a temple that no longer looked like a house built out of three pieces of badly hammered wood. It looked like a flat-roofed structure--a familiar kind, half-sunken into the ground.

Grogu insisted on sending Luke vision upon vision of the place flooded to the top of the walls, even though they’d gone over the fact that that was the point of this part of the temple at least ten separate times.

It was a foundation, Luke tried to explain. The temple itself would start on the next level. They just lived in the foundation for now because there was nowhere else to live.

Grogu was not impressed. But he was easily distracted with insects and frogs and puddles of water left by the night mist, so he was alright.

They sat together at night when the heat wasn’t so unbearable and began a series of lessons.

Luke didn’t have to start from the beginning. Grogu had received training before; he knew the basics. His greatest stumbling block, however, was fear.

Fear of being taken from people who he cared about and who cared about him. Fear of being trapped by scholars—held down and locked in rooms with no kind body in sight.

He feared especially for his person. His favorite person, the one with gloves and a helmet and a loud laugh that was always cut off short when the person realized what was happening.

The person stifled himself in Grogu’s presence and pretended that all would be okay for his sake.

Grogu loved this person.

Grogu missed this person.

Luke didn’t know how to approach his grief for having left such comfort behind. He made himself available. He settled the child onto his chest. He let him see the tracks of feathered scars that traveled up and down Luke’s body.

He too, missed some people, he tried to tell Grogu. He missed them all the time. So bad that it stung his eyes and made him always feel like he was consciously swallowing.

But this missing? It was love.

And he was so glad to have people who he missed so much that it hurt because it meant that he had had the chance to love them.

Grogu slept on Luke chest the nights after those heavy days. And they both shared through the Force a growing, sinking ache.

But they at least weren’t alone. Not anymore.

Three months in and it was winter on Yavin.

It was constantly wet. Constantly raining.

The foundation did not flood. Luke could have yipped in pride.

If only the scaffolding above it was not growing thick with moss and decay. Its wood softened more with every moment and Luke could only sigh at the thought of having to rebuild it all when this forsaken rain finally let up.

Grogu tucked wet hands into the heat of Luke’s neck, and Luke sighed again.

This child needed new clothes. He needed new clothes. They were both turning into walking blobs of mold and mildew with this humidity lurking around them all the time.

“Another bath?” he asked the kid.

Grogu nuzzled into his neck and longed for his person. He was cold and his person almost never let him be cold. He was wet and his person was fastidious about keeping him dry.

Luke hiked him up a little higher and nuzzled him back. He was rewarded with bursts of color, like pigment on wet paper.

“Let’s see what we can do,” he said.

Luke was not Grogu’s person, no matter how close they were these days. But they were closer than they had once been. Luke had come to learn that Grogu liked him best when he wasn’t wearing a tunic, but his work clothes. They were old, filthy clothes, torn and sleeveless and styled like those that he’d worn on Dagobah. They reminded Luke of Yoda and to be a teacher, he had to remember his teacher.

He had to hold the memory between his palms like a flame.

He missed Dagobah.

The mud and swamps here were similar, but not quite the same in smell.

And Luke had realized lately that, the same way that Grogu offered him glimpses of his person, he gave Grogu bits and pieces of his own loves and losses. Dagobah, probably, sitting cross-legged while Yoda told him that he was doing poorly, but not hopelessly. Maybe even the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, curled up in the dark in the seat behind Chewie’s designated place. He could feel the flutter and then the weight of a blanket tossed over him as he rested his head on his forearm. He could hear the low mumble of Han’s voice talking to Chewie, talking to Leia, over the thrum of the engine.

Grogu felt these things as Luke’s heart yearned for them.

Luke didn’t mean to expose him to that surging and rocking. It was a slip. He tried to reign it back in, but the water chattering down around their home made everything run together on their shared page.

He laid on his side on his sleeping mat and watched the child sleep. And then when he closed his eyes, he let himself fall into burning deserts that were not his own.

Red skies and purple clouds, lit around the edges by white, yellow, silver.

The sound of rustling, fluttering fabric.

The soft hum of a song over the scrape of a brush on metal armor.

It was four months. Grogu’s progress was tremendous. Luke teased him daily that he would soon overtake Luke and then they’d have to figure out how to make Luke his puppet in front of bigshot senators and council people.

It was four months.

And then there was Han. Han, tall as ever. Looking ruddy and tired.

Luke dropped all of the rope in his hands when he turned around and saw him. He leapt forward and Han caught him and hugged him just as tight back.

And Luke did not cry.

Almost.

Han asked him how things were hanging and Luke’s throat hurt to badly to answer him.

Han pulled away and seemed startled by Luke’s tears. He told him that there was no need for that shit. No one had died. He was still kickin’—hell, everyone was still kickin’ like the jackasses they all were.

Luke laughed, but even he could hear how watery it sounded.

He invited Han into the foundation to meet Grogu and once they were settled, Han became awkward and uncomfortable and Luke’s heart sunk. Luke stroked Grogu’s ears with his thumb and Grogu cuddled in close to his middle and let his ears fall down and back when Han looked at him. He tried to hide.

“Why are you here?” Luke asked, returning his student’s cry for protection by folding his arms around him.

Han breathed in deep.

Right.

Trouble.

“Luke.”

Trouble. Trouble. Trouble.

“Do you know where you got that thing from?”

What thing? Grogu? He’s not a thing, Han. Don’t call him a thing. He’s a student.

“Luke.”

Why did Han keep saying his name like this? Where was the trouble?

“Can I hold ‘im?”

No.

Yes.

No.

No. Grogu didn’t want to be held by anyone else.

“Please?”

He looked down at Grogu. He trusted Han with his life. He promised Grogu it would be painless—Han was a gentle person deep down. He was the one who always found a blanket to cover Luke with when he thought Luke was sleeping.

Grogu still whimpered in being handed over. Han settled him, though, by holding him up to eye-level and then placing him soundly in the empty place between his crossed legs. Han looked at him thoughtfully. His eyes seemed tired. He didn’t smile.

Luke reached out to touch his knee but couldn’t make his hand connect.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

Han lifted a hand and smoothed it carefully over Grogu’s head. Grogu watched it and when it came around for a second time, closed his eyes and leaned into it.

“Do you know who you took him from?” Han asked again.

Yes.

It was a man. A tall man with curly brown hair and thick, sloping eyebrows.

“Luke.”

A Mandalorian. Luke knew this from Grogu’s painted memories.

The Mandalorian cleaned his armor. The Mandalorian hummed ancient songs to himself when he thought no one was listening.

But what did it matter if Grogu’s person was a Mandalorian and Luke was a jedi? The transfer of responsibility had been peaceful. The Mandalorian had shown no sign of anger, and so Luke had no cause to believe that Grogu had in any way been wrongfully placed into his care.

Han sighed and leaned all the way back until he was holding himself up only by his elbows.

“He’s a Mandalorian,” he said.

Luke knew.

“You remember Boba Fett?”

Yeah, fuck that guy.

Han laughed lowly.

“Yeah, fuck that guy,” he repeated, then huffed. “He reached out to me.”

“Boba Fett reached out to you?” Luke blurted out. “How is he not dead?”

“It’s a long story,” Han said. “But yeah. The motherfucker himself called Leia of all people. Asked her where he could find you.”

No.

No, that wasn’t fair. They were past this now. Luke didn’t—Luke couldn’t—there was a child at risk—

“Hey, calm down,” Han said. “Just—Just lemme finish, kid. Breathe.”

Luke tried to. He wasn’t good at it.

Han pushed himself back up to sitting.

“Boba Fett called on behalf of another Mandalorian. Uncharacteristic, I know, but he was weird about it. He told Leia that it was a matter of importance, not just for you, but for all Mandalorians in the galaxy,” Han explained.

Luke frowned.

“All of them?” he asked.

Han’s eyes seemed to get heavier than ever.

“This little guy’s name—Grogu, right?”

“Han.”

“Grogu, buddy, do you know what your daddy’s job is?”

“Han.”

“He’s the Mand’alor,” Han said like a hiss.

The insects outside chirped. The air was heavy.

Luke felt empty. Hollow.

His hands both became equally artificial and rubbery, as if neither was a part of him.

“Luke,” Han said. “You have to give this child back.”

No.

No.

Grogu was his student.

The Mandalorian had given him to Luke.

It was Luke’s responsibility to—to—to—

“I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” Luke blurted out. “Why are you taking him now? Why now?”

Four months. They were teacher and student now. They’d shared deserts and wind and this mud floor and the weight of blankets in a cold seat in the Millennium Falcon.

This was—

It was—

“He’s a youngling,” Luke gasped. “He’ll be a jedi. You can’t take him. Please don’t take him. Please.”

Han dropped his face and shook his head back and forth.

“If I don’t, then the Mandalorians will come here and do it themselves,” he said. “Their leader, Luke, he’s not well.”

Not well?

What did that mean? Was he angry? Did he regret giving over his child? Had Luke not read his body language right?

“Not like that,” Han said. “In the head. Not well in the head. Fett’s acting—I’ve never seen him do anything like it, obviously it’s beyond either of our wildest dreams--but he’s spending all his time right now chasing after the Mand’alor, trying to keep him from--.”

No. No, no, no.

Luke stood up and his lungs felt like they were slowly collapsing in on themselves from the sides up.

“I did not wish this Mandalorian harm,” he said.

“I know,” Han said.

“I don’t want him to hurt himself. I didn’t mean to—”

“Luke. I know.”

If he knew, then why hadn’t he said something to Leia? To Fett? To anyone who would listen?

Why—

Han stood up and left Grogu where he was. He held his elbows a little wider than normal and then turned his wrists. Turned his palms.

The tears were back. Luke couldn’t stop them when he looked up into Han’s face.

“Come on, bring it in,” Han said.

No, not this time, Han.

“Give me another month,” Luke said. “Let me try for one more month. And if—if he wants to go then, then I won’t stop either of you. But you have to let me try.”

Han’s arms lowered.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“You don’t understand,” Luke snapped like a child himself. “No one understands—no one. I’m—it’s—” the tears came freely now and Luke wasn’t even embarrassed anymore. “I’m the only one,” he said lamely.

Han couldn’t look at him.

“I’m the only one,” Luke said again. He rubbed his lips together. “Until now.”

Han pressed his fingers into his eyes.

Han said he’d try to negotiate for one more month. Luke thanked him but didn’t hug him when he left. He felt too hollow still. So hollow that when Han was out of sight, he let himself fall to his knees in the empty foundation. Grogu startled at the sudden drop and squeaked, but Luke couldn’t look at him without succumbing to grief already.

This was what they always said.

No attachments.

Don’t get attached.

“I’m sorry, I’ve failed you,” he whispered to Grogu. “You’ll be back with him soon.”

Chapter Text

Five months.

It finally stopped raining.

Luke woke up and watched Grogu’s shoulders rise and fall next to him. His forearms were still muddy from that evening. Every one of his limbs was dragging him down towards the center of the moon. Even blinking took a century.

He pushed himself up and stared at the light coming in through the foundation’s entrance.

He got up, but he didn’t bother putting on the black tunic.

It wasn’t worth it. He was just going to get it dirty, too. He put on his boots by the door instead and pushed open the makeshift door while Grogu slept on.

There was breakfast to make. Concrete to mix. Water to chase out of the temple’s first story’s beams. He looked up at it and tried to find beauty in the way that the moon’s sun threw light across them and the delicate spiderwebs that had formed in their gaps during the night.

It was already getting warm.

They needed water, so he set off to get some from the river.

He came back with the water and found people already gathered around the foundation.

His heart stopped.

Grogu.

Grogu was still inside and—oh. No, he wasn’t. He was in the armored arms of a man. Green and red. Familiar colors. Luke dropped the bucket.

He wanted to cry out—to say that this wasn’t the agreement, that the child hadn’t even eaten yet; he wasn’t ready.

But it was Luke that wasn’t ready, wasn’t it?

Han turned around in the party and lit up in recognition. He moved past the others around him and started heading Luke’s way with his brow doing complicated things.

“We thought someone snatched you,” he snapped. “What the hell?”

Luke didn’t understand. He looked between Han and Fett holding Grogu. Han followed his gaze, then caught Luke’s shoulder and stopped himself.

“Luke? Where are your clothes?” he asked.

Luke looked down at and it dawned on him now that he didn’t exactly look very much like a jedi. The river bank had soaked his boots. His shirt from yesterday was still covered in dust and sweat and smears of concrete.

“I—” he said.

“You?” Han asked.

Luke didn’t know what to say. He just didn’t want them to take Grogu.

He just wanted to say goodbye to Grogu.

“Luke?”

“This is Skywalker?”

Luke jerked at the new voice and found himself looking into the eyes of a woman with red hair cut severely into a bowl-shape around her neck. Her eyes were piercing. Her chest was covered in armor.

Another Mandalorian.

“It’s his day off,” Han said on Luke’s behalf.

“Is it?” the Mandalorian asked, giving Luke another long once-over. “That’s…something. You were so dashing last we saw you, Jedi.”

Had they met? Luke didn’t remember this woman.

“Bo-Katan Kryze,” the Mandalorian said, holding out a gloved hand. “We appreciate your cooperation and are sorry that your arrangement with the foundling didn’t work out.”

“Who told you that it didn’t work out?” Luke asked.

Kryze’s right eyebrow arched. She said nothing.

Han cleared his throat.

“Alright,” he said. “You’ve got what you came for. Don’t drag this shit out.”

“Understood,” Kryze said, languidly letting her eyes slide from Luke back to Han. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Solo.”

Han’s nose wrinkled.

Luke felt his throat closing.

“Can I say goodbye?” he blurted out into the silence between those two. They both looked back at him, then at each other. Han narrowed his eyes. Kryze lifted her chin.

“If you wish,” she said to Han.

Luke left them both to make a beeline for Fett.

He said goodbye to Grogu with a hug and a promise.

He’d always be here if Grogu changed his mind.

He’d wait for as long as Grogu wished. When Grogu decided to come back, there would at least be an above-ground room to sleep at, at the temple. He promised.

He promised.

Grogu held both hands out for Luke as Fett took him away, without once making eye contact.

It hurt.

When the rest of the supporting party followed Fett and Kryze away from the temple’s foundations, the hurt started to rush in Luke’s ears.

He didn’t hear Han approach him from behind. He didn’t hear anything Han said to him.

He could think only of concrete.

Gray, gray concrete.

He threw himself into building the temple. It was the only thing that he could do. It was the last vestige that he could leave.

No students.

No teachers.

This was a place of worship now, not a place to live. Not a home.

A home was not Luke alone, even if he stayed here in this place for the rest of his life. Home was still a red sun setting with a white one on its heels. Home was still a purple dawn.

The tears he mixed in the cement were proof of the way of the Jedi. The fact that he remained where he was and did not pursue the child (the student) was proof that he was capable of letting go of his attachments.

If he was the last of the jedi, then surely he needed to practice the lifestyle as close to the letter as possible, right?

This temple could not be built by someone just dancing around the periphery.

So he started to meditate every morning in the center of the work he would do that day. He lifted his face to the sun. And when he stood up, he worked until he couldn’t work anymore. Until the stones needing lifting were too heavy to lift. Until the concrete between them became too dry. Until there was no scaffolding left.

Until he was too tired to remember those things that he’d lost.

In return for slaying a wild boar that tormented a nearby trading post, Luke received extra arms to help him build.

The local carpenters were surprised when they arrived to see what needed doing at the temple. They asked him who he’d been working with.

He said no one.

They asked him where he’d learned construction.

He said his uncle on Tatooine.

They looked at him curiously, and then told him so gently that they would help fix the things he’d done wrong that he couldn’t help but smile.

There were still good things to be found at the base of this temple.

It was five months and two weeks when he cut a wire. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if it had been literally any other wire, but this one was the one that ran up through his wrist to the thumb of his right hand. It was connected to a circuit board. When it shorted out, the whole thing started shuddering and in no time at all, he was out a whole hand.

The frustration was monumental.

R2 was with Chewie at the moment, who was with Han, who was with Leia. Even Leia was with Leia.

And Luke was alone now, with the local carpenters out on another job at the moment.

His hand refused to uncurl.

He needed tools and a light and to straighten these damn fingers. 

It took the better part of a day trying to troubleshoot the issue and by then, his worst nightmare had climbed out of its happy abyss to stand on his shoulders while he laid his head on the makeshift bench before him.

He needed a new part.

UGH.

He made contact with Leia and Han and asked if he could talk to R2. He’d given him all the numbers of the parts for his prosthetic.

Leia informed him that he looked like shit. She told him to come home for a visit. She worried about him by himself out on Yavin. She told him he was reverting to his early days of rural living.

He smiled and said that he’d think about it, and she told him that he had two days to give her an answer or she was coming to pick him up herself.

It was a warming thought.

He promised he’d think about it. And in the meantime he really did need to talk to R2.

R2 send him a parts list and he was going through it with his hand under the light again when there was a sound outside. It was a strange sound and Luke spun around at his bench, already reaching for the lightsaber on the other side.

He got up slowly as the scraping drew closer to the foundation’s wooden door. His breathing evened out as his mind glazed over with the haze that came before battle. His left fingers touched the coolness of the saber hilt.

“Here?” A voice asked outside.

There was a squeak.

The lightsaber’s hilt slipped from Luke’s fingers. It hit the ground and rattled and he went for it immediately, but unthinkingly with the wrong hand.

It rolled a little bit when his stiff knuckles knocked against it, and he lunged to grab it--only for his boot to be an inch quicker than his hand. The hilt went skittering, on its way to connect with the wooden door.

Luke froze as the door creaked opened just in time for the saber hilt to hit leather.

The leather was a boot. It stopped at the small impact and did not advance. Luke followed its worn, cracking brown up with his eyes to a silver tasset. Then it was silver, silver, silver all the way up an arm which was crooked just enough to carry a very familiar little person.

Grogu chirped happily for him. Luke looked from him to the helmet.

He knew this helmet now.

It was red deserts and purple clouds.

It was a battered, hole-ridden cape flapping in dry wind.

This was the Mandalorian.

This was the Mand’alor.

And Luke was here, stooping over with one functional hand and clothes caked with sawdust and mud. He straightened himself out. The helmet seemed to squint and slowly tilt to the side.

“You’re the jedi?” the voice inside it asked.

Luke vaguely remembered the voice in person. It sounded different from how it had in his and Grogu’s shared memories.

“I—yes,” he said.

There was a pause. 

“I see,” the Mand’alor said.

Cool?

“Did I interrupt you?” the Mand’alor asked.

Luke’s eyes went right to the saber. The Mand’alor’s helmet didn’t move.

“No,” Luke said carefully. “I was just on my way out, actually.”

His hand sparked. The Mand’alor recoiled sharply, drawing Grogu in closer to the heavy chest-plate he wore. Grogu pushed against it and made grabby hands for Luke.

Luke wanted to be happy. He wanted to be warmed. The student had returned. He was again the only jedi no longer.

But—

Uh.

“You’re sparking.”

Luke didn’t know what to do with this other guy.

Was he supposed to bow? Should he go bathe and put on proper clothes?

“ Uh, Jedi? You’re sparking.”

He was wh—WAIT, NO.

Luke was so glad he’d forsaken a bath. He’d never been more glad to have forsaken a bath, great Mandalorian visitor aside. He was okay with looking like a disaster if it meant that he hadn’t shocked himself into oblivion.

Although, now, with the hand mostly under control, he found it in himself to be embarrassed.

Grogu buried himself deeper and deeper into Luke’s disgusting shirt and Luke swore that his Mandalorian winced with each movement. Luke didn’t want to look into that visor. He settled for rubbing his thumb over Grogu’s head and ears while his hand laid on the bench under the Mandalorian’s attention.

In the quiet, he became keenly aware of the dirt floor and his sleeping mat by the window he’d covered with a heavy length of canvas. He could feel the grit under his boots and the tickle of too-long hair at his neck. He wondered if there was soot on his face and self-consciously kept raising his only free hand to try to wipe it off.

“How long have you had it?”

The question took Luke off-guard and he glanced up at the visor instinctively, before catching himself an averting his gaze.

“A while,” he said.

“Years?” the Mandalorian asked him, trading one thin tool from the leather pack on the bench for another.

“Yes,” Luke said.

“Do you do regular maintenance?”

Yes. Sort of. Sometimes.

The visor was watching him again.

“It’s probably the humidity,” the Mandalorian said.

No, honestly, it had probably been the boar from the village. But Mando didn’t need to know that.

“Thank you,” Luke said.

The tools paused in their clicking.

“Of course,” the Mandalorian said.

A silence settled in between them again and Luke cringed at what he knew the next question would be.

“Why don’t you live in your ship?”

There it was.

“For the sake of the ship. Have you seen me?” Luke volleyed back as haughtily as he could manage.

The helmet lifted and Luke met its gaze this time.

“You’ll forgive me,” the Mandalorian said. “You looked so different on Moff Giedon’s ship when we first met. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

Pft.

Yeah.

“I was coming back from my sister’s place,” Luke said. “She’s got higher standards of decorum.”

“Than you?” the Mandalorian clarified.

Luke couldn’t help laughing. He tucked Grogu in closer then flung his non-pinned arm out to the space around him.

“What do you think, Mando?” he asked.

He thought that the Mandalorian was embarrassed.

“I see,” the guy said, turning his visor back towards Luke’s hand. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I’m not offended,” Luke said. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have spruced up.”

Grogu trilled and grabbed at his fingers when he brought his arm back. He smiled down at him, and those big liquid eyes perked up.

“He likes you,” the Mandalorian said.

“I’m occasionally likeable,” Luke hummed. He gathered the child as best as he could and brought close enough so that they could nuzzle cheeks. Grogu went in for a second cuddle and reached for his favorite place by Luke’s neck. Luke set him there and tried to fight back the sourness invading the roots of his teeth.

This comfort would just be for a moment.

This person would take the student away again soon.

“What’s your name?”

Say what now?

“Your name?” the Mandalorian repeated. “I didn’t catch it.”

“You don’t know me?” Luke asked. “Everyone knows me.”

The helmet didn’t move the slightest. Grogu crooned and started to try to climb onto Luke’s shoulder. Luke let him go.

“My name is Luke Skywalker,” he said. “I’m the—”

Last.

“—I’m a jedi.”

“Like Ahsoka Tano,” the Mandalorian said. “I understand.”

Wh—no, no.

“Not like Ahsoka,” Luke clarified. “Ahsoka’s not—she’s different. I’m—”

Hm.

“O...pen?”

No that wasn’t it.

“Uh—”

“Open?” The Mandalorian repeated.

Luke could feel himself flushing.

“No, not open. I meant I’m available as a teacher. I can take on younglings—padawans--Little ones like Grogu.”

“Ah,” the Mandalorian said. “So you’re of status.”

Well. The current living situation notwithstanding, yes?

“What’s your name?” Luke asked quietly. “Why did you bring him back?”

The Mandalorian stopped moving wires around in Luke’s hand and appeared to be frowning hard.

“What do you mean ‘why did I bring him back?’” he asked. “Fett said that I only had two weeks.”

He—

Wait.

“What? Han said that he was going back to you,” Luke said. “He said that you were hurting yourself and Grogu would convince you to stop.”

“Hurting myself? What? Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kryze.”

Luke’s forehead stretched with his surprise as the Mandalorian clutched at his helmet in exasperation.

“So you’re not taking him back?” he asked.

The Mandalorian breathed harshly behind his helmet and then composed himself. He brought his hands down to his lap.

“This has been a misunderstanding,” he said. “And I see how that the last few weeks must have been confusing for you. Please have my most sincere apologies on behalf of my advisors. They’ve misrepresented the situation to yourself and your liaison. When I gave you Grogu, I understood that to be a permanent transaction.”

…right, okay. They were on the same page there, then.

“But now you’re thinking otherwise?” Luke asked. “Is it the mud?”

The Mandalorian almost choked.

“I—nn—I have to say that I wasn’t expecting the mud,” he admitted.

Luke smiled.

“Give me ten minutes and I can regain your confidence,” he said. “There’s a river not far from here.”

“You don’t have to do that,” the Mandalorian said. “Are you here by yourself?”

There was a correct answer to that question and then an even more correct one because Luke wasn’t falling for this diplomatic obfuscation again.

“I’m just setting things up for the others,” he lied brightly.

Grogu clawed at his ear. He swatted at him and impressed upon him the importance of keeping up appearances through their mental link. He got nothing back but grumpiness.

“So there are others?” the Mandalorian asked.

“There will be,” Luke said a dip of his head.

The Mandalorian studied him for a long time. Long enough that Luke started to feel something inside of him twinging awkwardly.

“Are you a builder by trade?” The Mandalorian asked him.

“It’s supposed to look like this,” Luke said before he could stop himself.

There was another pause.

“It’s a temple,” Luke insisted. “Or it will be.”

“When the others get here to help you,” the Mandalorian finished for him.

“Precisely,” Luke said.

Grogu growled. Luke plucked him off his shoulder and set him back into his lap.

“Did you have any other questions?” he asked the Mandalorian. “I can assure you that I’m looking after your child well. He’s got—”

“Skywalker.”

Luke shut up. The Mandalorian was holding his prosthetic’s wrist.

“I trusted you,” he said, snapping the wrist’s port closed. “And I will continue to trust you. Thank you for letting me see the kid for a while. My advisors are upset because I don’t stay in the same place as their former leaders have. They’ve misread my routine as part of some kind of episode, which it isn’t, I can assure you. But if you or Grogu ever need anything, you can always call. I’ll leave my contact information.”

Red deserts and purple skies. This Mandalorian would never be able to settle in just one place. Luke understood now.

He looked down at Grogu in his lap and felt his smile finally edge towards genuine when the child beamed at him and reached for him.

Not alone.

Again, not alone.

He hugged the kid tightly and told the Mandalorian that all would be well.

Chapter Text

The first floor of the temple was built by the time summer really set in. The rains came back, but this time, Grogu and Luke didn’t have to worry about them flooding the dirt floor of their home. They moved up a level. It was slightly better ventilated, if just as baren as the bottom floor had been.

Grogu was upset because there was less dirt to draw in, so Luke took him on an adventure through the jungle to find some of the rock he’d seen out this way.

It was a dark-colored stone that broke away in sheets. The nearby villagers had shown him how to make a slate from it. They showed him where to find chalk and how to form it into sticks. He brought Grogu with him to play with some of the materials while he helped the locals build a bridge across the river. He’d gotten the impression that they pitied his construction skills and worried that he needed guidance or else he’d die trying to mix his terrible cement.

They were kind villagers.

Their children were fond of Grogu.

He and Grogu found the dark stone a ways up above the river. Luke carried a large piece down to the water and washed it while the child splashed around and hunted tadpoles.

He wasn’t terribly good at it. Luke left the slate to show him how to cup his hands and pulled them up from the water instead of leaping from above.

This earned him a gift in the form of a tadpole with legs after he’d gone back and set about finding the slate that had slipped under the surface.

He treasured it, and when Grogu wasn’t looking, released it back into the current.

Minutes later, it was set tenderly on the now-clean slate.

Luke laughed.

Han stopped by and squawked at both the presence of Grogu and the progress on the temple. He pointed at it, then pointed at Luke.

Luke told him that he’d had help. Also, he’d learned how to build a bridge. That was new.

Han pointed at Grogu.

Luke explained that not all bounty hunters were as callous as him, and a certain Mandalorian had brought the child back to continue his studies. Han swore and made Luke promise not to talk to the Mandalorian again, especially without others present.

Things were extremely tenuous, he said. The Mandalorians were breaking into factions, some furious over their new leader.

Luke asked why. Han said that it was convoluted and involved some extreme religious beliefs that Leia understood far better than he did. Luke would have to ask her for the details, but what it boiled down to was that Grogu’s Mandalorian was part of a conservative sect and the majority of the Mandalorians he now led were not of that sect—or rather, if he ever decided to actually lead, they wouldn’t be.

Luke didn’t see how that was his problem. Han told him that the situation was delicate and the Mand’alor’s advisors were having a tough time getting him to be present for the duties required of such a position. The Mand’alor, allegedly, had not been raised or prepared for a position of power and his itinerant lifestyle and absolute refusal to make any decisions was causing distress in the lower ranks.

Luke had to be careful. To be too closely associated with that person was asking to be made a target in the face of an impending coup.

Luke thought back on a warm night with careful fingers working on the circuits in his wrist.

He thought of the sound of a flapping cape and the low hum of a song that Grogu didn’t remember having any words.

Then he smiled at Han and promised that he wouldn’t have anything more to do with the Mandalorian.

“He thinks I’m a slob anyways,” he said. “I’m 90% sure that he thinks he just gave his child away to poverty.”

Han gave him a cool look.

“You don’t have to live like this, Luke,” he said.

“I don’t have to do anything,” Luke told him. “This is what I want to do.”

“You don’t want this.”

“You don’t know what I want, Han.”

“Come home.”

“I’m trying.”

“This isn’t home, kid. This is art or something. All this heat and it’s cold as a fuckin’ corpse. There’s not a damn thing about you in any of it.”

There wasn’t supposed to be. It wasn’t a temple to Luke.

Han sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Luke,” he finally said. “I’m not sayin’ this because I don’t think you can do it. But it’s been months. And you’re breakin’ your back out here alone. Just. Come home. Take a break. And bring your little bog-cat. You guys deserve to sleep in a bed for once.”

Was it really that bad?

“Yeah,” Han said. “It is.”

Leia was pleased to see Luke when he arrived in her loading bay, but infinitely more pleased to meet Grogu. Luke had barely said hello when she snatched him and triumphantly scrambled away as though she thought Luke would take him back if she wasn’t quick enough.

Chewie folded Luke into a hug from behind once she’d gotten away and then moaned. Han translated that he thought Luke smelt like burned shit.

For that reason, he was dragged away from the bay, tossed unceremoniously into a shower and left there.

Leia told him his hair was too long.

Han made him come out to buy new clothes. When Luke got back from the market with him, he found his work clothes suspiciously missing.

Leia cuddled Grogu and played innocent. She thought out loud about how she wanted to dress him in something less coarse for his body. Luke figured that it wasn’t worth fighting.

He and Grogu returned to Yavin coddled within an inch of their lives and, before setting foot off the ship, Luke peeled off his new clothes and went rooting around for the next oldest set he could find. Grogu followed him around the ship and then stayed still as Luke divested him of the gown that Leia had (overenthusiastically) bestowed upon him, too.

These were now formal clothes. Congrats, little womp-rat.

They headed back to the temple and found it guarded by a tall, towering man in armor.

The Mandalorian had returned.

Han’s warning haunted Luke’s mind as he stood with Grogu peeking out from behind his boot. The Mandalorian remained motionless.

“Were you looking for us?” Luke asked him.

The helmet dipped and rose exactly once.

The Mandalorian didn’t note the transition from foundation to first story of the temple. Instead he gathered his little one and Grogu’s slate and watched him draw pictures.

Luke peeled the rind of vegetables and stripped the stems from herbs as he pretended not to be snooping.

Han and Leia would not approve. Chewie would not approve. R2 would have chased this rattling tin man out of the area before he could even set foot in through the door.

But alas, none of them were here right now.

Grogu squirmed around in the Mandalorian’s lap and held hands up to his helmet. The Mandalorian gently turned him back around. Grogu let himself be shifted, then hurriedly wriggled back to play the game again. This time he cooed.

The cooing was lethal. Luke had fallen for it many a time now.

The Mandalorian only smoothed a glove over the child’s skull. Grogu ducked away from the glove scowling and sought out Luke’s eye.

He gave him memories of the helmet lifting. Of the dark curls covering the back of a head that was bent over a brush and a small collection of objects.

“He wants you to remove your helmet,” Luke said casually, dropping two handfuls of gourd into the pot of bubbling broth he was minding.

“I am aware,” the Mandalorian said.

Hmm. Grumpy.

“Will you eat with us?” Luke asked.

“No, thank you. That’s very kind.”

Grumpy.

“At least take some back to your craft,” Luke said. “I’ve lived on rations before. It’s not fun.”

The Mandalorian’s helmet turned his way. Its visor was shiny. Polished. That must have been what the sound Grogu remembered was.

“What’s your name?” Luke asked.

“You can call me what you like,” the Mandalorian said.

“I can’t. You’re the Mand’alor. Shall I call you Mand’alor?” Luke nudged as he came around to see what it was that Grogu had been drawing before he’d dedicated himself to agitating his suit of armor.

“No,” the Mandalorian said. “Anything but that.”

Han had heard right, then.

Luke whistled at the picture on the slate.

“Is that our river?” he asked Grogu.

Grogu stopped trying to burrow into the Mandalorian’s flightsuit and struggled out to hold hands up to Luke instead. Luke took him and set him on his shoulders. He liked to be up high and to play around with Luke’s hair.

It wasn’t as fun anymore, he was sure, what with the severe cut that Leia had overseen it endure.

“People tell me that you’re not just any jedi,” the Mandalorian said.

Luke glanced at him and then reached for the slate. The Mandalorian handed it over.

“I’m just a jedi,” Luke said to it.

“They say that you’re a master.”

“They say that because there are no others left.”

“I thought you said others were coming to this temple.”

Damn him.

Luke looked around for Grogu’s bits of chalk and found one. Grogu curled over his head to watch as he added a little ship in the sky over the river’s waving lines.

“One day, they will come,” Luke said to that little ship. “I’ll bring them here.”

The Mandalorian was watching him, but he didn’t have to watch back.

Luke set down the slate.

“Eat with us,” he said.

“You are alone.”

“Not anymore. You’re here, aren’t you? Eat.”

“Why are you building this place by yourself?”

“Why do you refuse your role as the leader of your people?”

See? Two could play at that game, Mando.

“I am no leader,” the Mand’alor said. “And they are not my people.”

Politics, that was what this was.

“My sister and her husband warned me about you,” Luke said.

The Mand’alor seemed to deflate. His shoulders lowered. His head dropped. The shame appeared to be crushing.

“I cannot make my position any more clear,” he said. “I told them—all of them—to take their saber from me. I made no promises.”

None?

The Mand’alor huffed a laugh so small it could have been half of a breath itself.

“One,” he admitted.

Luke felt little claws digging into his hair.

“I see,” he said. “So you’re shirking.”

“Not shirking,” the Mand’alor snapped. “I’m—”

“Shirking,” Luke told him. “You asked me why I’m building this temple when there are no other Jedi coming? Well, there’s your answer. It is my duty.”

The Mand’alor’s gaze was weighty. Luke didn’t run from it, though. There was no point in avoiding it.

“Will you eat with us?” Luke asked him yet again.

“No,” the Mand’alor said.

“What’s your name?” Luke asked him.

“Whatever you want it to be,” The Mand’alor said.

Luke raised an eyebrow.

“Gonna call you R.5 then,” he said. “’Cause you’re not half as good as the original.”

The Mand’alor didn’t stay, but Luke could tell now that he was running himself ragged and that knowing where his little one was brought him enormous comfort and guilt.

The man was drowning in guilt.

Luke understood that. He tried to imagine what it might feel like to become the leader of a group of people who you didn’t consider your own and couldn’t make his brain do it.

It was too much. He was already building a temple that might never be filled with bodies.

He got Grogu fed and ready for sleep and held his prosthetic hand up to the light when the child was out.

It worked fine now. The Mand’alor had fixed it. It hadn’t even needed tuning up when he’d gone back to see the others.

What a strange person it was who could be so capable and gentle, and yet unwilling to budge when he was truly needed.

The Mand’alor was gone the next morning. He left nothing behind. Grogu whined for him, even as Luke told him that he was not coming back for now.

Grogu showed him the picture he’d drawn for his Mandalorian on the slate.

It wasn’t a landscape this time, but a face head-on in the middle of the slate. A horn arched up out of the center of the face, off the edge of the slate and underneath the base of the protrusion, Grogu had drawn wobbly teeth. Rows and rows of them.

It was quite disturbing actually.

Luke asked him what it was and Grogu met his eye.

A mudhorn exploded across Luke’s vision.

Huge. Enormous.

It was practically roaring, with saliva dripping down from its flattened teeth. Its hair was caked with dirt and its squat legs were braced low.

He dropped the slate. By some grace, it did not break, even as Luke stumbled back and caught himself against a support beam. The memory fell away. Grogu’s ears dipped.

Luke clutched at his heaving chest.

“It could have killed you,” he panted. “What were you doing out there?”

Grogu toddled closer until his hands found Luke’s knee. He curled his fingers and laid down his head slowly.

Red deserts and sparks of gold clashing off armor.

The Mand’alor stood with his hands out before him. Pleading almost. His helmet gazed up into the eyes of the beast.

The memory tore away. Luke gasped loudly.

Grogu’s ears fell low into his collar.

Luke dreamt of the mudhorn. He woke violently to the sight of it charging towards him. And one day, after taking Grogu with him to the village to get some supplies, he returned and found his sleeping mat missing from the temple. It was just gone. He didn’t understand. He asked Grogu if they were playing a game, but Grogu didn’t understand either. They’d been together the whole time.

The saber was where it should have been. Luke's ever-growing collection of tools were untouched. Even the canvas window coverings were completely intact.

It was just his bedding.

Man.

What shit luck.

That night he slept on the ground.

He woke up to the mudhorn. It was so real. His heart was pounding again. The taste of an aborted cry melted on his lips. After a moment he realized that he was laying on something soft.

He sat up.

The fabric beneath him was clean and striped from its head to its toe. It was pliable. It was thicker than his previous mat, and its bottom was covered in heavy leather all the way around. Grogu was nowhere to be found.

He abandoned the mat to grab his saber.

Grogu was outside hunting a butterfly as he was wont to do. The light was piercing. Luke had to squint through it. He let his sword arm drop, and looked over his shoulder, just to check that no one was in the area.

The mudhorn screamed into his face.

He was haunted now and feeling hunted. And he couldn’t shake the shadow or the sense of being watched from his back. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know what propelled him to go grab Grogu and a few bits and bobs to take to the ship.

He didn’t sleep in the ship. He didn’t live in the ship. But it was infinitely more safe than the temple and his hands were shaking as he picked through the box he’d snatched off his workbench. In it was a miniature transceiver. A round little thing the size of a large marble. It laid in the palm of his hand like a metal snail shell.

The Mand’alor had left it behind the first time he’d come to the temple. It was supposed to have his contact information on it.

Grogu whimpered and Luke swept him up and held him close against his shoulder.

“What’s happening?” he asked the little round transceiver. “What’s happening?”

Luke bathed them both—himself and Grogu--and changed clothes. The blacks were more intimidating. The cloak made him look older. He pulled his glove on over the prosthetic and locked all of the ship’s exits.

“Something’s wrong,” he told Grogu as he strapped him into the seat next to him at the console.

Was it a disturbance in the Force? No. But it was something the Force was connected to and it was pushing him, pushing him, pushing him.

He plugged in R2’s coordinates.

Han and Chewie were shocked to see him, but R2 and Leia were not. Luke stood before the latter two with Grogu hidden in the crook of his arm under the folds of his cloak.

“What’s happened?” he asked. “To the Mand’alor—what’s happened?”

Leia held his gaze. She stepped forward and took his hand and pulled him to sit with her at a table by a wide, circular window.

“We told you not to get involved with him,” she said.

Perhaps they had, and perhaps Luke hadn’t listened. This was what he got for that.

“Give it to me straight,” he said.

“I can’t give anything to you,” she said. “No one can find him.”

No one?

“Kryze and Fett were going to contact you as a last resort,” Leia said. “They thought that he might have returned to his child. But if you’re here now, asking after him, then he’s just gone altogether.”

Dead?

“No confirmation.”

But why?

“Luke.”

None of it made sense. Had Luke done this? Or was it the—

The mudhorn.

Chapter Text

Luke wasn’t thinking. His body moved on its own accord and he lost track of time and faces and memory. One moment he was sat in front of Leia in her neat white senator’s robes, the next, he was at the console of his ship, flicking switches and checking readings.

Grogu was anxious next to him with all of the sudden movement. Luke glanced at him at the corner of his eye and found him staring up through the cockpit window at the sky above.

Luke jerked his gaze back to the sea of readings before him and let out a short breath.

Mudhorns lived only on one planet.

Arvala-7.

They arrived to the planet pursued by aggressors. Their names were Han, Chewie, and R2 and Luke did not care about them in this moment.

He hit sand and started running. Grogu clung to his collar from his newly assigned home in Luke’s hood through the jostling.

Luke could practically hear the mudhorn’s roar. He followed the echo in his mind as far as he could go. When his legs started burning and his breath came short. He stopped to adjust Grogu and to clutch at his knees. There were short rocks all around him. Nothing sprouted out from between their jagged, broken crackles in such dry, hot weather.

 He had to keep going.

Somewhere around here—somewhere. He knew it.

There was a mudhorn.

He ran until Han caught up with him and physically made him stop. He grabbed Luke from behind and wrestled him down into the dirt and tried to calm him down enough to get words out of him.

Luke shouted back, trying equally to make Han understand through the rising panic that if someone didn’t do something now, the mudhorn would kill the Mand’alor.

“He’s going to die, Han,” he pleaded.

“No one’s going to die,” Han said back. His hands dug into Luke’s wrists and he shook him to drag his attention away from the echoing roar. “LUKE. Look at me. No one’s going to die.”

Grogu whined where he’d tumbled out into the sand. Luke looked away from Han, back towards the desert landscape he’d been running across.

There was nothing but undulating tan and gold. Even the sky seemed impossibly bright and unyielding.

His eyes burned.

“Luke. Look at me.”

He longed to scream.

“You got him, Solo?”

“Fuck off, asshole.”

“Would love to; you just hold ‘im steady and we’ll get out of your hair.”

The mudhorn. The mudhorn. The mudhorn was screaming.

Did no one else hear it?

Hans eyebrows were drawn when he stopped snarling at Boba Fett’s receding steps. His brow stayed wrinkled as he tried to read Luke’s face.

“You’re talking crazy now, kid,” he said. “Come on, let’s get you some water.”

Maybe it was heatstroke. Maybe the Force was making him hallucinate.

Whatever it was, though, Luke couldn’t stay still, even sat as he was at the base of the Millennium Falcon under a crescent of stony gazes. He couldn’t focus. There was just this urge—this magnetic pull—across the dunes and the sand and the hard-packed dirt. He needed to go there. He needed to find the mudhorn.

“Skywalker, listen,” Boba Fett told him with a face covered in scars, “There is. No. Mudhorn. We checked. All of us checked.”

Luke eyes swam with tears. Fett’s expression became, if possible, harder.

“What’s the matter with you? Is this some jedi shit?” he asked. “When did you get involved with him?”

His name—

His name—

The mudhorn’s name was—

“Don’t you fuckin’ interrogate him,” Han snapped from just inside the ship

“Why don’t you sit the fuck down, Solo?” Fett hurled back. “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to your crazy brat-brother.”

“Well, you’re about to be talkin’ to my foot up your ass—”

Luke felt the first tear finally break loose.

The mudhorn collapsed before him in a rush of color. Its browns gave way to yellows, to oranges, to whites. It fell to its knees in dull grays. The light around it lost its warmth and all that was left was paleness.

Luke shivered and covered his ears until the sound of arguing all around him faded away.

The Mand’alor must have replaced Luke’s bed before he left the temple for wherever it was that he wanted to die.

He hadn’t needed to do that.

Luke didn’t understand why he’d done that. Maybe so that Grogu could sleep on it with him? Maybe he’d felt pity for Luke, who hadn’t been the jedi everyone told him that Luke was supposed to be?

Luke didn’t understand and all he had for Grogu were tears of grief.

He stroked the child’s ears.

R2 chirped and beeped and tried to find comforting words to offer. Han came into the cramped sleeping quarters on Luke’s ship and sat with him and R2 and the child in silence for a long time.

Luke couldn’t make himself speak until the second time that R2 came to prod at him late that evening after Fett and his fellow Mandalorians had left the planet for sure.

“He’s gone, R2,” Luke murmured said without lifting his head.

R2 disagreed. Luke could only sigh.

Since the mudhorn had knelt, he hadn’t had any more visions. The echoing roar had died off.

He used his sleeve to dab at his eyes.

R2 told him that when all else was lost, that which never could be taken from anyone ever was that which Luke himself was to so many others.

Hope.

Have hope.

Han and Chewie wanted Luke to follow them back home to Leia. She was expecting all of them. Luke couldn’t go to her.

He pressed his forehead into Han’s shoulder and pulled out of his well-meaning hug to say that he was going back to Yavin. He and Grogu would go and they would return to working on the temple. They’d resume their lessons until the Mand’alor resurfaced.

Luke smiled at Han in the way that always made his stiff back bend.

It worked this time, too.

Han said that he didn’t like it, but fine. Okay. If that was what Luke wanted. So long as he kept R2 this time.

That was a deal. Luke waved him and Chewie off with Grogu whimpering in his arms. As soon as they were out of sight, Luke turned to R2.

“Can you keep a secret, pal?” he asked.

The Mand’alor’s transceiver wasn’t properly programmed. Luke thought that he may have given him the wrong device by accident.

But no matter. That which he had given Luke was just as useful as his comm frequency, in a way.

It was a set of schematics for a small gunship. It was an old model. It had a serial code and if Luke was a bastard with a droid friend (and he was), then some picking and poking and tracking and very strategic syncing between the transceiver and his own ship aligned the small gunner’s current readings with his own.

Luke took notes of all of it before breaking the sync.

R2 showed him a map of the readings all at once and he read them and read them until it finally all clicked together in his head.

He brought up a map and started plotting out the readings. Temperatures. Altitude. Turbulence. Each eliminated a thousand possibilities and brought Luke closer and closer towards a singular place where all of these bits of information collided.

And lo and behold, after some increasingly intense minutes, there was only one place that made all of readings make sense.

Naboo.

Han and the others were expecting Luke on Tantive IV. Luke had a few hours before they noticed something was amiss, however, and that was all it took.

He left Grogu and R2 to get to know each other and set the ship on autopilot so that he could get some sleep.

It felt like it had been ages since he’d actually rested and something about the determination that came with having a specific place in his hands—no longer a beast but a point on a map—made sleep finally seem like a true possibility.

He laid down in his sleeping quarters and let his eyes close.

He heard Grogu shriek at something R2 did in the main cabin and couldn’t help but laugh.

They’d be fine.

He was going to find the mudhorn. The Mand’alor.

Same difference.

He got a good five hours before R2 could no longer fend off the cries from the family on Tantive. Luke answered the comms blearily and put an extra dose of slur behind his words as he said that all was okay, he’d just fallen asleep at the controls and they’d gotten a bit off course. He promised that he’d arrive home soon and then shut off the comms.

R2 told him that he loved when they started sneaking around and Luke scolded him for revealing their troublemaking ways in front of the baby.

Grogu didn’t need to know that his teacher was a magnet for disaster.

Naboo came into view sooner rather than later and Luke was relieved to see it. The feeling in his chest grew as he flicked through the controls and double-triple-quadruple-checked R2’s map and coordinates.

He put Grogu into his seat and buckled him in for landing.

The place where he did was empty.

It was a plain. A valley with several shallow, winding rivers cutting through it. It was filled with sparse, tall-growing grass of some kind. When Luke stepped out of the ship, followed by his trusty droid and a toddler, he discovered the grass to be a grain. He let the heavy heads of a handful of them tickle his palm as he passed through them. Grogu sneezed a little ways behind him.

The waving grains grew thinner, less green and more reddish-golden the further away from the slow-moving rivers Luke and the others walked, until they reached a lump of land that was the tell-tale misshapen gray of a ruined village.

People had once lived not far from the braided rivers. They must have planted the grain, which had, in their absence, set about planting itself year after year. The land was raised and covered with new green and dried grass in places, while in others, it sank into hilly depressions. The cycle of rain and sun and wind had eroded and hardened the ground around the knolls until it appeared to be cobbled and cracked into a thousand tiny islands, themselves surrounded by canyons.

The wind blew peacefully across this once-village and through its surrounding grains.

“So this is the making of the great Mand’alor?” Luke asked the crumbling wall nearest him.

R2 chirped at him quizzically.

Luke ignored him to walk along the line of a piece of old lumber that had been long set into the ground. It had been bleached by the sun, but its shadow still drew a boundary between the outside and what had once been the inside of a home.

“A Mandalorian village?” Luke asked the landscape. “Did your people give up on the hunting and settle here as farmers?”

There were two full footprints in the soft dirt before a dip in the village ruins. The place appeared to have once been a cellar, long since collapsed in on itself. All traces of its old doors and contents had been eroded until it had no more structure than a softened, old basket. At its bottom was a small pool of muddy water. Luke blinked slowly at it and looked down at the space in front of him.

There were more footprints that led down into the water.

There were some that lead out to the other side of the dip.

“Gone for a swim, Mando?” he asked the horizon ahead.

R2 made a cut-off bleat of alarm when Grogu tripped behind him. Luke turned back and went down to collect him before he started hiccupping.

“Do you feel it?” he asked the child. “Can you feel it?”

Grogu looked around and then back up to him with trembling ears.

“There’s a mudhorn here,” Luke whispered.

At the bottom of that pool of water was the hilt of a saber. Surrounded by murky water, it still glinted in the light.

The mudhorn hadn’t fallen.

It had thrown down its burden and Luke had a feeling that that wasn’t the only thing he would find as they made their way to the other side of the village, where the land dropped abruptly down a few feet into the small tributary eating away at it.

He set down the child and made his way to the drop-off point. He got down on hands and knees and climbed over the side. There was a good three foot fall to find soil again, and when he did, he stood up in front of a body facing the smooth, stacked boulder that held up the ledge.

The body laid on its side. It had dark curling hair a few inches long that flickered lightly in the wind.

Luke turned around and walked a few feet to pick up the helmet also resting on its side in the dirt and the sun.

The Mand’alor slept now and possibly forever--heartbroken and homesick for a village that would never again be.

He truly, truly had not wanted to be what he had become.

The head of a mudhorn rose out of the metal on his far shoulder, and Luke looked down at the helmet in his hands.

It was heavy. Heavier than he’d expected it to be.

Beskar.

This helmet was a sacred object. It was a vessel made to protect a soul.

He knelt down beside the Mand’alor body and tilted the helmet to the side. He lifted the back of the Mand’alor’s head to fit the latter inside the former, but mere moments into the act, his arm bent abruptly the wrong way.

The air in his chest vanished. The whole world became a blur that ended in dirt. And after a beat to reorient himself, Luke realized that he was being sat on.

“Excuse you?” he blurted out without thinking and somehow suddenly angry. “I’m trying to re-knight you, buckethead.”

There was no answer for a long time.

“How did you find this place?” the Mandalorian’s unmuffled voice demanded.

“Get off me,” Luke said, trying to struggle.

If the Mandalorian himself wasn’t heavy, then his armor was doing the job for him beautifully.

“I asked you a question,” the Mandalorian said.

Luke frowned and thought for a split second that his helmet somehow flattened the guy’s usual inflection. His words carried more tone out in the open air like this.

“I saw a mudhorn,” Luke ground out, glaring at the dirt in front of his nose. “It fell and I thought it died.”

The pressure on his wrists let up.

“There are no mudhorns on Naboo,” the Mandalorian said.

“There is no Mand’alor either,” Luke threw back.

He let the statement sit. He didn’t try to move or fight. It wasn’t worth it. He let his eyes fall closed.

“No one will listen,” the Mandalorian finally said, so quietly it was almost swept away by the wind. “I don’t want it. But no one will listen to me.”

“I’m listening now,” Luke said.

“I don’t know who you are.”

“I told you, I’m Luke Skywalker.”

“I DON’T KNOW WHO THAT IS,” the Mandalorian roared. Luke’s shoulders jerked up towards his ears subconsciously. His heart throbbed fast as his breath stuttered.

The mudhorn reared back over him.

He squeezed his eyes shut even tighter.

No impact came, though. There was no fist, no blade—no nothing—against the center of his exposed back or neck. The Mandalorian stayed where he was, straddled across the small of Luke’s spine, unmoving.

“I—I can’t—I can’t give any more than my name,” Luke stammered. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry that no one is listening.”

I don’t want you to die, Mudhorn.

The knees on either side of his hips ground slightly against the grit in the dirt.

“Why did you come here?” a defeated voice asked. “I have no more to give. You have the child. You want the saber? It’s yours. Take it. Put it in your temple.”

Luke finally opened his eyes. The Mandalorian stayed hovering above him, still not touching any more of Luke than his back.. Luke decided to take the chance to push himself up onto one elbow, then two, then a palm. He twisted back and found dark eyes watching him.

Luke felt void of color now under that gaze.

He looked away sharply.

“I don’t want anything from you,” he said.

“Then why are you here?” the Mandalorian asked.

“I followed the mudhorn,” Luke said.

“There are no mudhorns on Naboo.”

“It’s you,” Luke said. “The Force brought me to you.”

The Mandalorian sucked in a deep breath and then stood up.

“The Force,” he said, leaving Luke to go stand before his helmet where it laid again in the dirt.

“It’s an energy--” Luke started.

“I don’t care.”

Oh.

“Take the child.”

“But he’s your child,” Luke said as he scrambled up himself. “And that’s your helmet. Why won’t you put it on? You’re the mudhorn.”

The Mandalorian reached down and hooked the tips of his fingers in his helmet. He lifted it and held it out in front of him with his back to Luke and its eye slit staring up into his face.

“I can’t put it back on,” he said.

“Why not?” Luke asked. “Do you need help? Here, I can hold it for you?”

“No,” the Mandalorian said almost with a laugh. “I can’t put it back on. You saw me. And I let you see. And I let the child see, too.”

Luke didn’t understand. Let him and Grogu see what?

“My face.”

Oh. Well, that was fine. It was a nice face, as far as faces went. And anyways, a face and a new bed in exchange for a little bit of Jedi assistance was more than a fair trade.

The Mandalorian did laugh this time. Bitterly. Terribly bitterly. He folded his arms around the helmet and curled around it the way Luke had once curled around Grogu.

Luke’s heart stopped beating.

“I’m not a person,” he erupted. “I’m not anyone who matters. I’m the one who invaded your privacy. You couldn’t have known I would be here. You were unconscious. It can’t count.”

“It all counts.”

The Mandalorian’s voice was muffled by his arms and their layers of padding and metal, and Luke’s heart seized the opportunity to forget entirely how to start beating again and chose to do wild things instead.

“It doesn’t,” he said. “Because—”

“They would all be so ashamed.”

No. No, wait. No, they could make this right. They could. They just needed to think.

Luke had to think.

“You—” he tried.

The Mandalorian unfolded abruptly and held his helmet loosely in his arms. The back of his head jerked to the side as he stared up the stones to the top of the ledge where Grogu now peeked down. Grogu tipped his head to the side and then waved. He chirped again.

“I really did it this time, kid,” the Mandalorian told him thickly.

Grogu crooned down at him.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” the Mandalorian said.

“It does,” Luke countered.

“Does it?” the Mandalorian asked, half-turning back towards him.

Luke looked away again.

“It always matters,” he said to the river at their side. “There’s always hope.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s the only reason I’m here.”

The sun was rising in the sky and its light made the tributary hard to look at. It shined too brightly. Luke’s eyes were sensitive. He looked at his own shadow instead.

He heard the crunch of boots on sand getting closer. He could see from the Mandalorian’s shadow blending in with his own now just how close they now stood.

“My name is Din Djarin,” the Mandalorian said.

Luke resolutely kept his gaze on the shadows spilling over the sparce grass by the tributary’s edge.

“You were born here,” he said.

“I was a foundling.”

Luke swallowed.

“I don’t know what that means,” he admitted.

There was a huff in front of him.

“I can’t put it back on. I’ve broken the Creed now with no lives at stake.”

He could, though. Luke wouldn’t tell anyone.

“Is that why you’re building a temple, Luke Skywalker?”

…fair point well made.

“Well, I guess I’m just glad you’re alive,” Luke said. “I really did think you were dying. If you want us to leave you alone now, that’s fine.”

Right? It was, right?

Luke lifted his eyes slowly and found the Mandalorian’s still lowered.

“Din?” he tried.

The irises flicked up to him, and Luke face’s caught fire as Din Djarin lifted his chin. His jaw was square-shaped and his face was gentle with a prominent nose and soft-looking facial hair. His eyes and cheekbones were lined and tired. He didn’t wear the shape of a man who took pleasure in the loss of life.

This was not Boba Fett.

This was not a king or a ruler.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Din Djarin said softly. “The last thing I had was the Creed. Without it, there’s nothing.”

The tension leaked out of Luke’s shoulders all at once.

“There’s never nothing. Come with us,” Luke said, holding out his hand.

Din looked away this time.

“To build your temple?” he asked Luke.

“To raise your child.”

“I am no jedi.”

“And I am no father.”

The wind swept across Luke’s fingers and through his hair. It ruffled Din’s curls.

“Should I say ‘please?’” Luke asked.

“The Creed says that a foundling who cannot be returned to their people is the responsibility of their finder,” Din said. “This is the Way.”

“So given that I am not a ‘people’ and am, in fact, barely a person on a good day, that means you’re still on the hook, right? By Creed?” Luke asked.

The corner of Din’s lips twitched slightly upwards.

“I think it might,” he said.

“And so by that logic, since I’m still barely a person and definitely not a people, does that mean you can put the helmet back on?” Luke goaded.

That tiny smile didn’t waver. It might have been due to Luke’s earnestness. Leia had told him before that it was a force to be reckoned with. Luke tried putting a optimistic smile on top of it to really ramp up the charm.

“No,” Din said indulgently. “But perhaps my covert would understand that you believed there was a life at stake.”

Oh. So this was the feeling that Grogu kept trying to show him. Red deserts and purple skies. The gold glint of light hitting silver.

The sound of a cape fluttering in the wind.

“I like that,” Luke said taking a step back and willing his face to cool somewhat. “So let’s start again. My name is Luke Skywalker. I’m so glad you’re alive, Mandalorian. I thought that mudhorn was going to kill you.”

Din Djarin laughed and the sound filled Luke’s whole heart. It made Grogu overhead giggle in response, to R2’s deep confusion.  

“Hello, Luke Skywalker,” Din said, lifting his helmet. “My name is Din Djarin, and it seems that we’ve had a misunderstanding. Thank you for the rescue.”

The helmet went back on. Luke felt his heart soar at the sight of its shining silver surrounded by the reddish-gold of grain and the glimmer of clear water.

“Don’t sweat it,” he breathed.

“I can’t lead my people,” Din said. “They’re all gone now. The only person I can lead is the child.”

“We have that in common,” Luke pointed out lightly.

“It appears that we do,” Din said. “But we can’t both lead.”

No, they couldn’t, could they?

“So, I’ll follow you,” Din said. “If it would not be a burden to you.”

“Bad news. Can you keep a secret?” Luke asked.

The helmet before him tipped slightly to the side.

“I can try,” Din said.

“I’m really bad at leading,” Luke admitted. “I just have anger issues and black clothes. That’s my whole leading philosophy, which I think we can both agree is not exactly a winning strategy for anyone. So can we maybe go halfsies instead? If you’ve got the undercurrent and I’ve got the over, then surely together we can build one competent leader?”

Din barked a laugh that he didn’t try to cut off. Luke beamed at him.

“Is that a yes?” he asked.

“What a mess,” Din said. “But sure. Why not?”

Grogu cheered above and R2 bleated in alarm. Luke made a note to tell him later to delete that recording before Leia got her hands on it.

“Where now?” Din asked him.

“Not home,” Luke said immediately. “Neither of us will hear the end of it. What do you say to a little adventure to kill some time?”

The helmet turned back towards the braided rivers and then shrugged.

“I guess I’ll lead then?” Din tried.

Amazing.

“I love you already,” Luke told him brightly. “Now, gimme a boost.”