Chapter Text
Luke gets the message from the child in the early evening.
It’s spring on Yavin, and the wind smells like the glowing purple blossoms that cluster in the corners of old rooms and spring up through the pavement. The air is heavy with twilight, the orange-violet of the sky creeping its way down, filtering through the new-leafed boughs and down to where he’s sitting under a tree.
The children have dragged out a radio into the open air, some new tune playing just loud enough for Luke to hear the beat. They’re all dancing off-rhythm, swaying in the breeze and stamping their feet clumsily, and he can’t help but smile at the sight as his eyes flutter closed.
Even without trying, he can feel the life around him. It stretches out like a still, shallow pond, bright with growing things that give off ripples every time they shift. Yavin is filled with life, quiet and full of peace. If there were ever a spot for a Jedi temple, this would have been it, Luke thinks.
He lets out a breath, and tries to drop deeper into the meditation, letting everything else filter away.
It doesn’t work.
The shallow pond drags at his skin like molasses, sticking and pulling, pricking him all over. It was easier, somehow, on Dagobah, when the threat of Darth Vader had been pressing in—easier when there was nothing but him and Master Yoda and the depths of the swamp stretching up and endless and away into the dark.
Dagobah had been alive too, but not the same way as Yavin—not still, not calm, not placid. There had been no pool of the Force to draw him in and drip down his throat until he was drowning.
Luke lets out another breath, then draws one in, letting the scent of the purple blossoms coat the back of his mouth with their scent. He can do this. He can do this. He is a Jedi master, one of the last in the galaxy, and there is peace within him.
He feels the grass, soft and young and bright green on his fingers, feels the bark of the tree against his back, so brown it’s almost black, rough and ancient, feels the air in his lungs, in his mouth, on his face. He feels them, and lets them go—lets the Force take him.
A heavy stone drops. The ripples become waves, and the world shakes.
The molasses splits to become something worse, something terrible and turbulent, stirred from billions of lightyears away. Whatever is pulling at them, tearing at their minds with each new surge—it’s stretched thin, a tangle of fear and worry rendered massive and unyielding by a power Luke can’t touch.
There’s a moment when it’s all Luke can do to hold on, when the storm is too strong to touch, and then the children are whimpering on the ground ten meters away from him and he’s reaching out, pulling them in close enough that he can weave what shields they have left under his own, and then it’s just him.
He reaches towards the disturbance, tugging at one thread of the tangle, and a vision comes to him of sand and bare rock, a planet of scrub and dust, and at the center of it, a ring of stones, singing, broadcasting into the Force.
Fear. He senses fear, radiating outwards, its source at the center of the stones. The disturbance is there, it is trapped, and it is afraid.
Show me, Luke asks. I know what it is to be afraid. Show me, and I will come.
The vision clears. A pillar of blue light surrounds the source, the Force made visible, and at its edges, an armored man, desperate to get through.
Is he what you fear? Luke asks, though he can already tell the answer is no.
The tangle takes the edge of Luke’s mind, pulling it through to the desert planet. It grabs a stray thread of Luke’s shields, and forces it together with a foreign mind, a Force-null dimness.
Luke chokes, a flash of fierce, furious, love flooding his mind, overwhelming his senses. Through the man’s eyes he sees the figure on the stone, the source of the disturbance. It’s a child— tiny, wrapped in brown, and, though the man doesn’t know, crying out for him in the Force. The man’s panic builds, looking back to where ships have come, and Luke knows the way the man does that something is coming— something awful, and terrible, and something that wants the child.
I will come, Luke tells the man, though he cannot hear him. I will come.
A spear of emotion cuts through him, a love that’s jagged and kind and edged with kind of desperation born of the fear of losing it. It cuts deeply, to the quick, and Luke tears his mind away before it can immobilize him entirely. The break is messy, incomplete, threads of Luke’s shields, Luke’s mind, still interwoven with the armored figure’s. He can feel them at the edges of his consciousness, beating in time with the man’s mind.
He wrenches his eyes open, taking deep, ragged, breaths of Yavin’s perfumed air, a crowd of tiny worried faces surrounding him.
“Call Leia,” he says, unable to suppress the fear in his voice. “I need to leave.”
He barely makes it in time.
He can trace the child across the galaxy through their nascent bond, but the galaxy is wide and empty and cold, and Luke can only cross it so fast.
He comes out of hyperspace after days of travel, the muteness of the blue-white tunnel disappearing, his bond with the child slamming back into focus. Less prominent, but still there, is the man in armor, his stubborn fury burning at the edges of Luke’s consciousness like a candle in the darkness.
Luke lets out a breath as he settles in the ship, reaching out in the Force to still the droids, drawing them towards him.
He can feel the pair at the end of the long, straight, hallways, the armored man’s signature orbiting the child’s, a planet around a bright star in the Force. Already the child is reaching out, touching Luke’s mind with that same fear-hope-anger-love tangle that had shattered Luke’s peace just a few days ago.
I’m coming, he thinks, brushing against the child’s mind. I’m coming, he repeats to the man, hearts beating in time together. Do not fear.
It is a strange thing when the door opens, to see so many people gathered on the bridge of a star destroyer— Bo-Katan Kryze, who he has heard Ahsoka’s stories of, and her friend, and Cara Dune, who once drunk him under the table, and Fennec Shand, who’d tried to put a blaster bolt, and then bullet in his head in quick succession, and even an old Moff. In another time, he might have stayed, might have talked, might have called Leia to deliver her the Moff personally. This time, he is here for the child and its father.
“Are you a Jedi?” The man in the armor asks, voice so much lower and more resigned than it had been just a few days ago.
Luke removes his hood, lets them see his face. “I am,” he says, though the child already knows him, already is reaching out with tentative pokes in the Force. “Come, little one.”
He can feel the flash of fear from the man, of hesitance, of overwhelming terror that floods those few forgotten threads of his mind. “He doesn’t want to go.”
He will be safe, Luke wants to tell him. You know this. You can let him leave, let him be trained before worse tragedy occurs.
“He wants your permission,” Luke says instead. The child has already made his choice, is already entangling their minds in a bond of Jedi making, but Luke can feel both of them, as clear as the stars outside the viewport. He will not rip the child from its father, or the father from its child. “He is strong with the Force,” Luke adds. “But talent without training is nothing.” He knows too well the tragedies that result when power is not trained, when it is left to grow beyond its bounds and other forces take notice. “I will give my life to protect the child, but he will not be safe until he masters his abilities.”
Believe me, he pleads to the Force, he pleads to the man. Hear how my truth rings clear, know that I know what must come. Do not keep him now to abandon him to worse fates later.
There’s a moment, a pause, when everything hangs in the balance. Luke can feel the forces in the man’s mind striving for balance, the endless litany of ‘come, come, let him stay, let me love him’ against the truth that he cannot protect the child, cannot keep him if he does not want to lose him.
“Go on,” the man says, the sound of a heart breaking, “that’s who you belong with. He’s one of your kind.” He pauses, and Luke can feel how every step towards him presses a greater weight upon the man’s chest. “I’ll see you again.” It’s not a promise, not in the man’s mind, but Luke can hear it resonate throughout the Force. It’s a truth, a prophecy unwittingly made, and Luke will ensure it is kept. “I promise.”
The child lets out a soft cry, reaching towards the man’s helmet.
There’s a silence, a deafening moment, another clash in the man’s mind, and then, slowly, slowly, he takes the helmet off.
The child reaches up with one small, green, hand, and touches the man’s face. In the Force, a star explodes, an endless shattering of light and love and promises. The man, though he cannot feel it, smiles at the child, a sad, small, hopeful thing.
Their moment stretches into one forever, two, a kind respite for the pair, and then the bond dissolves, the forever ends, and the man sets the child down on the floor.
Luke lets him talk to R2 for a moment, a wordless gurgle that R2 doesn’t have to translate to understand, and then Luke picks him up.
“May the Force be with you,” he says to the man, and knows that it will.
Please, Luke hears as he turns, as he leaves, and it is the barest whisper against his mind, let him be safe. Let him be loved.
Luke swallows, feels flame and ash and two dead bodies flash in front of his eyes, feels Ben evaporate and the cold emptiness of the galaxy press in around him. He will be safe, Luke promises in return. He will not be alone.
It is all he knows how to promise.
They make the trip back to Yavin in short jumps, from system to system to system.
The X-Wing is small, and cramped, but it has guns for the pilot, and when Luke had sat, waiting for precious days on Yavin, he’d decided that this was the best shot he’d have.
He’d called Leia right after he’d gotten the child’s message, frantic and half-mad. She’d understood—even from half a galaxy away, she can feel him. Their minds are linked by a bond they’ve had since before birth, one formed not by intention but by the Force. Even over those nineteen years, they’d known the other was out there. (Sometimes, in the dead of night, Luke wonders if that was why he had wanted to leave Tatooine— that what he’d known was out there wasn’t adventure, or glory, but Leia.)
She’d sent Han, already on the Outer Rim, to the temple on Yavin. Luke needed the help, couldn’t afford to leave the children unprotected, but each moment waiting for Han had felt like agony as the threads of the man’s mind beat against his own in a litany of fear.
The child— Grogu, he tells Luke, sending an image of Ahsoka saying it— sleeps from the light cruiser to Ytall, where they land on the edge of a spaceport.
It’s been days since Luke slept— really slept, not the meditative trance he kept up during hyperspace— but he can keep going on the Force if he needs to. He’s endured far, far, worse. Instead, he finds a Hkraith-style pub and goes in.
Talking to Grogu is a strange thing. Their bond is already half-formed, the mess of Grogu’s mind clinging to Luke’s shields like ivy to an old stone wall. Grogu doesn’t use that, though, he just pushes images out into the Force for anyone nearby to feel.
Luke snorts when a server comes by and asks what he wants and Grogu shoves an incredibly detailed image of a bowl of frogs at the server. He’s glad the server isn’t Force-sensitive— it’s a traumatizing image without context. At least he’s had the dubious benefit of watching Yoda swallow various amphibians whole— nominally for ‘training,’ but Luke has suspected for many years that it was simply Yoda’s way of getting back at Luke for his whining.
In the end, he compromises with Grogu by getting him some Kolien worms in a fish sauce. While Grogu eats, Luke explores the edges of the child’s mind, beginning to untangle the mess of emotion and weave them into shields. Halfway through, Grogu figures out how to push certain strands into place along with Luke, and the work goes faster.
It’s difficult, intricate work, far easier in his own mind where he doesn’t have to worry about getting too close to a thread and touching the memory. He’s been near Grogu’s mind recently, but that’s not the same thing as being inside it, as being invited in. Like all Force-sensitives, Grogu’s emotions radiate out, drifting in errant strands along the edges of his consciousness, and to guide them into place, to weave them into a basket and shield, Luke has to nudge at them with the Force, showing Grogu how each one can thread into place.
Luke messes up at one point, forgetting to nudge with the Force and instead seizing a strand with his own consciousness. Grogu recoils on instinct, as any creature would, but almost immediately he calms, allowing Luke in.
‘Why?’ Luke asks, in the not-voice of their minds, because he’s never met a creature so open—not even the youngest nests of klee-chicks that will jump into strangers’ hands. ‘Why will you let me in?’
Grogu shoves another thread of memory at him, and he’s plunged into the past.
All around him, the Force is still, a deep well of ancient design. It is quiet, peaceful, the bubbles of light that dance in it barely causing a ripple. It would take a great stone to shatter this peace, a great darkness to cause a splash.
In the memory, a bubble of light reaches out, the Force swimming to it willingly, surrounding it and carrying its intentions until they reach Luke. Luke feels himself— feels Grogu— reach out and touch the gentle wave, let it surround him and lull him to sleep, and as he drops into unconsciousness, he feels the mind that had sent the wave approach him, brushing its tightly-woven walls against the sprawling threads, not yet coalesced, and braiding one of the outward strands into a bond.
Luke comes out of the memory breathing hard, his shields tightening around him without even thinking about it. He’s shared minds, memories before, but the Force, there—the bone deep feeling of peace that seized him so gently that he could not let go if he wanted to, that trapped him and drew him in and wrapped itself around his rough edges—he would not touch it again willingly.
“Oh,” he says, voice rough and low and unsettled.
Grogu grabs at his presence in the Force, tugging at a weakness in his wall, and Luke gently rebuffs him, consciously loosening his shields as he does. Luker unthreads a different section, looking through Grogu’s mind for a place to tie it. There’s a good place— one with several shorn threads that could do with some tending— but when he reaches for them there’s a flash of pain, of sundering, that Luke has only felt once before, with Ben. He moves away, tucking those into an inner pocket of Grogu’s mind, and returns, finding the memory of what must have been the Jedi temple again. He ties his own loose thread to that one, braiding it until the two becomes one, and it thrums with completeness. The deep satisfaction of feeling it settle floods the bond, and his own memory, one of touching Leia’s mind, follows, lending it a lightness.
Grogu burbles happily in his chair, and Luke smiles at him.
“No more shoving memories, alright?”
Grogu eyes him, and then shoves a memory at him, as indelicately as before, completely neglecting to use the bond.
Luke snorts, catching it and threading it back into Grogu’s growing shields. “Nice try, kiddo.”
Grogu gives a little shrug, and a feeling of ‘worth a shot’ comes across the bond, loud and clear.
Luke smiles again. “Well done.”
They jump from Ytall to Ruan, come out of hyperspace above Coruscant, and then continue along the Hydian way, stopping every few standard hours. Luke could charter a transport— could even ask Han to grab the kids and come meet him— but he likes this, Grogu likes this, with the long stretches of blue-white of hyperspace and then endless stars all around them, and then the green of planets and the feeling of dirt under their feet.
In the old archives, the ones undiscovered by Sidious, there’s mentions of pilgrimages, of journeys by Jedi Masters away from their Temples. There was a tradition of poetry for it, Luke knows, because he’s found thousand page-sagas of their journeys under the stars, of ancient temples and wellsprings, and of the hyperspace meditations of old.
‘In the light of that tunnel, that endless beginning thing,’ he remembers one saying, ‘time stretches to a diamond’s point. / The carbon falls, breaks, into endless pieces / and amongst the shattering, I remained.’
Through the endless jumps, he holds tight to Grogu, and the pieces of him that had been stretched thin in the endless trip to the Deep Core crystallize once again, harder than ever. This—here, with Grogu—is not a pilgrimage; it is a homecoming.
It’s night when they get back to the temple, the great gas giant of Yavin turning the sky orange. There’s still a light on in the hangar, with the doors are open to the air, and Luke can hear Han’s tuneless humming as he powers the X-wing down.
Grogu is strangely silent when they get out, both in the Force and in the flesh, but a trepidation lingers at the edges of the child’s mind— trepidation, and wonder.
“Sorry,” Luke says out loud, “I know it’s not—”
‘—not like the Temple on Coruscant,’ he wants to say, because the Force on Yavin is nothing like that deep well, born of a millennium of masters coming together in harmony. Here the Force is light, new, and while the kyber that remains in the air above the planet no longer sings of fey fire and destruction, it does not yet lend itself to peace.
‘—not Jedi,’ he wants to say, because he’s met the Jedi that are left— him, and Ahsoka, though she denies it, and once, in passing, an old one going by Vos, and he’s the closest thing to a Jedi, really, but he doesn’t much feel it.
“—much,” he says, in the end.
Grogu shifts in his arms, and gives him a poke in the bicep.
Luke snorts. “Of course, little one. Let’s go.”
The tuneless humming ceases, and then there’s the sound of a paintbrush dropping into a can.
“Luke,” Han calls, “that you?”
Instead of answering, Luke moves around the side of the Falcon, coming into view.
Han looks him up and down, then blinks. “That is one ugly baby.”
The paint can behind Han floats up into the air, hanging menacingly over his shoulder before coming down with a splash. Luke allows the first few drops to hit Han— just enough to keep his plausible deniability— before catching the rest and levitating it back into the can.
“He can understand you,” Luke says, trying not to laugh at Han’s horrified and indignant expression. He is, after all, a Jedi Master, and besides, Han sulks easily.
“You could've told me that beforehand,” Han mutters.
Luke chokes back a snort. “Han, meet Grogu. Grogu, meet Han.”
Grogu looks at Han for a moment, unimpressed, and Han meets the child’s gaze with the same sort of look Luke has seen him use on hardened criminals. Grogu turns back to Luke, and sends him an image of Han covered in paint.
“Absolutely not,” Luke says briskly, though he breaks into a grin.
Han narrows his eyes. “Do I wanna know?”
Luke tilts his head, pretending to consider the question while Grogu continues sending him images of Han covered in paint. “Doubtful.”
Luke is woken up the next morning by loud whispers right next to his head. He’d elected to let Grogu sleep next to him, given that they don’t have any sort of cradle, and also given that sticking a toddler in a dormitory with lots of other older kids without telling them who or what Grogu is would be a massive disaster.
He feels a tiny, three-fingered hand on his face, and then another, and then Grogu is crawling bodily over his face.
“It’s awake,” Jirii whispers loudly, and Luke resolves to find a way to make all the children get better at sneaking around. He’d rather be spied on quietly than be spied on loudly— at least while he’s sleeping.
“Bah!” Grogu says, finally getting off Luke’s face.
“What did they say?” Clio whispers loudly. “I don’t speak... whatever they’re saying.”
“I think it’s an it,” Jirii whispers back. “Doesn’t look sentient.”
Grogu very loudly sends all of them a psychic image of an adult Togruta calling him Grogu.
All the kids next to Luke’s bed wince, and Luke decides it’s time to get up.
“His name,” Luke says wryly, pushing himself up to see Jirii, Clio, and Kieu all clustered around Grogu, who is staring down at them like a king amongst his subjects, “as you’ve all heard, is Grogu.”
“So he’s not a pet?” Jirii asks.
Grogu sends Jirii a very clear image of him biting Jirii on the head tentacle.
“No,” Luke admonishes, “there will be absolutely no biting while you’re here.” That was a rule they’d had to establish early on, when Ra’akh had attempted to bite the other children during sparring practice. It would have been bad enough if Ra’akh had normal teeth, but xer species had a second set that were connected to venom glands. Luke had had to teach everyone how to filter poisons very quickly that day.
Grogu sends Luke a tentative image of him chewing on one of Jirii’s many purple head-tails, accompanied by wide, pleading, eyes.
“No,” Luke repeats, “those are very sensitive for Nautolans. You can only do it if he tells you that you can.”
“What is he?” Kieu finally asks.
Luke frowns. “I’m not sure. My teacher—Yoda, a master of the old Jedi order—looked like the same species.”
“What does he eat?” Clio asks, frowning.
Grogu sends them all a series of images of frogs, what looks like large jelly-like eggs, something that looks suspiciously like a highly venomous snake, and blue macarons.
“We have some tapioca balls in the pantry that sort of look like eggs?” Jirii suggests. “And Kieu saw that wicked looking snake earlier this week.”
“Let’s start with the tapioca,” Luke decides, because he’s not really up for corralling multiple children while trying to catch a snake without anyone getting bitten or eaten. “Who wants to show Grogu the dining room?”
Kieu volunteers, and Luke hands Grogu off to them, watching the kids leave in a chattering cluster.
Spring on Yavin is a bright, loud thing, louder still for Grogu’s presence. He’s the smallest of all the children—still a toddler, near as Luke can figure—but he’s got the best control over the Force, which makes him even more of a trouble.
The first time he levitates something, Luke watches him closely and quietly, peering at Grogu through the Force as he unfolds errant threads of himself to wrap around a tin of cookies, dragging it bit by bit over to himself without ever tugging a thread out of place. Grogu is careful, for all the tin lurches as it moves—careful not to tie himself too tightly to the tin, to yank too hard and rip himself in half, threads still stuck fast, and set his hands shaking and skull burning with pain.
Then the tin makes its way to Grogu, and the cookies are coming out one after the other, and Luke has to intercede, taking the tin and all the cookies but one away and hiding them out of sight. Grogu finds the tin again a day later.
Still, for all his troublemaking, for all his control, for all his ability to blink up at Luke like the biggest angel there is and then turn around and get Jirii to throw him on top of the cupboard, he’s still small, still young, and still painfully, painfully alone. The first night, he comes crying to Luke before the rest of the kids are in bed, having found his way out of the spare room, and Luke can’t bear to send him back. Instead, he scoots over and offers Grogu half his small bed, and does the same the next night, and the next night, and the next.
Luke wakes with a jolt in the middle of the night.
Grogu is sleeping peacefully next to him, tiny mouth open as his chest rises and falls slowly. It’s an adorable picture made cuter by the way he’s managed to tuck Luke’s arm around him despite starting out on the other side of the bed. Luke briefly touches the edge of Grogu’s mind to check if it was him that had woken, finding nothing but the strange swimming of a Force-sensitive's mind in sleep.
He casts his senses outwards, reaching out to find the children one by one. Mira-ki is awake, reading, as expected, Jirii, Ra’akh, and Keiu are all piled into the same bed, minds touching as closely as their bodies—they must have fallen asleep playing some game after lights-out—and Han is his usual bubble of Force-null-ness, sleeping on the Falcon.
When Luke goes to touch Clio’s mind, there’s a not-flash searing directly into his brain, too hot and cold and all the things in between to describe, and everything shifts. He’s not touching Clio anymore, she’s touching him, pressed to his mind, and there’s the taste of dust and ash on his tongue, a vise grip tightening around his heart and there’s burning and burning and Clio is reeling back pushing against him as he clutches at her with iron fingers and there are corpses on the ground and Clio is screaming and—
Luke slams his shields down, releasing Clio, and his own breath steadies.
The halls are lit by the soft glow of Yavin Prime, reflecting the light of the sun back at them just enough that only a few stars are visible.
When he’d been on Yavin the first time, he’d spent three nights awake, staring up at the sky and trying to pick out the patterns he knew from them. There was a trick to it, on Tatooine—one he’d learned before he’d even been old enough to leave the compound. You searched out the eye of the great Krayt first, and found A’aleiar, goddess of water underneath her, her oasis trickling down to the feet of the shade goddess Lukheva.
He’d managed it, almost. The great Krayt was a little lopsided, and the lesser bantha was more a jumble of bright points than anything else, but A’aleiar had been almost visible in the orange glow.
Leia found him that night and pointed out Alderaan at the center of a A’aleiar’s veil as they looked up, and Luke had traced her namesake’s figure for her. There’d been a moment, then, when they’d held their breaths together and felt as though their lungs were the same. And then they’d felt the kyber like glass in the sky, shot with the screams of Alderaan, and remembered.
Neither of them had looked at the stars after that.
Luke rounds the corner. He can feel Clio inside her room, fear oozing off her in thick swirls that only increase when he reaches out with his mind. He swallows, and knocks instead, letting out a slight breath when the door drifts open.
Those first few months on Hoth, they’d shoved him in a private room—more of a closet, really. It hadn’t been an honor for the hero of the Rebellion, though that was the answer he’d given with a grin and a shrug when they’d asked. He’d just screamed too loudly at night for anyone to bunk with him.
A few weeks in, he’d woken up in the middle of the night, sweat soaked shirt halfway to freezing through, to see Han at the door, a bottle of something dubious and definitely illegal in his hands. Han had sat down on the floor with him, ducking under the extra boxes of ration bars that were stacked above Luke’s paper-thin mattress, and offered Luke a drink directly from the jug.
That night, with alcohol turning his skin warm and rosy and Han slumped against him on the floor, had been the first time he’d rested—really rested, not just dipped in and out of sleep—since Tatooine.
Somehow, Luke doubts he can offer Clio some under-the-table spotchka as a solution.
He has to search for a moment before he spots her, the yellow of her skin mixing with the warm tones of the lamp so that she blends into the wall. She’s in the corner with her knees tucked to her chest, lekku twitching anxiously against her shoulders and casting strange shadows across the room.
She doesn’t say anything when he comes in—doesn’t even look up—but she doesn’t need to, not when that flash of searing heat is still fresh in both their minds.
Luke lowers himself to the floor across from her, crossing his legs and shoving his hands in his lap as he tries to find words he doesn’t even know. This isn’t a random nightmare, some strange dream of an oversized rancor that Luke can chase away with little details about how to defeat one. She saw him—him as he was, nineteen, furious and reckless and grieving.
She’s fourteen, now. She hasn’t seen her parents since she was nine, when they begged him to take her away and he’d had to find somewhere safe for the both of them. He’s known her for five years, felt her mind against his more times than he can count, and yet, in this moment, he couldn’t guess what she’s thinking.
“Who was that?” she says finally, huge, dark eyes peeking out of the embrace of her own arms to look at him.
Luke swallows, and for a moment there is fire and burning and death so thick he can taste it. He shoves down the taste of ash in his mouth.
“My—aunt and uncle,” he responds, quiet and shakier than he’d expected. “When I was nineteen.”
She nods, and her gaze drifts back down to the crook of her skinny elbows.
The shadows flicker on the wall, ends of her lekku curling and uncurling.
“You know,” she says, and there are cracks in her voice that mean she’s seconds away from breaking, “I would have gotten my tattoos last month.” She tugs at one of her lekku, a blank yellow all the way down.
“Oh,” Luke says, a horrible lump rising in his throat, and he wants to—to do something. To offer to do her tattoos himself. To track down her family and make them give her what she’s owed—make them give her all five years. Make her stop looking like she’s going to break, like she’s lost something she can’t get back, like she’s standing in the sand and watching her home burn in front of her.
“Yeah,” she says, voice splintering, and suddenly there are hot tears spilling down her cheeks, and a strange, horrible, gasping noise in her chest as she tries to breathe, and Luke is reaching forward and pulling her against him, clutching at her until his knuckles turn as white as the scars covering his skin.
She’s scrabbling at his back too, trying to pull him closer as she sinks her face into the crook of his neck.
“I want to go home,” she says, voice breaking in the middle, and he can hear what home means, can hear the back and before it entails.
Luke tastes dust and ash in her voice, licking at his dry throat like flames the way it did all those years ago as the future solidified into the past.
Luke holds her tighter. It’s all he can do.
The attack comes three days later.
It almost feels like the other attack on Yavin, the one that had come years ago, a couple days after the Death Star was destroyed. They had been packing for days, the ceremony only a blip in an endless whirl of work, but there had still been yelling when it had come, the last of the last struggling out in darkness, trying to get a few more packs of medical supplies or tech out before the Empire started bombing them from orbit.
This is different. There’s less screaming— at least out loud, but the Force is in flux, each of the children screaming out into it, yelling for Luke. Grogu is the only one that’s quiet— dangerously, dangerously quiet— and when Luke brushes against his mind, he sees fire and ash and fallen bodies. Grogu remembers another attack, another temple. This is not the first time he’s seen Jedi fall.
Luke refuses to let any of the other children see it to begin with. There’s a reason he still sleeps with his lightsaber within arm’s reach.
He grabs Grogu in his arms and runs towards the room Jirii, Ra’akh, and Kieu share, navigating the hallways half by the pale orange light, and half by the Force. He can sense them still there, safe but scared, and a little further away he can sense Mira-ki, who’s climbed up the columns in the entryway, hiding in the shadows.
Luke opens the door to Jirii, Ra’akh, and Kieu’s room to see Jirii pointing a blaster at him, and shoves Grogu at Kieu and leaves. This isn’t the time for a lecture about weapons safety, and Jirii is a decent shot anyways.
The sounds of blaster shots get closer as he nears the hangar, finding Han tucked into the entryway behind some old crates. He’s pale, a terrified look in his eyes, and Luke knows something has gone very, very wrong.
“Clio,” Luke breathes, stretching out into the Force to feel her aboard one of the ships just outside the hangar. She’s fighting, screaming, causing waves in the Force, and Luke is just glad they don’t have any Force-binders on her.
Han gives him a look, and Luke ignores it.
He ignites his lightsaber and steps into view.
The first four go down quickly, blaster bolts directed into their throats. Luke isn’t in the mood for mercy, not when they’ve taken a child. The rest—another ten, maybe—take cover, and Luke is about to pull them out of hiding when he hears the dull roar of engines, the screech of thrusters igniting.
He sprints for the edge of the hangar, feeling Clio fight the whole way. If she were older, if he’d trained her more, maybe she’d be able to bring the ship down, but she’s not and Luke can’t see the ship, doesn’t have time to look for it in the Force and figure out how to drag it down without hurting the people inside, and she’s getting farther away by the second.
He reaches the edge of the hangar and grabs, the ship just a dot in the atmosphere. There’s a pull at his mind as he binds it to himself, weaving the fibers of it into the edges of his mind. He can feel it ripping, feel it tearing its way out, feel the hole forming where the scream of the engines comes through, straining for hyperspace. He doesn’t let go, he can’t, because then Clio will be gone.
There’s a single, infinite moment, where he can feel the edges giving, his concentration frayed by the burning that comes with pulling too hard on the Force, and then the ship jumps, and Clio is gone.
He stumbles back with a ragged breath, the rush of the Force screaming in his ears, tearing at his consciousness like fire. It hurts, everything hurts, the sort of pain born from extending himself too far, but he’s felt worse.
Luke presses back the screaming, twists his hand, and the ship next to him comes crashing down. In it he can feel the flares of panic that signal people, each of them terrified by the knowledge that he’s right outside their door.
From behind him, he can hear Han approach, and the low mutter of ‘You don’t look so good’ and ‘Take it easy, kid’ that accompanies him, but Luke ignores it.
Instead, the ship rips itself apart under his grasp, shredding itself into a pile of crumpled scrap metal, and five people stumble out, falling on the pavement in front of him.
“Where,” Luke says, breath ragged, eyes burning as he points his lightsaber down at them, “is she?”