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Skywalker was like a calm lake.
The description was perhaps overly poetical; Din never considered himself a man of words, but he was good at watching and waiting, at seeing who and what a person was. When he took the measure of the man who was teaching his son how to wield a power he could never understand, he thought about the gently rippling surface of a lake on a breezy, cloudless day. He thought about the way sunlight glittered on waves, about the lap of waves on the shore, the relaxing embrace of cool water on hot skin.
Even that first day, when Skywalker tore through an entire platoon of dark troopers, he had done it with a quietude that stilled and enthralled Din in equal measure. His motions were precise and controlled; he’d barely broken a sweat. He’d walked onto the bridge looking perfectly unperturbed, and left it cool as a dead star. The Jedi’s tranquility, even after a fight like that, had soothed Din’s grief at giving up Grogu like mist on tired eyes. It had calmed him to see that display of power and control, to know that Skywalker could both help and defend Grogu.
Since then, Din had seen on his visits to Yavin IV that Skywalker’s moods had variable weather. He had been the cause of some of those variations, in fact. Some had been very unintentional, like the time they’d been sparring and he’d accidentally boxed Skywalker’s ear hard enough to give him a mild concussion. Other incidents had been very intentional indeed, Din’s hidden playful side emerging under the influence of a pack of younglings. There had been the time he’d helped Skywalker’s nephew hide his boots, or the time he’d brought back googly eyes for the younglings and helped them “decorate” the template (including the meiloruuns and Skywalker’s lightsaber). Then there’d been the many, many times he had encouraged the younglings to make more mess in the kitchen than was probably necessary. In his defense, he’d always helped clean up after whatever miniature disaster he’d spearheaded. It was worth it to see Skywalker’s exasperation and the way it abated quickly into amusement, little whitecaps on a windy day settling back down into a smooth surface.
He’d seen Skywalker frustrated, tired, annoyed, impatient, whiny, and petulant. He’d seen him fret: Skywalker had admitted his worries about teaching and the new order to Din more than once, late at night when they sat in the kitchen, Din caring for his weapons and Skywalker tinkering with his lightsaber or his hand or some droid part. He’d seen shadows pass over his face like clouds, and knew it wasn’t a trick of the kitchen lantern. He’d seen him sad and melancholy on the anniversary of the destruction of Alderaan, his normal brightness muted into something chilly and grey and weighted down. He’d seen Skywalker put on a smiling mask with the younglings on Endor Day, and knew it was a mask when Skywalker had been unable to keep his hands steady enough to set off fireworks. Din had taken over that particular task, and had then pulled the story of Anakin Skywalker’s death out of him later that night. It had felt like he was watching Skywalker drown.
(He discounted the moments before his departures from Yavin, when Skywalker’s easy smile seemed a little dimmed, a little forced. Din was clearly imagining things, and if he wasn’t – well, no, he was most surely imagining things.)
At the heart of it, though, Skywalker was centered, had a deep well of stability and strength inside him. From the first day on the star cruiser, Din had trusted him because of it – trusted him with his name because of it, trusted him with Grogu because of it. He watched Skywalker with the younglings, patient even in the midst of chaos and frustration, and he knew that Skywalker was teaching them how to develop that same stability, how to let a harsh galaxy flow through and around them and buffet them without breaking them. He saw it in the way Grogu had started to close his eyes and take a deep breath when he was frustrated, and in the way the other students put their own selves in time out when they felt themselves melting down.
Din knew that the man felt anger. They’d talked about it before, during those late nights at the kitchen table: at his masters, at his father, at the Emperor and the Empire. He’d seen the turbulence of it under the surface, the way Skywalker’s jaw tightened as he recounted the past or the way he paused before speaking, as if letting something pass through him. He knew that Skywalker’s anger had mellowed over the years, that it was twinned with compassion, that the desire for revenge he’d felt had transmuted into a desire for active justice. It was the Jedi way, Skywalker explained: to sit with negative emotion and then to move through it, letting it go to be a thing of the past. Over time it became less and less, until it was no longer a burden pressed tight and heavy to the body.
It sounded peaceful.
It sounded hard.
When Din tried to sit with his own anger, at the Separatists and Moff Gideon and the Imps and the Armorer and himself, he didn’t feel himself moving through it towards compassion or understanding or a desire for justice. It just simmered under the surface, even when he tried to copy the techniques Skywalker taught the younglings. It smarted a little to know that small children were better at this than he was, but then he was fighting against years of training that told him to take anger and to stoke it, to turn it into a tool for action and vengeance. He could have that much compassion, at least, to know that change was hard.
There were times when he thought he felt little tendrils of it whisk away from him and not return. He felt it when he saw Grogu laugh with his whole tiny body and all he wanted to do was make space for that laughter. He felt it when he watched the small circle of Jedi meditate in a group, beings sitting together in a state of trust. There were times, too, when he felt it in the company of the Nite Owls, the easy camaraderie between Kryze and her people setting something in his chest at ease, even if he himself was outside that fellowship. Something about beings finding beings, beings taking comfort in other beings, made his anger and pain and loss a little easier to bear.
It impressed him, when he thought about the monumental size of what Skywalker had let go of. He thought that if he was a Jedi, he’d be letting go of anger for the rest of his life in slow drips and drops, never emptying the reservoir.
He said as much to Skywalker one day after watching him mediate a spat between two of the younglings.
Skywalker hummed. “I’m not sure anyone ever gets rid of it all. We’re always letting go of it, over and over and over, Jedi or not. It’s an ongoing struggle.”
“You don’t seem to have much trouble with it.”
Skywalker snorted so hard he almost choked. “Oh, Din,” he said, and the fondness in his smile made Din pause and straighten. “You have no idea how much trouble I sometimes have with it.”
He didn’t really believe it until he saw it.
*
Din arrived on Yavin IV for a regularly-scheduled visit with Grogu. Unlike his previous visits, he had arrived with the company of a small, bedraggled, Force-sensitive Twi’lek girl.
Old habits die slow, or not at all. He needed food and fuel, and the Darksaber didn’t provide those. Despite the responsibilities coalescing around him, he still took bounties. He had taken one on this trip back to the Yavin system from Kryze’s cruiser, a smuggler accused of murder, and was looking forward to having a few extra credits padding his accounts. More than a few, given the murder accusation, even if it meant setting down on a dustball more backwards than Tatooine.
He didn’t realize that the bounty had also gotten mixed up in slaving until he burst into the room above the inn and found not only the human he’d been trailing, but a Rodian man and the tiny little Twi’lek girl. The Rodian was underfed, with an empty look on his face, and the girl cowered in the corner, scared of both her human master and the sudden noise and chaos of a Mandalorian busting down the door.
Din knocked the man unconscious in under five seconds. He trussed him up, and took stock of the situation – the Rodian’s blank stare and the Twi’lek looking at him with large and terrified eyes. “Who are you?” he asked in Basic. That was when the Rodian scrambled, leaping to the other side of the room. Din barely had time to raise his blaster before the Rodian grabbed a pair of ident pads and smashed them into the floor. They broke into dozens of pieces, rolling and sliding across the old pitted wood.
“Good call,” he said as he watched a wire spring free from one sparking chunk of plastoid case. He could think of only one reason that someone might smash ident pads like that, and it made his stomach twist in disgust and anger. Heat rose up his spine in a way that it hadn’t during the exceptionally brief fight with the bounty.
His words appeared to put the Rodian at ease, a thin hope spreading across his thinner face. Din nodded at him, and looked back down at his bounty. The man was bleeding abundantly from a wound on his temple, although the bone wasn’t broken. Din just shook his head, and neglected to slap a bacta patch on the wound. Part of him wanted to shoot the man then and there – a karking slaver – but killing a bounty while carrying the Darksaber was probably a good way to set off a galactic incident. He didn’t want to deal with Kryze’s scolding if that happened. (He pushed aside the thought of Skywalker’s face if he told him he’d killed a man lying injured on the floor.)
He turned then to the corner, where the little one sat curled up. He crouched down and reached out a hand. She stiffened, and stared at him straight through the visor. Her gaze was like Skywalker’s: it met his unerringly, eye to eye.
“It’s okay, little one,” he told her in what little Ryl he knew, using his hands in place of lekku as best he could. She blinked, but her shoulders relaxed. “What’s your name?”
She held his eyes through the visor, and Din could see the moment that she decided to trust him. “Alema.”
“That’s a very strong name. Do you know where your parents are?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know your parents’ names?”
She shook her head again, trembling.
The Rodian refused to provide his name, and repeated only that he wanted to go home to Rodia; he had only made his way into the bounty’s possession recently, after the girl. Din did the only thing he could think to do: He sent the Rodian off with enough credits to get him home through the Corellian hyperroute, and decided to take Alema to Yavin IV. He had nowhere else to take a foundling; the covert was gone, and Kryze’s battleship was no place for a child this small. He knew that Skywalker would work to find her parents – and if he couldn’t, he would find a place for her somewhere in his wide network of friends and allies and acquaintances.
It was quick work getting rid of the bounty at the Guild. He placed the girl in a sling, much like the one he’d carried Grogu in; his poor Ryl seemed to have won her trust. The Guild agent looked confused when he walked in with the girl curled up against his side, her hands gripping the edges of his armor plates, and raised his brows at Din’s less-than-gentle treatment of the bounty; still, the man had no desire to pull conversation out of a taciturn and clearly agitated Mandalorian, and the processing went quickly. After that, it was a winding path through the city until they got to the hangar where Din had parked his ship.
Alema perked up at the sight of his N-1. That, at least, was a good sign for an extended hyperspace ride. He kept her tucked into his side as he prepped the ship, explaining what he was doing in a mix of Ryl and Basic. She paid attention closely, and once he took a seat in the cabin and began the last pre-flight procedures, she settled onto his lap, her lekku twitching in interest.
She startled when he turned the engines on, but the look of wonder on her face when they took off and broke atmo was one of the best things he’d seen in a long time. A curl of the anger he’d been carrying for the last several hours broke off and dissipated. Good riddance to this dustball, indeed.
Once they settled into hyperspace, Din left a comm message for Skywalker briefly outlining the situation: bounty turned in, foundling acquired in less-than-ideal circumstances. He then looked down at Alema. She had already fallen asleep, her head curled into the crook of his neck between helmet and pauldron. He could feel that twist in his stomach again, as if his whole body rebelled against the idea of any being in the galaxy being owned.
Sleep, he thought, was a good idea.
He woke much later, half an hour from Yavin IV. He had a crick in his lower back, the way he always did when sleeping in the N-1, and his leg had completely fallen asleep where the majority of the girl’s weight lay on it. He nudged her gently. She woke with a jolt, hands clinging to him, eyes darting around in confusion until she recognized her surroundings.
“We’ll be arriving at Yavin soon,” he said. “It’s only going to be–” a quick glance at the chronometer “–the early afternoon. There are some other kids there, including my son. I bet you’ll be able to meet them today.”
She looked up at him, eyes wide, taking in his words.
“They’re nice kids. There’s another Twi’lek there, though they’re a few years older than you.” He swallowed. If Alema stayed at the temple, if she spent any time around the children, she was going to see them use the Force. “The kids at the temple – they’re really friendly, but they’re a little different. They can make things float.”
He didn’t expect the way her eyes suddenly lit up, the way a fast stream of childish Ryl bubbled out of her mouth, too fast for him to follow. He really didn’t expect the multitool that he kept in the pilot cabin in case of sudden mechanical failures to wobble up into the air.
"Oh," he breathed out. He let the shock of it – another Force-sensitive foundling – run through him. How was it even possible? "Nicely done, kid."
She beamed at him.
It was an easy touchdown on Yavin IV, on a breezy, blue-sky day; auspicious, Din thought, a good sign for a small child who deserved far more easy things than she had already experienced in life. He could see Skywalker approaching the landing pad, drawn by the engine noise, as he showed the girl the post-flight checklist and tried his best to shake the pins and needles out of his leg without jostling her too much.
He didn’t realize that Skywalker had completely missed his comm about the girl until he clambered out of the ship only to find Skywalker staring at her, his eyes wide as saucers.
“Din,” he said, half in greeting, half in confused exasperation, his eyes roving up to Din’s visor.
“I commed ahead,” Din offered.
Skywalker looked a little abashed, and made a noise of assent. He then looked down at the girl, who still clung to Din like a windbreak in a storm. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The girl looked up at Din.
“This is Ma–” he cut himself off. He knew Ryl well enough to know the connotations, and he didn’t want to take chances with that word, didn’t want her to think that she was still there. “This is Luke Skywalker,” he said. “He can help look for your parents. He can also teach you how to make things float even better than you already can.” It was best, he thought, to get that newly discovered chestnut out in the open as soon as possible.
Skywalker looked at the child again, his eyes searching and his entire posture shifting into the loose-limbed bearing he took on when he sunk into the Force, and then a slow smile spread across his face.
“Yes,” he said softly, in much better Ryl than Din’s. “I can.”
Alema tensed, some combination of excitement and apprehension coursing through her.
“What’s your name, little one?” Skywalker asked, walking up to them with that soft, slow smile still on his face.
She pressed her face into Din’s pauldron before answering, shyly: “Alema.”
“Well,” Skywalker said, “how about we get you settled in, Alema? We need to introduce you to the other younglings.”
She kept her face pressed into Din’s armor as they walked towards the temple, but Din could feel the tension relaxing out of her.
*
Eight hours later, Din was in the kitchen. Every evening – or at least, every evening that he wasn’t in the cockpit of the N-1 – began with the ritual of caring for his weaponry. His amban rifle, his jetpack, his vambraces, vibroblades, and sundry other weapons all lay on the table in quiet order. He was tired, and the ritual of wiping, polishing, and tidying weaponry was soothing after a long day.
The temple was quiet now, a very excitable pack of younglings settled into their beds. Alema had been tucked into a bed next to Grogu’s, neither of them willing or able to sleep until Din’s voice had gone nearly hoarse with telling stories.
The creak of the kitchen door was loud against the still air, and he turned his head to watch Skywalker walk in. His face was still and quiet as the temple around them.
He then closed the door behind him and the calm veneer shattered.
He leaned back against the door and slid down until he was cross-legged on the floor. Din could see his hands shaking as he placed them on his knees in meditation position; his lips were pressed thin, his jaw clenched, every line of his body taut and ready to snap. He was barely holding his body in one piece, Din thought, a thunderstorm pressed into human flesh.
Din didn’t move. He could feel the world around him fall away as he watched Skywalker settle onto the floor. The tension in Skywalker was palpable, and Din couldn’t help but tense up himself. He’d known from the first time he saw Skywalker that he was a dangerous man to have as an opponent; this was the first time he’d felt it, understood what it would be like to be in Luke Skywalker’s presence without basking in the open friendliness that he by default gave to the galaxy.
Skywalker closed his eyes, or rather squeezed them roughly shut. He took a long, slow breath in, held it, took a longer, slower breath out. Box breathing, Din knew, had seen him teach it to the younglings as a method to manage anger and fear.
Halfway through the second breath, Din heard something behind him break, and recognized it as the sound of the ceramic teapot shattering.
Din made a decision then, and knew that it was either very stupid or very smart. He set down the vibroblade he was holding and stood, slow and careful, to move towards Skywalker. He kept his steps gentle, audible but soft against the cool tile of the kitchen floor. He could hear something fall over behind him; it sounded like the little wooden jug that held utensils this time. He knew that neither the teapot nor the jug were intentional pieces of destruction.
Dangerous, he thought again, but not to him.
Din crouched down in front of Skywalker and carefully placed a bare hand on his forearm.
Skywalker stiffened, and his eyes flew open. As always, Skywalker’s gaze met his through the visor. He glared at Din, spoiling for a fight. Din had never seen a darjetii, but that if this was what a Jedi looked like when angry, he could not imagine a darjetii. Din, who was as Force-sensitive as your average pebble, could feel the anger crackling around Skywalker, barely contained.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Even with the helmet between them, Din couldn’t wrest himself away from Skywalker’s eyes; he felt held in place. Anger made Skywalker’s blue eyes darker, like water churned by a storm. Anger, he thought, always came from somewhere vulnerable. Before he could talk himself out of it, he reached out and placed his other hand on Skywalker’s cheek, barely touching the skin but still there.
There was a split second where Din thought that Skywalker was going to deck him – felt the other man tense even more under his touch. Something let go in him instead, like water shifting and moving past stones, and Skywalker tipped forward until his head pressed into the space between Din’s cuirass and pauldron. Din slung his arm around Skywalker’s shoulders, and Skywalker took another long, slow breath. This one seemed to work; Din couldn’t hear anything break or topple over behind him, just the sound of Skywalker’s exhale.
“She showed me,” he rasped. His back rose and fell with the wave of his breath, moving under Din’s arm. “I went in to check on how she was sleeping, and she showed me.”
Din didn’t ask what Alema had shared, just squeezed Skywalker’s forearm. Skywalker stayed quiet, continuing his long, slow breaths. After a few moments, Din moved out of his crouch to sit cross-legged, Skywalker still pressed into his shoulder. They sat like that for several long minutes: Skywalker breathing back to his center, Din holding him in the circle of his arm.
Skywalker said something into his shoulder, so low that he couldn’t catch it. He made a quizzical hum in response. He expected Skywalker to say something about anger and the Jedi code, or about what Alema showed him, or the shattered teapot.
What he didn’t expect was: “My father and grandmother were enslaved.”
Din sucked in a breath, and felt again that twist in his stomach that had been his companion over the past day.
“It’s personal, for me. Before the Jedi found him, my father was a slave. My grandmother was a slave until… she must have been in her forties.” Skywalker paused, made a noise as if to speak, paused again. What was there to say about it that wasn’t already encapsulated in these few short sentences? The galaxy could be harsh and cruel, could be personal, and sometimes the only thing that could be done was to bear witness and to carry on.
“I’m sorry, Luke,” he said. It was just above a whisper.
Skywalker pressed in closer and wrapped his arms around Din’s waist. Din tightened his arm around him. He felt his chest contract, as if the very ideas of family and pain and loss were physical things that could prick the muscle of his heart and make it quiver.
He thought, too, about how he kept finding family, as if kinship were inevitable. Maybe, he thought, it was. It was the way of beings to keep making a home out of the galaxy, despite everything.
Skywalker pulled back and looked up at Din. There was a crease on his forehead from where it had pressed against Din’s pauldron. His face was still tight, but there was a tangle of grief resting there now, not just the rage of before. He gave Din a small, crooked, brief smile – fleeting but real, like every other smile Din had ever seen on his face.
“Thanks,” he said. It was simple, and very Skywalker. Din made a noncommittal noise and moved to lean against the door next to Skywalker. Skywalker correctly interpreted the noise as brushing off his thanks, because he rolled his eyes. He leaned back, half against the door and half against Din, and Din wrapped his arm around Skywalker again. They stayed that way, curled together on the kitchen floor: Skywalker cycling between flashes of anger and the deep grief he carried for his family, the Jedi, the whole galaxy, Din holding the man next to him like an anchor, unsure who kept who from reeling.
“Sometimes I wish it were easier,” Skywalker said. He was staring at the busted teapot.
“It wouldn’t be life if it were,” Din responded, thoughtful and slow.
“No, it wouldn’t be.”