Work Text:
~*~
It had taken him over thirty standard years to discover this:
Life was not a hologram. It was not a list of boxes to be ticked. It was everything happening so much all the time, and the most honest thing one could do was acknowledge that fact and not try to change it.
Life was a series of hardships, through which one was to persist in the pursuit of finding the good strapped to each underbelly. And if one was to have those good things, the privilege to hold them in two hands, one must also be cognizant of the bad one could so easily do in the same breath.
He had a small house in an out-of-the-way place.
There weren’t many visitors, which was the way he liked it.
Until he didn’t; not really.
The afternoon, hot as high rafters, blurred in like the streaking tail of something embarrassed of having it. Din felt the footsteps on the sands before he heard them.
He ducked through the clattering beads the kid had helped him string along the entryway out of celebration when the whole thing held and didn’t collapse after letting the base later of packed mud dry. Smudged against the horizon and growing more evident: a hitch-hipped gait, with the gangling broadness of that silhouette becoming sharper and sharper and sharper—Marshall Vanth took the last few steps up to the foot of Din’s carved-in porch, the shallow stairs still fresh and slightly damp from the earth sleeping low beneath the sun.
“Heard you were maybe sticking around somewhere,” he rasped, and Din’s belly turned over, like maybe it was thinking that sight deserved a second sun glaring over it to set this man properly enough in nature to be real.
Cobb stopped at the bottom step and squinted up in the lurching shaft of daylight. “Or something like that.”
Din hedged at the top step, his hand opening and closing a few times around the top of the railing he installed after the second time the kid tried to pelt a little too eagerly out into the yard and ended up with his feet in his ears. “Something like that,” he said, and wished he hadn’t slurred the last few syllables into a mealy mumble; som’th’n’like that, as though Cobb would only still be fond of him after so long apart if Din sounded a little more like him.
I could stick around on Tatooine too, he almost blurted, but held that in to examine it for a moment; he liked it here. Din had a place here, a hungry root system finally letting itself make the first gentle wriggles against the first layer of the earth.
“You wanna come in?” he asked—and remembered in the same breath that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d put the helmet on for anything but a job.
With an abortive reluctance that could have easily been mistaken for a play of coquettish shyness, Din reached up and swiped at his bare right cheek with the palm of his left hand in the oldest nervous tick he had (he would reassure himself in those early days of faith that he hadn’t forgotten his helmet by seeking the shape of the cheekplate—a gesture he later applied to Cobb’s sleeping face through each slow rarity of a desert planet morning in the days before Din learned and believed with a soft breakage in his heart that Cobb Vanth was a dead man).
Cobb took an extra second to look at him, which the line of his shoulders translated as keeping back every ounce of needy, heartsick energy that man pumped like blood through his veins.
“Yeah,” he said, already mounting the steps with one hand halfway to outstretched—the barely-reined twitch of finally arriving at the end of a journey that’s been on the long side of possible for many clouded years. “Something like that.”