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When Leia is ten, Ben Kenobi disappears for a month. No one else seems to notice it, so she doesn’t say anything, but it’s strange being outside working on the vaporators without him watching.
By the time the lady comes, she’s imagined forty seven and a half different reasons he’s gone. The sarlacc pit one is probably the coolest, but she secretly hopes he’s just visiting someone down at the south pole. It’s probably a little weird that she wants him to come back, because he’s never really talked to her, but he’s—nice. Or he feels nice. Or something like that. Anyways, Uncle Owen sees him watching sometimes and hasn’t told him to piss off or he’ll stick him with the wrong end of his bayo-rifle, so she figures Ben Kenobi probably isn’t bad people.
But then everything is happening, and there’s a lady who feels like a black hole—or what Leia thinks a black hole feels like, anyways, from the study modules they get from town—and Leia runs, and the lady follows her and it all works out alright in the end, but Ben Kenobi goes into the wastes anyways. (No one tells her that—not for a long while. But she knows. She just knows.) And Leia doesn’t mention it all.
Two years after that, when Biggs goes into town with his mom for two weeks and all older kids tell her to go play with the babies whose feet can’t touch the pedals on a speeder yet, she goes to visit him.
She hasn’t got a good reason—not even a Feeling, which Uncle Owen tells her is just being impulsive, and Aunt Beru says is being a teenager—but it’s the dry season and she’s bored and no one has seen Tuskens around for at least a month, so she uses one of the satnavs to find something that looks like a house in the Jundland Wastes and takes the speeder before anyone can ask what she’s doing. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. And besides, even if she gets grounded, she’ll have a story for Biggs.
And then the satnav breaks on her.
She’s well into the Wastes at that point, and the suns aren’t due to set for another four hours—it being the dry season and all—but her canister’s just about run out of milk, and her speeder doesn’t have enough fuel to go wandering around in the Wastes and then go home. Which is a problem, because she wasn’t really paying that much attention to the route in the first place.
Leia’s not scared—being scared is for babies who can’t even hit the head on a womp rat at four meters—but she’s been seeing caves for the last half hour, and everyone says Tuskens leave the Dune Sea in the dry season when all the black melon spores are dormant, and Norai told Aytin told Biggs that she’d found one of their weird sticks in a cave in the Wastes when she’d been frenching that cool starship pilot that got chased out of Mos Eisley, and it’s not like Leia’s an idiot, she’s not going to get herself shot, but she definitely saw something moving in that corner a moment ago, and it’s not like she’s got any real defenses, and Uncle Owen doesn't even know she's gone, and if she dies out here no one will even find her bones.
Something moves behind her and she slams on the gas. The engine whines in a way that really sounds like someone shrieking but totally isn’t because she’s not scared, and then the speeder bangs off the canyon wall and spins off, skidding across the rough, sandy floor, until it lands in a banged up pile and the engine goes dead.
“Uncle Owen’s gonna kill me,” she moans softly, looking down at the crumpled front of the speeder. She’s seen worse, but only at Beggar’s Canyon, and the worse usually means the person in it is bleeding bad.
“It doesn’t look too bad to me,” says a voice from behind her.
Leia whirls around, grabbing the blaster out of the pocket Aunt Beru keeps it in for whenever they head to Mos Espa.
It’s Ben. He’s got his hood up, and his cloaked wrapped around him tight, but it’s Ben. She knows.
Leia suddenly becomes a little too aware of how far out in the Wastes they are—everyone calls Old Ben crazy for a reason. There’s no one around for miles and miles and miles, and, well—she doesn’t think Ben is bad news. She didn’t, at least. But now he’s silent and watching her and sure Uncle Owen never told him to piss off, but he’s still bigger than her, and crazy, and a wizard, and she never thought the pilots down at the cantina way down in the slums of Mos Eisely seemed too bad either until Norai’s older sister Amila came back with a split lip and a feeling like a sandstorm had carved her out, so she grips the blaster a little bit tighter, pointing it right at Old Ben.
“I’ll shoot you if you try and grab me,” Leia says.
“Will you?” Old Ben says, looking down at her with one big blue eye. Two seasons ago when Biggs got a magnifying glass for his birthday, they spent a whole day putting dust beetles under it and looking at the way they squirmed around on their backs. Right now she feels a lot like she’s the dust beetle and he’s just grabbed her out of the junk pile by her feet. “Hm,” he says after a few seconds, and the feeling of looking lessens, but she doesn’t feel a whole lot better. “Yes, I suppose you will.”
She eyes him warily. “What are you doing out here?”
He raises one eyebrow—it’s a neat trick, makes him look crazy, like the scientists Biggs’s holomag collection, but also real smart. She should learn how to do that. “I live out here. The real question is: what are you doing out here?”
Leia blinks several times and presses her lips together. She doesn’t lower the blaster.
“I see,” Ben says, though she doesn’t see how he could see at all. “Well, let’s take a look at that speeder, shall we? I can’t imagine your uncle will be very happy to see you’ve crashed it.”
Leia edges back, hand still on the blaster, to let him take a look. “The engine’s stalled.”
He looks down at the huge dent in the front, and then back up at her like he’s trying to make a point. “So it has.”
“It’ll be fine,” she adds. It’s just a dent, whatever, he doesn’t need to give her that look. She’s not a baby, she’s not going to lose it just because she wrecked a speeder’s paint job.
He raises an eyebrow again, and Leia hmphs, watching him pop the hood open. A bit of smoke comes out of it, but that’s normal. The thing’s lived through three Tusken wars and a shootout with Jabba’s goons.
“Well,” he says, poking at the engine with the edge of his cloak. “The repulsors are fine. Turn it on and we’ll take it back to my house. I’ll see if I can get it working tonight.”
Leia looks up at him, lips scrunched together. “You’re not going to kidnap me and hold me for ransom, are you?” She doesn’t think he will, but she’s been wrong before.
Old Ben looks extremely amused. “If I wanted to kidnap you, I could have done it already.”
“That doesn’t mean you would have though,” Leia points out.
Old Ben gives her a funny old sidelong look. Not bad-funny. Not the kind of funny Aunt Beru worries about. Just funny.
“True enough,” he says after a bit. “Would it make you feel better if I said the thought had never crossed my mind?”
Leia nods.
He turns to look at her, full-on, and she looks at him back—really looks at him, properly and everything.
“I’m not going to kidnap you,” he says, and it’s true, she knows it’s true, but she gets the uncomfortable feeling he’s looking back.
She breaks eye contact and sits back down in the seat of the speeder to turn it back on. It takes a crackle and her hitting the dashboard for the repulsors to come on and the speeder to lift off the ground, but it works.
Old Ben gets the towing cable out of the compartment in the back and starts tugging the speeder up the canyon, following a route she hadn’t seen before. She doesn’t say anything at first, because the repulsors are working fine and she doesn’t really want to get out and walk, but after five minutes she starts to feel guilty.
“Do you want to trade spots?” she asks, and he turns back to look at her. “I could pull for a bit and you could sit.”
“You don’t know the way,” he says like it’s obvious, and turns back around.
She doesn’t say anything after that.
Ben’s house is a real old-looking thing, completely beat up. He’s got it at the top of one of the canyons, where the wind never stops blowing, and there are cracks in the walls, and all the corners look crumbly and soft. All the vaporators are nailed down hard too, rattling loudly against the rock. She wonders how he manages to sleep at night with all the noise.
He ties up the speeder and goes inside without saying a word to her. Leia sits there for a second, frowning, and then a gust of wind hits her straight in the back of the head and she thinks about how long it’ll take to get the tangles out, and stops caring about whether it’s rude to go inside without being invited first.
When she comes in, he’s boiling water like an idiot offworlder.
“That’s not very efficient,” Leia says, standing in the doorway. “You’re wasting more water than you can afford, that way. Don’t you have a purifier?”
Old Ben looks over at her—quizzically. It’s the only word for it, even though it’s right out of a reading module. He’s quizzical. “I’m not purifying it.”
“Oh,” she says, trying not to make a face. She gets the feeling he would find it funny, and she doesn’t like being laughed at by him. It makes her feel like he’s got an inside joke she’s not allowed in on—like Aytin and Norai when they’d told her she couldn’t come out to Beggar’s Canyon because they were doing grown up things. Like the lucispice they buy is so cool and grown up. “What are you doing then?”
“Making tea,” he says, bending over with a bit of a groan to grab a box from one of his storage bins.
Leia blinks at him, and he looks over at her again.
“You do know what tea is, right?”
Leia wrinkles her nose. “Of course I know what tea is. It’s hot vegetable water.” All the kids in the reading modules they get from the Core drink it. One time she tried to make some with mani root, and it just tasted like sand, so she doesn’t get the appeal. Maybe roots are nicer in the Core. Everyone says everything is nicer in the Core.
Old Ben looks at her in silence for a long moment. He looks halfway between shocked confused and offended.
“What?” Leia says, trying not to feel the hot shame rising in her belly. She’s not cultured, whatever. All the rich assholes in Mos Eisely wouldn’t survive a day without her family’s water.
“Nothing,” Ben says after a long moment, even though it’s obviously not nothing. “You just—” and now he looks sad. A big kind of sad, the way Amila had been when she came back, but fuller. Like their cistern. Carved out by the wind, and then filled back up with something cool and damp and wonderful. “You reminded me of someone for a moment.”
“Oh,” Leia says, and then she doesn’t say anything else. Everyone she knows is reminded of someone sometimes. It’s not new. “Can I help you make tea?”
He sort of shakes himself out, and nods, handing her the box. “There are some cups and silver in the cupboard next to you. Would you put a spoonful into each—just enough that you can’t see the bottoms?”
Leia nods, and takes it from him. When she opens the box, it smells—not wonderful, really, but not like mani root. Less gritty. Deeper. Fresher. Like something not from Tatooine.
She spoons out the tea carefully into each tin cup, just enough to cover the bottoms, and brings them to him, careful not to spill. He’s taken the boiling water off his burner and is holding a proper water-holder, insulated and everything. When she sets the cups down, he pours a little of the cool water into each one—just enough that all the tea is floating on the surface—then adds the boiling water carefully, down the side of the cup.
“It scorches them if you add boiling water directly,” he says. “It’s best if you have a kettle that brings the water to the right temperature for you, but so long as you’re not working with a white tea, you can get away with mixing boiling and cold water to get the right temperature.”
Leia nods to show she’s learning, though she’s not really sure why she’s supposed to be learning anything, or what she’ll ever do with that. “What do we do now?”
“We wait,” Old Ben says. “Two and a half minutes, and then we’ll strain the leaves out and dry them to use again.”
Leia nods, and finds a place to sit down next to his small table while they wait. There’s not much in his house, she thinks, but it’s so small it looks crowded anyways. He’s got a bunch of metal tables, and more of the boxes he keeps his stuff in, and an ancient holotable and a pallet in the corner, but the only thing that keeps it from looking abandoned is the water barrel in the corner with the light blinking that means it’s a quarter full.
She thinks he notices her looking around, but he doesn’t say anything. He just strains out the leaves and leaves them to dry on a piece of fabric that looks kind of like an old cloak, and brings the cups over.
“Now,” he says, sitting down with her and giving her that magnifying glass look again, eyes blue and bright as the third moon. “Why did you come to find me?”
Leia shifts uncomfortably in her seat, not looking at him. She gets the feeling he wants an answer—an answer-answer—and she’s never been great at giving those.
“I hadn’t seen you in a while,” she says.
He raises his eyebrows—both of them, this time. “In a while?”
She shifts again, taking a sip of her tea to give herself more time. It tastes—leafy. Not good. She tries to avoid scrunching up her face and swallow. It’s important, she thinks, that she doesn’t hate it. Not to her, but to him. She’s not sure why. But it is.
It tastes better than mani root, at least, and she keeps thinking that as she chokes it down and opens her mouth to speak again.
“Yeah,” she says, looking at him. He doesn’t look like he’s noticed her reaction, which is good. “You know. Since you left for here.”
This time when his eyebrows shoot up into his hairline, he actually looks surprised.
“Two years ago?” she adds.
He cocks his head, looking at her—different. Better, maybe, but also more worried. She likes it better, anyways, so it’s alright. “I hadn’t realized your uncle would tell you.”
“He didn’t,” Leia says like it’s obvious. Which it is. Like Uncle Owen would ever say anything about Old Ben to her. “I just—noticed.”
“You noticed,” he repeats, and she nods. “And you wanted to see me?”
She shrugs, suddenly feeling uncomfortable again. His eyes are on her—heavy. Too clear. “Biggs was gone. And Norai and Aytin told me to go play with the babies. But I’m not a baby, and I don’t know—I wanted to see how you were.”
He’s silent for a long moment, then, and when she looks up his lips are pressed together tightly and he’s not looking at her. He’s not crying, at least, though she’s heard stories of Core-worlders that never learned to stop. But there’s something else. He feels like—he feels like the water is gone from the cistern, and it’s just the winds hollowing him out again.
Leia reaches across the table and puts her hand on his wrist. She doesn’t know why she does it. It’s stupid, probably. But he looks up, and then the hollow wind isn’t licking up his spine again, blowing into the back of her teeth, and it’s—better. It’s better.
“It’s late,” he says, voice like he’s been breathing in dust for seventy years. When she looks out the window, the sun is over the horizon and the sky is as dark as it ever gets. “You should sleep,” he adds. “I’ll go work on the speeder.”
Leia nods, not sure what else to do. She takes her hand off his wrist, and drinks the rest of her tea without grimacing a little bit, and she eats a calbar when he brings one of those over for her too.
She goes to bed on his small pallet, clutching the thin blanket to her chest. It smells like old man, and dust, and the wide empty sky of the desert wrapped around her. But her belly is warm, and her mouth tastes like cool damp sweetness of a cistern buried so far below the sands no one will ever find it again.
(When Leia dreams that night, it’s about a boy with bright blond hair. He has his feet in a stream that looks like it’s out of a storybook, worth millions of credits, but he’s not paying attention to the water. There’s a toy droid by his hand that’s flat like the pancakes Aunt Beru makes whenever the dust beetle eggs get into the flour, and he’s got it half open, playing around with the wires inside, doing something she can’t see.
Leia tries to step forward—to do what, she doesn’t know—but it feels like she’s neck deep in sand, pressing back against the weight of the universe. She grits her teeth with the effort of standing still.
Behind her, someone yells “She’s gone, Kenobi!” and the boy looks up. For one long second, he looks at her with wide blue eyes, and she looks back at him, and then Uncle Owen is standing over her and Old Ben is saying something about calming down before someone gets shot, and before she knows it, she’s out the door.)
The suns are already up on their way back—it’s the dry season, after all—but she can feel Ben outside his house, watching them go, long after he fades from view.