Chapter Text
“Pyjamas on. No. No more candy. Go brush your teeth. Close your sleeping bag fully or you’ll get cold at night. Now go…”
Luke shuffled from child to child, hustling everyone forward with the first camp night’s routine, until a tap on the back of his leg gave him pause. When he turned, he found a pair of big, dark eyes looking up at him - eyes belonging to the smallest kid in the group and currently glassy with emerging tears.
“What’s the matter, Grogu?” Luke squatted down to the child’s level.
Voice barely louder than a whisper, Grogu answered: “I miss home. Can I call Dad?”
The kid looked so heart-wrenchingly sad that Luke wanted to immediately rush to get his phone and let him call. But he reminded himself that he had a protocol to follow.
“I’m sorry to hear that. I need Master Yoda’s permission for you to call. Let me go ask him right away. I’ll be right back, ok?”
Grogu sniffled and wiped off a loose tear from his cheek but nodded in agreement. After a soothing pat on his shoulder, Luke stood up, left Ezra to tend to the rest of the kids’ evening routine and jogged up the neighbouring hill to the tent that functioned as Master Yoda’s office.
“Grogu is homesick”, Luke said. “He wants to call home.”
Master Yoda put down the papers he had been studying and inspected Luke with deep, intent eyes.
“Please, Master, let me get his phone”, Luke added when Yoda did not immediately react. When he finally spoke, it was in his usual, riddle-like tone:
“Truly wonderful the mind of a child is. Let him call home and he’ll cry all the harder. But just let him go to sleep, and his own courage find he will.”
“But he’s so sad!” Luke paced around the confined space of the tent in frustration. “What if he cries all night?”
“Young Skywalker, always looking to the horizon” Yoda stretched his words as a serene contrast to Luke’s agitation. “Never here, now, hmm? The emotion in front of your nose. A blessing, a child’s tears are. Fear them do not. Brush them away do not. Rejoice when a child faces homesickness and works through it.”
Luke forced his breathing to calm down and reminded himself about his training. Yes, it was pedagogically important to let the children experience whatever emotions that camp life brought up and find their way through. So he swallowed back any further arguments and nodded. “Alright, thank you, Master.”
When Luke returned down to the tents, Ezra was sitting by the fading fire in the middle, reading out a bedtime story and making a different funny voice for each character. When he finished, Luke silently gestured that Ezra could leave and Luke would be right behind him.
Like that, Ezra left him in the middle of the quiet circle of tents, the only sounds the nightingale in the surrounding woods and sleepy sniffles from the kids every once in a while. But right when Luke was about to sigh of relief, get up and leave to join the rest of the staff for supper, he heard another sound: sobbing from one of the tents - the tent where Grogu slept.
A blessing, a child’s tears are. Fear them do not. Brush them away do not. Rejoice when a child faces homesickness and works through it, Luke reminded himself - until he no longer could. He hitched the canvas forming the door of the tent open. Carefully not to wake the other kids, he tapped Grogu’s shoulder and whispered:
“Let’s go call your Dad.”
Grogu’s sobbing immediately paused as he shimmied out of his sleeping bag and followed Luke out of the tent and up the hill. Joyful chatter echoed out of the mess tent where the staff had gathered for supper, but next to it, Master Yoda’s tent was completely silent. Lifting a finger over his lips as a sign for Grogu to stay quiet, Luke sneaked in with the kid on his tail.
It took only a moment of searching to find the key to the phone box under a too obviously oval-shaped rock. And inside the box, carefully arranged close to the beginning of the alphabetical order, Luke found a small cellphone marked as belonging to Din Grogu. Despite having already violated the first step of the correct home calling protocol, Luke still reminded himself about how he was supposed to handle the call from now on. As he handed the phone to the kid, he said:
“Pick the number but let me talk first. And after you’re done, let me finish.”
Obediently, Grogu opened his phone, found his father's number easily, turned on the call and handed the phone to Luke. After just a few rings, the call was picked up in the other end with two words:
Hey, kid.
Just those words nearly dropped the phone out of Luke's hand. Even though the man in the other end assumed that he was talking to his kid, he had the deepest, huskiest bedroom voice Luke had ever heard. It sounded like a voice straight from his fantasies manifested in real life.
Grogu? That unfairly sexy voice prompted while Luke was still unable to get a word out of his own mouth.
So Luke cleared his throat and summoned his most professional voice: “Ehm, hello? This is Luke Skywalker. I’m a counselor here at Grogu’s camp.”
Is everything alright? The Voice turned instantly worried.
“Yes, yes, all fine, ehm, the first day has gone well with Grogu. He’s already finding friends and following the program well. It’s just that when it was time to go to sleep, he got homesick. So we thought that if he talks with you for a bit, maybe he’ll sleep better.”
Good. A relieved exhale.
Luke faced an urge to come up with something to ask, something that would make the Voice talk longer, preferably keep talking to his ear all night. But Grogu was looking anxiously up at him, and after he had explained the situation, there was really no excuse for keeping the kid from talking to his father any longer. So reluctantly, he handed the phone over to Grogu.
During the following moments, Grogu did not speak much himself, mostly only occasional sounds of ‘yes’ and ‘mh-hm’. It seemed that just listening to his father’s magical voice soothed him like nothing else. When he was done and handed the phone back to Luke - call still open like Luke had instructed - he was already smiling peacefully, all traces of tears gone. Luke gestured him to go back to sleep, and he obeyed, skipping out of the tent with light steps.
“Thank you”, Luke said into the phone. “Looks like he really calmed down. Did everything seem ok to you?”
Yes. Thank you for letting him call.
The otherwordly, sexy voice did not elaborate, to Luke’s disappointment. He tried to think of something else to ask, something that would make that deep, husky voice continue talking - talking and talking and never stop. But there was nothing he had a professional reason to ask, so all he said was:
“No problem. Good night.”
After closing the call and locking Grogu’s phone back into the box, Luke hid the key back where he found it and walked out of the tent. Except that no, he knew that he should just walk out of Master Yoda’s office tent before breaking any more rules, but his legs refused to move. Instead, he found his hands reaching for the drawer storing all the kids’ personal information folders.
Quickly, he browsed through the first few letters of the alphabet, until he reached the folder dedicated to Din Grogu. Grogu’s personal details inside were brief, only specifying the allergy medicine he must remember to take every morning. But rather than that, Luke’s attention was drawn to his contact details - or more specifically, emergency contact details. Out of the two available lines, only one was filled, specifying that in case of emergency, the person to contact was Din Djarin.
Din Djarin. No one else. Din “Bedroom Voice” Djarin was Grogu’s single father. SINGLE FATHER.
Willing his thrumming heartbeat to calm down and his overeager brain to stop making its over-interpretations, Luke stuffed the papers back inside the drawer and hurried out of the tent. Before heading for supper, he paid one final visit to the kids’ tents and peeked in the one where Grogu slept. There, in a compact formation among the other kids, Grogu lay wrapped tightly in his sleeping bag, face relaxed in peaceful sleep.