Chapter Text
---- August, 1987----
The closer his dashboard clock gets to 8:00, the more Luke thinks about starting up his car again, pulling back out of the parking lot and spending the day at the shop. His palms start sweating as he taps out a rhythm on the steering wheel, thoughts racing through his head and butterflies swirling in his stomach. He stares at the sight ahead of him, of students milling around in front of the steps to Watford County High School. It’s the start of another year, sure, but this year feels different. It’s high school. And high school, from what he’s heard, is a Big Deal.
A thud from the roof of his car makes him jump. He glances out his driver’s window and sees a familiar face smiling down at him.
“Scare ya?” Biggs asks, his crooked, wide smile covering his face.
Luke rolls his eyes and grabs his backpack from the other seat. He pushes the door open, shoving Biggs backward and climbing out of the car.
“I’m surprised this old bucket of bolts is even still running,” Biggs says, throwing his arm around Luke and walking toward the school.
“We missed you over the summer, Luke,” Camie says from behind them, and Luke looks back to see the rest of his friends tagging along. “The shop just isn’t the same without you.”
“Yeah,” Deak chimes in. “Not another person in there telling me when I fuck something up.”
Luke rolls his eyes again, smiling. He still hasn’t found his voice quite yet. It seems to be receding steadily into him the closer they get to the door. He listens to the conversation as they pass through the double set of doors into the school. The butterflies start swirling again, a nervous energy pulsing through him. Biggs takes his arms off Luke’s shoulder, and his friends begin walking toward the senior lockers. Luke pauses, glancing around at his classmates standing at their lockers and chatting.
“You alright, Luke?” Biggs asks. He’s hung around, giving Luke a curious expression.
Luke shakes his head a moment, finally coming back to reality. “Yeah, I think so. It’s just … weird, you know?”
Biggs chuckles. “Tell me about it. Last first day of high school for me.”
“For all of you,” Luke mutters, glancing down at the floor.
“Aw, c’mon, don’t be like that,” Biggs says, giving him a gentle shove. Luke looks up, and Biggs is smiling at him. “Graduation’s a whole year away. This is your first day of high school. At least try to enjoy yourself, won’t you?”
Luke smiles in spite of himself. “I guess I’ll try.”
“Good. I’ll see you at lunch then?”
The warning bell rings in the middle of Biggs’ sentence. Luke feels his stomach start churning again as the chatter around them increases. “Yeah,” he says weakly, as Biggs gives him another grin and turns around. “Wait! Biggs!” The older boy turns back. “Where’s room 213?”
Biggs rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Luke, you’re a smart kid,” he begins. “There are six hallways in this building, and only one of them is up a flight of stairs. I think you can figure that one out for yourself.”
Luke peeks his head into the classroom, only letting himself relax when he realizes no one else is there. Even the teacher’s desk at the back of the room is empty. He slips into the desk in the back corner of the room and takes his sketchpad and a pencil out of his backpack. His summer project of designing a new engine for his car had fallen by the wayside once harvest had started, but he was determined to actually have a working model by Christmas. As he starts drawing, he listens absently to the sounds filtering in from the hallways, a gentle buzz of background noise. Voices begin to filter in more clearly after a few minutes as students come in.
The bell rings again. The desk in front of him shakes a little as someone sits down in a rush, and Luke’s hand shakes, creating a dark gash down the middle of his sketch. He looks up to glare at the person in front of him and is met with a pile of dark hair, done up in intricate braids. A boy’s voice comes through the intercom, saying “Good morning, WCHS, and welcome back to another year” in a voice that sounds far too chipper for eight in the morning, and Luke resumes his sketches, letting the announcements fade into the background as everyone around him babbles on about their exploits over the summer.
“Would everyone shut up for a minute so I can take attendance?” a loud, growly voice says from the front of the room. The din around Luke quiets, but whispers persist. The teacher begins calling out names. Luke makes notes to himself on his sketch, listening as his classmates respond, forming a mental picture in his head of the class. It’s not bad, he thinks absentmindedly. It’s not great, either; there are too many football players, but at least they’re all nice to him. Mr. Anderson pauses for a moment, and Luke pauses too, glancing up at him. “L-Leah Or-”
The girl in front of Luke sighs. “It’s pronounced Leia,” she says. Luke can practically hear her eyes rolling. He stares at the back of her, at the braids piled on top of her head. He can’t remember the last time someone new moved into town. Moving out was the more common theme around here.
“Leia,” Mr. Anderson repeats. “Leia … Organa, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re new. Parents get transferred in on the railroad?”
“No, sir. My father’s an army officer. Retired army officer.” It sounds like a correction, like the words are unfamiliar in her mouth.
“Odd place to come for retirement.”
There’s a small pause before Leia responds with, “Yes, sir,” again. She sounds amused.
“Your father fight in the war then?
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, be sure to tell him thank you from me.” Mr. Anderson glances back down at the attendance sheet, obviously ready to move on.
“I would, sir,” Leia says, just as Mr. Anderson is about to call the next name, “but my father doesn’t accept any thanks for the part he played in Vietnam.”
Mr. Anderson turns back to her, staring at Leia with a bewildered expression on his face. The announcements have stopped, Luke realizes, which is why it’s suddenly so quiet in the room, the tension palpable. “And what is that supposed to mean?” Mr. Anderson asks, quieter now, with just a hint of disgust.
“Just that. Sir.” Leia’s voice is clipped and cutting.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of somebody who fought for their country and then came back to side with hippies and anti-war freaks,” Mr. Anderson spits out, giving Leia a look that sends shivers down Luke’s spine. But Luke can see Leia’s shoulders tense, her fingers grabbing onto the edge of the desk, and hears her let out a shaky breath as Mr. Anderson says “Jeremy Pinkman.” Luke feels the class let out a collective sigh as Jeremy responds, “Here.” Luke returns to his engine sketches, still feeling on edge. “Luke Skywalker,” he hears after a few seconds.
“Here,” he says without looking up.
He hears Leia turn around more than he sees it. The chair squeaks, and her jeans rustle as she turns to face him. Her arm drapes over onto his desk, touching the top of his sketchpad. “Skywalker?” she whispers.
Luke glances up at the new girl, at Leia. She’s close to him, a lot closer than he’d expected, and her big brown eyes are staring at him intensely, as if she’s evaluating him. There’s conflict in her expression - her jawline is set in determination, but her eyebrows are furrowed, as if confused. “Y-yeah,” Luke whispers back, more of a question than a statement.
Her eyes flit over him, scanning him with an intensity that makes Luke uneasy. Leia’s gaze brushes over his sketches. Luke has the urge to cover them up with his hand, but his arm stays where it is. He feels frozen by her stare. “Huh,” she says, turning around casually. The bell rings. Luke doesn’t move again until Leia is out of sight.
“So how was the first day?”
Luke moves his head up only to feel it collide with the cold, hard metal above him. “Shit! ” he whispers as the bang echoes in Ben’s massive garage.
“That well?” He can hear the smirk in Ben’s voice.
“It was fine,” Luke replies, ducking out from between two parts of his engine to scribble in his notebook.
“That’s all I get? Your first day of high school, and all you can say is ‘It was fine’?”
Luke rolls his eyes, glancing up at Ben. “You sound like my aunt and uncle,” he says before returning to his sketch.
“Fair point,” Ben says as he picks up a tool Luke had set down earlier. “But they aren’t letting you build a new engine for your car in their garage, are they?”
Luke sighs and puts down his pencil. “It was … fine,” he says again, and Ben raises an eyebrow. “No, really, it was pretty boring. I was nervous, but I got over that pretty quick once I realized all we were going to do was go through the syllabus and do ice breakers.”
“Meet anyone interesting?” It’s an innocent enough question, but Luke notices the way Ben doesn’t make eye contact with him when he asks it.
Luke snorts. “I know you only leave your house once a month, but you know the way Meridan is. No one comes in, no one goes out.” He frowns. “There was one girl, though.” He waits for Ben to ask a follow-up question, but Ben’s eyes stay fixed on the part he’d picked up. “Uh, in my homeroom. Her name was Leia, I think.”
“Interesting name,” Ben says, still not looking at Luke.
“Yeah,” Luke says, picking up his pencil again. “She acted like she knew me?”
Ben is still for a long time before he sets the part down and finally looks at Luke with an intense gaze that unsettles him. “Really?”
“Y-yeah. Or at least like she’d heard my name before. She heard Mr. Anderson say my name and turned around to give me a look, like she was judging me or something.”
“Douglas Anderson is still teaching?” Ben says, a smirk on his face. “I thought I was done hearing complaints about him from a Skywalker.”
“My father didn’t like him?” Luke asks, feeling his heart pick up speed. It had been a while since Ben had told him something new about his father.
“Anakin had … let’s just say, strong feelings about the man’s teaching style, and expressed his feelings often, and loudly.”
“He cussed him out, didn’t he?” Luke asks, smiling.
“Many, many times.” Ben moved over to stand behind Luke, a smile on his face. “How’s this thing coming, anyway?”
Luke shifted to let Ben look at his design. “I’m hopeful,” he says, looking for approval on Ben’s face. “And I think you’ve got pretty much everything I’ll need to put it together.”
“Good.” The smile on Ben’s face gets bigger, and Luke’s pride swells.
“Thanks for letting me use your garage again. And your parts.” Luke adds a quick label to his sketch as Ben moves to inspect the part Luke had spent the last two hours putting together. “I couldn’t convince Uncle Owen that it would be worth it to let this take up space in his workshop.” Or any of my other projects, Luke stops himself from adding.
“You know what’s mine in this garage is yours, Luke,” Ben says, turning back around. “Besides, I’m sure your uncle will realize what a good idea this is when he doesn’t have to spend half of his harvest money fixing up your piece of shit car.”
Luke smiles. “I hope so.” Ben’s cuckoo clock begins to chime, and a plane begins flying out of its face. “Crap, I better get going,” Luke says, quickly closing his sketchpad and stuffing it into his backpack. “Aunt Beru will have my hide if I’m late for dinner again.” He turns to head for the door before he stops, a question he’d thought to ask during school resurfacing in his mind. “Hey, Ben?” he asks.
Ben doesn’t turn from examining Luke’s engine. “Yes, Luke?”
“Did you ever meet anyone in the army with the last name of Organa?”
The chimes on Ben’s clock echo into nothingness, and Luke counts thirty more seconds before Ben turns around. “The name sounds familiar, but I don’t think I ever met him. He might have been above me. Why do you ask?”
“The girl I was talking about. From homeroom. Leia. She said her dad was a retired Army officer who fought in Vietnam. I was just wondering if you -”
“No,” Ben says abruptly. “No, I don’t think so.”
Luke nods slowly. “Okay,” he whispers. “Well, see you tomorrow.” He turns to leave, the weight of Ben’s intense stare still sitting on his shoulders.
A week later, Luke regrets telling Ben that his first day was boring. The first day was an illusion, designed to lull Luke into a false sense of security before piling on readings and essays. He can admit to himself — now that he’s eating lunch in the library with his history textbook on the left side of his lunch tray and a half-finished essay on the right for the third day in a row — that maybe spending all his free time working on his engine in Ben’s garage instead of doing his homework was not the smartest idea he had ever had. But he is Anakin Skywalker’s son, and making smart decisions about schoolwork has never been his strong suit - or at least, that’s what Ben tells him.
He’s shovelling a square piece of pizza into his mouth and trying to write a coherent sentence about the first American civilizations when he sees Leia Organa round the corner and fix him with a soul-piercing gaze. Leia is filled with soul-piercing gazes. Every time Luke has seen her in the hallways in the past week, she has looked him straight in the eye and stared into his brain, seeming to hear every thought. Which is mostly, when Leia looks at him, Oh God, please stop looking at me. “Is anyone else coming to sit with you?”
He’s surprised at how she can seem so direct and yet so unclear at the same time. Why would she ask him that? “No?” he says truthfully, trying to look anywhere but at her face.
“Great,” she says, beginning to grab books off the shelves and stacking them onto the other end of the table forcefully. Luke can see the librarian at her desk glance over at the noise Leia is making. “You’re the only person sitting alone and I’m going to need the whole table.”
Luke opens his mouth to ask a question, but she disappears into the stacks. He takes another bite of pizza and finishes the sentence on his paper, nearly managing to convince himself the whole thing had been a hallucination before hearing another book smack on top of the stack. He jumps, glancing up and watching Leia sit down and pull one of the books from the middle of the stack. She grabs a notebook and a brightly colored pen out of her backpack and begins to read, taking notes every so often. Luke doesn’t realize he’s staring until Leia looks up again, looks him dead in the eye, and growls, “What.”
Her tone sends shivers down his spine. “Nothing, sorry,” he says, quickly looking down at his essay. He erases his last sentence and starts over. “What are you working on?” he asks, trying to sound like she hadn’t just scared him shitless.
“Research,” she says, scribbling something into her notebook. The pen has bright pink ink, Luke notices.
“Research for what?”
She sighs, gives him a withering glance. “I’m going to win the state forensics meet this year.”
Luke tilts his head and glances at the titles on the spines. A People’s History of the United States. Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Making Schools Work: A Reporter’s Journey Through Some of America’s Most Remarkable Classrooms. “I thought forensics was like … crime scene investigation.”
“It means speech. Debate,” Leia says abruptly, not bothering to look at Luke this time. She crosses a t with such fierceness Luke is sure she’s ripped her paper, but she keeps writing. “Even a school this small has a debate club, I’ve seen the posters around.”
Luke nods, whispers, “Okay,” and picks his pencil back up. He stares at the sentence he had written, or at least started to. Nope, he realizes. Nothing’s coming. He glances back at Leia, her chin sticking out almost defiantly, her mouth silently forming words as her eyes scan the pages, her hand racing across the notebook. He can see her brain working, thoughts going a thousand miles an hour, faster than she can get them on the page. He’s struck, suddenly, by the realization that he’s seen that exact expression before - distorted, reflected back at him in dull metallic parts in Ben’s garage. He opens his mouth to keep talking, then closes it. The words won’t come, but not because he’s scared of her. He knows how much he hates it when Ben interrupts him.
He takes a final bite of his bland, square pizza, glances over at his textbook, and keeps writing.
It becomes their thing, somehow.
Leia is already at the table the next day when Luke arrives with his macaroni and cheese and algebra homework. The next Monday, Luke nearly jumps out of his chair when she sets her backpack down on the floor, sounding like a bag of bricks and earning both of them a steely glare from the librarian. Every day, Luke gives her a polite smile, she nods back, and they work silently on their separate projects until the warning bell rings. After three days of meeting in the library, Leia says, “See you tomorrow,” as they pack up, and Luke could be going crazy, but he could swear he hears a hesitancy in her voice, as if she needs reassurance that he’ll be there. He nods at her, and she smiles as she hurries out of the library.
“I’m telling you, she’s gotta have, like, a crush on you or something,” Deak says to him from underneath a car one day after school. He’d asked for Luke’s help trying to fix an engine he’d been working on for a few days. Hansen blares from the speakers in the shop. Deak’s taste in music always was shit.
Luke shakes his head and chuckles. “Absolutely not,” he says. “Have you even met her?”
“A freshman?” Deak slides out from under the car and gives Luke a withering look. “No. Besides, I think I’d remember seeing - how did you describe her? A chick with fancy braids who looks like she could hurt me?” A shit-eating grin covers Deak’s face as he stands and wipes the grease off his hands. “Your turn. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.”
Luke rolls his eyes and lays down on the creeper. “Trust me, even if that was true, and even if I wanted it to be true, it’s not like that.” He grabs a flashlight and slides underneath the engine.
“Then what’s it like?”
“I don’t know!” Luke says defensively. Because he doesn’t. He cannot explain why Leia would continue to sit next to him, why she would let him take up valuable table space as she studies. Especially since he’s seen empty tables in the library the last few days. He stares up at the engine and lets his problems fade out as he works, and he’s grateful that Deak doesn’t push the issue. After a few minutes of nothing but Top 40 radio and the sound of metal and plastic, he hears the bell above the door tinkle, and heavy footfalls come in the direction of the workshop.
“Did you get the onion rings this time?” he hears Deak ask.
“Save some for me!” Luke shouts as the smell from the diner food Biggs and Camie brought into the shop wafts over to him. Technically speaking, there's no food allowed while they're working, but Randall, the shop owner, never seemed to care when they brought in appetizers from Val's across the street.
“No guarantees,” Biggs shouts back, and Luke smiles in spite of himself. He screws the last bit back in place and slides himself out from under the car.
“Please don’t tell me you fixed it in five minutes,” Deak says, shoving food into his mouth, as Luke walks over to the workbench everyone else has huddled around. “I’ve been staring at that thing for two fuckin' days.”
Luke shakes his head. “Nah, I can’t see what the issue is, either.”
“Geez, you start hanging out with a girl, and all of a sudden you can’t fix a car anymore?”
Luke feels his face flush, and Biggs and Camie look at him with wide eyes. Biggs even cracks a small smile. “And I think that’s my cue to leave,” Luke says, grabbing a mozzarella stick from the pile and heading toward the door.
“What?” Camie shouts after him. “You can’t leave and not explain that!”
“Yes, I can!” Luke swings his backpack over his shoulder and swings the shop door open, feeling his stomach churning with every step he takes. He hears his friends shouting after him until he walks out the front door, his heart racing all the way.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
Luke looks up from his algebra homework, blinking a few times. “What?” he asks. He needs to make sure isn’t hearing things.
“Can I ask you something?”
Luke looks at the clock. It’s only 11:45, lunch has only just started. Too early for their usual See you tomorrow that comes at 12:17, just after the warning bell. “Sure.”
He sees apprehension on her face, and for the first time he notices that the steel in her eyes is gone. Her mouth is relaxed. She looks … normal. She glances across the library. “Do you know those guys?”
Luke follows her eyes across the room. She’s talking about Grace Dittmer and Annie Blake, sitting on the couches in front of the Literature section. “I mean, yeah,” he answers.
“Are they nice?” Leia asks.
Luke shrugs. “Yeah, I think so.” He’d sat in between the two of them last year in history and had been forced to pass notes back and forth. The only thing the two of them seemed to care about was boys, but they had always been friendly with him when they were paired up for class projects.
Leia nods. “Okay,” she says, smiling. She glances back down at her book, twirling a loose piece of hair.
Luke has never seen her like this before. She seems nervous. Luke hasn’t known her for very long, but the list of adjectives he would use to describe Leia Organa would never have included nervous before today. “Why do you ask?” he says, wanting to see if he can push her.
She looks up at him, her mouth open slightly, as if caught off guard. “Oh.” She swipes a piece of loose hair away from her face. “They’re in my English class. They asked me if I wanted to go to see a movie with them sometime.”
Luke nods. “Okay.” He goes back to his homework, looks down at the string of numbers he’d been in the middle of.
“Do you think I should? Go to the movies with them, I mean?”
He’s really never seen her like this, he thinks. The way her eyebrows worry together, her mouth pulled down into a frown. “I mean, yeah,” Luke replies quietly. “If you want to. Why are you asking me, anyway?”
Leia looks down, gives an uneasy laugh. “I …” she trails off. She wiggles her pen back and forth before looking at him again. “You’re right. Sorry.”
Luke watches her for a moment. She bites her lip as she skims the page of the book on her right. It’s a long time before she writes anything down. He goes back to his homework, working through the problems and periodically spooning bites of spaghetti into his mouth. Leia doesn’t try to talk to him again. When the warning bell rings at 12:17, she gathers her things very quickly, shoving everything into her backpack haphazardly, and whispers, “See you tomorrow,” almost as if it was a second thought. Luke watches her go, absolutely baffled.
Their lunchtime work sessions stop just as quickly as they began. The next day, Leia stops in to grab a book off the shelf ten minutes after lunch begins, smiles at him apologetically, then rushes off without saying a word. The day after, she doesn’t show up at all. Luke even walks around the library halfway through lunch, just to make sure she hadn’t somehow forgotten which table they sit at. On Friday, he sees her walking in the halls, laughing with Grace and Annie. She giggles, loud and high-pitched the same way they do, and he feels something churn in his stomach at the noise. It seems so un-Leia. What do you even know about her? he thinks as he ducks into the science lab. You hardly talked to her.
There had been something there, though, Luke knew. Not a schoolgirl crush, like Deak still seemed to think, maybe not even friendship. But a mutual respect for each other, at the very least. An acknowledgment that they both were working and wanted each other’s companionship. She wouldn’t have kept coming back to the table if she hadn’t wanted to be with him at all. All those other days, she could have found other tables to sit at, freeing the space Luke took up at the end of the table for three more books to lay out and scan and scribble notes about. She had to have felt at least some kind of connection, the same way Luke did.
Maybe he had been making it all up, he thinks as the geology teacher begins lecturing. He takes out his sketchpad and studies the changes he’d made to his designs last night after talking to Ben. Maybe Ben could help him figure out what was going on with Leia? But Luke remembers how Ben had reacted the first time he’d told him about her, his deflections and refusal to make eye contact with him. He’s on his own, he realizes, for the first time in his life, and he had absolutely no idea what to do.
“We made it to Thanksgiving break!” Camie cheers, lifting up her mug of root beer as if it was the real thing. “We are officially a third of the way through our last year of high school!”
Luke lifts his milkshake up to toast with the others, but he doesn’t cheer or applaud with them. He can barely bring himself to smile. He’s excited to have days off of school, to be able to finish his homework on the never-used dining room table at home instead of the old, worn splinter-hazard table in the library. But as he looks around the table the four of them have claimed at the old diner, and watches his friends give each other shit as they shove fried food in their mouth, a deep ache settles into his chest. Nothing will be the same in six months.
“So where are you guys going for Thanksgiving?” Deak asks Biggs. Luke grabs an onion ring and dips it in the ranch dressing cup that made their waiter give him the evil eye.
“Ugh.” Biggs rolls his eyes. “My grandparents’ house. And not the fun ones. The ones who live in fucking Leavenworth. Right next to the military prison. One year when we visited, we couldn’t even go outside because of some lockdown going on …”
Luke lets his friends’ chatter swirl around him, the conversation jumping from trips to holiday food opinions to the homework in their government class. Luke just listens, taking it in. And his friends let him, which may be one of the things he loves about them the most. They’ve learned, over the past two years of working in the shop together, that Luke will respond when he has something to say. They let him in to their weird little group, and kept letting him in, ignoring the fact that he was four years younger than him and that he was a massive nerd who took apart car engines for fun and that he didn’t talk much. They talk about government projects and how they’re never going to be able to get them done and Luke’s chest aches with the idea of doing any of that himself, knowing that these three won’t be around when he does all of those things.
The bell on the entrance rings, and Luke grabs at the nearest bite of onion rings, but they don’t make it into his mouth. Instead, he watches as Leia walks past their table, taking a booth at the far end of the diner. She tosses her hair, lying straight down her back, as the waitress approaches her, but Luke watches as she waves her off. Deak elbows him, and Luke comes back to reality, watches as Biggs and Camie smile impishly and snicker at him. They glance back at Leia, but they don’t say anything, instead continuing their debate about whether the original Pilgrims would have had turkey at the first Thanksgiving, and whether or not turkey is delicious (Biggs) or tastes like napkins (Camie and Deak).
“Fuck,” Biggs says under his breath. “We gotta get back to the shop or Randall’s gonna tear us a new one.”
“Shit,” Camie says, digging in her purse and pulling out a $20. “Sorry, Luke. We’ll see you on Saturday, though, right?”
Luke smiles at them as they shuffle out of the booth. “Yeah, definitely.” The three of them say their goodbyes, and Luke watches them walk across the street to Randall’s shop. They laugh at each other, and Luke smiles, takes one last bite of onion rings.
He glances toward the back of the diner. He and Leia are the only ones left. She’s been alone in the back booth for well over half an hour now. Luke watches her back as she brings a mug up to her face, taking a long drink. She fidgets, tapping on the table, glancing up at the clock, out the windows, up at the menu, back toward the kitchen. Fuck it. He stands, leaving a couple extra dollars on the table for a tip, grabs the half-full basket of fries his friends had abandoned, and makes his way back toward Leia.
He can see her shoulders tense as he gets closer. She doesn’t turn to look at him, even when he stops right in front of her table. He can see her glance down at her tea, and her cheeks redden.
“You want fries?”
She looks up at him, wide-eyed, embarrassed. Finally, she nods, and says, “Um, yeah. Sure.” Luke takes that as his cue to sit, and drops the basket onto the middle of the table.
She takes a single fry, dips it in ketchup and takes a bite, then looks out the window. Luke waits for a while, hoping Leia will be the first to say something. To apologize. But she just keeps eating the fries, so Luke swallows his fear and asks, “Are you waiting for someone?”
He can see her blush deepen. Shame wells up in him momentarily, and then surprise. He’s gone from being terrified of her to pitying her in three months. Leia nods. “Grace and Annie were supposed to meet me here before we went to the matinee. But I, uh …” she swallows and stares at her lap. “I saw them go into the movie theater ten minutes ago with a couple of junior boys.”
Luke nods. “That sucks,” he says, grabbing a fry. “I’m sorry.”
Leia gives him a wry smile, and he can see her eyes well up. “It’s fine. I think I deserve it.” Her voice wobbles.
“What?”
Leia breathes in deeply. “I was shitty. To you. I shouldn’t have just stopped coming to the library at lunch. I should have talked to you.” She looks out the window, and Luke thinks she wants him to say something, but then she looks him in the eyes, and for a second that same terrified feeling he felt on the first day of school cuts through his chest. “I thought I was making friends with the popular girls, which I’ve never done before. I should have remembered that that’s not important. I should have valued the friend I already had. I’m sorry.”
Luke sits, looking into her eyes that no longer seem to pierce into him. Instead, they just look earnest, painfully so. “We were friends?” he asks.
She smiles gently. “I thought we were.”
He nods. “Me, too.” He grabs another fry. “Are we friends again?”
“If you want to be.” She looks at him hopefully.
He smiles back at her. “I do.”
Her smile widens. She grabs another fry and begins to talk with her mouth full. “Well, then I’m going to say I’m sorry, again, because friends aren’t shitty to their friends like that.”
“More tea, sweetie?” the waitress asks, a hint of southern drawl coming through.
“Um, su-”
“Actually, she’ll have a large chocolate shake,” Luke interrupts. Leia gives him a puzzled look. “Trust me,” he tells her. The waitress nods. “And one for me, too, please.”
The waitress smiles at them, small lines crinkling together on her face. “Sure thing, honey.”
“What if I hated chocolate?” Leia asks him, raising her eyebrows.
Luke looks her up and down. “Nah, you don’t seem like the type.”
She giggles. “I’m not,” she admits. “Well, if we’re friends, then you should know that this has happened to me at pretty much every school I’ve been to. I try to make friends, I inevitably screw it up somehow, and eventually I find the person I should have been friends with the whole time.” She smiles to herself as she grabs another fry. “This is the fastest the whole thing has happened though. Usually it takes me at least a year to figure out that I’m friends with the wrong people, and by the time I find the right people, we’re about to move again.”
“Have you moved a lot?” Luke asks. The waitress brings the shakes and slides them over to the two of them. Leia opens her mouth in shock as she watches Luke grab a fry and dip it into the chocolate shake. But she shakes her head, grabs a fry, and dips it into the shake anyway. Luke feels a rush of satisfaction at the expression of glee on Leia’s face afterward.
“Where has that been all my life?” she asks, and Luke smiles. “But yeah, we moved a lot. The military moves their high-up guys around all the time, so we’ve been pretty much everywhere. California, Louisiana, North Carolina. Even Wisconsin for a little while. We’d been in San Antonio for four years, so I figured once Dad retired, we’d stay there but … he decided this was where he wanted to come. Mom and I still can’t figure out why.”
“You mean you don’t know why anyone would ever move to lovely Meridan?” Luke asks, gesturing widely out the window at the run-down shops and stores across Main Street.
Leia’s smile widens. “I’ve given up asking questions. He’ll tell us if he wants to, and if he doesn’t, he won’t. That’s just the way my dad works.”
Luke nods, and watches Leia savor another fry dipped in chocolate shake. “Speaking of,” he begins, feeling a pit open up in his stomach, “how do you know about my father?” Leia gives him a befuddled expression. “The first day, when Mr. Anderson said my name during roll call in homeroom. You turned around and stared at me like you’d heard my name before. I thought, maybe, because of your dad -”
“Oh, yeah,” Leia says. “Yeah. My dad has told me about Anakin Skywalker a few times before.” She smiles wryly. “Most of the time it’s about the trouble he’d gotten my father and the rest of the crew into.”
“Really?” Luke feels his heart pick up pace.
“Oh, yeah.” Leia smiles to herself. “There’s always a happy ending, where Skywalker figured it out, and everyone was back safe and sound, but damn, did he give my dad a lot of heart attacks.”
Luke smiles to himself. Ben had told him much the same. “I wish I’d known him. My father, I mean.” He grabs another fry, and he catches the look on Leia’s face. “He, uh - he died, when I was really little.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
Luke waves a hand at her. “It’s fine. I was so little when it happened, I don’t really remember much. Just Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru telling me that Mom and Dad had been in a car wreck, and they weren’t coming back.” He looks at Leia’s forlorn expression. “Sorry, that’s super dark.”
“No, it’s fine.” Leia takes another fry, rather hurriedly. “We’re friends.”
The corner of Luke’s mouth turns up. “Yeah, you’re right.”
"I can relate, actually. Sort of." Luke raises an eyebrow at Leia. "I was adopted, so I've never known who my 'real parents' are." She does air quotes as she speaks.
"Oh." Luke isn't quite sure what to say to that. "I'm sorry?" he tries.
Leia shakes her head. "Don't be. I don't think I could have ended up with better parents if I'd tried. They always call me their gift. It got annoying for a while, but I just think it's sweet, now." Leia grabs another fry, and Luke feels his stomach curdle. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had fed him, clothed him, given him a place to live. They loved him, in their own way. But he doesn't think they've ever thought of him as fondly as Leia's parents think of her. “Do your aunt and uncle talk to you much about your dad?” she asks.
Luke shakes his head. “No, not at all, really. I don’t think they approved of his choices.” Luke grabs a fry, dipping it in his milkshake before continuing. “Did you know my dad actually signed up for the military? He wasn’t drafted. He wanted to fight. Well - he wanted to fly, at least. And he got to. He was even a flight instructor for the military after he did his tour -”
Leia gives him a side eye. “I thought you said your aunt and uncle didn’t talk about him.”
Luke smiles. “They don’t. But one of my dad’s old war buddies - Ben Kenobi?” Leia shakes her head. “Well, anyway, he lives on the homestead right next to ours. He was …” Luke casts around his brain, trying to figure out how to describe Ben. “He was around a lot, when I was little. He supported me more than my aunt and uncle did. Still does, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My aunt and uncle are still under the delusion that I’m going to stay and farm on the family homestead and continue the legacy or whatever.” Luke rolls his eyes. “My father left. On purpose. He joined the Air Force to get out of this shit hole. And I’m going to, too.”
“What are you going to do?”
Luke breathes in deep, feeling his insides twist a little. He’d only ever told Ben about this before. “I want to be a machinist. Design parts, use new tools … create stuff. I’ve been working on trying to design a new engine for my car.” He gestures out the window to point to his old junker. “I want to do something meaningful.”
“That’s really cool.” Leia takes a final sip from her milkshake.
“Yeah.” Luke sighs. “I can’t believe I told you all that. I’ve never talked about my father, or Ben, or … any of it, to anyone before.”
Leia nods, taking the last fry out of the basket. “Yeah, me either.” She stares out the window. The sun has started to go down, casting a shadow across the street. “And I feel like I should feel weird about it, but I don’t.”
“Me, too.” Luke looks at Leia, really looks at her. Her smile, one of the first he’s seen from her, is gentle. The fire in her eyes is still there, but it’s a merry dance instead of an overwhelming roar. He shakes his head, the corner of his mouth twitching upward, unsure of how the two of them managed to end up here. “So do you need a ride home?”
“What, are you gonna drive me? You’re not old enough to have a license.”
Luke chuckles as he shuffles out of the booth and begins walking toward the door. Leia follows him. “Actually, I am. Out here in the boonies, if you live far enough away from town, they give you a license at 14. You’re really only supposed to drive to and from school, and you’re not supposed to have passengers. But. They can only pull you over if you’re doing something stupid, and I am an excellent driver.”
Leia rolls her eyes, but she climbs into the passenger seat. “So you’ve only been driving for - what? A few months?”
Luke starts up the car, the engine roaring from under the hood. “Well, I’ve been driving tractors since I was … six? But if you’re asking when I got permission from the government to drive, it was last May.”
“Take a left here,” Leia tells him. “Wait, so, when’s your birthday?”
“May 25th, 1972.”
There’s a pause. “No fucking way,” she mutters under her breath. “Take a right at that stop sign up there.”
“Why? When’s your birthday?”
Luke hears the smile in voice as she says, “May 25th, 1972.”
“Seriously?” he asks.
She chuckles. “Yeah.” She points up ahead. “I’m the blue house on the corner up there.”
“Wild.” Luke pulls up into the Organas’ driveway. “So, I’ll .. see you on Monday?” he asks, looking across the seats at her.
She smiles at him. “Yeah. See you Monday.”