Work Text:
Many had thought them foolish, even selfish, for having laid eggs together when their world was slowly dying around them.
How could they bring a pebble into this world without knowing if the planet would even survive until their adulthood?
How could they doom another to a life of misery?
What so many didn’t know, is that their pebble was found.
Din had come upon the rough-edged pebble when he had been tasked to check in on one of the mates of the crew that had left to save them.
They hadn’t been seen for a few days.
What Luke’s mate had come across was a cold carapace, and a pebble unhandled in its sharp edges and unsteady gait.
A pebble abandoned with one parent dead, and another on a mission amongst the great silence above.
Grogu had become theirs then.
Clinging to Din as if a mass growing right from his limb, a dense speck upon bell like mirrors.
Luke was enamored with the small pebble. They had considered laying together soon, or soon in the before times. Before the cooling, the waning.
Grogu seemed uncertain in singing. Single tones emoting from sparkling orifices.
Luke and Din didn’t care what others thought.
Grogu was theirs. Until the time that their saviors returned.
If they ever did.
+++
Grogu was 50 when the strange object fell from the sky.
When Rocky returned alone.
Well, with an alien.
But Grogu’s other parent had been lost to the strange nothingness out there.
And there was no reason to let it be known.
Luke assisted in making sure the strange soft alien, who Rocky swore they would not have survived without, would live.
And despite Din’s protestations, Luke found himself fascinated with the “human” and learning everything he could of its physiology.
Luke just had to swear to keep Grogu away.
…. Until the alien, Grace, started teaching.
Then not even a protector Eridian like Din could find a reason to withhold their child from knowledge, the most important thing on their planet.
And it suited them all, to have a pebble who was finally starting to find its voice, come whistling into their home after its classes, excited to tell them just all that it had heard.
Din and Luke had never planned for a pebble. But they couldn’t be happier they found one.
