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The stars around him snap back into solid points, and the low roar of the quad-jet engines drops down to a low hum, as Luke Skywalker drops out of hyperspace. He toggles his radio open, and picks up the last conversation where they left off, almost mid-sentence.
The Rim back channels are always a hotbed of gossip, and only a tiny fraction of these reports end up being anything interesting, but Luke's got time today. Things have been quiet on Coruscant lately- or, as quiet as the New Republic ever gets, meaning not very- so Leia was only in the middle of about twenty important negotiation sessions when she told him there's been credible reports of a Jedi archive at Farroush, a system out near the very edge of the Rim.
He's taken his X-wing and made it a series of short jumps and stopovers. It's a long trip, and it's been more dull than usual, because Artoo picked up some kind of bug from a new software upgrade that didn't play nice with his many frankly terrifying hardware upgrades, so Artoo is currently camped out with a half-dozen Republic techs back on Coruscant, who are all trying to figure out how to update an astromech droid who hasn't been wiped since the Clone Wars. But it's not been as boring as it could be, because it turns out that Wedge Antilles is off on leave- well, probably enforced leave, because Luke has never seen Wedge willingly take a day off from flying in his life- so Wedge has been perfectly happy to jump on the comms to pick up their chat every time Luke drops out of hyperspace.
"You gotta come back and fly with us again, Luke," says Wedge, his voice crackling a little. "Only half our missions are suicide runs these days, and they make me provide expert testimony at Senate committee meetings the rest of the time, okay? It's boring. Wes is even more annoying when you're gone. We all miss you."
Luke grins, and somewhere light-years away, he hears Wedge laughing. A true friend, in a galaxy where maybe that's the one thing that matters most, in the end. He's so lucky that he has so many.
And oh hells, Luke remembers those days, too. Flying by a wing and a prayer and outgunned by the Empire ten thousand to one, constantly careening between terror and grief and triumph. In a strange way, though, that had all seemed much easier. Maybe none of them had ever really thought they'd make it out alive.
There's a shimmer of something, awareness of something happening at the edge of his consciousness, and Luke frowns, and says, "Hey Wedge, hold on a second-"
And that's when the cruiser screams out of hyperspace, right on top of him, and blows him out of the sky.
***
Luke made the Empire's Most Wanted list at age nineteen, with a bounty that started at five million credits and only got bigger, so this has been a fact of life for him for the last decade: bounty hunters learn everything they can learn about him, and then sometimes those bounty hunters get the drop on him. This has happened six times already, before today.
Three times, Luke extricated himself; once it was Han, swaggering in with a smoking blaster, grinning at him, that's three you owe me, junior until Luke clipped him in the chin with his newly-unlocked stun cuffs; the second, it was Rogue Squadron, who scrambled from the hanger in what turned out to be the standing Alliance-record preflight time, and ran down the shuttle that was making a run for hyperspace with Luke out cold in the back compartment; the last time, sithsake , it was Leia, and it had been his own damn fault for chasing the assassin who'd taken a shot at Mon Mothma straight into the Sellonian embassy, and then the entire Sellonian diplomatic corps had collectively decided to call it quits on their embassy and give high-stakes hostage negotiations a try instead- against Princess Leia Organa. To this day, she's never let him forget that one.
Unfortunately, the thing about being the Empire's Most Wanted and simultaneously the last of the Jedi, is this: meticulously prepared bounty hunters, armed with an absolute grab bag of Palpatine's Jedi-killer horror-tech can, terribly easily, as it so happens, get the drop on him.
This is how Luke wakes up, after encountering the seventh bounty capture attempt of his career. Cold on a metal-grate floor, bruised all over, in a cell on an Imperial prison cruiser, with a duristeel Force suppression collar locked tight around his neck.
The first thing he thinks is, oh thank fuck I didn't bring Artoo. He's not sure he could have handled that. Then he thinks, Leia’s going to kill me, and then, finally, Wedge is going to know something's gone wrong.
But Luke is out on the Rim here, and that's a long way out from help.
He got enough of a look to know it was bounty hunters, not the Empire. That's pretty cold comfort, though, because the bounty hunters have left him in an empty cell in his undershorts. The cell has white-cold lights above, at least two meters out of reach, and a fist-sized drain in one corner. They haven't left him anything else, and that includes his lightsaber.
The Force suppression collar though. This is new. Luke touches it with fuzzy detachment. He's only ever read about this kind of thing in the intelligence dossiers Leia has assembled for him, because even now, five years after Endor, despite the fact that he's never held an actual position in the New Republic government or fleet, no one's ever bothered to revoke his old Alliance top-secret clearances. He probes the collar, abruptly more focussed, feeling out the dimensions, the hum of micro-circuitry recessed below the surface. This is one of Palpatine's skin-crawling little toys, left over from the early years of the Empire, when Imperial agents were busy running the last Jedi survivors to ground. It's colder against his skin than duristeel has any reason to be, and Luke fights back a tremor that doesn't seem to want to stop.
So. Luke is mostly naked, cold, alone in this cell, and cut off from the Force. He takes a deep breath, exhales to centre himself. Presses his palms and his ear to the deck, and then concentrates entirely on listening. He concentrates on listening, because if he starts thinking about how these bounty hunters knew where to hit him, and where they got their hands on Palpatine's Inquisitor technology, he's going to have to start thinking about what's going to be waiting for him on the other end of this trip, and honestly, none of that is helpful right now.
So. Listening. Luke can't touch the Force, and it’s awful, a cold and yawning void inside him, but he can still centre himself, and he can still listen. The low-frequency hum of the deck plating from the engines. No sound of steps, no movement, which means no guards outside the cell. If there's anyone nearby, they're not close.
Luke sits back on his heels and presses a knuckle to his mouth, and opens his mind to possibilities.
The ship that shot him down was an old Imperial Alkotroz-class prison transport. He only had a split-second to register it, but it was enough. Not anything like the big Lusankya-model prison haulers, but still. Rows of cells, yes, but the Alkotroz models were retrofitted cargo haulers, not designed for standard Imperial lockdown prison transport. Luke remembers downloading the schematics from an incredibly sketchy darknet hub on the Holonet when he was fourteen, and so starved for stimulation he would pour over the specs for anything that flew . So, a retrofitted ship. Which means lots of dark corners, lots of places for cover, and more importantly, these ships are old-school tech and they're big. They aren't designed to be manned by a skeleton crew. Definitely more crew than most of the bounty hunter groups he's ever tangled with. There's no way they could realistically cover this whole ship.
He just needs to get out of this cell first. This cell, with its heavy duristeel door and oh yes, right there-
This is how Luke got away from his first three sets of bounty hunters, back when he was about a decade younger and admittedly, a lot dumber than he is now. The Empire and the bounty hunters guild might think they know everything about Luke Skywalker, the Rebellion's Jedi, but no one ever accounts for one simple fact, and it's this: Luke grew up on Tatooine, in what was truly the back end of nowhere, and the only interesting things to do were drinking, racing, developing hyperfixations on ship specs, and lastly, taking literally anything mechanical apart.
It's this last skill, actually, that Luke hopes, hopes, is going to get him out of this mess. The bounty hunters did, fortunately, leave him one thing to work with.
It turns out, though, that it's not exactly easy to field-strip a bio-hydraulic piston rig out of a cybernetic hand without any tools, and also when he's so chilled and fuzzy in the Force that it feels like being ice-cold and half-blind. Luke takes a deep breath, steadies himself, and keeps working the fingers of his good hand through the seam deep under the synth-skin, blinking back the shocky, nervy pain. He closes his eyes and breathes hard, fast, feeling around under the base of the thumb until his two fingers close around the hot, vibrating little component. Luke thought he was braced for it, but it feels so wrong , pulling it out with its sparking twist of wire, as his hand goes nerveless and limp and gone . It's not the same as that first sudden traumatic shock, back at Cloud City, but it's an echo, close enough that it makes him shake.
That's the worst part. Luke puts his head between his knees and breathes, that four-count breath hold that Aunt Beru had taught him the first time he was old enough to bash his fingers with a hydrospanner. Strangely enough, Yoda taught him pretty much the same thing, his second day on Dagobah. Neither of them ever taught him this trick, but door locks are pretty standard, whether they're Imperial or Alliance or anything else in between. There's only so many ways to make a bolt slide shut. And there's not many bolts in the galaxy that a medical-grade duristeel bio-hydraulic piston rig can't pop open, not if you overload it, and then if you angle it in just right-
The door pops open. Luke tumbles out into the hall.
Lucky for his dignity, and more importantly for his chances of getting out of this mess, none of the bounty hunters are manning the corridor. They must need everyone just to keep this ship flying. Luke quietly and reverently thanks Alliance Medical, Aunt Beru, and every Jedi he's ever met for top-quality prosthetics, for darknet-hub Imperial blueprints, and gods-damned Tatooine , for being so boring that all this bantha shit stayed in his brain until today.
Oh hells, he thinks, dizzy, and it's at this point that Luke realizes that the Force-suppression collar might, possibly, be sending him into shock. He tucks his dead mechanical hand-don't think about it- under his other arm, and he gets moving. Staying low, staying quiet. He has to get out of here, and it's a tight window, already closing.
Ship's quiet. Luke moves, cat-footed and silent, locked into that hyperaware state that he doesn't need to Force to access, but it's hard work. He's freezing cold, but beads of sweat are starting to rise on his forehead. He doesn't have much time. He needs to get this collar off, first thing- it's got what feels like a weak point at the hinge, so a laser torch, an arc welder, hells, even a decent set of manual boltcutters, and he'd have this fucking awful draining rancor's yoke off in a hot second-
And then he stops, suddenly. It's not the Force, because that's still an awful bleeding absence, but it's something else that draws him up short, even when every instinct tells him to keep moving. The cell doors he's gone past have been dark, but this one's got a narrow crack of light under the door. Luke hits the lock mechanism before he knows what he's doing.
"Oh," he says, and for a split second it's like he can feel again, through the groggy shock of the suppressor collar, and then he's smiling, helplessly, blinking wetness out of his eyes. "Oh, hello there."
The baby smiles back at him. Soft black eyes that trust him. He sticks out a little green clawed hand towards Luke with a furrow of concentration, and then he frowns, like he knows this isn't right. Under a fold of a loosely wrapped brown robe, the baby's got a Force collar suppressor too, one that's small enough that Luke feels a fast swoop of nausea.
As it turns out, no one ever taught Luke how to tie a little green baby to his back one-handed either, but Luke thinks he's pretty gods-damned good at problem-solving under pressure, thank you, and the baby is at least semi-cooperative. When he's pretty sure the kid is strapped in as tight as he can get, Luke pauses, and reaches back. His fingers graze the widest point of the baby's fuzzy ear. "Well, kid," says Luke, and his voice is a little scraped up, but not bad, all things considered. "Carrying you on my back, and getting the absolute banthashit kicked out of me, at least this part's familiar."
The baby coos in his ear, and then kicks him in the kidney. Yoda used to do the exact same thing. Somehow, it's a lot more endearing now.
***
Luke's always been able to find useful things.
When he was younger, he used to take his skyhopper out into the Jundland Wastes, and his aunt and uncle had hated it, but they'd never stopped him. He'd always known that there wasn't any money, and that useful scrap brought in cash. Everyone had to grow up quick on Tatooine, and faster if you had a name like Skywalker, which meant a family that wasn't more than a couple of generations out of slavery, and on top of all that, a father that no one ever talked about.
Luke used to find all sorts of stuff in the desert, mostly sand-blasted scrap, but sometimes, often, he'd find useful things. Blast rifles, field packs. Imperial-surplus spotter scopes. Things that had been getting too heavy to carry, by people who were going to die when the suns came up.
Luke had never thought of this as stealing. Nothing in the Jundland Wastes belonged to anybody anymore.
Maybe the baby is good luck, or maybe, years later, Luke is still just really good at finding useful things, because one junction farther, he spots the emergency technician's repair kit mounted on the wall.
Some past Imperial bureaucrat was responsible for this particular aspect of workplace health and safety, and Luke chokes back a laugh- the baby says beeeee against his ear, and that makes Luke laugh again. He braces the kit with his bad arm and unlatches it with his good hand, and when everything spills out, including a set of heavy duristeel shears, the sound should bring anyone with a working brain running, but both their luck holds out, and he just needs a few moments more-
Luke's got the cutters lined up just right against the baby's collar when the whole ship suddenly lurches sideways.
Weapons fire. Turbolasers, Luke thinks distantly while the kid trills in alarm. They tumble hard into the opposite wall but Luke keeps his grip on the shears. The kid's suddenly loose, but Luke scrambles, gets him pinned with the elbow of his dead hand, poised on the balls of his feet, his bare toes gripping against the floor plating, and he grimly works at the weakening metal hinge- almost there- until the baby's collar suddenly pops loose.
"Baaah! " says the baby, indignantly, and Luke has a half-second to smile at him, helplessly, before there's a second broadside and they both go flying again.
When the third hit comes, Luke realizes he probably should have gotten his own collar off first, before he helped the kid. No time to second-guess now, though, and he staggers back up, gets his feet under him, and there's a screaming, reverberating crash that throws him to the floor, to the bulkhead again, but somehow he holds on to the baby and the shears and then he's got them braced against the hinge of his suppression collar, digging into the tight skin of his neck, hard enough to bruise, and it's almost through, he's almost got it-
And then armoured boots are pounding on the deck, and Luke can't breathe, he's yanking the shears through the collar hard enough that the metal shrieks, and he's been lucky and he's been good, but he's not going to be able to get out of this one, and he'll never see Leia or Han or any of his friends again and the baby-
Luke's crouched frozen on the deck, barefoot and bruised in his gods-damned underwear, and he can't get this fucking collar loose, and it's a squad of Mandalorians.
Mandalorians, guns up, armed to the teeth, and Luke has a sudden and vivid memory of Boba Fett, but no, that's not right. Too many of them, different armour, and there's one out front, leading the pack. He's wearing bright beskar armour that looks like it's drawing all the light towards him. The baby's crowing excitedly under Luke's bad arm.
Several things happen then, all at once, or at least in very fast succession.
The Mandalorian grates out, in a low voice that cuts right down through Luke's bones, "Stop. Put the kid down. Give him to me."
The collar carving into his neck suddenly gives- it clatters to the deck, along with the shears.
And then a dozen bounty hunters come around the corner behind Luke, and start shooting.
Luke reacts without thinking. He shoves the baby behind him, blocking him with his body, and takes three blaster bolts right to the chest.
***
Whenever they're both on-planet, and Han needs to get clear of politics and diplomacy and the nagging feeling that kid, things were easier back when I just had to keep you and your sister alive in a garbage compactor, he and Luke go to a bar down in one of the lower canyon neighborhoods, a long way from the towering transparisteel Senate buildings. It's in an old converted supercargo shipping crate, lit up all over with neon; a place where the background drone of plasma screens and air conditioning units, not to mention the warm torrential rain drumming on the sheet metal, can cover a hundred low conversations. Han likes to go there because it reminds him of being anonymous, just some random smuggler in the crowd on a wet night. Luke likes it because they stock Ithorian tritical vodka, which is the only thing he's ever found that hits like the rotgut homebrew from Tatooine and Rebellion barracks stills, because he never developed anything like a palette and Leia despairs over it.
Han and Luke go to this bar, with its neon glow and its mechanical hum and the sound of the rain, where no one looks too closely at their faces, and they talk until the tritical vodka runs out.
In Cloud City, Han had said, one night, drunk and rubbing a thumb absently across his collarbone, where Luke's seen the scars from the Imperial interrogation droid's needles. I shot him-Vader, I mean, and the bolts, he just- put his hand out and he stopped them.
***
In one of those Force-slow nano-moments, Luke thinks of Han, thinks of his father, and remembers that conversation. At the same instant, instinctively, he reaches out, wraps the Force around each blaster bolt and he- diffuses it, somehow, spreading all that killing energy out all around him. It still hits his chest like a rancor's punch- his scalp crackles and all the hair stands up on his arms, but the bolts don't kill him and he's already moving.
Han was also the one who taught him how to throw a punch without breaking the little bones in his hand. That's useful too.
He doesn't have a weapon but he's got his body and he's got the Force, and behind him there's the baby, and a pack of Mandalorians who don't deserve to get gunned down by bounty hunters who’re after Luke. He jumps and flips, and the Force propels him, slows everything down, so he has time to map it out, off the wall here and a punch to the chest here, and a strike to the neck there and there's bounty hunters all around him but they're so slow, and the corridor is tight, and they're in each other's way. He's in the flow of the Force now, and Luke has a full view of the whole hall, can see and feel everything around him, where to strike, when to dodge, and he knows that this is going to work - but then, just for a split-second, the pain in his chest bleeds through, white-hot and blinding, and Luke loses his focus for just an instant-
And then the bounty hunters are suddenly moving in real-time, suddenly no one is close enough to hit, they're getting their blasters up again-
And then one of the Mandalorians behind him, the leader, yells at him, quick and bitten-out- "Catch!"
Luke reaches out instinctively, not thinking, just trusting. His fingers close around it, and then suddenly Luke's got his lightsaber in his hand, and all the new possibilities abruptly explode through the Force around him with the rush of green light.
***
Luke was nineteen before he ever saw green and water.
Well, that's a lie, but barely. On Tatooine, water was the vaporators, tracking the scant wisps in the atmosphere, and the occasional deep tap into the water table. Recycled greywater and whatever was left to sell at the end of the season, after the creditors had gotten their cut. Water was his uncle looking haggard, saying harvest's when I need you the most, and Luke knows only part of that stemmed from the need to keep him away from Obi-Wan and his father's ghost.
Running water and green life- he never saw it, not for real, until Yavin. Everyone in the Rebel base humming with urgency, the Death Star bearing down on them, but what Luke really remembers is missing Ben, missing his aunt and uncle, watching Leia get whisked away by her generals and Han packing up to leave them, and in the middle of all that, watching all that rain fall on that wet green jungle and how no one except for him had even seemed to notice it.
It's funny how certain memories linger. His father's blue-white saber had looked like that rush of water. Years later, when he'd built his own blade to replace it, he remembered that endless sprawl of creeping green life.
His father grew up on Tatooine. He wonders sometimes, whether Anakin Skywalker ever felt the same.
***
Luke’s never really learned how to fight with a lightsaber. He had all that he'd cobbled together from Ben and Yoda, but the first time Luke had ever really fought anyone other than droids, stormtroopers, and that fucking Dagobah hallucination, it had been Darth Vader. His father had fought like an unstoppable machine, in a way that Luke's never managed to copy.
Luke's developed his own style, though, over the years, and if it's more like pissed-off Tosche Station barkeep swinging an amped-up shockbat than anything the Jedi ever taught, well-
Ben had called the lightsaber an elegant weapon from a more civilized age. Luke's not sure anything he does is elegant, but it's pretty hard to say it's not effective.
Also, Luke once saw Ben cut a man’s arm off in a bar fight, so it’s possible Ben was just full of shit on that particular topic.
When the last body hits the floor and Luke thumbs off his lightsaber, the Mandalorian leader's voice is literally still echoing in the hall. It falls away, and everything is just absolute blank silence for one long moment.
And then one of the Mandalorians soldiers behind him says, a little too loudly, "What the fuck."
If there were any justice in the galaxy, this would be the point where Luke got to stop for a gods-damned second to get his breath back, but justice is not one of the defining traits of Luke's particular galaxy, because that's when another bounty hunter rounds the corner with a grenade launcher, and blows a hole right through the hull.
***
Depending on who you ask, Luke founded Rogue Squadron. Luke's view is that he just survived Yavin when he had no business surviving, and everything spiralled out from there.
Rogue Squadron was a place to belong, when everything else in the galaxy didn’t make any sense. Luke was out in space and his family was dead, Ben was dead, and he was just starting to touch the edge of a power he couldn’t really understand, but he was still the best bush pilot in the Outer Rim, and every hour he spent in a snubfighter, he only got better. And Rogue Squadron was where the best pilots ended up.
It was their third mission, Luke remembers. They were a bunch of kids- that soon after Yavin, a lot of the higher-ranking pilots were dead- and they had all gotten stuck in a freezing cold little prefab base on some rocky moon that barely had enough atmosphere to breathe. They were three days ahead of the Alliance support crew, the rations were frozen solid, and none of the base heaters worked. That had happened a lot, back in those days.
Luke had taken one look at everyone unloading their gear and trying not to shiver, and he’d thought, hey, I can take care of this, and that always settled him down, having a problem to solve, having a friend he could help. He'd taken the heaters apart, one by one, and found the problem, corrosion in the wiring to the main ceramic element. He'd remembered the triumphant little glow, remembered saying, "Yeah, okay, I got it. Hobbie, bring me that spare dash plate, the one in the crate with the ship parts."
He hadn't looked up when someone handed it to him a few minutes later, a burned-out part of a heads-up display from someone's X-wing. Too busy following the lines of the wires with his eyes and his fingers, brain working a step ahead, looking for the best solder points while he pulled the loose wiring from the dash plate free.
When he'd finished soldering and the heater kicked on, there'd been that fast rush of problem-solving pleasure, and he'd grinned, rolled his shoulders back in a little shimmy because he'd cramped up, crouched over the heater like that. And then he'd looked up, and there was Wedge and Tycho, Wes and Hobbie and the rest, the bunch of kids who would end up following him, and everyone had been staring at him. "What?" he'd said, and no one had answered for a long moment, and then Wes Jansen had said, very seriously, "Everyone else get out of here, I'm going to suck this guy's dick."
“Oh,” Luke had said, and gods damn it, had blushed all the way down his chest. “I’m just gonna-” And then he’d gone outside with a respirator, a blaster and his field knife, and he’d shot and field-dressed a mynock; if they’re going to have heat they may as well have dinner too, and mynocks were a hell of a lot easier pickings than a womp rat.
That's how Rogue Squadron really got started. They'd thrown their bunk rolls down together in the little briefing room off the main hanger, the newly-fixed heaters rigged up with a grill for the mynock steaks. “For fuck’s sake,” Wes had said, despairingly. “I grew up in a megacity on Tanaab. Heat comes from the wall, dinner comes from the noodle stand, Skywalker, what the fuck?” And then the general discussion had turned to Wes Jansen’s cheapness as a date, Wes’s spirited rejoinder, and the resultant scuffle. Everyone had passed around a bottle of Corellian whiskey, and they'd all fallen asleep tangled together.
It was the best Luke had slept since he'd left Tatooine.
***
No one ever taught Luke what to do in the event of a hull breach, other than Wes, who'd never sucked his dick, the liar, but who was a good friend anyway. Wes, in his inimitable way, had summarized the general Rebel pilot's wisdom for Luke as, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
The Mandalorians have zero-grav magnetic grips on their boots. Luke has a half-second to think, oh that's handy before the solid roaring wall of escaping atmosphere sends him flying. He has an instant of quick-thinking, in the scream of the slipstream, and he manages to shove the tumbling baby into someone's arms, and then he's in space and the sudden icy airless silence is such a fucking shock-
In the disorienting tumble of vacuum, it's long seconds where Luke can't breathe, can't feel, nothing but numb silent awful cold all around him, but he can still think. He can still think , and he only has a few seconds, he knows, but just out of reach, there's a Mandalorian soldier who was too close to the hull when it blew, and maybe he has an emergency rebreather in that helmet, and maybe that armour can protect him from vacuum for just a few seconds more. He's still moving, one arm struggling to reach for something behind him- jetpack controls, Luke realizes, but the movement's weak and jerky, and Luke's going to pass out any second now, but he's close, so close-
-and then Luke's got him , arms wrapped around the Mandalorian's armoured shoulders, and his lungs are still in his chest, his heart so frozen it's like it's stopped between beats, for one awful, agonizing second and another, and then-
-and then the Force floods through Luke like everything that's warm and living and good, and he knows out here, it’s cold airless nothing, but back there, back in the ship, there's heat, and life, and there's a future, and it's calling him, so he gathers the Force around them both like a hard pulse of energy against the empty vacuum and he moves them-
The Mandalorians have patched the hull breach with some kind of portable emergency tech that he's never seen before. A handful of fist-sized generators, forming a webwork of blast shielding between them, keeping the atmosphere in and the vacuum out. It's incredible. Luke wants to take one apart to see how it works.
Then his bare feet hit the deck, too frozen numb to feel it, but the jolt shudders right through his body. The big Mandalorian soldier is staggering out of his grip, and they're both falling, but a dozen arms are reaching for them both.
Someone's holding him up, then, and Luke abruptly remembers something Leia'd told him, once- Luke, when in doubt, take a nap. You never know when your next chance might be.
Leia is genuinely a lot smarter than him, and this seems like a good time to take that advice. Everything goes grey and silent.
***
Here's one difference between Luke and Leia.
When they were both sixteen, Leia wrote and defended a thousand-page graduate-level political science thesis at the University of Coruscant called Beyond the Core: Stabilizing systems in the Mid and Outer Rim to eliminate drivers of illicit slavery.
Luke learned how to take apart and reassemble his skyhopper’s engine, understand Binary, and kissed Biggs Darklighter behind the Tosche Station cantina.
Luke doesn't regret any of this. Sometimes, though, he really wishes he'd had a bit more of Leia's education.
***
There's something pawing at the edges of his consciousness. Luke thinks, distantly, Leia’s going to kill me, and then he comes awake all at once.
Mandalorians. This isn't necessarily any better. But he's not strapped down, no one's got a blaster trained on him, and that awful suppression collar is gone, so honestly, this is already a lot better than his last time waking up.
Absolutely everything hurts. He's lying flat on his back on what he's pretty sure is, from unfortunate experience, an emergency portable med-bed. It's hovering on what looks like, of all places, the prison transport's bridge. He's under a standard grey medical shock blanket, and he can feel the slick, lukewarm itch of bacta strapping on his chest and belly. But he's finally warm, and that's a triumph all on its own. There's a buzz of chatter and activity, armoured Mandalorians moving fast and purposefully all around him.
More important than all of this, however, and where Luke's focus abruptly directs, is to the baby. He's sitting on Luke's stomach. The second he clocks that Luke's awake, Luke gets hit through the Force with a cacophonous wall of baby thoughts and they are mostly HELLO and GROGU and HELLO FRIEND and a sentiment-word he doesn't know, which is BUIR, but the feeling behind it is so pure and bright and warm that he's already smiling as he reaches for the kid with his good hand. "Hey there, Grogu," he croaks, and Grogu wraps a little clawed hand around his finger, friendly and grabby and insistent. Luke's pretty sure he's smiling like a fool. He doesn't care. "I'm so glad to meet you."
"You're awake," says someone next to him, and Luke startles, and sithfuck, ow, yeah, he's suddenly awake enough to feel that under the bacta strapping, his chest is aching from the blaster bolts, his skin prickling pins-and-needles from the vacuum exposure, probably burst capillaries and micro-bruises all over because no organic life is designed to go into space without paying for it later.
And fuck, he's an idiot. There's Grogu, yes, a point in their favour that clearly they were here to get the baby, who looks perfectly happy and unharmed. But it's a group of Mandalorians. Luke might not know much Galactic history, but he knows the Empire slagged their planet, violently displaced them, and he knows they operate by their own laws and codes, out in the Rim. He also doesn't know a fraction as much as he should about Jedi history, but he knows that the Mandalorians treated them as ancestral enemies, and Luke couldn't fight off a mynock hatchling feeling the way he does right now, and fuck-
He was clearly a lot more out of it then he realized, because the big Mandalorian leader is right there, leaning against the wall right next to his bed. He's holding the suppression collar in his hands, and Luke goes still.
The buzz of activity on the bridge suddenly drops, and a dozen Mandalorians- dispassionate helmets, and scarred fighter's faces, all that focused intensity- turn to look at Luke. It only lasts a moment, because the Mandalorian leader shifts his weight, and everyone suddenly shivers back into motion.
No one ever gave Luke any credit for being the diplomat in his family, because he stares up at the Mandalorian, the quick dazzling bursts of light off his helmet, his bright armour, and maybe he's just traded one set of bounty hunters for another, but Luke suddenly remembers him throwing his lightsaber, how he'd caught it and the way the Force had suddenly bloomed around him with limitless possibilities and oh -
"If you're trying to claim the Empire's bounty on me," says Luke, like an idiot, "the Republic will probably pay more to get me back." He thinks about the baby, Grogu, in Imperial hands, and it makes him tense all over, and fuck that hurts , so he says, his voice scraped raw, "No, do what you want with me. Just keep Grogu away from them."
The Mandalorian stares at him, that expressionless helmet, and maybe Luke's too exhausted to parse it, but he's just a riot of emotions, with everything packed down down so tight that Luke's not quite sure what he's feeling, and then the Mandalorian's leather glove clenches, and he snaps the suppression collar into jagged halves.
Luke stares at him, and he's about to pass out again, which doesn't feel like the best idea, and then, thankfully , someone out of his sightline shouts, "Mandalor, we've broken the encryption on the main system!"
The Mandalorian spins away. He takes a step, turns back and looks straight at Grogu and tells him, very deliberately, "Stay here." But then the tight walls around his mind crack open for just a moment, and it's nothing but raw, agonizing love .
Luke's exhausted and barely managing to keep the pain under control, and he’s not sure how to react because that was so strong, and then the big Mandalorian strides off.
STAY FRIEND, Grogu informs him via mental baby yell. Luke blinks, and the baby settles back against him. He starts rubbing his little clawed hands across the old electrical burn scars on Luke's chest and shoulders, like he thinks they should just rub off when he touches them.
It's sweet. Now that no one's hovering over him, Luke finally has a moment to breathe in, find his focus well enough to try a healing trance, regardless of the busy hum of activity from the Mandalorians around him around him, though why they've kept him up here as opposed to some tucked-away infirmary or cell-
Luke never had the benefit of Leia's extremely extensive Core-world education on Galactic history, so he's blaming that for the delayed realization. He suddenly loses his focus. That solid beskar armour, all those other Mandalorian soldiers behind him, and oh hells fucking maw-
A few cycles back, Leia's intelligence briefing. Concerning a sudden rapid change in the de-facto leadership of the Mandalorian diaspora, what's left of it, and independent credible reports coming back to New Republic Intelligence of a massing force, ships and infantry- the best assessment Republic Intel could put together was unification of the disparate Mandalorian factions; in summary, an invasion force, one mostly likely aimed squarely at retaking-
Luke is suddenly pretty godsdamn certain that he just met the new king of Mandalore.
He looks at the baby, and thinks, exhausted: Grogu, I think I just made a really stupid mistake.
NAP, answers Grogu, placidly, and Luke has to agree that's probably a smart call.
***
When he wakes up again, Luke's got a fresh set of bacta patches, there's an intravenous fluid line bundled away to the side, and his bad hand is strapped across his chest in an expertly-tied sling. The baby is dozing between his knees, and there's a woman sitting next to him.
She's watching him. Vintage Rebel trooper ink and an Alderaanian tear tattooed on one sharp cheekbone. She's got big arms and a bigger rifle, balanced on her lap, which she's currently field-stripping without paying it any appreciable attention. "Kriffing hells," she says. "Luke Skywalker. I never figured half the shit they said about you was true." She rams the magazine back into place. "Looks like I was wrong about that."
She feels stressed and edgy, but it’s not really directed at him , which is reassuring. Her tattoos and the gun are both pretty reassuring too. They're also familiar. "Hello," Luke says, and his voice sounds a lot better this time. "I remember you," he says, and it's coming back to him: her sharp-featured face, her intensity, that big fucking rifle, her wide shoulders looking even bigger in her cold-weather gear- "You were on Hoth."
"Cara Dune," she says, turning the rifle aside. She nods, and then her gaze turns inward. "My unit, we were in the trenches covering the evac. It was so kriffing cold, and the guns were smoking so bad I could barely see. I remember that big walker bearing down on us, and then I saw you. You with your laser sword, cutting the belly and blowing it open." She suddenly refocuses, back in the present, staring at him intently. "Thanks for saving my friends, Skywalker," she says. "I've lost too many of them already."
And gods, Luke barely remembers that day on Hoth, between the terror and the adrenaline, barely out of bacta but still forcing his body to just move. But it sounds plausible enough.
And then the baby wakes up with a chirp, and clambers off Luke and onto Cara's lap. She sweeps the gun aside and scoops the kid, practiced enough that this must be a common occurrence. "More trouble than a Kowakian monkey lizard," she says, but she sounds fond. "Glad he's found someone else to climb on for once. Anyway, Skywalker, I owe you one. When we get out of this, let's get a drink."
"About that," says Luke, and he's trying to figure out a way to ask, so how'd an old Rebel trooper end up with a pack of Mandalorians and a baby who's just so bright. He wants to ask, is that the king of Mandalore and where'd he get my lightsaber, and maybe most of all he wants to ask, what are we all doing here, when someone comes up behind Cara and stops, his heavy boots settling deliberately on the deck plating.
It's the Mandalorian who'd been spaced with Luke. The one who'd been reaching for his jetpack, trying to stay alive even if it had been hopeless. "Hey there," says Luke, propping himself up on his one good elbow. "Are you doing okay?"
"Vizsla," says Cara, and there's suddenly a warning in her tone; she shifts her weight a little, ready to move. Luke frowns, because there's a tangle of emotions there but he doesn't feel anything like ill intent, and then the big Mandalorian folds himself down onto his knees next to Luke's cot.
The Mandalorian- Vizsla- lifts a gloved hand. He's holding something bright and sharp. It's a sleek little folding microblade, honed down to a razor's edge, less than the length of his palm. From the shine of it, it's beskar. "Jetii," he says, "Take this. Hide it in your false hand. You were a fool to be taken unawares without one."
Luke blinks, and takes the knife. "Thank you," he says, confused, but he means it, truly. Knives really are useful, in all kinds of situations. Sometimes you have to gut a mynock for Rogue Squadron’s dinner, and sometimes you need to escape from bounty hunters with Palpatine’s Jedi-killer tech. It's actually weirdly sweet .
Vizsla nods, stiffly, and rises up off his knees. He moves off, and Luke looks at Cara, holding the little knife in his good hand.
Cara's eyebrows have risen towards her hairline. "Well, that answers that question."
"What?" says Luke, and Cara snorts, and says, "Who was gonna make a play for you first, obviously."
"Wait, what?" says Luke. Cara's grinning. This doesn't seem good.
"Everyone saw what you did with the kid," says Cara. "They’re Mandalorians, kids are important. And everyone saw you fight. Half the Mandalorians here want to fuck you straight through that biobed as soon as you're fit, and the other half are probably trying to figure out who they have to ask to marry you." Cara laughs. "Vizsla's traditional. That's a good knife. I thought- well, no wonder, Skywalker. You sure make a kriffing impression."
Luke says, faintly, "I think I might need you to explain a few things."
Cara is too busy laughing to grab the baby when he climbs back into Luke's lap. Grogu's awake properly now, staring at Luke with those big dark eyes and he says I TRY NOW, fiercely enough that it makes Luke restrain a grin. And then he puts one little hand on Luke's chest, and Cara stops laughing.
"Oh wow," says Luke softly. He can't look away. "Oh kid, look at you."
Warmth and feeling are creeping back across his frostburned skin, and the bruises on his chest start to flow away like water. All the pain he's been focused on blocking slowly begins to fade, and Luke exhales hard, because that had been so much work, holding all that at bay, and all of a sudden, all the tension in his body unwinds at once.
"Oh yeah," Cara is saying. Luke comes back to himself, feeling abruptly like he's just come out of a week in a bacta tank, only without the sick-sweet taste in the back of his throat. "This is one of his little tricks." Cara shakes her head. "Never thought I'd meet two of your kind. I've never seen anything like this."
"This is incredible," Luke says, honestly. He's never imagined using the Force like this for someone else, sending all that warmth and life back into collapsed capillaries and dying tissues, and why did no one ever tell him this- "I don't think I can do that."
Cara gives him a sardonic eyebrow. "Oh, you never found time to learn how to heal people by touching them- so that'd be in between blowing up Death Stars, and knowing how to get shot and spaced and not die. Lazy, Skywalker."
Luke's chest still hurts too much to laugh, but he does anyway.
***
The big Mandalorian leader- the Mandalor - comes back. Luke has maybe been somewhat distracted by the euphoria of no longer feeling like he's been beat to banthashit, on top of the fact that Grogu is busy showing Luke how he can make Vizsla's little beskar microblade float. Which, granted, is not a very good excuse for what Luke says next.
"I'm Luke Skywalker, hi," he says, and for fuck's sake, just- fucking outstanding, Luke, an absolute credit to the diplomacy Leia's tried so patiently to teach you, and Luke, demonstrating precisely no ability to recover, then says, "I think this is your kid."
The Mandalor, as it happens, is somehow even worse at diplomacy than Luke.
"Jedi," he says, and then stops, like he isn't sure what he meant to say. Luke is sitting up, holding Grogu, and it's suddenly quiet, Mandalorians turning to face him again. Luke remembers what Cara had said, and he's not going to blush, he isn't - "Just-" the Mandalor stops, and starts again. "Thank you, Jedi Skywalker," he says, and his tone is stiff and formal. "I owe you a debt I can't repay."
Heat blooms in Luke's cheeks then, and fuck, where are Leia's easy diplomatic manners when he needs them, so he goes with his instincts, and he says, "No, that's not- no." He puts a hand on the Mandalorian's arm. The armour is cool under his touch, but it warms up fast. "It's just Luke. And there's no debt between us," he says, and the Mandalorian pins him with a helmeted gaze and for fuck's sake he is still touching the king of Mandalore.
The king of Mandalore doesn't seem like he's in a hurry to shake him off, though. He ducks his head, and then he's opening a belt pouch.
He's holding out Luke's lightsaber, for the second time today.
"It's yours," says the Mandalor. "I- well. I knew when I first saw you fight. We found it in the hanger on the way in." He's holding it out carefully, hilt first, in his gloved hand. "I wanted to return it. Again."
Luke takes it, and he knows he's blushing all the way down his chest. "I thought it got spaced," he says. The weight of it in his hand, the familiar grip, the notch where his thumbnail always digs in. He's smiling, he realizes, because- well, he thought he'd lost so much today, and instead, he has a sudden feeling that there's so much here to gain. He looks up at that expressionless helmet, but it's not, is it? The Mandalor's emotional core is locked down hard, but there's something there that Luke thinks he could learn to read, in his stance, in the angle of his head. "Thank you, Mandalor," he says, trying to pronounce the vowels the way he'd heard, but the big Mandalorian shakes his head.
"Din Djarin," he says. "My name is Din."
And that's- that's something important. Luke doesn't need the Force to know that.
"Hello, Din," says Luke. There's a jet-black saber grip hanging from his belt that Luke knows on sight, and Luke has about a hundred questions, starting with, so why do you have a legendary Jedi relic and your kid is so bright, and where in the galaxy did you come from but instead of running his mouth, he holds out his good hand.
Din looks at it like he's more used to expecting a blaster. But he takes it, and the leather of his glove is warm against Luke's hand. His grip is strong.
"I'm really glad I met you today," says Luke, and it should be light, a joke, but it isn't.
Din grips his hand, tight, and doesn't let go for a long time.
***
They don't have anyone who can fix his hand. "This is a high-quality prosthetic," says the Mandalorian who took Luke's arm and turned it back and forth in the light. She's tall, and she has a fur ruff on her armour. Cara had called her Armourer. "If I had my tools and schematics, yes. Not here, though. You can clearly fight without it, however. But still, a loss for now. I am sorry."
Luke's sitting up on the biobed. Someone's gotten him a pair of close-fitting black trousers and a matching high-necked sleeveless shirt. It's all tight, clearly meant to fit under armour, but it's close enough to the thermal thinskins he wears under his flight suit that it all feels familiar enough. The boots are armoured, though, and heavy- he has no idea how any of them move as fast as they do.
Cara just laughed at the pants. In her defense, they're pretty tight.
When Luke's finished being poked over by the Armourer, there's a circle of Mandalorians around his bed. Luke has never been so glad to be sitting up and wearing clothes in his life.
One of them he actually knows, by reputation if nothing else. Bo-Katan Kryze- he knows her face from Imperial bounty posts, and from Republic intelligence dossiers. She'd been somewhere high up in the ruling structure of Mandalore before the Imperials bombed most of their cities to glass. Leia's mentioned her before, in passing. She'd been the de facto leader of the largest part of the offworld Mandalorian groups- Leia's been trying to recruit them since her earliest days in the Alliance, without much success. She's got a severe face and sleek armour, leaner and quicker-looking than most of the others. She's got to be smart and quick, Luke figures, staying ahead of the Empire for as long as she had. She's been arguing with Din on and off for hours- Luke's heard her voice rise and fall around the bridge- but now, the entire conversation has migrated to Luke's bedside, presumably because Din went and they all followed.
Apparently, the argument has been, and continues to be, about Moff Gideon, and the location of his base. Luke’s listening closely, because he knows that name.
Moff Gideon sent the bounty hunters for Grogu and Luke. Moff Gideon has a base of operations, somewhere Luke knows the Republic’s never tracked down. They’ve just pulled the location from this cruiser’s database.
Moff Gideon is dead. Luke startles, hard enough to jolt his still-healing ribs, because that’s new information.
He doesn't have time to process it, though, before they're joined by a technician, a young woman with black hair and narrow eyes. “Mandalor,” says the tech, soberly. She’s got her helmet off, and she looks ashen. “Mandalor, I just found a set of records in the databank. They have children there. Children like-” and her gaze cuts to Grogu, and she doesn't have to say anything else. Din goes suddenly rigid.
Luke's on his feet in a second. Cara only has to prop him up a little.
Din says, quietly, urgently, "How quickly can the rest of the fleet get here?"
Bo Katan shakes her head. "It will take days to rally our ships from the various coverts. By then the Imperials will have moved bases, and they’ll have wiped their tracks."
Din turns to her, and says, "It'll have to be enough." His gaze cuts to Luke, suddenly. "Jedi," he says. “Will you come with us? Will you fight?"
"Yes," says Luke, without a second thought. Sometimes the path forward is clouded in the Force; other times, it's like the whole galaxy tips on its longitudinal plane to send him spinning down a certain direction. Even without the Force, Luke would know, in his heart, what to do now. "Yes, I'm coming with you. I'm coming to fight with you."
And then one of the soldiers calls, urgently, "Mandalor," and his boots are ringing across the deck plating. "Mandalor, we've got multiple incoming signals."
Alarm klaxons start howling, and suddenly everyone on the bridge is in motion. Luke hustles over to the bridge viewing platform, alongside Din, Bo Katan, Cara and the Armourer. There's a half dozen heavy cruisers dropping out of hyperspace, already accelerating towards them, and just a little nearer-
-Luke abruptly sags against Cara in relief, before they're even close enough to scan or ID, because he can already feel them, and then the comm alarm blares.
"This is General Antilles of the New Republic First Fleet." Wedge's voice crackles across the channel, and Luke laughs. Can't quite bite back the joy of it, because of course it's Wedge who's come. Wedge, who's always had his back, through all their missions together, all the way back to Yavin.
Wedge's voice is cold and tight. "Power down your weapons and engines and prepare to be boarded" he says and Luke starts, because of course, right, there's the ring of Mandalorian ships, and this half-shot-up Imperial prison cruiser, and none of this looks like anything good to Wedge. Luke can see at least two squadrons of X-wings and A-wings boiling out ahead of the cruisers.
Beside him, Din's gone very still, and the emotions from the Mandalorian troops around him are edgy and rising, so Luke does the first thing he can think of- he grabs the commlink from the startled soldier, and opens the channel.
"This is Commander Skywalker," he says, and nevermind that he’s left Rogue Squadron, that it's been years since he's held any official designation in the fleet. Wedge technically outranks him now anyway but Luke somehow doesn't think he's going to mind. "Stand down, General," he says, and across the thousand kilometers of vacuum between them, on the bridge of that big frigate, he actually feels Wedge exhale hard, and unclench his jaw. Luke bites back a laugh, and says "I've got some friends here, and we could use your help."
“Copy that, Boss,” and the sudden warmth in Wedge’s tone shouldn’t be so obvious over the static of the comm. Luke grins.
“You're supposed to be on leave.”
***
So it turns out that the king of Mandalore never takes off his armour, and he became the king of Mandalore entirely by accident .
Luke accepts this with more equanimity than Din probably expects, but nothing in Luke's life has been normal for a very long time.
The two of them are leaning against the bulkhead in an out-of-the-way corner of the bridge. The patched-up prison transport, the Mandalorian ships, and the Republic heavy cruisers are all in hyperspace now. There was a brief and lively difference of opinions as to whether Commander Skywalker would come back to the command ship and get proper medical attention, which Luke shut down because-well. It doesn't seem right to leave yet. Wedge is taking his various insubordinations in stride, though, so it's all right.
The Mandalorians have basically set up camp here on the bridge, like no one wants to be down in the halls or the cells, and frankly Luke doesn't blame them. There's a handful in full armour, still masked up; others are stripping down, checking each piece, cleaning weapons, eating, talking together and occasionally shooting glances in Luke's direction. Everyone's giving them space, though, including Grogu, who's toddling from group to group and collecting bits of blue- and only blue- food from various ration packs.
Well. Din is leaning against the bulkhead. Luke is sitting in a damn comfortable chair. Somebody must have hauled it all the way down from some former bounty hunter's living quarters. He'd sat down and grinned, cocked an eyebrow towards the biobed still floating in the other corner, and Din had said, very dryly, "There was absolutely no chance we were letting you get anywhere out of sight."
Luke's choosing to interpret that in the friendliest way possible.
At any rate, Din's been explaining how the recent shakeup in Mandalorian leadership had occurred. Luke's sure he's going to get debriefed to hell and back on this once Republic Intelligence gets their hands on him, but that seems less important right now than leaning forward, and listening to Din recount his history in a low voice, like it's only for the two of them.
Moff Gideon is dead. Leia, Mon Mothma, and a whole lot of generals are going to be happy to hear that, and also are going to be simultaneously extremely annoyed about the quality of Republic intelligence coming in from the Rim.
"I shot his TIE down," says Din. "It was one of those custom jobs that the important Imps have, and- it should have killed him, but I went to check, I don't know why I did. And then he cut his way out with this-" Din rolls the Darksaber along his palm, "-and I shot him in the head." His fingers move absently, like they're still working the trigger. "He wanted Grogu," and Luke can't fault the finality in Din's tone. And then Din tips his head back, and says, in honest-to-gods irritation , "And then less than a cycle later, Bo Katan and her crew showed up and things got- complicated ."
Luke just laughs, and shakes his head. "Complicated, yeah. Suddenly responsible for an enormous legacy you knew nothing about.” Force, how does this happen. “Doesn't sound familiar at all."
Din makes a faint huff of sound that might be a laugh. "Don't be smart, Jedi," he says. "Bo Katan's still on the fence about spacing you."
Luke grins. "She can hit me with her best shot." He's being cocky, like the kid he hasn't been in years, but this is- well, it's fun. It's fun to sprawl here in a big synthleather chair with the glow of hyperspace around him, showing off for-
-well, for Din.
And then his comm beeps. Luke wants to leave it, but he knows he shouldn't. He opens the channel, and Wedge says, tightly, “Luke, the Princess is already going to have me demoted to flying garbage scows. Could you please just shuttle over now, so Medical can fix your kriffing hand?”
Din says, "The Princess?" Luke jolts, guiltily. Right, he should probably get his hand taken care of.
***
They’re a few hours out from the coordinates of Moff Gideon's base, and Luke has somehow managed to gently bully Din and his Mandalorians, and Wedge and his Republic crew into playing nice.
It's not that hard, in the end. Everyone here wants the same thing.
They're crowded around the comm station on the bridge of the Orso, Wedge's command frigate; Luke is standing shoulder-to-shoulder between Wedge and Din. The captains from the other cruisers are all flickering blue-flame images on the holoprojector. The other Mandalorians are leaving more space between them and Wedge’s command crew than is precisely necessary, but at least everyone's here.
The central computer console is projecting the schematic of Gideon's base that the Mandalorians pulled from the prison transport's database. It's a sprawling complex on a dry rocky plain, nothing for cover for miles around. Standard Imperial build, big walls and a big shield generator. The walls and the corner mounts of the generator are studded with turbolaser posts.
No way to mount a ground assault, Luke thinks, and Wedge sees the same, clearly. "We didn't exactly come equipped for desert warfare," Wedge says. "We try to siege this place, we're looking at a hundred hostages. No winning in that situation."
Din shakes his head. "Can't run the risk to the kids. What else?"
Bo Katan points to the shield generator, and the big turrets mounted at close intervals along the wall. "Anti-aircraft defenses," she says, frowning. "You might get a single run past with your snubfighters, if they were fast, but that generator’s too covered. If the Imps get the blast shield up, nothing we're packing could punch through it."
Din is staring at the projection. The holo reflects across his visor in a series of little falling blue lights. Luke stares at him, and says, "So, those guns won't be calibrated for smaller aerial targets, will they?"
***
"Luke," says Wedge, and he doesn't have to sound so aggravated about it. "When I said you should come back and fly with us, you know this isn't what I meant."
Luke grins under the respirator mask. He's wearing a pair of pilot's goggles to keep the slipstream from blinding him, hanging onto the fuselage of Wedge's X-wing. He's got a quick-release strap buckling him on, but he barely needs it, because he's got a locked-in grip on the metal with his newly-repaired artificial hand.
Besides, he can't fall off, because he wouldn't miss this for the world.
He catches Wedge’s eye through the canopy, gives him a thumbs-up, and Wedge's heavy sigh rumbles over the radio earpiece in his helmet. "Copy that, Rogue Leader," says Wedge, slightly less enthusiastically than Luke would like, but Luke's pretty sure Wedge would still rather be doing this than be stuck on leave.
It feels good, though, hearing Wedge call him that again, just one more time.
Wes Janson, because he can never leave well enough alone, comms in and says, "Hey, how come Luke gets to ride outside with all the legroom when I'm stuck in this cockpit? This is an unfair work environment, I'm reporting you to Personnel Resources."
Tycho Celchu, who's been Wedge's XO long enough to tune literally everything out, says, evenly, "Wes, clam it. Approaching the target in sixty seconds," and that's enough to snap everyone back to attention.
Rogue Squadron- still the best snubfighter squadron in the galaxy, although Luke's admittedly biased- makes a sharp banked turn in tight formation, and then a dozen X-wings are screaming over the Imperial base. They bloom apart as the turrets start to split the sky with laser fire. Luke hangs on as Wedge barrel-rolls with Tycho almost wing-to-wing, the ground and the sky swapping places in a dizzying spin, and then Wes skims the top of the wall close enough to scrape the paint on his belly and says, incredibly brightly for a man dodging cannon fire, " Fuck , I love it when we get to be the distraction for once.”
Hobbie says, “Wes, quit tempting fate. I got our friendlies inbound at 12."
Wedge says, "Force be with you, Luke," almost too quietly for his mike to pick up, and Luke smiles, and cuts his drop strap.
Luke’s got to hand it to Vizsla. That knife he gave him is sharp.
Luke dives, smashes into the tarmac surface inside the complex walls, absorbing the force of it, hard enough that the impact knocks the first group of stormtroopers sprawling. Everyone's yelling, a riot of confusion, a fresh wave of stormtroopers surging out of the main building. Luke throws his goggles, helmet and respirator aside, and sweeps his saber to life. In his wake comes blaster fire, a squad of Mandalorians with jetpacks, each one with a pair of Republic troopers hanging off their shoulders, raining fire down from above. The stormtroopers all scatter for cover, but not fast enough to get away from Luke.
And then Din lands hard, surging back to his feet while he sweeps up the darksaber. Luke vaults, lands behind Din and shoves a pair of stormtroopers back to clear a space for himself. Back-to-back with Din, he grins, and says, "You any good with that thing?"
Din says,"Let's find out."
***
There's a dormitory full of kids.
They come out in singles and small huddles, some being carried by Republic troops and others by Mandalorian soldiers. Cara comes out, looking grim, a kid on each hip and her gun slung across her back. Dozens and dozens of kids, wide-eyed and too quiet. Luke lets all those little Force signatures flow through him and this feels like it could take him out at the knees, so he gets ahead of it. Kneels down in front of one boy, dark skin and huge eyes, and says, "Hey, I'm Luke. What's your name?"
The kid wavers, and Luke feels a faint touch of his Force presence reach out towards him, just a bit. And then he leans into Luke's arms, and mumbles against his chest. "I don't remember it."
"Okay," says Luke. He pours every bit of warmth into the Force around him, and the kid starts to cry. "We'll help you find it."
***
It's hours later, and it's getting dark. They've been shuttling the kids up to the Orso in small groups all day, and the last shuttle's just unfolding its wings for takeoff now.
Luke's been prowling the landing pad. He should be exhausted, but he's not. He's keyed up, in a way that he can't seem to shake off into the Force. He should find his radio, comm up to Wedge again, help him start planning out next steps, and then someone catches his arm.
It's Din. There's dust all over his armour, and his cape looks like he put out a fire with it. Luke's in his space in half a second.
He grabs Din. An instant later, Luke's been spun, shoved back-first against the wall, in a patch of darkness just beyond the floodlights. The metal sheeting wall is hard and cold against his back. Luke grins, and then he surges forward and kisses Din hard, right under the edge of his mask, where the helmet just dips below his jaw. Where he can feel it.
Everything is frozen for just a moment, and then Din makes a broken-off sound and cups Luke's cheek.
And this is such a bad idea, but Luke feels giddy and reckless, and he's only known Din a day, a handful of days, but- he knows Din. If anyone would understand carrying the weight of everything Luke's been carrying for so long, it's going to be the king of Mandalore.
Din's got him against the wall, cold grating at his back and cold beskar armour against his chest, and Luke's burning anyway. Din cups a hand against his cheek, traces one gloved leather thumb against his lip, and Luke doesn't hesitate. Grabs that armoured gauntlet, and he doesn't need the Force to feel the thunder of Din's pulse, as fast as Luke's own. He presses a kiss to Din's gloved palm, and says, breathlessly, "I've wanted to do this since the first fight," and Din shudders against him.
"You can't say things like that to me," he says, and he sounds honestly aggrieved , like he's not the one still holding Luke against the wall, his chest and one big thigh pinning him, but Luke's pretty happy to be exactly where he is right now, so he doesn't complain.
"The armour," says Din, abruptly. "The helmet. I don't- I can't," and he sounds agonized, so Luke leans into him.
"I don't care," says Luke, reckless and honest, "I can still feel you."
***
In the morning, another fleet of New Republic ships drop out of hyperspace, and one of them is the Falcon .
Din’s the one who has to wake him up, but he doesn’t have to tell him that detail. Luke blinks, and smiles up at him, because the warmest presence in the galaxy is here, and getting closer every moment.
Out on the landing tarmac, Leia strides down the Falcon’s ramp while it's still opening. She’s dressed in white fatigues, and honestly, it’s good that she's here because there's definitely some diplomatic work that needs to be done, but first she's hugging him so tight it hurts, and that's much better. Luke hugs her back just as hard.
"Everyone who reviews your intelligence dossiers is getting fired," she whispers in his ear, and Luke makes a mental note to talk to her out of that later.
Han ambles down the ramp a lot more casually, but he hangs on even harder than Leia, and slaps his back, thankfully between the bruises. "Heard you went into space without your pants on," he says, because of course he does, and Luke pulls back far enough to punch him in the arm.
"Hell's maw, kid," says Han. "You've got to get this life and death shit under control."
"Beats a trash compactor," says Luke, and Han just shakes his head. Chewie thumps down the ramp then, his bowcaster slung over shoulder. He ruffles Luke's hair violently with one big paw, and growls something that Luke translates as you hairless fucks should stop encouraging each other.
The Mandalorians are headed out of the compound now, but Leia's got a look in her eye that says she's got something to do before she meets with them. Cara's out front, and when she sees Leia her eyes widen.
"Gunnery Sergeant Cara Dune," says Leia, and Cara literally snaps to attention. Leia nods, purposefully. "In my capacity as commander-in-chief of the New Republic Fleet, as of this date, you're reinstated in rank and I'm authorizing a field promotion. You're the tactical liaison to the Mandalorian government, and you'll be reporting directly to me. My office will be in touch. Congratulations, Commander Dune."
Cara salutes sharply, the look on her face suggesting that her arm is moving entirely outside her control. Leia nods, says "Carry on, Commander," and sweeps away towards the crowd of Mandalorians.
"Skywalker!" Cara hisses. "What the fuck was that?"
It's probably not in line with Jedi dignity to laugh at her quite as hard as Luke wants to. "You know you don't actually have to accept it if you don’t want it," he says, instead.
Cara gives him a look that suggests she knows exactly where the brains ended up in Luke's family, and she says, very precisely, "That is Princess Leia Organa." And that seems to be the end of the discussion, as far as Cara is concerned.
"You deserve it," he says, and he means it. Cara must hear it, because her shoulders slump and she shakes her head. "Sithspit," she says, a little wonderingly. "Let's make sure we get that drink."
***
It's later, on the Falcon, and they've gotten into the Ithorian tritical vodka, which Han keeps in the galley when he thinks Luke might be coming, and the Corellian whiskey that Han hides in the hyperdrive compartment, which he thinks Luke doesn't know about. The kids are in the infirmary on the Orso, and thank the Force Wedge had brought half a medical frigate's worth of staff, and Leia had brought the rest. Luke's been over there most of the day with them. It's not enough, it can't be enough, but it has to be enough until they can get these kids somewhere safe and stable.
He only had to use the Force at the end, to smooth the last of the kids down into sleep. Grogu's down there too, a warm comforting glow even asleep, under the watchful eye of a dozen Mandalorians and blue-coated Republic doctors.
It's been such a long day. Up here on the Falcon, though, there's a pack of ebullient Republic troopers and pilots with every bottle that could be pulled out of a locker on short notice, and a crowd of Mandalorians who're getting raucous. The Mandalorians have cracked a barrel of what smells like chemical accelerant. Luke absolutely wants to try it.
"The princess," says Cara. She's leaning against his shoulder. Well, leaning's a kind word. Listing, might be more accurate. They're sitting side by side with their backs to the bulkhead, legs stretched out in front of them, while half a dozen Mandalorians who're half-shucked out of their armour have lined up to arm-wrestle Chewie. So far, Chewie's winning, but no one looks deterred. "The princess,” Cara says again. “Her and the pirate flying this scrap heap, huh?"
"Yeah," says Luke, and tips his drink in Han's direction, where both Wedge and Vizsla appear to be fleecing Han at sabaac, based on Han's outraged expression and the steadily shrinking pile of credits in front of him. Luke didn't think an expressionless Mandalorian helmet could look smug, but Vizsla’s managing it, and Wedge looks like he might actually be happy to be back on leave. Luke laughs.
Cara sighs. "I could take him," she says, a little wistfully. And then the crowd parts respectfully, or as respectfully as a pack of Mandalorians and Republic troopers on a bender can get, and Cara's smile turns a little sly. "Go shoot your shot, flyboy," she says, and gives him a shove.
Leia's come in with Din, the Armourer and Bo Katan, and she's looking composed, but through the Force, Luke feels her radiating satisfaction. Bo Katan looks like she's never cracked a smile in her life but she's thinking about it now. The Armourer ducks her head, and says something to Din in a low voice.
Luke weaves through the throng towards them. Leia catches him by the shoulder, and he leans in so she can murmur in his ear.
She's smiling, tired but warm, "Having the unified Mandalorians onside is going to stabilize the Outer Rim in more ways than I can even list right now. We could have worked for years and not made it this far." She kisses his cheek. "And you're the one who says you're no good at diplomacy."
"Hey-" Luke starts to say, because that feels like a shot, and then Din's there. "Jedi Skywalker," he says, levelly. "May I talk to you alone?"
There's not many places where anyone can be alone on the Falcon, but the eddy of bodies moves away, back towards the lounge as they walk down the hall. They end up in the doorway of the cockpit. It's empty, autopilot engaged, the streaks of hyperlight cool and bright as they flash past the transparisteel canopy overhead.
"These kids," says Luke, wonderingly. He feels like they’re still close enough to touch, all those warm sleeping minds. "They're all so bright. Grogu, maybe more than any of them."
"You should take the kids," says Din, abruptly. "Grogu too," and Luke's head snaps up, because no, that's not what he meant, not at all, but Din is soldiering on already.
"I can't offer you anything," says Din. "I'm not a good man. I'm the king of a planet that the Empire slagged into sand, and I'm only that because of a mistake."
Luke laughs. It's involuntary, sudden, and he knows he shouldn't, but he can't help it, because absolutely none of that is right. And he's used to sand.
"I'm coming with you," he says, steadily, and slowly moves closer against Din's side. Din doesn't move away. I’ll make you understand, he thinks. With both of them tucked close together under the starlight of the window, it feels like a vow. Luke means it to be one, anyway. He'll go out down the hall and say it again in front of Din's soldiers and all the Republic troopers, if anyone is sober enough to witness it. Tycho and Leia and Bo Katan might be. "I'm coming with you," Luke says again, in case Din didn't get the message, "Leia will make sure the kids are safe for now. First, we're going to liberate Mandalore."
Din doesn't say anything for a long moment. And then he sways against Luke, like he can't keep his balance anymore, and Luke leans back against him, bearing the weight of that armour and everything it represents, because he understands.
Din says, "Where did you even come from," and gods, he sounds like he's going to weep, and Luke says, "Tatooine," before his brain can stop his mouth. Din just laughs, wetly. Then he tips his head, and rests his helmet against Luke's temple.
"We go to Mandalor," Din says, quietly, against his ear. "We win it back from the Empire. I’ll build you a school." He stops, for a moment, and then says, his voice rough. “Luke. I’ll take this helmet off and kiss you. Take you to bed. If you want it.”
The hyperlight's bright overhead, and Luke takes Din's gloved hand and doesn't let go.