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When the dust settles, Obi-Wan is surprised to find himself still standing.
It takes all of him, he thinks, the end of the war. It takes everything he has.
He used to wonder, in a distant, nebulous way, what it would feel like in the aftermath. How his life would return to the routines he held before Geonosis, if the cadence of Temple life would feel strange and unfamiliar to him after so long spent in the trenches. If he would miss the sound of his men behind and around him, the steady stream of words and laughter and presence of others, at all times, surrounding him.
It’s only when the dust settles, when the first grains of sand whip through the arid desert air to sting his eyes, that he realizes that every time he ever allowed himself to think about the end of the war, he’d always assumed that they would win. He had never truly thought they would be defeated. That the Jedi Order, the Temple itself, so strongly entrenched in the galaxy and in Coruscant and in Obi-Wan’s world view, were capable of falling.
He had cautioned others against the same assumptions the moment he heard them. He had warned those closest to him to not look too far into the future, to not plan too much for the war’s end. He had told many people—clones, civilians, holonet reporters, other Jedi—that it was dangerous to think of the war as something they would inevitably win. Nothing was inevitable, especially not victory.
But he realizes now, only now, only as he traverses the desert on the back of a stolen eopie, wearing robes still smelling so strongly of volcanic sulfur that his eyes are stinging with reactionary tears at the stench, that he’d thought. He’d always thought.
He’d never really considered…this.
This aftermath, where he is still standing on shaking legs and everything that he has ever cared for in the world has become ash, has become the dust settling around him.
Everything he has ever known and loved and fought for has slipped through his fingers. When the dust settles, when he looks down at his hands, he expects to find them empty.
Instead, there is a baby in his arms.
And he knows—he knows intimately how much damage these hands are capable of. What hurt these hands can inflict even on those he loves. Loved.
He knows, as the homestead rises up in the fading light of the two suns, that these hands should not cradle this baby. Not the son of the man he has murdered. Not his brother’s son. Not his padawan’s. Not—
He knows the babe is safest here on this farm in the care of this couple. He knows he must leave the child with them, to raise and to love a thousand times better than he is capable of. He has tried before. He has failed once before already.
He knows.
And yet—he can’t. He cannot let him go.
While the Galactic empire rises on one side of the galaxy, the dust settles on the other and Obi-Wan Kenobi looks down at the babe in his hands and realizes that he cannot let him go.
Not another Skywalker.
The first week is miserable.
Luke is a quiet babe, what the crechè master of the Temple would have called a sweet little one if she had been there. If the Temple were still standing. If such things as crechèmasters existed in the barren wastelands of Tatooine.
He rarely cries, Luke does.
His needs are simple—to be fed, to be held, to be changed several times a day. To be kissed gently on the forehead. To be rocked to sleep, to be cradled against Obi-Wan’s chest, pressed to his shirt or skin and allowed to feel the beating of his heart.
They are simple needs, but complex still in a way Obi-Wan never really considered. Did not consider, when he made the decision to turn away from the homestead, when he made the decision to keep Luke with him. To raise him as he could.
Because to be fed, they must have food. Liquid food that babes can ingest. It will be a while still before Luke is able to eat anything solid. To have food that babes can eat, Obi-Wan must have currency to exchange. Wupiupi, or peggats—Republic credits are not accepted here.
And, oh, had that stung to hear, when Bail had cautioned him about his choice to land on Tatooine. “I cannot help you there,” Bail had said, arms a cradle in which the girl, Leia, slept. “Alderaan’s credits carry no worth in the Outer Rim.”
And, oh, how trapped in the past Obi-Wan had felt then, suddenly. So far back, years and years, back to an emergency landing and a youngling wearing the robes of a queen and a Jedi master with his time in the galaxy almost at an end, and a barren wasteland spread out before them all.
I know, I know, Obi-Wan would have screamed if he had not felt like all the air had been knocked from his body. He had felt so suddenly stuck in the past that he thought no words he spoke would be able to reach forward, to reach the other man. I know, I know! Once, we had to ask a boy to race for his freedom because our credits were useless to buy him, to buy the engine we needed, and he did and he won and I chose the planet we crashed on then, did you know that, did you know I chose Tatooine once, does it not make sense to crash there again?
But that was before. That was before he realized he did not have it in him to give Luke Skywalker over to a family. That was when he was still banking on just—just making it to Tatooine, just landing in the sands and letting them bury him here too.
Now there is Luke’s needs to think about, all those simple complex things. He needs food, so they need peggats. He needs clothing to protect his fragile skin from the desert heat and sand, and so they need peggats and a homestead of their own to shelter in. He cannot survive the cold desert nights in a cave with only Obi-Wan for warmth. They need some place to live. A place the wind cannot touch, a place the suns cannot burn and the nights cannot freeze.
And perhaps the hardest, most complex of all: the babe needs to be pressed up against Obi-Wan’s chest to hear the beat of his heart. And for that, it must keep beating.
The first week is miserable, but the second week is worse.
It is impossible to find work, even the slimmest guise of work, with a babe strapped to his chest, but it is just as impossible to leave Luke at the cavern they’ve been using as temporary shelter. He knows enough about younglings to know that they must be constantly watched over. And Obi-Wan cannot provide him with adequate food the way his mother would; he cannot provide him with a home yet, a safe house, a comfortable place to sleep that is not against his own chest. But he can give him this. He can give him his attention.
In many ways, it is exactly what Obi-Wan needs as well. He’d loosely entertained the idea of it, of securing Luke into a section of the cave where he could not hurt himself, swaddling him in blankets and stealing out to Mos Eisley while the boy slept. He could be back before he even noticed he was gone, surely. Surely he would return, work procured, to find the boy just as he left him.
But the idea of finding him not where he left him is too terrible to truly consider ever leaving.
And—the thought is silly, a concern for another universe, a different, alternate reality, but once thought of cannot be banished.
He does not know when the experiences and feelings of Force-sensitive younglings begin to crystalize into actual memories, but he knows it is when they are young. He was brought to the Temple as a babe himself, yet when he thinks hard enough he can still feel his blood brother’s voice reverberating in his ear. Can still feel his mother’s touch along his brow.
It is silly. It is sentimental, and the desert winds and heat of Tatooine take sentiment first. It is frivolous to be concerned over such things when their supplies for food are running dangerously low, when they still sleep on the floor of a cave exposed to the elements, when there is still a gaping maw of a wound in Obi-Wan’s chest that keeps him awake most nights.
He does not want—he cannot—he cannot bring himself to risk Luke growing up with even the faintest of impressions that he has ever been left alone, left behind. Anakin’s son deserves—
But sentimentalities aside, they are running out of food. They need work, Obi-Wan needs work. He has made do so far, securing the babe to his chest and riding into Mos Eisley lifting wares from the markets with the use of the Force and convincing vendors to part with their goods through heavy suggestion, but that is not sustainable. That is not how one builds a life, and two days into the second week on Tatooine the realization settles into Obi-Wan’s bones. That that is what he must do now, despite how impossible it seems.
He must build a life and then, even more impossibly, he must live it.
He takes the babe to the Lars homestead. A part of him screams and claws at his chest in protest, insists that this is a failure on his part, insists that he should never have tried, that of course he was not going to be able to care for Luke the same way he had not been able to care for his father.
But if the desert winds inevitably strip one of their sentimentality, they strip Obi-Wan of his pride first.
He needs—help. He needs just one week, two at the most. To find a homestead of his own, to secure some type of work. He cannot do this with the youngling and he cannot leave the youngling by himself, so he needs someone else there to hold Luke, to mind him when Obi-Wan cannot.
Just for a week. Two at most. Just for as long as it takes to sift through the ashes of his old life and pull out what can be saved and repurposed. Just for as long as it takes to fashion himself into a caregiver for the babe. A week. Two at most.
Owen and Beru Lars hear him out at least. Beru’s face is pinched in sympathy, concern. Owen’s face is pinched.
He doesn’t say anything, but Obi-Wan can hear the words anyway. What did you think would happen when you came here with no peggats, no supplies?
Obi-Wan hadn’t been thinking. Obi-Wan had been acting on instinct, a wounded animal limping back to the last place it went before everything started to hurt. Obi-Wan had tried to think logically about the boy, about his future, about his needs. But when Yoda had suggested Tatooine and Obi-Wan agreed, it was not an agreement based on logic.
A part of Anakin Skywalker still lived on Tatooine, would always belong to these dunes. A version of Anakin Skywalker was here, one that Obi-Wan had never met. He had thought, wildly, dimly, that perhaps he could find the ghost of him now that the real him was dead. Was gone.
“Just for a week,” Obi-Wan says. “Two at the most.”
“He’s no blood of mine,” Owen says. His expression is pinched. His arms are crossed. He’d been suspicious at the door when he’d let Obi-Wan inside. Obi-Wan does not think that the Larses have bought into the Imperial propaganda, the stories of Jedis turning traitor and seeking to overthrow the Republic—or perhaps they have. Or perhaps so far out into the Outer Rim, Owen Lars does not care about the Jedi at all, traitor or betrayed.
Luke stirs in Obi-Wan’s arms. He had realized minutes into sitting down that he should have handed the baby over to Beru or Owen, show them how sweet of a child Luke is, convince them by having Luke do it. He is such a sweet babe.
But when the moment had come, Obi-Wan had hesitated. He had not been able to move the child off his chest. He was asleep then, and he’d looked so peaceful, and there’d been a gnawing fear in Obi-Wan’s heart that if he let him go he’d never get him back.
It’s almost shameful how quickly Obi-Wan has grown attached to this baby after a lifetime of eschewing attachments in all forms—after personally surviving the results of one man’s dangerous, terrible attachment.
It is shameful. It would be ruinous if he did not also feel like holding onto the baby Luke was the only thing holding him together.
“Two weeks at most,” he says again. “Please.” His voice runs out of energy and it takes him three tries to force the next words out of his mouth. To even give breath to the name. “I understand that Anakin was not your brother by blood.”
He means to continue fluidly. It is shameful that he cannot, that he must pause and raise a hand to his mouth, stroke over his mustache and beard as if he is collecting his thoughts and sharpening his argument—not as if he has just found himself in dangerous freefall.
Anakin. Brother. Anakin. It has been so long since he has said the name aloud. It has been two weeks. Not once in the past twelve years has he gone so long without voicing those familiar syllables.
Anakin. Anakin.
He cups the back of Luke’s head with his palm, mostly to ensure that it does not shake. “But Shmi Skywalker was as good as your mother. I understand that as well. It is Shmi’s blood that runs through Luke’s veins.”
Owen’s expression becomes more pinched. Beru reaches out across the table and rests her hand on Obi-Wan’s forearm. He stares at it; he can feel his eyebrows furrowing. No one save for the baby has touched him in two and a half weeks. The weight of her hand on his arm is almost too heavy to bear.
“Of course we will take him, Obi-Wan,” she says. Something must flash across his face, something naked and panicked and raw, because she adds quickly, “for a week. Two at the most.”
“You’ll need work,” Owen says gruffly, as if this is new information. “No one in Mos Eisley’s going to care if you don’t have the right papers, but you’ll need a different name. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s got a bounty on his head, and people are going to care about that.”
“Ben,” Obi-Wan says. “Call me Ben.”
Owen’s mouth twists open, but he closes it without a word.
“There are empty homesteads along the Lazimol cliffs,” Beru says. “The sand people have made it dangerous to live there, so settlers have moved closer to the city-hub. But you are….”
She trails off. She does not have to finish. After all, Obi-Wan understands what they have understood. He is a dangerous man, even with a baby in his arms. Even as whittled down and warped as he is. A month ago, he was a General of the Galactic army.
“That may suit my needs nicely,” Obi-Wan says to spare them all from hearing that sentence finished. “Thank you.”
“Bad land for moisture farming,” Owen says. “But it could be good for livestock.”
Obi-Wan purses his lips. Livestock is expensive. The eopie he’d taken has been difficult enough to feed. But he cannot deny that the idea of self-sufficiency that tending to livestock promises is attractive. “I believe I will find whatever work I can,” he says. “And then, eventually, expand into more..sustainable means of survival.”
Owen’s mouth twists once more before he smooths his face into stoicism. He nods. Obi-Wan nods. The table is quiet, suspended as if they are waiting for something.
Then Obi-Wan realizes what they are waiting for. They are waiting for him to give them Luke. He has asked and they have agreed and now he must unwind the sling he has tied around his neck to support the babe. He must carefully separate Luke’s hand from his finger. He must let him go.
Luke blinks awake the moment he leaves Obi-Wan’s arms. Beru holds him like she is comfortable with the weight of him, like she has experience with these sorts of things. She holds him like she is a natural. It looks natural, the image of the woman and the baby. It would look perfectly picturesque, if Luke’s face wasn’t scrunched up in worried confusion quickly morphing into alarm.
He is two weeks old. No one has ever held him save for Obi-Wan. Not even his mother.
Obi-Wan leaves quickly, but not so quickly that he avoids hearing the pang of Luke’s wail splitting the air in two.
One week. Two at the very most.
The settlements Beru mentioned are not much at all. They’re the ghosts of settlements before they are proper homesteads, but Obi-Wan has worked with less than good bones in the past. The third one that Obi-Wan finds only halfway up the craggy rock has three walls, a roof that is only slightly caved in. It is one main room and a nook that could be a place for food, could be a place for his bed.
It is not much at all, but it is better than he has had in weeks, and he at least can use the Force to clear the room of debris, sand, and dust. In ten years, perhaps the place will be too small for both him and a youngling, but that is not the problem he set out to solve today.
Today, he needed a roof. He needed at least three walls. And so the victory is monumental.
It hardly takes any time at all to fill the place with his things, of which there are truthfully not many in the first place. He’d never been one to place a great deal of meaning in the things he owned, but he’d also always owned things. His quarters at the Temple had held trinkets and gifts spanning the galaxy and his time in it. A teapot Qui-Gon had purchased with him in mind. An old, obstinate plant a young Anakin had thrust into his hands once. And things he’d picked up himself over the years. A soft rug with a beautiful spiral pattern from Colsteph, a Mid-rim planet he’d spent two months on in his adolescence. A set of dishes he used for self-decided special occasions, the gilded edges chipped on a few of them from over-eager padawan hands. A meditation mat he’d had since he was a youngling.
All were now things he’d owned that he’d never see again. All he owned now were the things he’d managed to steal off first the senator’s ship and then off the stalls of the merchants in the Mos Eisley markets: a large stock of food for Luke, formula packs that would last him the next few months. A more rationed stock of food for himself. A pallet for sleeping, blankets as well. Water canteens that he was quick to place in the ground, safely out of sight and to keep them cool.
A meditation mat that Bail had found on the senator’s ship, that he had given to Obi-Wan as if it were a kindness. As if it were a normal thing for Padmé Amidala to possess. As if it did not still have threads of Anakin Skywalker’s Force signature sticking to it.
Two lightsabers, tucked inside a wooden box. One stolen.
It is late afternoon when Obi-Wan has finished the task of taking the remnants of his life and spreading them carefully over the new homestead. It is too late to go into Mos Eisley, not if he wants to make it back by nightfall, and he does. If Beru is right and this area is dangerous, then Obi-Wan needs to stay and protect it. He did not need to have fought a war to know that.
Night falls slowly. Time inches forward at an agonizing pace. Hours ago, out of habit perhaps, Obi-Wan left the pallet to sit instead on the meditation mat. Though his legs fold into the standard pose, though his eyes close, and though his breathing slows, he cannot meditate, as if there is a duracrete wall between himself and the living Force. Thoughts and emotions roar through his mind, battle each other for his immediate attention—pain, sorrow, grief, fury, devastation, confusion, guilt, remorse, pain and grief, and pain and grief and pain and love and blame and the Force takes none of it.
When there is a rustle outside, the low murmurs of footsteps growing closer, of invaders breaching the wall, Obi-Wan stands with something akin to relief. Defending his home—fighting for it—this is something he knows how to do.
It is only when he returns to the mat, warning stalwartly given to the sand people in the form of severed limbs and cracked ribs, that he realizes in his hurry and in his absent-mindedness, he’d taken the wrong lightsaber from the box. It had sung so sweetly in his hands that he had not even noticed until he returns to see the hilt of his own, untouched.
The sobs start then, first as a whimper and then as a scream.
It is something of a miracle, that they did not come sooner—that they waited for so long.
Just one night, he thinks. I will let myself mourn for just one night.
Two at the very most.
But there is so much he has lost and the loss is so fresh that when Obi-Wan finally allows himself to gently prod at the wound, the responding pain pulls him up and pulls him under.
There are the bodies of the younglings, strewn through the Temple—caught, it seems in various stages of escaping. Shot through with blaster bolts and left—and left—
There is the large, vast emptiness in the Force, a galaxy gone dark as its stars wink out of existence.
There is Anakin, age twelve, sitting at his bedside in the Halls of Healing, angry and afraid in turn, scowling and crying and telling Obi-Wan that if he’d been allowed to go with him then this never would have happened.
There is the smell of molten rock and sulfur and yellow eyes and singed robes and there are the bodies of the Jedi in the Temple, cut through with a lightsaber—-
There is Anakin, so tall that Obi-Wan must look up at him, Anakin saying that he should go with him to face Grievous, that Obi-Wan should not go alone, Anakin telling him none of this would have happened if he’d just taken Anakin with him, if he hadn’t insisted on going alone—
There is Padmé’s face, lined with pain and tragedy and wet with tears, crying out and splitting in two and Obi-Wan can feel her dying, he can feel her life force slipping away and the only thing he feels in response is jealousy that she is allowed to die for the crime of loving Anakin too much and he, Obi-Wan, must keep on living—
There is the face of a youngling who asks Obi-Wan to train him in Soresu, just the basic forms, but Obi-Wan does not have time, Obi-Wan never has time, Obi-Wan says perhaps when I return from Utapau and then Commander Cody is at his arm, informing him the ship is ready for launch and then Commander Cody is shooting at him and then the youngling is dead and Obi-Wan could have saved him perhaps but he didn’t have time and he didn’t know that he didn't have time—
There is Anakin, who screams and cries in agony and there is Obi-Wan who tells him that he loved him and there is Anakin who calls him a liar, as if he didn’t know as if he didn’t understand how much Obi-Wan has—Obi-Wan always has, and did Anakin really not know, how could Anakin not—
There are the twins, then there is the babe. The boy. Luke.
In his mind, in the Force, in his agony, Obi-Wan grabs onto the image of Luke. Luke. He has not yet lost Luke. Luke. It is the only thing he still has—of the Jedi. Of Anakin.
It takes him two days to emerge from the homestead, chest aching and eyes red. It takes him four to realize there is no work for him in Mos Eisley. He is allowed to work once at one of the shadier, busier cantinas, making a decent amount of peggats, but he cannot keep Luke beneath the counter nor can he strap him to his chest as he breaks up fights in the corners and makes drinks for bored, dangerous travelers. No, this is no environment for a babe.
He has always had a head for mechanics, despite how Anakin liked to tease him, but no local business trusts him enough to allow him to even take a look at their broken machinery let alone take it with him into the desert with only the promise that he’ll return it fixed.
He gets temporary work as a meat scavenger, slicing chunks of decaying flesh from a recently deceased desert creature, but he—the knives they have are not sharp enough to cut through the hardy scales to get at the meat so they are instructed to use a torch first and the smell of burning flesh is too—he cannot—
He can’t.
Not to mention that working in the hot desert sun is no place for a babe.
With the sparse money he does earn, he replenishes their supplies of water and food and takes the lot back to the homestead. After that first night, he has not encountered any more intruders upon the Lazimol cliffs, but he takes care to store the precious commodities out of sight, deep in the ground to keep them cool and hide them at the same time.
And then, even though it has barely been a week, even though he has not been able to find work, he climbs astride the eopie and turns it back in the direction of the Lars homestead.
It is a toss-up between who looks most relieved to see him: Beru, Owen, or Luke. The babe’s face is red and scrunched up, voice a constant high-pitched whine til the very moment that Beru unlatches the babe from the shawl around her neck and passes him into Obi-Wan’s arms.
Instinctively, Obi-Wan feels his Force signature curl around the babe’s, soothing it and comforting it until he feels in clumsy response, Luke’s own signature latching onto his.
It is not done, to soothe a youngling with one’s Force signature, as it speaks of serious, dangerous attachment.
But perhaps it is done now.
Obi-Wan is hungry enough, thirsty enough, that when Beru asks that he stay for supper, he does not argue.
It is Owen who asks him stiltedly if he is good with mechanics. “Pay’d be bantha shit,” Owen says, eyes focused on the plate of stew in front of him. “Barely more than enough for whatever the kid needs. But. Beru can keep an eye on him, watch him while you’re out on the land with me. I need a second pair of hands.”
Obi-Wan’s eyes cut over to Owen’s wife. He knows she is his second pair of hands, that one does not make a living on Tatooine if one is not good at everything Tatooine demands you to be.
But he is desperate. And he is too smart or too tired these days to spurn kindness by questioning it.
“I know machines,” he says. Promises. He does. Perhaps not as well as Anakin does—did. But he knows mechanics. Then, “I—thank you.”
Owen grunts. It’s a noise that Obi-Wan has heard from his old padawan a thousand times, when offered too earnest of a compliment, when surprised by the force of someone’s unexpected gratitude. The sound makes Obi-Wan’s lips twitch up for a moment before he remembers where and when he is.
His eyes fall to Luke, asleep in the sling around Obi-Wan’s neck. The babe looks tired, worn out, but he’d fallen asleep easily enough when Obi-Wan had taken him back from Beru. In the week since he last saw him, he looks much the same, though he’d seemed to stare at Obi-Wan differently, as if he knew who he was. As if he recognized him.
The babe’s eyes are still blue. Obi-Wan had heard of eye color changing in newborns, but it wasn’t until he saw Luke once more that he realized how afraid he’d been that the baby would be returned to his arms and his eyes would have shifted colors. That in the week he’d been gone, he would have lost another part of Anakin Skywalker.
After the food is eaten, the water carefully savored and details of Obi-Wan’s work on the Lars’ moisture farm is beaten out from idea to employment, he takes his leave. He will arrive back here early the next morning to begin work. He will bring food for the babe, clothes for him to change into, water for him to drink. In return, Beru will hold him, move about the place with him tied to her chest or at least left within view. Every night, Obi-Wan will take the babe and travel back to their homestead. And every morning, he will return. Eventually, when Luke is old enough, he will help out around the farm as well, but the brunt of the work will always fall on Obi-Wan's shoulders. Perhaps eventually, when Luke is old enough, when he is in school and does not need to be kept within arm’s reach, when the Empire stops looking so intently for Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan will take up different work, closer to Mos Eisley. Raising livestock, or tending bar, or cutting meat off fresh corpses. But that is eventually. That is so far away, years and years, that it is not even worth thinking about.
Outside in the fading light of the binary sunset, Beru reaches out and rests her hand on his forearm. “I am no wizard,” she tells him lightly. Gently. “I can't feel magic around me. But I know pain when I see it, Ben.”
Obi-Wan says nothing in reply, focused as he is on climbing atop the eopie without jostling Luke from his slumber.
“You should talk to someone,” Beru says. “It will only fester if you leave it the way it is.”
“I would not dare to inflict my story on anyone kind enough to listen,” Obi-Wan finally says, and he can feel his mouth curl up into a smile he does not feel. “I cannot think of a soul who would deserve such a fate.”
Beru’s mouth purses, and her eyes are hard when they catch his in the dying light. Hard but kind. The most effective of weapons. “That boy deserves to grow up with a father who is not drowning in his pain, Ben.”
“I’m not—”
“Or anger, or grief, or whatever you want to call it.” She waves her hand through the air, as if the specifics do not concern her.
“I’m not his father,” Obi-Wan spits out around the heart in his throat. The words are choked and garbled and filled with shards of volcanic glass.
The sympathy in her voice slides into pity between one moment and the next. “Ben,” she says. “You are the closest thing that he will ever have, you have to have realized that by now. He’s never going to know another.”
You made sure of that, she doesn’t say. Perhaps she doesn’t even think to say. Obi-Wan hears the words anyway. Hears the screams of Luke’s father as his flesh burnt in the lava of Mustafar, as Obi-Wan answered with his own screams as if their pain were equal. Split between them the way they’d split everything between them. The way they will, apparently, split the title of father now.
Obi-Wan turns the eopie towards his homestead without so much as a good night.
He cannot imagine saying a single word.
It starts accidentally, the talking. Beru’s words must knock something loose inside of him because his nightmares are louder and more vibrant than ever that night. It is almost as if he is back on the shores of Mustafar, inhaling the smoke and listening to the man he loved more than he ever loved anyone scream. Because of him. Because of the pain he’d caused him—because of—
When he wakes up in a cold sweat, Luke is already wailing in the small box he has fashioned into a holder next to his pallet. Perhaps he has had terrible dreams of his own, or perhaps he is reacting to the sickness and grief clinging to Obi-Wan’s Force signature. Either way, he does not even quiet when Obi-Wan lifts him from his crib and holds him to his chest.
“Hush,” he murmurs into the downy hair as he sits up to lean against the wall behind him. “Hush now, Luke, there is nothing to cry so loudly about.”
Luke’s small hands flash out, bump Obi-Wan on his face and his neck. It’s only when they pull away wet that he realizes that he’s crying too.
“Alright,” he says, as if Luke has shown him his own hypocrisy on purpose. Anakin’s child would, is the truth of it. “Alright,” he says, and he stands, casting around for the cloak he discarded earlier and throwing it over his shoulders one handed. It gets cold in the desert at night, and when he leaves the relative warmth of the homestead, he curls the babe close to his chest and sits down on the ledge just next to the entrance.
“You’ll have to promise me to be careful, you know,” he tells the baby in the softest voice he can manage. “The only place I could find is far off the ground. Hardly safe at all for younglings learning to crawl.”
It truly is not, now that he’s thinking about it. The homestead is protected from the elements by the cliffs and rocks it’s been built into, but a babe could so very easily fall from this very ledge.
“When you want to crawl about, you will tell me,” Obi-Wan decides rather nonsensically. “And then I will carry you down to the sands and you can crawl about all you wish. You will not go alone.”
Luke whimpers, but his cries have grown much softer. When his hand rises up next, it latches into Obi-Wan’s beard and tugs lightly.
“I taught your father how to swim, you know,” Obi-Wan tells him. He does not know where the words have come from, but when he opens his mouth to breathe in the desert night, there they are already on his tongue. “Or, I tried to. I showed him the basics, the theory of it. We spent perhaps one hour in the pool, and I held him up so he could…could practice the kicks, the strokes without having to keep himself afloat. Oh, he was terrible at it.”
Luke makes a gurgling noise and pulls at his beard sharply as if taking offense on behalf of his father. Gently, Obi-Wan shifts him in his arms until he can free his hand and untangle the boy’s fingers from his hair. Luke shifts, irate perhaps, but calms when he realizes he can hold onto Obi-Wan’s thumb instead.
“That night,” Obi-Wan murmurs, looking out across the empty desert sands, “he went back by himself. He was ten years old, but he was so clever, Luke. He circumvented the security around the pools and taught himself. Practiced until he could swim all by himself. Drowning—it never occurred to him that he could—that it would be safer to wait for me….He stunk of water for weeks, and I knew, too, where he went. After that first night, I started following him in secret. Just to watch. To make sure. To keep him safe. He never….I suppose he did not want me to see him struggle. But I did not want to see him hurt either, so he would sneak out and I would follow and then pretend I did not know where he went. I wonder…” he adjusts his hands on the babe, puts him further up his chest so he can stroke over the tender softness of the back of his head, the small amount of hairs he has already grown.
“I wonder if he ever realized I was there,” he says to the baby, to the desert. To the Force. “Perhaps I had my own secrets from him after all.”
So he does not truly mean to start, to open his mouth and allow the stories to flow past his teeth. He just does. It just happens.
His sleep is often disrupted by nightmares, and the Force…no matter how much he begs It to take the emotions away, he can't seem to rid himself of them. His grief and his fury bite at his heels. During the day, he works quietly beside Owen Lars, learning the ways and ropes of moisture farming, allowing the sun to sear him pink and red. At night, he sleeps and he wakes and he holds Luke and he talks.
During the harshness of the day, it is impossible to remember anything but the pain of this life. The aches and tragedies of it. He tries to focus only on the work in front of him, the intricacies of the machines that harvest moisture from the desert, but his mind inevitably wanders. Away from Tatooine, away from the rise of the Empire, away from the burning brightness of the Tatooine suns. It is hard to be anything but wounded during the day as his mind casts itself back into the tide of the past and slams up against the rocky crags of what happened and what had become of the Jedi. Of the Republic. Of Anakin Skywalker.
But at night, blinking the remnants of sleep from his eyes and holding Anakin’s son to his chest, it is easier to recall softness. To push past those tragedies, those horrors, those betrayals, the corpses, the broken promises, the smell of sulfur, the bitter heat stinging his cheeks, the tears in his eyes. It is easier to remember that there was a time he had been so sure they would win the war, that the galaxy was filled with such goodness that it was impossible to imagine that it could fail.
“Your father stole a shiny’s armor once, you know,” he tells Luke, leaning back against the outside of the homestead. The suns set long ago, leaving the sky dark save the glistening of stars. “On a bet. He wanted to see how long it would take the commanding officer to notice, but what he did not know is that I’d told Ahsoka the moment he’d mentioned it to me and she forced all the new recruits to run laps, in their whites til Anakin was the only one who remained. Oh, he was so angry when he found out I told her, but of course I did--how could I have not? I’d done the same thing a month before and he’d pointed me out in front of all my men, stopped right in front of me in formation and asked Cody if he didn’t think I was a little short to be a clone trooper.”
Even now, the memory brings a smile to his face, one that is small and so true that it hurts to wear.
“It was war,” he tells the baby and the desert and the Force. “And it was hell. But we found good things there too. We all…we all had things to fight for. Things we held close, that we thought of on nights in the trenches, nights enduring a siege or recovering from blaster shots. We all had things that we wanted to see again before we died, and—and the way your father smiled, Luke…”
With the force of a thousand suns, that was the way Anakin smiled when Obi-Wan was able to nudge him into it. So light in the Force that it was dazzling. He’d smile and his face would shift and change, years melting off it until he looked his age. Anakin smiled with his eyes and with his teeth, and he’d tilt his head slightly when he did it and every time, it would make Obi-Wan’s breath catch in his throat. Every time, he’d wish he could find the right combination of circumstances and words and experiences that would make his former padawan that happy always.
“That was one of mine,” he admits with all the gravity of a confession that was never meant to be verbalized at all.
The baby and the desert and the Force are silent.
On the day he escorts Beru into Mos Eisley, he wears a dark hood over his head and covers Luke almost completely within his cloak. He is mostly here to carry and protect purchases that Beru makes. In return, he pretends he does not see her pay for infant formula from her own pouch of peggats.
They stop into a cantina on their way back to the speeder for no other reason than that Beru winks at him, says that they’ve finished up early, says that Owen will never know. Despite all the reasons they have to return quickly to the farm, Obi-Wan wants to rest. Luke has been good all day, quiet and sweet, blinking up at Obi-Wan and then the galaxy around him with wide, curious eyes.
“He is growing so fast,” Beru remarks when Obi-Wan takes the cloak off as he sits.
“He will be too heavy for an old man like me to lift one of these days,” Obi-Wan replies, clutching the babe to his chest. It has not yet been a month since the fall of the Empire. Since his birth. And yet, Luke truly is growing quickly. Each day, his eyes focus more intently on Obi-Wan, on what’s around him. Each day, he seems to need more food, seems to want more of everything.
So much like his father that it steals his breath away.
Beru hits his arm, something playful to the motion that he has long forgotten how to properly respond to. Before he can flinch back, already struck, already too late, the cantina’s holo device catches his attention.
The place is loud, a veritable din of noise—a spacer must have just landed in the shipyard. He cannot hear the sound of the broadcast, the words, but he recognizes the image beamed up in the corner of the bar. Chancellor Palpatine. Emperor now. Sidious.
And beside him, a dark hulking beast with a smooth black durasteel mask. Obi-Wan does not recognize it. A droid? But Sidious would never allow a droid to stand to the side of him. It must be an apprentice then. A sith that none of the Jedi had known about. How many things remained a mystery to the Jedi even as they died? How many things were they killed for not knowing?
And then—the camera shifts away from the machine of a man, from the victorious Sith lord. It pans over those standing in the background. Soldiers, all of them.
Soldiers wearing armor colored in white and orange.
Obi-Wan hardly makes it out of the cantina before he is sick in the streets.
"There is so much I will have to teach you, little one,” he tells the crown of Luke’s head that night. He presses his lips against the soft skin once and then twice, as if he can eke out more comfort simply by repeating the same action over and over again. “How to crawl and walk, how to meditate. How to speak. What the word empire means. What it means to a Jedi. How to control your temper because Force knows you’ll have one. I will have to teach you to—to use your gifts, but keep them quiet. You must keep them quiet, Luke love, no one must know. We live in a time where we cannot celebrate that which should be celebrated, and it will hurt me immensely to teach you caution instead of compassion. It may feel like I am stifling you, that I am overbearing, that I am not letting you shine, but I promise, Anakin, I a—”
“He was kind, you know,” Obi-Wan tells the babe, letting his head loll back against the rocks. The stars twinkle back at him, cold and distant. “Oh, he was impulsive, moody. Prone to fits of rage. But when he loved, he loved with everything he had. And he loved so much. He loved the galaxy, though he hated it too I think. He showed it kindness in the same breath he showed its abusers fury unbefitting of a Jedi. Of a man. Oh, but he loved his padawan, and she loved him too.”
His hand falls to his chest, rubbing over the skin above his heart at the thought of Ahsoka. Where was she? She had been on a ship full of clones. Had she met the same fate as other Jedi who had been surrounded by men they considered brothers in arms?
No. Force, it is kinder to believe no.
“He was so good,” Obi-Wan whispers. “He was so good to her, Luke. So patient. He would have—he would have made a good father, I think. If he’d had the chance. To you and your sister both. He’d have left the Order to be with you all. He would have loved you entirely, the way…the way he loved your mother. I would have supported him, if he’d told me. It would have broken my heart in two, I think, but I would have understood. He loved me first, you know.”
What a stupid thing to say, even in the privacy of the night. What a stupid thing to claim, when he will never know for sure. When Anakin met his wife when he was just a youngling himself, when Obi-Wan knows he never forgot about her, grew up keeping tabs he probably thought were subtle on the queen of Naboo.
“Perhaps not,” he allows. “But…but of all the people he loved, I bore the brunt of it all, I think. I think that is fair to say. I saw it all firsthand, for the longest amount of time. We took him from his mother when he was only nine. And he and Padmé were really only together for a handful of years—and half that time, he was gone, fighting a war with me. Ahsoka left too, hers was an apprenticeship that lasted three years. But I stayed. Through it all. I knew him for thirteen years. I knew how he loved, what he would do for his love, how much he’d let it consume him. Thirteen years. I knew him better than anyone, and still, I—how did I—”
In his arms, Luke blinks at him and then splits the night open with his wail.
“I’m sorry, Luke,” Obi-Wan says, tears beading up in his own eyes, hopeless and grieving and knowing full well that he is addressing the wrong Skywalker and also the only one he has left. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”
“There will be a time,” he murmurs one night, smoothing his hand over Luke’s hair. The babe has grown a thick shock of blond hair. His eyes have remained blue. It is the sweetest blessing the Force has given him in months. Years, perhaps. “There will be a time where I will not be able to speak to you about any of this.”
The boy in his arms blinks up at him, mouth open and currently occupied with the tattered edge of a rag doll Obi-Wan had crafted from the ruins of one of his old robes. It had been Anakin’s.
“When you are old enough to respond, to understand, I will not be able to tell you much about any of it at all. Not about the galaxy before the empire, not about the war, the Jedi, my part in it all. Not even about your father. It will be safer for you not to know. You will call me Ben. When you ask me about your mother, I will tell you that she died in childbirth, but that she loved you—so much. Beru thinks it will be easier if you grow up calling me your father, but I—I can’t, Luke love. I cannot bear it.”
Luke screws his face up as if he is contemplating another bout of crying. That is, after all, how they’d both woken up, just a few hours ago.
Obi-Wan croons, softens his tone and his Force signature, gives him all the best parts of himself that still remain untarnished. “Owen thinks I should tell you that he worked on a spice freighter, you know,” he murmurs. “Imagine that. The best Jedi in the entire galaxy, the brightest of us all, reduced to navigating a spice freighter.”
He scoffs and then hesitates for a long moment, contenting himself with running his hand up and down the length of Luke’s back absently as his mind jumps away from him, ahead of his mouth.
“Perhaps in a galaxy far, far away,” he allows finally. “He would…I suppose he would enjoy it. Flying, navigating. Exploring the galaxy. Evading authorities, rigging up death-traps of mech advancements in his ship to make it go faster. Maybe…maybe if I had chosen a different planet when we were crashing. Maybe if we never set foot on Tatooine. If the Jedi never entered Anakin’s life, if I’d never—” he swallows, his throat sticking together from the dryness of the air. “Perhaps he would have died a free man then. A better man, if he’d never met….”
The desert rises up and steals the last word from his breath. It is for the better, he decides.
He looks down at the babe resting on his chest. Luke has fallen asleep again. With the utmost care, Obi-Wan leans down and presses a kiss to his upturned forehead, lifting Luke’s hand from the openings of his robes and holding it loosely between his fingers.
Once, years and years ago, as a different man, as a man who had not yet met the best of himself, he’d held another youngling’s hand on this same desert planet. Just for a brief second, just for a single moment in what would trigger a cascade of them.
And even now, even here as he is, marooned and alone and broken into a thousand sharp shards and scattered amidst the desert sands, he cannot regret it. Not truly.
Not Anakin; not ever.
“Alright, alright,” Biggs says in his most reluctant tone, raising his hands above his shoulders and rolling his eyes. They’re sparkling playfully though, and his mustache twitches with his grin. He drops his hand, raps the table with his knuckles. “Drinks are on me, birthday boy.”
“Aw gee, thanks Biggs!” Luke says with a grin of his own. “It only took an hour and a half of negotiating—”
“Whining,” his friend interrupts, and Deak cackles, swinging an arm over his shoulder before he can shove at Biggs’ retreating form and tugging him down into the cantina’s booth.
“It’s my birthday,” Luke complains, collapsing back into Deak’s grasp. “You’d think I was asking for my own astromech or somethin’.”
“You’re lucky he’s getting you drinks at all,” Camie says, falling into the booth opposite them. “What’d Biggs get you for your birthday, Deak?”
Deak pretends to think about it for a beat. “He punched me in the stomach nineteen times, so I’d stop complaining, Skywalker!” He reaches out to slap Luke across the head. It’s a light tap at most, but it’s Luke’s birthday. It’s his eighteenth birthday.
“How old do you gotta turn to get a little respect around here?” Luke complains, pushing at Deak until he’s free from the other man’s grasp.
Privately, he thinks Biggs’ had better get him at least two drinks. After all, what Luke had gotten him for his birthday was way more fun than nineteen hits to the stomach and it involved way more spit.
“Maybe when you’re nineteen, yeah?” Camie says and she kicks him under the table because all of his friends are sleemos who wouldn’t know how to respect a birthday if it was Jabba the Hutt’s.
“Fuck off,” Luke replies, messing with his hair. He’d spent forever trying to make it lie flat and now it’s completely all over the place, he can feel it.
“Oh whoa now,” Deak says with an exaggerated gasp. “You don’t want Daddy Ben to catch you using that sort of language, do you?”
“Let him curse if he wants ta curse,” Biggs says, materializing back at the table with a luridly green drink in one hand and a dark brown one in the other. “Kid’s all grown up, eighteen and everything. Not much Benny can do now to stop him, huh?”
Luke scowls automatically. “Don’t call him that,” he says, even as he takes the proffered green drink.
“Benny?”
“Daddy?”
“Both,” he snaps, defensive. Too defensive, because it makes Biggs look at him sideways, eyebrow half-cocked.
“Fighting with your pa, Luke?”
“No,” Luke snaps and then clears his throat to try again. “No.”
“Uh huh,” Camie says. “Sure.”
“This about the Imperial Academy, kid?” Biggs asks, and it’s a serious question, Luke knows, because the man turns to look at him with his whole body, putting his elbow on the table and tilting his head. “He still not letting you apply?”
Luke takes a gulp of the drink. It burns as it goes down. Tastes like nothing but alcohol. It’s all he can do not to cough embarrassingly hard.
“Why’s he not letting him apply?” Deak asks, always one to catch the first whiff of intrigue. “Ben’s gotta know our Luke’s destined to fly.”
Luke tucks his hands underneath the table so that his friends don’t see them shaping into fists. He won’t say it, can’t say it, but Biggs is right.
Ben’s been impossible about the Imperial Academy thing, even though all of Luke’s teachers think he’d make a great fit for it. Even though Biggs is applying next year and he’s definitely going to get in, and if Biggs can get in, Luke can definitely get in.
But the thing is, Luke knows a whole bunch of stuff that his friends don’t. Stuff about Ben, about himself. Stuff Ben told him to keep quiet. Ben’s Force sensitive, and the Imperials hunt Force sensitive people, and Ben’s…Luke knows Ben better than anyone else in the whole galaxy. He knows Ben is afraid of the Imperials. He’s afraid of being found out as being Force sensitive. And he’s afraid of Luke’s own Force sensitivity being found out, and Luke understands it, he does.
He loves Ben like he’s his father and he knows him and he knows his fear, and that’s why he’s never told any of his friends about what he can do, and that’s why he’s never told any of them about all the arguments between himself and Ben about the Imperial Academy because they wouldn’t understand. They can’t because they don’t know about how afraid Ben is, and Luke would never tell them.
But that means Luke is the only guy who knows exactly how much of an asset he would be in the Academy. He’d be able to work his way up, hide his powers the way he’s been doing all his life, and then if anyone’s ever sniffing around too close to Tatooine, to his dad, he can direct them the other way. He could protect him for a change, if Ben let him help out, but no one seems to understand it.
When he talks to Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen about it, they always just say to talk to his father and when he tries that, it’s like he’s run smack into a duracrete wall except somehow worse because every time he brings it up, Ben gets this expression in his face like Luke’s hurting him on purpose, and Luke would never.
So it’s all a big mess of something he doesn’t want to think about let alone talk about on his birthday, so he shakes his head and comes up with the very first thing he can think of. “No, it’s about my dad.”
“Yeah, Ben,” Deak says.
“No, idiot, his dad.”
“He’s got two dads?”
“You’re a Imperial-grade moron, Dee,” Camie snaps. “Of course he’s got two dads.”
“What about your dad?” Biggs asks, and he’s still doing that thing he does sometimes where he’s looking all calm and serious and concerned at Luke, like Luke’s some damsel he can sweet-talk into his bed or round the back of the cantina or something.
Which, alright. He can.
“Just wanted to know more about him is all,” Luke lies with a shrug, taking another gulp of his drink. “Cause it’s my birthday and all.”
Out of all the topics in all the galaxy, he sure knows how to pick them, he thinks rather morosely as he sees Biggs look at Camie from over his slumped head.
“Do you mean Ben hasn’t told you about your dad before?” Camie asks, sounding kind. “Like, ever?”
“I mean, I know some things,” Luke says, sitting up straight and defensive with a glare at his friend.
“Like what?” Deak asks. “Cause I gotta tell you, Luke, I was pretty sure he was your dad.”
“That’s cause as the kind lady said, you’re an Imperial-grade moron,” Biggs snaps back at him. “Everyone in Mos Eisley knows Ben’s not Luke’s father.”
“He is too my father,” Luke snarls before he can contain the words.
Biggs is nice enough to only roll his eyes a little. “You’re not making this whole thing easy, kid,” he points out, patting him on the back. “But we get it, alright, he’s your father. He’s your mother, he’s whatever. He raised you, but he ain’t yours by blood.”
Luke scowls and takes another drink. Ben’s basically his by blood, sorta. Blood doesn’t matter that much anyway. Blood’s fucking overrated.
“So what do you know about your actual father, Luke?” Camie asks. “Cause you never talk about him, I sorta thought maybe either you knew it all or Ben is as tight-lipped as he looks.”
“I mean, I know some stuff,” Luke repeats sourly. He taps his fingers around his glass. It feels weird to talk about this. Something in his brain is telling him to shut up, but it’s not like Ben ever actually told him he shouldn’t talk about his birth-father. He doesn’t get why he feels so guilty then, like he’s betraying his dad by saying this stuff at all. “Like, I know I look like him. And he was a flier! A real good one too apparently. Uncle Owen says he was a navigator on a spice freighter, but Ben’s never agreed on that. I think he was a pilot somewhere.”
“Alright,” Biggs says carefully. “What else? Any identifiable traits? A name?”
“Anakin,” Luke says, pronouncing it carefully, the same way he’s heard Ben say it. Ah-nah-kin. All hoity-toity and expensive sounding. He likes it. It’s a fancy name, way fancier than anything Luke’s ever seen. When he was younger, he liked to imagine his birth-father was from some big castle in the Inner core of planets, that he grew up wearing gemstones and eating green stuff and taking baths in big pools of water. He must have, with a name like Ah-nah-kin. And maybe he'd come to Tatooine one day and ask Ben and Luke to come back with him to his planet where everything was green and it rained sometimes.
“Huh,” Deak says. “Anakin.”
“And Ben wouldn’t tell you anything else?” Camie presses, sounding split between intrigued and concerned. “When you asked today?”
“He died, I think,” Luke says, crossing his arms over his chest. “I know it hurts Ben to think about. I get why he doesn’t wanna talk about it. It makes him sad.”
“It’s weird is all,” Camie shakes her head, leaning back on the other side of the booth. “That he won’t tell you anything about the guy who helped create you, when he obviously knew him.”
Luke shrugs and uncrosses his arms to finish off his drink. “You know what, I don’t need to know,” he snaps, even though he was the one who brought it up in the first place. “I know everything about him that I wanna know! He looked like me, he was a pilot, his name was Anakin, and Ben loved him!”
The table is struck suddenly silent.
“You, uh,” Biggs says. “You think your old man Ben loved your dad then?”
The question makes Luke pause. Think. “Yeah,” he finally says. "Yeah, he really loved him."
“He tell you that?” Camie asks, and now she’s definitely just being nosey, looking for the new town story.
“No,” Luke snaps. But then—then he hesitates.
The truth is, everything that Ben’s ever said about his father Luke can probably count on one hand. It’s not something they talk about much, even though Luke knows he probably asked way too many questions the moment he realized Ben wasn’t a normal thing to call a father, that most kids lived closer to Mos Eisley, that most kids have a mother too.
He can feel his eyebrows furrow as he drops his gaze from the girl across from him down to the table. He doesn’t think Ben’s ever told him that he loved Anakin, his father. But there’s something in his brain, just out of reach, that insists that he has. A memory. Something vague and undefined, blurry with no real lines separating fact from fantasy.
A hand, rough and dry, cupped against the back of his head. A voice, light and familiar and yet achingly different than the voice he knows now, murmuring words he can’t quite make out. But there are feelings too. His own, maybe. Safety. Security. Comfort.
But others, ones that can’t be his because they're things he's never felt. A hitch of breath that disrupts the avalanche of words, a spike of something that has to be sadness. Pain so soul-encompassing it hurts just to feel brush against him. Then the voice stops, quiets, and then starts again but different. Love now, mixed in with the pain.
Just an impression. The lightest, slimmest of memories, something more like a dream than anything duracrete. Luke is almost afraid to examine it closer lest it falls to threads in his fingertips. “Yeah,” he says, with a shake of his head. “Yeah, I guess he did. He told me once, I think, but I must have forgotten.”