Chapter Text
Whenever Din needs to drag himself up from the straits of his own bullshit, he goes for long drives in the dark and loses his head for a while. But when he needs to let himself wallow in the thick of it, he goes to Peli’s bar.
Motto’s Mark is a veritable hole in the wall so filled with kitsch that Din has always thought the wall decor may be doing more for the structural integrity of the building than its own support beams. He stumbled in for the first time one night back when he was still running jobs, in the midst of a bender on which he’d been reeling for a day and a half already. Peli had taken one look at Din, served him a raw egg topped with bitters, and given him nothing but water to nurse it away despite his protesting.
When Din returned the following afternoon to settle the tab he suspected he left, Peli had simply told him Just order what you like next time, and don’t go back to whoever let you get so soused.
It’s been his favorite watering hole ever since.
“Din!” Peli greets him with a wave from behind the bar, but her face immediately falls to concern. “Everything okay?”
“No,” Din growls, sitting heavily on one of the many empty stools. It’s a place that hardly gets full before sundown and barely hums besides a few regulars even at peak hours, and that’s exactly the way Din likes it.
Peli watches him for a moment, her hands on her hips, and she sighs when Din doesn’t elaborate. “Well, don’t rush to explain it all at once.”
Din lets out a long sigh and leans forward onto the bar. “Almost had something good,” he hums, “but I fucked it up. Big time.”
Making a wizened sound and reaching immediately for the bottle of Din’s regular, Peli nods as she pours. “Didn’t know you were angling that way again.”
Peli is one of the few people privy to the bellwether polarity of Din’s heart. Thanks to his half-drunken gut-spilling on occasion, Peli knows about the kid and the jobs he used to run. She also knows Din’s last fling with the drummer from out east, Cobb, had crashed and burned in a blaze of glory that almost glued Din to the floor of the bar with how heavily he had drunk to forget it.
Din snorts. “Me neither.”
“What happened? Call him by the wrong name?” Peli angles as she slides the gin, neat, across the counter to him. “Forget an anniversary? Blast past a birthday?”
Taking a slow, deep sip from the glass, Din shakes his head shallowly. “Punched his dad in the jaw,” he says.
Peli squints at him before looking resolute. “Yeah, that would do it.” She nods at his glass. “Next one’s on me.”
—
The rain has picked up into the early stages of a summer storm by the time Din peels himself up from the bartop and trundles home, keeping straight down the road with nothing but sheer will and the miserable press of knowing he’s fucked up yet again stiff between his lungs.
At a red light, watching the windshield wipers swooping back and forth, Din thinks perhaps it’s time to leave town—but he can’t, he has to think about his son and even the very small nucleus of support he has here, and when Din realizes in one great and sluggish rush that he can’t run away from a problem anymore, he thinks perhaps the universe is just way more puzzling than it needs to be.
To drive home its point—fate, consequence, call it what one will—the hand of something greater than himself has deposited Luke on his front stoop by the time Din pulls to a stop in his driveway.
Hissing a low mutter to himself, Din cuts the engine and shoulders open the door before trudging up to the scant cover of the porch. Luke has a jacket slouched over his head in a makeshift poncho, and he looks like a drenched kitten when he draws up to look hard at Din.
“How the hell did you get my address?” Din demands over the pelting of the rain.
“Fennec,” Luke replies, and then he greets Din with a sharp slap to the face.
They’re both silent for a moment as thunder growls low in the distance. Din blinks, raindrops wicking from his lashes, and nurses his check with a flat, curious hand. “I—”
“Why didn’t you stop?” Luke demands. When Din looks back at him, his shoulders are tense and his eyes are bright. Something fierce waits behind that stare, something Din hasn’t seen behind those pupils before but into which he suddenly wants to dig his fingers and explore. “I know you heard me.”
Din swallows hard and considers his options. All of them are shit. He flexes his jaw. “Because I knew you’d be angry, and—”
“Of course I was angry,” Luke spits, “and I still am! Do you know what my fucking father told me the first day we got back and you weren’t there?”
Din steels himself for more hard truths, more poison trickled into the ears. “What?”
“He told us you dropped us yourself.”
Breath catching, Din stares hard at him. He wants to squawk something brash, something disbelieving, but the bitter irony in Luke’s sapphire stare already holds all of it in hand. Din simply stares, bidding him to continue.
“I’m not angry that you came back,” Luke says, “I’m angry that you didn’t do it sooner.”
Din lets the truth wash its cold, unexpected palms over his skin, shaking him in an instant. He narrows his eyes. “I thought you were here to read me the riot act.” Luke shakes his head, flinging raindrops from the lip of his jacket.
“We’re going independent, we dropped the label.”
The world spins briefly, and not just for the gin. “You what?”
“We don’t need to get our foot in the door anymore, one whole leg is already through. Fuck the label. Leia and I know what suits us best,” Luke says, emphatic and...pleading? Before Din can finish reading the moment, he has both clammy hands held in Luke’s and can only concentrate on how impossibly warm his touch is even in the rain. “ You suit us best, Din.”
Din works his jaw. He’s definitely hearing correctly through the fog of sensations spilling into him— You suit us best. When has anyone ever said anything remotely close to that, anything to hint at him ever belonging?
“You sure about that?” he says, the self-sabotage impossible to kick away while he treads the water of his tipsiness in the face of revelation. “Could have been the road talking.”
It’s a possibility he’s started entertaining from underneath the waves of misery the last few days, that he only played so well with the twins because of some unbridlable enchantment of the spirit of touring; that he would never be able to bring that back into the studio. But they had begun in the studio, and it was just as electric on the first day as any day on the road.
Luke reaches up and puts a gentle hand on the cheek he hit on arrival, and Din lets his eyes fall shut as he leans gently into it. “You suit me best,” he whispers over the smattering of the rain. Din’s heart flexes.
“I thought—” Din pauses, collecting himself past the noise of longing buzzing into him through the presence of Luke’s touch again after so many days. He gestures blindly with his bruised right hand. “I figured I’d ruined that with the whole...to-do.”
“Din,” Luke says, and when Din opens his eyes again he sees humor and brilliance and everything he’s missed since splitting away from the hatchback on the road upon their return, “I’ve wanted someone braver than me to do that for years.”
Reaching down to slide the jacket from his head, baring Luke in full to the weak yellow of the porchlight and the soft wash of the rain, Din takes his face in both hands and almost can’t stand to look at him. “I think I’ve been falling in love with you,” he murmurs.
“I think I fell a long time ago,” Luke says through a smile, going up on his toes.
When he finally kisses Din again and makes him stumble a little—just a little, just enough—to trip back against the front door, Luke is at once the beginning and end of everything Din has ever wanted.
“Does it bother you?” Din remembers to ask, coming up for air and balancing Luke’s stare back up to his for as much gravitas as he can summon through the surge of adrenaline. “That I have a kid?”
Luke snorts. “Does it bother you that I play the banjo?”
“How’s that change anything?”
A peal of thunder rips across the sky above them alongside a scoring of lightning, and Din wrestles for his keys as Luke leans in close and smirks against Din’s jaw. “Exactly.”
Din tears the door open and pulls Luke in after him before shutting and locking it against the storm. He helps Luke shed the sodden jacket and shrugs off his own as well, toeing off his boots and wiping at the rainwater on his face.
“Should we—is it okay to leave it there?” Luke asks with a gesture at the pile left on the doormat. Din makes a low sound in his throat.
“Who knows. Come here.”
The freedom of an empty house at their disposal rather than the un-space of a hotel in Vegas or the cramped inside of the van makes Din’s mind sing at its edges with possibility. He crowds Luke against the entryway wall to kiss him again, making the shallow dish of keys and sundries beside the door rattle softly.
“God, I missed you,” Luke gasps against his lips. I thought I would never get to do this again, the back of Din’s mind supplies, and he groans low before redoubling the work of his tongue at the seam of Luke’s mouth.
Luke is putty in his hands, more so than even during the tour. The permanence of them meeting now, the unsaid promise of this happening in Din’s own house, is limitless. Din kisses him until Luke is trembling, and before he can ask whether or not it’s cold from the rain Luke pulls back and rests his head with a soft tunk against the wall.
“I need to be horizontal,” he pants. Din’s fingers tighten at his shoulders and he nods wildly before stepping back and leading Luke down the hall toward the bedroom.
“I have…” Din’s words fail as he gropes out in the half-dark for the reading lamp switch. He looks up at Luke when he finally gets it, waiting at the foot of the bed, and makes a messy gesture with his fingers to indicate the lube he has somewhere in the clutter of his nightstand. Luke chuckles and pulls off his shirt—Din’s mouth goes dry.
“Good.”
Din almost rips the drawer from its slides in his eagerness to find it.
Luke is stepping from his pants when Din has the little tube in hand, and Din’s feet root to the spot with immovable, sharp-toothed need. The last time he’d felt a craving for a body this badly Din had been six years younger and standing front-row at a sweaty, overstuffed concert at the Vulcan Gas Company, in the middle of a good trip and staring hard at a dancing stranger across the crowd.
Caught looking, Din nearly shudders as Luke grins at him. “What? Nothing you haven’t seen before.”
“I know,” he rasps, “But it’s...different now. In a good way.”
And it is different, and good, and all sorts of other things that Din can’t find the reason or space to articulate at the moment. Still in his shorts and socks, Luke crosses to him and kisses him softly as he slides his hands down both of Din’s arms. “I like different,” he murmurs, “in a good way.”
Somehow, past all the wanting, Luke helps him out of his clothes. Din means to guide them to the mattress and get nice and romantic with it, but he stumbles before his knees can hit the covers and lowers them both to the floor instead.
“It—sorry,” he mumbles, burying his face in Luke’s neck to chase the taste of his skin. “Just want to have you.”
An airy laugh lets fly from Luke’s throat, the cords of his neck humming with it. He knits both hands into Din’s hair and drags him up for a kiss again, shifting to lie more comfortably beneath Din’s body. “We can stay here.”
Din loses himself to the swirl of sensation as he braces his toes against the carpet, drags his touch up and over Luke’s skin, slicks his fingers and crosses into the hallowed territory of fucking again after what’s only really a few weeks now but feels like far too long. He drowns in the sensation of it, the needy and prescient craving, and only pauses when he feels his limit threatening while he sits back on his heels with Luke’s legs wrapped around his waist.
“Don’t fucking stop,” Luke begs him, his face twisted with ecstasy and his gaze heat-desperate as he swats uselessly at one of the hands Din has braced on either side of Luke’s ribs.
“I really do love you,” Din says, taking himself by surprise as it rumbles from his chest like a lick of the thunder outside. Luke’s gaze flashes and his body twitches hard around Din, pleased. His petulant hand goes soft, petting him now with one slender thumb rather than cropping Din along.
“Then fuck me the way you want to, daddy,” he murmurs.
Din takes him anew, one hand going up to knit into Luke’s hair to hold him down and fuck him deep. The carpet scrapes his knees but he can’t care—the only sensations that matter are the sound of Luke pleading for it Harder, right there, just like that, tight and willing and pliant. His profile is austere and debauched at once in stark relief against the carpet, his right cheek pressed into it like a grounding circuit as Din looks down and commands him the way he deserves.
“Din,” he gasps, reclaiming the shape of Din’s name in his mouth as something hallowed now instead of the urgent hurt it held at The Palace. Din’s core trembles, heat building in a wave, and he holds his pace.
“Come on,” he growls, and when he wraps a hand around Luke his body arches like a welding arc and he cries out so sweetly Din thinks he might shatter. Din licks his lips, rapt and alive from every corner. “That’s it.”
The only warning he gets is the faint hitching of Luke’s breath and a very sudden suspension of the tension under his skin, and then Luke spills with a sound that could mend the very fabric of reality which it tears in its perfection. Din works him through, lulling him with soft nothing-sounds, letting him spend and gasp and shake with arrival as Din continues fucking into him.
When Din breaks as well, it surges up through him from root to tip to press him flush against Luke and cling to his thighs. He means to say something in the throes of it, something clever or tender, but all is lost to bliss and Din can only bend forward to groan into the sweat-and-rain-tacked hollow of Luke’s shoulder as he comes.
In a panting, sated pile, they catch their breath on the floor. At the back of Din’s mind, he resolves to tidy under the bed as he stares at the clutter there while his mind slowly returns to him in refraction.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Din finally says, dragging his mouth along Luke’s collarbone, “being back on the album.”
Luke grunts as Din shifts up to a half-sit and casts about for a tissue box. “Good. I was hoping you still wanted to. We sound like shit without you.”
Din slides himself carefully out of Luke and helps the both of them clean up, and when he has a handful of tissues and most of his brain back from the distant plains of bliss he stoops to kiss Luke lightly on the forehead. “I don’t think that’s true, but I’ll take your word for it.”
Catching him at the elbow before he can stand and make for the bathroom, Luke fixes Din with a purposeful look. “We’re gonna be something great, you know.”
Din knows. Din has known since the first day they met in the studio. But he smiles with a doubtful angle and cocks his head down at Luke with his hair sprawled in delicate disarray against the carpet. “We’ll see,” he teases.
And see they shall.
—
- 1 month later -
Monday used to be a day for too much coffee and long-suffering feedback from musicians Din had little to no faith in whatsoever. Fetching Grogu from Ahsoka’s first thing in the morning was once the only balm on the start of his long-suffering weeks, but luckily Din’s days have started getting a little brighter at their edges.
“You have the rabbit?” Ahsoka calls down the driveway. Din turns and holds the toy up in the air as evidence.
“Thanks again,” he says before bouncing Grogu lightly. “Say thank you.”
“ Ee-u!” Grogu cries, waving one little hand backward at Ashoka’s stoop as Din carts him toward the van.
Grogu hums a nonsense tune to himself as Din gets him strapped in, kicking his little feet and waving at the front seat with a thousand-watt grin.
“Hey, buddy, you gonna do harmonies today?”
Din turns to smirk at Luke twisting to greet the kid from the passenger’s seat when Grogu giggles. “I think we should let him handle the mix instead,” Din offers. “Think Fennec needs an apprentice?”
Luke laughs, which makes the kid laugh again. Din’s heart threatens to burst. “He’d be biased,” Luke says, regarding Grogu with put-on slyness. “The whole album would be nothing but guitar tracking.”
Din leans up and kisses him, his eyebrows raised in challenge. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
With the kid situated and happy with his rabbit in his lap, Din slings into the driver’s seat and starts the van. Ahsoka gives them one last wave goodbye from the front door, and Din cranks the radio—a split second of recognition dawns before something like victory grips him thick about the spirit.
“I’m stuck in Folsom Prison,” he sings along as he backs up smoothly into the street—he meets Grogu’s beaming face from the back seat and grins at him, happier than he knew he could ever have any right being— “and time keeps draggin’ on!”
“But that train keeps a-rollin’,” Luke joins in on his higher harmony, all the glistering warmth of their Lubbock show sewn into the tenderness in his voice, “on down to San Antone...”
Din rolls down the windows despite the early morning nip in the air and lets it toss through his hair to wake him with the briskness. He and Luke sing along with the radio as the sun hits its steady rise to the east, and as the light paints the world gold it goes ahead and coats Din Djarin’s heart right along with it.