Chapter Text
“Then I headed down the street,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing;
And it echoed through the canyons
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.
On a Sunday morning sidewalk,
I'm wishing Lord that I was stoned
Cause there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel al—”
A sudden knocking on the glass wakes him with a start, sniffing sharply as he sits up. The pulse of the job shoots through him, a dump of adrenaline, and Din is upright and gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles—instinctive, automatically-on, he cranks the gas and—
“Hey, whoa! The fuck!”
He pauses, collecting himself—a glance out the window, another breath in and held to center his racketing heartbeat. There the early morning sun peeks over the rooftops, there The Palace recording studio waits dormant and empty ahead of him, and there, Fennec glares at him through the driver’s side window of the van. “You all here?” she asks, her gravelly voice muffled through the door.
Din forces himself to relax and smooths his palms down the wheel before scrubbing one hand down his face, while the other cuts the engine and yanks his keys from the ignition. “Yep,” he grates out. He reaches over to kill the radio and shoulders open the door. “You’re early.”
“Gotta put on a fresh face for the new clients,” Fennec says, with her drawn and near-permanent frown anything but fresh, although it isn’t quite Din’s place to point that out. He notices she has two cups of coffee in hand and takes one without asking.
“The duo from Wimberley, right?” he asks as he sips off the top. Fennec narrows her eyes at him.
“That was for Fett, you dick. And yeah, their first LP. Did you look over their tabs?”
Din shrugs, noncommittal. He had noodled through most of it last night, sprawled on the floor of his sitting room with a deep pour of gin and the tabs for several tunes spread out around him as he picked idly along their contours— Gold in the Air, Broken Cowboy, Misery’s Lovesong. They were easy enough to get into his fingers, the normal fare of an upstart duo act from central Texas, so it will be a week of easy money that hopefully gets Din back in the studio’s good graces after the mess he made of his presence on the last record.
Which hadn’t been his fault—well, hadn’t been his fault entirely. One can only suffer so much of Calican, that shithead crooner with a stick up his ass; everyone knew that, and insulting Din's playing on a piece so poorly composed it may as well have been made from jello was a step too far. It was only Fennec’s reluctant insistence that there was no other session guitarist in or outside of Austin who could play like Din that made Fett budge on his resistance to let Din back in his studio for this week's gig.
Don’t lay hands on my fucking clients, he’d said just the other day, not looking up from the careful splicing of tape he was fading together under his thick, tattooed fingers, and Din could still feel the tightness of borrowed time in his chest as he seized the second chance with a nod. But You’re on thin ice, Djarin, Fett reminded him, and Din could only nod again.
Now it’s nearly halfway into 1973, and Din is determined not to make an ass of himself this year. He’s been on a good run of it too, although the way Fennec is still frowning at him means that perhaps he’d dinged his hot streak by being presumptive about the coffee—but Din is more intent on waking himself up good and well before getting into the studio. He can always hop around the corner to the doughnut shop and grab another cup for Fett before they start in earnest this morning.
“Anyone of note rolling through these days?” Din asks. Fennec snorts.
“Everyone’s trying to be the next Steely Dan, so no, not particularly."
Din makes a sound of commiseration as he draws another sip of coffee. He fucking hates Steely Dan.
Fennec nods her head backward at the studio and jangles her keys, so Din hops from his van to get set. It's a beast made for touring, and although he hasn't been on tour in about two years he still loves it more than the van really deserves. He slides open the side door to bare a sparse interior—more guitars than he should probably be storing in a vehicle, several amplifiers of various sizes, a serpentine pile of cables, and a mattress that he sleeps on a few days a week even with a perfectly comfortable home and a back that's been starting to resist the compulsion for him even when he craves the feeling of being on the road.
Din misses touring, he really does. But the collapsing house of cards that his life has steadily become does not have that for him in its suits any longer, and with that he's made his peace.
Sort of.
Hefting two cases, one electric and one acoustic—both of them well-loved and even more well-looked-after—Din follows Fennec into The Palace through the door she holds open for him into the building's dark, quiet belly.
For all Fett's gruff utility when it comes to the gear he uses, he has one hell of an eye for aesthetics. As Fennec leads the way down the winding hallways through the annals of the studio—small recording booths, whisper rooms, a sound stage, a mixing suite—a familiar excitement wells up between his joints. Fennec flicks on tasteful neon signs lining the walls, swipes up a pair of full ashtrays outside of one studio clearly left from a prior session, and slips into a hulking bank of main power supplies where she takes a moment to cycle and flip on several rooms' worth of gear. Din holds in a yawn, the morning still heavy on the back of his neck.
"How many rooms are they using," he asks, "aren't there only two of them?"
"It's a Saturday," Fennec says from between the power racks, her voice baffled by the rising hum of hardware fans. "We're packed with sessions til closing, gotta warm it all up."
Din shifts the weight of one guitar and then the other, peering down the hall. "Which room are we in?"
"Studio C. Meet you there."
The unlit hall swallows him as Din moves through, back toward the larger studios usually reserved for bands. He wonders what sort of money the label must have to spend so freely on a group as small as a duo, but then again all that concerns him on the books end of things is whether or not he’ll get paid at the end of each day.
The standing lamp by the door of the booth glows a warm yellow when Din toes it on with the floor switch. Silence envelops him as he shoves it to behind him, latching softly. Din sets down each guitar with reverent gentleness and lifts the electric out first to tune it with the unplugged twang whispering out from each string beneath his calluses.
Din has missed this. He’s been a body onstage for a few acts around town in the interim since Fett kicked him out of The Palace, filling both his belly and the insatiable call to make music with the paltry offerings of two-cent acts breezing through town and not staying for longer than their own set in most cases. But the real resonance of it all, the low-humming current of satisfaction in art well-made, never comes from the paycheck. That only comes rare and unbidden, and only ever when Din isn’t looking for it.
Movement in the control room pulls Din’s head as he moves to take up his acoustic, the electric set for now. Fett settles himself into the engineering chair, peering evenly through the glass.
"Howdy," Din says when the red light at the control room window begins blinking—armed, Fett can hear him through the talk-back.
"Howdy yourself," Fett replies, piped into the PA mounted on the opposite wall. He has another coffee in hand, which Din surmises Fennec sacrificed to prevent a grumpy studio boss. "Can you keep from socking someone in the stomach today?"
Din holds in a rise of heat to his face, the memory looming of Calican doubled over in disbelief before he could finish calling Din a sorry excuse for something Din wasn't keen on hearing in full. "Think so," Din replies, and the edge Fett's mouth tips up in the faintest angle of a grin. Din can count on one hand how many times he's seen the master engineer smile in ten years.
"Good. These two are new, should be refreshing."
"No Steely Dan covers," Din says, a warning, as he leans back over his knee and sets to plucking along his strings again. Fett snorts, shaking his head.
"Fucking hate Steely Dan," he growls, and as Din runs a scale his mouth twists into a relieved smirk.
Fennec slips into the studio behind Fett and begins waking up the board, sliding faders up and checking microphones. There’s a pair already set at the center of the room across from Din’s seat on an unplugged amp, and Fennec arrives at the door of the booth before toeing Din’s feet out of the way as she crosses into the space. “Ten minutes,” she says. Din leans over to lift a sheaf of sheets from his case, and Fennec makes a dramatically relieved sound. “Good, I figured fifty-fifty chance you actually brought them with you.”
“You know, getting kicked off the gig list didn’t mean I suddenly forgot how to function,” Din insists tightly. Fennec doesn’t have to know how rusty he really feels, deep underneath it all.
“Didn’t say it was sudden,” Fennec says as she adjusts the height of the second microphone down a touch. Din rolls his eyes.
Running the tunes through a few times, loose and soft with inward, ghostlike plucks as he hears the tunes coming to life between his ears, Din is quietly impressed by the songwriting. He would never say it outright, but the tiny twist of jealousy in his guts toward the folks who were born with the ability to beg music up from nothing beyond just playing it will likely persist until the day Din dies. His talent begins and ends with playing what he’s given, but just once he would like to feel the prickling of agency shuddering under his skin the way some of the greats have said it does.
Perhaps, he thinks, this will be a good week. Perhaps the tide is finally shifting.
“Din!”
Din looks up, yanked from his thoughts, and sees Fett leaned over the board to thumb the talk-back. There are two figures behind him, obscured by the reflection of the booth swimming back at him through the low-lit glass—how long have they been in there, getting a warning from Fett about how volatile their guitarist can be without Din even knowing it? The tips of his ears burn, but he nods and unfolds from the amp into a stand. “Be right in.”
As he rounds the corner from the booth to the control room through the narrow, arterial hallway, Din begs down his temper. You’re just jumpy. You’re nervous after being away for a while, you need to relax.
Din has never worn jumpy well. Fett knows how to push his buttons to get a good performance out of him, but those same buttons also route directly to all of Din’s other facets—his patience, his passion, his threshold for bullshit. And if Din hasn’t spent enough time exercising those cold muscles of Dealing With It before today, who’s to say when they might snap or give out? Who’s to say he won’t—
The hurtling charge of Din’s runaround thoughts scream to a halt as he steps into the control room and the new clients turn to greet him at the same time. The first thought that stabs traitorously into the back of his skull is Gorgeous.
Ah, the initial threat of rumination returns to finish itself; who’s to say he won’t make a complete and total ass of himself?
“You must be our guitarist,” the young woman says, her smile broad and pearly, but it isn’t her on whom Din’s attention is snared like a sharp yank to the ankle. The man to her left, just behind her shoulder, all long lines and a pretty mouth and a gaze sharp as blue flint, that’s the one whose hand DIn wants to shake first—her brother? He can’t remember. Oh, goddammit, he’d better be able to remember how to play the guitar after this.
“Hi,” Din croaks, a beat too late to not be awkward, and tears his gaze away from the man and back to the woman. “Yes, Din. Djarin. We—I’ve got electric or acoustic, whichever suits best.”
She takes his hand in a firm shake. She’s wearing green gingham and her dark hair in a low knot, and as Din races to collect himself on the inside he appreciates the gusto with which she seems to be driving the show. “Just acoustic for this one, have to reel them in before we blast their ears out. I’m Leia,” she says, “and this is my brother Luke.”
Din does not let his eyes do the leading and instead takes the hand offered to him—wider palm, warmer too, long fingers, does he play as well? “Alliteration,” Din states, his voice oblong on his tongue. Get it together, you bastard. He clears his throat. “Hi, nice to meet you.”
And it is nice, when Din finally lets himself look up and meet his eyes, eyes so blue they might not be real, Luke, that’s his name, Luke.
Luke.
There is a list that makes up Din’s type of man that unfurls low in his gut, which his mind begins checking with unbridled gusto.
“Luke,” he replies, smiling at Din, another checkmark scraping in deep grooves to the meat of Din’s guts just behind his heart. “We’re so pleased to have you play for us today.”
“How many are we tracking this morning?” Din asks, for no other reason than to force himself to look down at Fennec. He remembers—too late, but better than never—to let go of Luke’s hand.
“Three,” she says as she rifles through her track notes sheets, the clipboard riddled with stickers and doodles and other mementos of bygone sessions. “ Gold in the Air, UFO, and Down by the River.”
Leia nudges Luke with her elbow, pulling an expectant face at him. “Showing off on our first day?”
Luke scowls at her, lovingly, and before he turns to Fett his gaze slides over Din for a fraction of a moment—just a moment—that sticks in Din’s belly like a sweet and heady burr. “Ah,” he says, somewhat bashful, “yeah; we’ll need to track the banjo too.”
“I only play guitar,” Din says quickly, and Luke looks at him with a sunny, half-bewildered grin.
“Oh, no, I’ve got that one.”
Din notices the case over his shoulder as Luke speaks, and wishes fiercely that he could sink into the ground. He jerks his thumb back through the open doorway and ignores the way Fennec narrows her eyes at him steadily from her seat beside Fett before the board. “I’ll see you in there, then.”
He leaves before anyone can say anything snarky. Fett leaves the talk-back switched off, and Din watches the window out of his periphery as he roots around aimlessly—sets and resets his sheets in order, angling his chair to get the ideal pickup on the microphone that will sit before his sound hole. When a bolt of laughter rises, both siblings’ voices mixing with trained richness that weaves a fine sound together even through thick glass, Din’s gut twists. Quit counting, he wills the penknife ticking along behind his heart, just let me do my fucking job in peace.
The booth goes cotton quiet as the two come around to shuffle in and close it behind them. They seem to read each other without needing to say anything as Din pretends not to watch too closely, deciding which microphone goes to each of them and checking their levels with practiced ease. A fraction of Din relaxes at the evidence of neither of them being completely green at this—perhaps this will be easy after all.
“We’ll start with UFO ,” Leia says brightly, earning a thumbs-up from Fennec in the control room.
Luke glances over his shoulder and gives Din a small smile, reflexive and subtle. “How long have you been playing?” he asks. Din doesn’t watch as he winds his strings into the proper tuning: a mode of C, playing plenty around B and F to be the right kind of dreamy.
“Since before I could talk, I think,” he says. Whether or not he meant to make a joke, Luke grins.
“Well, break a leg.”
The light at the window goes steady red as the tape begins rolling. The click track begins, Din lets it lead off for a phrase, and then with a four-count tapped in his toe and under his breath, they’re off.
It’s a mellow tune, with the cadence of an eager heartbeat and a winding melody that Leia leads in alongside the guitar with a tambourine and a high, clear harmony hum. Din melts into the whole of it, the unbridled magic of a first full take through cold—the out-of-body surreality in its transience, the impermanent imperfection that, somehow, can occasionally be truly perfect.
Din is couched so low in the comfort of the opening, the comforting twist-turning of the melody, that half of him not already latched to playing nearly slips apart when Luke begins to sing.
“Shakin’ like a leaf on the desert heat,
His daddy's got a bag that's hard to beat;
Bought me a ticket, got a front row seat.
I'm checkin out the show with a glassy eye.
Looking at the sun dancing through the sky.
Did he come by UFO?”
If he ever let himself dip the wide ladle of his sanity into indulgence, Din would describe the voice as candied. Toffee-rich, slightly smoky, hemmed with a sharp edge of youth and the barest sheen of mischief. Din would wonder what it might taste like across the back of his tongue if he didn’t have a job to do in fastidiously not losing his mind in the middle of a take.
Din plays on, alight. The tune continues to unfurl, and a small piece of him begins to unravel ever so slightly right along with it.
“Lotta tricks were pulled in a book I read.
Only man I know that got up from the dead,
Lotta people living by the words that he said.
I'm checkin’ out the show with a glassy eye.
Looking at the sun dancing through the sky.
Did he come by UFO?...”
The two siblings are perfectly suited to one another, Leia’s laser-focused harmonies sticking to Luke’s leading melody like finely-wrought filigree. As the chords sink familiar and easy into Din’s fingers, he lets himself glance up and watch them go—facing each other on a quarter-turn, leaning in slightly, a comfort in collaboration that Din has only seen before in groups that have been making music together for their whole lives.
Although, he supposes as the song turns itself into its bridge, with the way they both fit the scene so agreeably, God knows how long they’ve been doing this—record label or not.
The tune closes before Din is ready for it to stop, but he guides it thrumming stillness nonetheless; unrehearsed but all intuition, the three of them in the booth hold still until the last partial goes to silence. The recording light blinks off, and the talk-back crackles to life:
“Well done.”
Din’s stomach flips. Fett never gives compliments.
“Here, come listen,” Fennec offers, gesturing them all back into the control room with a wave. Din sets his guitar carefully across his seat and doesn’t realize that Luke has tarried by his side until he turns around. Thank God he manages not to jump.
“That was really something,” he offers, his expression bright.
You’re gorgeous, Din holds back behind his teeth, biting down around the flesh of it with a desperate clenching of his jaw. He clears his throat gently and flexes his fingers out as he gestures for Luke to lead the way ahead of him from the belly of the booth. “Thanks,” he croaks, “you too.”
Well, let it never be said he wants for brevity.
“You’re fantastic!” Leia insists as Din steps out and meets her in the hall. He makes an abashed sound.
“Just doing my job,” he hums, and follows her into the control room with a too-hot feeling on the back of his neck as Luke follows just behind him.
When did his predilection for prodigious blondes start? Din can never remember. There were a few when he was a teenager, and fewer still once he crested adulthood with his fistfuls of bad choices and a chip on his shoulder to show for it. He had only taken a connection with another session musician outside of the studio twice before, and both times it ended in flagrant arguments that left Din blacklisted from at least one dance hall in town. He likes it better that way: a flash in the pan, and then brutally swift severance once the well runs dry and leaves no room for the what-ifs.
Luke leans forward to hold the control room door open for Din from behind him, generous. He gives a little nod for Din to go through first, and his fair hair tosses just a bit. Din’s mouth goes dry.
Perhaps one of these days he should make room for what-ifs.
Fett is leant over the tape machine when they cram back into the control room, and Fennec looks at them all in turn. “Hell of a tune,” she says. Leia beams.
“Luke wrote it,” she says, nudging her brother in the arm with one elbow as he demures his gaze to the floor. “He got the brains, I got the beauty.”
Luke rolls his eyes, and Din looks away just before they can catch his own when he looks down again. He got the everything, Din thinks to himself, and then closes the fist of his shame around his brain in a vise.
“Here,” Fett announces with the playhead set right, “give it a listen.”
The hiss of blank tape comes through the speaker towers at either side of the board, tall as Din’s shoulder and bell-clear in their tone. The mutter of Din’s four-count from off-mic comes in, the tap of his boot on the carpet, and then the warmth of his guitar throbs around them all as the song takes off in toasty, analog impression.
Usually Din hates listening back to a recording of himself, the bald and vulnerable gaffe of it. But now it bleeds through the speakers and buoys him, gentle as a spring breeze but brisk as wintergreen, as the sound of his guitar twines in around Luke’s voice and makes something...new. Something Din might hazard to call charming if he had the stomach for it, but he hasn’t eaten since midday yesterday and stale gin atop this morning’s coffee doesn’t mix well with charming .
Too soon, Din glances to the right and catches Luke’s eye. The singer raises his tidy, tawny brows as if to say, Who knew?
Din tightens his jaw and slides his hands into the pockets of his jeans although he may be liable to reach out and do something foolish.
“I never asked,” Din says in the silence of the track when it ends and leaves them all in thought, his voice surprising himself as the others in the control room turn to look at him, “what do you call yourselves?”
Luke and Leia share a smile. “The Skywalkers,” Luke says, and the backs of his eyes glitter with a mix of pride and pleasure that cracks the tallowed armor around Din’s heart just a little more.
Fuck.
“Another take?” Fett asks, breaking the moment to Din’s quiet relief. “Fennec and I have some thoughts, if you’d like them.”
They share their notes as Luke & Leia listen closely, nodding periodically and chipping in their own two cents to decide on adjustments—less tambourine, Leia will sing the melody along with Din’s introductory guitar instead of harmonizing, a little more backbeat in Luke’s tone. Fennec cues up the tape for their second track, and before Din can follow the siblings out she catches his hand.
“Watch it,” she says, her voice low as she looks up at Din from under a hard brow. Din frowns.
“Watch what? I was perfectly on tempo.”
“Act. Professional,” Fennec clarifies. Din’s gut twists sharply.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says—a lie. Fennec sniffs, not buying it.
“Don’t look at my clients like you’re fit to devour them.”
Din scoffs. “I’m not trying to devour him, I—”
“Djarin,” Fett cuts in, a cooled sort of patience rumbling under his tone, and when Din looks over at him he has one eyebrow raised in challenge. “They’re my clients too.”
Something pulls Din’s attention through the viewing window, and his heart sinks with a fizzing sensation to see that one; Luke has been staring and only averts his eyes when Din looks up, and two; the talk-back light is blinking.
“Ready?” Leia says brightly, marking the sheets on the stand before her with distracted intent and either oblivious to the exchange or willfully shoving past it in the name of time far better spent than debating the merits of Din’s bullshit penchant for untimely distraction.
Din grits his teeth and reaches forward to disengage the talk-back with a hard flick of his thumb. “Told you to watch it,” Fennec hums. Din ignores her with a flaring in his gut.
As he stalks back into the booth, determination takes root deep under his skin. He will bury this fixation like a bitter hatchet, like he always does. Din will be damned if something derails himself from getting his life back in order this time.
I will not fuck this up, he chants to himself as he props his guitar back onto his knee and prepares to take the song from the top. I will not fuck this up. I will not fuck this up.
He can feel Luke’s eyes dancing to and away from him of their own volition. I will not fuck this up.
When they start the song again, the grooving canter of it already familiar, the words are noise and the noise is the music, and the music is so good he almost forgets to hate himself.
—
Songs in this chapter:
Sunday Morning Coming Down - Johnny Cash
UFO - Jesse Woods (Jim Sullivan cover)
Down to the River - Jesse Woods (folk hymn rendition)
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