Chapter Text
It happened for the first time on an ordinary Taungsday, during one of their early-morning walks to the lake.
Grogu managed to scrape his tiny palm trying to clamber over an enticing pile of rocks on the side of the path. It was barely more than a red line, but even before Luke could make his own way over to survey the damage, Mando was at his side, antiseptic spray already in hand, muttering, “Hold still, kid.”
Grogu huffed in theatrical annoyance.
“I know. Tragic.”
In the warm, honey-colored sunlight of the Ossus dawn, the Mandalorian cleaned the scratch with an incredible amount of patience, dabbing away the sting before wrapping the tiny claw with fresh gauze that Grogu would undoubtedly pull off within the hour.
It was such a little thing; nothing heroic, nothing dramatic. Just—
Care. Pure and simple, given without hesitation.
He stroked his gloved thumb once across the back of Grogu’s hand, checking the bandage one last time before gently tapping their foreheads together. Grogu leant forward to meet him, butting his head against his father’s in a move that seemed natural as breathing.
As it happened, the rising sun glinted off Mando’s pauldrons and helmet, haloing him in an ethereal glow that reminded Luke of the old spacer pickup lines Han used to feed him about angels on the moons of Iego.
It made something in Luke’s chest flip and begin to hum, not unlike a freshly-tuned speeder engine whose ignition switch had suddenly been turned to on.
A few seconds later, Luke felt a tickle in his throat.
The coughing fit that followed was small, but unexpectedly intense. Which made no sense, because if anything he'd been feeling better lately. Leia would no doubt credit the miracle to the fact that he'd finally started taking his medication on schedule instead of treating doctor's orders as polite suggestions.
She wasn't entirely wrong. Whenever they spoke over the comm, Luke could feel through their bond just how smug she was regarding his improving health, barely restraining herself from crowing, I told you so, only because they both knew the reason why he’d suddenly become so diligent in actually taking care of himself.
He’d finally found a padawan.
In that same vein, neither of them were particularly interested in rehashing the same tired argument over the merits of whether Luke was taking care of himself, quote, for his own sake, unquote, rather than because he was, quote, pathologically disinclined toward ‘showing weakness’ in front of anyone he wasn’t related to, un-kriffing-quote.
Which, wasn’t that just the biggest load of banthacrap this side of the Outer Rim? Just because he wasn’t exactly eager to have his first ever student, let alone his student’s father — who was a Mandalorian bounty hunter by the way, in case anyone forgot — know the exact extent to which being a so-called war hero had made a veritable ruin of his body, did not mean he wasn’t perfectly well-adjusted or at peace with his chronic health issues, thank you very much. And furthermore, any quips Leia had about Luke making himself vulnerable in front of others was especially rich coming from her, quite possibly the worst case of the quacta calling the stifling slimy he had ever heard, and he was best friends with Han Solo for Force’s sake—
“Are you okay?”
Luke jumped.
Narrowly repressing a shriek, he coughed one last time into his hand. It came out wetter than before, Mando’s sudden appearance at his elbow working like a sharp slap between Luke’s shoulder blades.
Drawing his first unobstructed breath of air in what felt like several minutes, but in reality was probably less than thirty seconds, Luke cleared his throat and looked down at his palm.
He blinked.
There, lying in the center of his glove, was a small white flower petal, damp with spit and hardly larger than one of Grogu’s claws.
“Skywalker?” Somehow, Mando’s voice was even closer than before, his modulator practically emitting straight into Luke’s ear.
When Luke turned, he found the Mandalorian's hand hovering only centimeters from Luke's shoulder, as though frozen halfway through reaching for him.
Blaming the warmth of his face on his abrupt coughing episode, Luke discreetly wiped his hand on his trousers.
“I’m fine,” he said, offering the Mandalorian a sheepish grimace. “I, uh, accidentally inhaled a flower petal.”
Mando tilted his visor.
“You… inhaled a flower petal.”
Even on the best of days, the Mandalorian’s vocoder flattened his words to a complete deadpan, and to Luke’s ears, Mando’s current tone was as dry as the Dune Sea.
Luke’s good mood began to wilt.
Good going, Skywalker, he thought, heroically fighting the urge to cringe. Now Mando thinks you’re a mouth-breather.
Great.
Thankfully for his dignity, however, Luke was a pro at rallying. Borrowing shamelessly from the Lando Calrissian Playbook of False Bravado, he pasted on his most disarming grin and waved an insouciant hand, as if physically batting away whatever low opinion Mando might’ve abruptly formed of him.
“Cut me some slack,” he said lightly. “After growing up on Tatooine, I’m not used to airborne plant debris. You should see the orbak pill I have to take during allergy season. Pollen and I do not get along.”
“That’s why I wear a helmet.”
For a beat, Luke merely stared at him, confused. The Mandalorian shrugged.
“Filters,” he clarified.
Again, Luke couldn't tell whether Mando actually intended to sound funny, or whether his vocoder simply spat out every statement with the exact same degree of solemnity.
For the sake of his reputation as Grandmaster of the revived Jedi Order, Luke would’ve liked to claim he didn’t emit an ugly snort. Unfortunately, that would’ve also made him a big fat liar, which probably violated the spirit of his recently re-written Jedi Code more than succumbing to an attack of the nervous giggles and laughing a little too hard at an unintentionally deadpan joke.
Luke had long learned how and when to pick his battles when it came to appropriate behavior around his padawan’s father, and thankfully, Mando didn’t seem offended. In fact, he didn’t seem to have any reaction at all, save for the slightest softening of his shoulders, though even that might’ve merely been wishful thinking on Luke’s part.
Further down the path, Grogu let out a restless trill, whatever discomfort he’d felt over his earlier tumble apparently already completely forgotten. He pointed an eager claw in the direction of the pond, chubby cheeks puffed into a pout that Luke was hard-pressed to classify as anything but positively adorable.
“Patience, Grogu,” he chided, smothering his chuckles in favor of effortlessly slipping into what Ben called his teacher voice. “The frogs might appreciate a few extra moments of sleep before we wake them up to say hello.”
Beside him, Mando sighed, the noise emerging from his vocoder as little more than a tired burst of static.
“At the rate the kid eats them, it’s a wonder there’s even a single frog left on this kriffing planet,” he muttered.
Luke laughed again, only deepening Grogu’s consternation, which then prompted yet another quiet remark from Mando and started the cycle all over again.
Eventually, Grogu finally had enough of their inscrutable adult nonsense and bounded off ahead of them, using the Force to ping-pong his little body off the sturdy bamboo bordering the track and propel himself toward the wetland.
In the scramble to catch up with his padawan before he actually did decimate the local frog population, Luke forgot all about his strange cough and the flower petal that caused it.
Until the next time.
***
Leia once accused him of being in love with the concept of love itself, and Luke had never found a convincing argument otherwise.
Years ago, in a city among the clouds, Luke learned the hard way that being a Jedi demanded far more than the simple ability to commune with the Force. Duty. Compassion. Protection. Restraint. The Jedi Code gave them different names, but to Luke they all pointed toward the same fundamental truth. That love was the most powerful force in the galaxy.
However, just because he believed in the inherent power of love, didn’t mean Luke was naive about it. Though he didn’t agree with it, Luke understood why the Jedi of old instituted doctrine that eschewed romantic and familial attachments. Where love existed, there was also the capacity to suffer — to hurt. To succumb to the pitfalls of obsession and possessiveness. Like the very Force itself, there were two sides to love, and as a Jedi, Luke had to be extremely careful about the choices he made in regards to it. His prosthetic right hand was testament enough to that.
But that’s all it was, wasn’t it? Choices.
Unlike what the old Order might have taught, attachments were not anathema to compassion. If anything, Luke's own life had proved pretty much the opposite. It was the love of his family — of his sister and his friends and now his nephew — that strengthened his resolve to regard the universe as a place that was inherently good despite all the darkness he’d witnessed. Just as his father's love for his son had led him to save Luke from a torturous death at the hands of the Emperor, Luke's own attachments were what led him to continue choosing the light. To continue being a Jedi, like his father before him.
So, yes. Luke could agree that he was probably more than a little in love with the concept of love. Sue him. It would’ve been impossible for him not to be.
Which, of course, made his actual romantic track record all the more ironic. As far as successful relationships went, he was sitting somewhere between zip and nil.
Funnily enough, romance seemed to be the one part of his life where he couldn’t find a way to strike any sort of balance. If there was one thing the old Order had been right about, it was that romance was indeed complicated for any Jedi, let alone one like Luke, who wasn’t exactly anybody’s idea of a perfect partner to begin with.
His running hypothesis for why he couldn’t keep a man was that there was something about him that was fundamentally misaligned, that he possessed some inherent flaw in his makeup that made him harder to understand, harder to stay with, than he was worth — and that was before he’d accrued his garbage scow’s-worth of wartime-related chronic health issues no amount of attempted self-healing with the Force could fully fix.
Luke knew he only had himself to blame. He’d always been something of a loner; the sort of child who grew up playing by himself, and as a result had learned to enjoy keeping his own company, free from the passing judgements of others. Even back on Tatooine, he’d never been the sort of person other people got very easily, a phenomenon that only seemed to intensify as he got older. He found that boyfriends especially tended to ascribe certain roles to him within the bounds of their relationship based on discrete personality traits or behaviors outside of it, only to become confused and disappointed when the reality of being with him failed to fit their established paradigms for romance. After that, for whatever reason, the practical calculus of being in a relationship just never seemed to work out in Luke’s favor.
The worst part about it all was that Luke couldn’t even bring himself to resent exes for leaving. Because he knew, with absolute certainty, the reasons weren’t out of a lack of love or care. He knew it the same way he knew his eyes were blue and his hair was blonde; because what Luke lacked in healing ability, he more than made up for with Force-assisted empathy.
Luke had learned, embarrassingly late in life, that his ability to easily gauge the locations and emotional states of others — which he usually perceived as a sort of low-level background hum beneath the larger metaphysical orchestra of the Force — was an experience almost wholly unique to him, even among other Force sensitives. As someone who had been dumped more times than he cared to count, this peculiar gift spared him a great deal of unnecessary heartbreak, allowing him to begin grieving a relationship before it wheezed its final death rattles.
In fact, both Han and Leia separately had more than once called his demonstrated ability to turn what should have been several incredibly messy breakups downright amicable, as if by magic, nothing short of freakish. Luke never had the courage to tell them he'd technically been cheating the entire time — that in every relationship he’d ever had, including the one between him and Han early on in the war, there came a time when he would sense that the melody of their shared romance had shifted into minor key. That he eventually would hear, with heartbreaking clarity, the soft tones of emotional discord thrumming among the music of his partners’ feelings in the Force that marked the inevitable senescence of their affair.
These early warning signals allowed him plenty of time to prepare for the end. More often than not, he would end up putting the relationship on a sort of gentle hospice, tacitly facilitating the transition of romantic decoupling so that when it did finally pass, the process was mostly painless for both of them. Never once had Luke been blindsided by a breakup, instead facing every hard conversation that ended with the statement, I just think we would be better off as friends, with a sad smile and an understanding, I know.
From a certain point of view, some people might have found this level of emotional triage somewhat manipulative. Luke preferred to think it demonstrated a level of pragmatism that would’ve made Ben Kenobi proud. If the relationship was doomed to fail anyway thanks to that ineffable lack of something on Luke’s part, then why allow the process to be harder and messier than it needed to? Either way, Luke wasn’t left with many regrets, nor did he bother dwelling on what-ifs. It simply wasn’t worth it, as with each attempt at romance he let end, something stronger and more enduring grew in its place.
Han, Wedge, Lando — they weren’t simply his close friends or former lovers. They were his family, as much as Leia, Ben, Chewie, Threepio, and Artoo were. Despite his lack of a romantic partner, it wasn’t as if there was a lack of people Luke loved who also cared for him in return.
Still, that didn’t preclude him from feeling lonely on occasion. He was, after all, merely a mortal man, and a romantic to his very bones. He allowed himself a daydream or two.
But in the end, though, that was all they were. Daydreams. In the real world, Luke had all but given up on the prospect of finding a partner.
For one, he simply didn’t have time to date. And two... at this point, the thought of asking someone to hitch their starship to a man with his long and involved catalogue of myriad chronic health issues felt unbearably selfish.
Being repeatedly subjected to Dark Side electrical torture and living with the aftermath was not something Luke would’ve wished on his worst kriffing enemy. There were very few things he truly resented in the galaxy, but the fact that he couldn't simply meditate away his scarred lungs, his weakened heart, and the occasional bouts of crippling neuropathic pain — not to mention his genetic predisposition to chemical imbalances in his brain or his sithing droid hand — felt like one of the universe's pettier cruelties.
Luke was a luminous being, yes, and his strength was measured by far more than the crude matter of his body. But his body was also a tool, the most important one he possessed, and as a lifelong mechanic of specialized farm equipment, he knew exactly how frustrating it was when the instrument he needed to work on a precision job was broken more than half the time.
The various pills and injections he took in order to manage his injuries were functional stopgaps at best, not cures, and possessed a number of cruel and unusual side effects of their own, not the least of which were chronic bouts of insomnia, cold feet, and an inability to plump up to more than a half-chub no matter how karking horny he was. Once he realized the last symptom was likely permanent so long as he continued to take his medication, that alone was enough for Luke to disqualify himself from the galactic dating pool.
So, Luke did what he'd always done whenever one corner of his life refused to cooperate: He threw himself into work, focusing his energy toward reviving the Order. Somewhere in the midst of drafting his new Code, scouting prospective planets, and eventually laying the foundations for his Temple, he decided that despite having no official doctrinal reason to do so, he would live like the Jedi Masters of old, finding emotional fulfillment in the Force and platonic earthly companionship among the members of the Order.
All he needed then were students.
It had been rough going for a while. Master Yoda may have drilled a deep well of patience into Luke those months he’d spent on Dagobah, but after over a year of fruitless searching, that well had been in serious danger of running dry. However, then the call came out from Tython, and Luke felt in real time the course of his life shift in the profoundest of ways.
He’d found a student.
Or rather, his student had found him.
And what a student he was. Grogu was a delight: Mischievous and playful, but also fiercely and eager to learn. He was so talented, and so full of potential in ways Luke could have only dreamed of being at that physical age. Truly, in another reality, Luke would’ve been perfectly happy spending the rest of his days not only teaching the child everything he knew, but learning from each other as they communed with the Force and built their Temple, simply enjoying their Order of two before it expanded in the future.
However, naturally, the Force, clearly in possession of an infuriating sense of humor, hadn’t seen fit to send Grogu alone.
He had a family, which Luke considered a blessing rather than an obstacle. He would honestly rather go through the Emperor’s torture all over again than force the separation of a child from those who loved them.
It was more so that the family who loved the child happened to be the child’s father.
A father who took a personal interest in his adopted son’s education, and who had decided, once Luke cleared up the misunderstanding that familial attachments were absolutely allowed, that wherever Grogu went, he went as well.
A father who was, if the impossibly brief, entirely accidental glimpse Luke had caught aboard Moff Gideon's cruiser while saying what he'd believed were his final goodbyes to his son was anything to go by, exactly Luke’s type.
Contrary to what some of his friends had to say on the subject, Luke was not a mind reader. He could not parse out a person’s specific thoughts, nor was it particularly easy for him to identify someone’s individual emotions unless he knew them on an especially intimate level. In practice, most beings’ emotions tended to blend into the Force’s ambient rhythm, which Luke had long since learned to tune out, much the same way he did the underlying staticky buzz of a long-distance comm call. Every now and then, someone's emotions would spike loudly enough to catch his attention without meaning to, like overhearing a single shout rise above the chatter of a crowded cantina, but that was very much the exception rather than the rule.
Usually, Luke had to consciously focus on someone to glean anything useful about their emotional state, and even then, the less familiar he was with the cadence of their Force signature, the fuzzier his impressions became. A handful of people he was especially close with, such as Han and Leia, he could hear in the Force with perfect clarity if he ever allowed himself to. Those people, however, were exceedingly rare.
Mando, on the other hand, was an absolute anomaly. A complete blank spot in the Force.
After a bit of research, Luke came to the conclusion it had something to do with the pure beskar armor he wore, which somehow shielded him from Luke’s awareness.
The day they met aboard Moff Gideon’s cruiser, Luke hadn’t even registered Mando’s presence until the moment he removed his helmet. One moment there had been nothing; the next, Mando's Force signature had screamed into existence, slamming Luke over the head like an electrohammer and nearly deafening him with a series of distressed chords that all called out an endless refrain of exhaustionloveterrorloveragelovegrieflovelovelove.
Luke had been left completely speechless that such overwhelming emotional noise could originate from someone who was otherwise so profoundly quiet. Afterward, he’d been so eager to retreat and regain his bearings, he’d nearly forgotten completely to extend the Mandalorian an invitation to follow him and Grogu to Ossus once he found a ship of his own.
When Mando eventually did arrive, just after Luke had successfully fended off an impromptu visit from Ahsoka Tano, he’d gone back to being his eerily silent self, once again existing entirely outside the realm of Luke’s perception. Whenever he closed his eyes, it was as though the Mandalorian simply wasn’t there.
It was, to put it in Han Solo-terms, extremely kriffing spooky.
Luke would be the first to admit that Mando had actually unnerved him at first. Encounters with Ahsoka always left him on the back foot, and being confronted immediately afterward by what at the time had felt like nothing less than a physical manifestation of a void in the Force had only compounded the feeling. He hadn’t realized just how much he used his empathic abilities as a crutch until he met the Mandalorian.
It turns out, he hadn’t realized a lot of things until he met the Mandalorian.
For years, Han and Leia had insisted that Luke trusted far too easily, that he was too eager to see the good in people who didn’t necessarily deserve it. He’d always argued that compassion, being the heart of what it was to be a Jedi, simply came easier to him than it did most beings — which was true, but just not for the reasons he’d initially believed.
Luke had always possessed the uncanny ability to see through lies, though it had less to do with some inherent method of detection than it did the simple fact that he could always get a sense of when someone’s words weren’t quite aligned with what they were feeling. Indeed, Luke knew now that Ben Kenobi had only managed to conceal so much from him because he'd paired emotional discipline with carefully chosen half-truths. Only now, at the tender age of twenty-nine standard years old, did he truly understand how hard it was to take the actions of another on faith alone, without the Force’s quiet reassurance of their sincerity.
Fortunately, Mando gave Luke every reason to place his faith in him.
It hadn't happened all at once. After four months of tentative cohabitation and more than a little meditation on Luke's part, he no longer perceived the Mandalorian as a void. Rather, he felt more like a rock in a stream, its surface worn so smooth by the current that the water slipped around it with hardly a ripple. Not a threat, but a potential safe space, a refuge whenever the current of the Force grew too swift.
After he got over his initial misgivings, Luke found himself actively seeking out the Mandalorian’s company with increasing frequency, if only to borrow some of the peace that surrounded him. The symphony of the Force was beautiful, but it was also loud and constant, and sometimes all Luke yearned for was a few precious moments of silence. In doing so, Luke actually managed to build something of a rapport, and over the course of their increasingly friendly conversations, he’d learned three fundamental facts about the Mandalorian:
The first, and simplest, was that he was kind. Not politely kind or socially kind, but instinctively so — the sort of person who quietly picked up another's burdens before anyone thought to ask. The second was honor; Mando possessed the rare ability to say exactly what he meant and then do exactly what he'd promised.
The third — the third eclipsed the first two entirely: The Mandalorian loved his son with the sort of fierce, unwavering devotion that bent the orbit of everyone around them.
Looking back, he should’ve known it would be the love of a father for his son that would eventually spell his downfall.
Luke Skywalker was, despite what his sister occasionally implied, a grown man. He knew what a crush felt like, unfortunate and inappropriate as it was. He was mature and self aware enough to know his own feelings, and honestly, it would've been stranger if he hadn't developed some measure of psychosexual fascination with the man. It wasn't anything new or particularly out of the ordinary as far as the usual Luke Skywalker banthashavit was concerned.
What was new, however, was that, for the first time in nearly three standard decades, he found himself now in the mortifying position of having no sithing idea how object of his affections felt about him at all. Not even a little bit.
And that, he would eventually come to realize in the worst possible way, was something he was fundamentally unequipped to handle.
Or survive.
***
In a brutal act of cosmic irony, the last semblance of calm before the storm occurred on the final night of a three-day cyclone.
Feeling less like a human being and more like an ambulatory pile of raw nerves and meat, Luke stalked down the darkened corridor of his dwelling. After a hellish day trying to keep it together while the storm raged outside, the gale-force winds and booming thunder threatening to shake the prefabricated house off its shallow foundations, all Luke could focus on was putting one foot in front of the other on the way to the guest ‘fresher, where he kept his spare tub of bacta cream and the rest of his extra medical supplies.
Luke hadn't given much thought to Ossus's climate when he'd chosen it as the site of the new Temple. He hadn’t exactly been spoiled for choice; when he first began his search for a planet that fit all his requirements, he’d been half-convinced that he’d end up with another Dagobah, or worse, someplace similar to Hoth.
Finding Ossus, with its shallow axial tilt and near-perfect distance from the local yellow sun, had felt like nothing short of a miracle, a shot in the arm for Luke’s dwindling supply of personal morale after the war. Only later did he realize he'd been so eager to begin building, he'd overlooked one inconvenient detail about the spot he’d chosen to break ground.
On flimsi, it was perfect. The headquarters of the new Jedi Order was located in Ossus’s mid-latitudes, which experienced an average of 200 local days of sunshine per orbital period and mild temperatures year-round. At the time, that was all Luke thought he’d needed to know, and had all but dismissed the tiny detail that his chosen spot to lay the Temple’s foundations also happened to be smack-dab in the middle of Ossus’s monsoon belt.
He wasn’t an idiot; of course he’d accounted for the obvious practicalities, such as ensuring adequate drainage and drafting a protocol for flood control around the sites of both the permanent Temple and the temporary prefab he planned to live in throughout construction. But he also couldn’t deny he might have taken something of a romantic view of this quirk of the local climate cycle. Which, of course, was classic Luke Skywalker behavior.
Even after nearly a decade away from Tatooine, Luke still had a little bit of trouble wrapping his head around the concept of a guaranteed rainy season. The fact that there were planets like Ossus where water scarcity was considered a state of ecological emergency rather than a mundane aspect of daily life felt like something out of a bonfire tale. During the war, he’d found himself growing increasingly jealous of Leia’s cozy recollections of the summer thunderstorms she’d weathered during her girlhood in Aldera, especially as even by the time of the Empire’s surrender, Luke could count on less than both hands the number of substantial rainstorms he’d experienced firsthand.
So, yeah, kark it. He might’ve actually been a little excited to make some similar memories of his own once he heard about his new home’s weather patterns. Unfortunately, reality had a habit of spectacularly derailing all of Luke’s quietly held hopes and dreams.
Once, right around the time Luke had just turned eleven standard, Uncle Owen took a bad fall off a ladder while adjusting the antenna system on one of the vaporators in the west field and hurt his back so badly he’d had to take an entire week off to rest. Beru had all but begged him to take it easy for longer than that, but with Luke still so young and it being so close to harvest, they simply couldn’t afford it. Owen still ended up making more or less a full recovery, but his body simply hadn’t been the same after that.
Luke distinctly remembered how after the fall, Uncle Owen could always tell when a sandstorm was coming, hours or even days before it actually did, simply because his back would start acting up worse than usual. Back then, they’d treated it as something superstitious, as if it’d been some kind of compensatory sixth sense bestowed upon him by the desert. However, now that Luke knew all about the concept of barometric pressure and the havoc it could wreak on old, chronic injuries, Owen’s ability to accurately predict oncoming windstorms was a whole lot less mysterious.
Force, but he burned whenever monsoon season came around. Sensation in his extremities that was normally akin to easily ignored pins and needles turned into deep, searing pain at night during a storm. It required daily applications of topical bacta cream if he wanted to achieve anything resembling rest, despite the fact that the last time Luke remembered feeling anywhere near this fatigued, he had just cremated his father atop a hastily built pyre after bodily dragging his 120 kilogram corpse off an evil space station.
Ever since his first monsoon cycle on Ossus, when he’d stupidly tried to grit his teeth through four straight standard weeks of storms and only succeeded in making himself utterly miserably for it, Luke made it a habit to be offplanet during the rainy season. He would have done the same this cycle as well, if not for the fact that the Mandalorian had abruptly taken off to deal with an errand before Luke could say anything about it, and all of Luke’s attempts to comm him in the past two weeks for anything more complicated than a simple proof of life had been met with radio silence.
Simply put, Luke was frustrated. Angry, even. Angry at Mando, for picking up and taking off without so much as an explanation or anything more than a cursory goodbye, and at himself for not having the foresight to work out some kind of contingency for Grogu weeks earlier, when he first sensed the subtle shifting of the weather.
It wasn’t that Luke minded Mando leaving Ossus to take care of his own business. He was a guest, not a prisoner, and Luke’s role in caring for Grogu had long since come to resemble coparenting more than a traditional teacher-student dynamic. Luke had no qualms caring for his padawan in the Mandalorian’s absence — that had been more or less his original plan, after all — but he also wasn’t about to abscond with somebody else’s child without their express permission.
The trouble was that, after nearly two uninterrupted weeks of nonstop fatigue, brain fog, phantom nerve zaps, and every other recorded variety of neuropathic misery and then some, Luke’s pride was no longer so fragile that he couldn’t admit he was reaching the limits of his abilities to function like a normal human being, let alone one responsible for a headstrong, exceptionally perceptive toddler.
Just that afternoon, he’d caught Grogu trying to use Force healing on him while Luke attempted a short trance on the couch — something Luke had explicitly forbidden, not only because healing another person still had the potential to exhaust Grogu, but because it was simply unacceptable for a child so young to feel any sort of responsibility for taking care of his Master.
Artoo — the little metal traitor — had been supposed to keep an eye Grogu during Luke’s meditation for precisely that reason, but when Luke reamed him out for slacking off, the droid had the audacity to snark back that perhaps Luke ought to spend more time caring for his own faulty organics before making decisions about how others used theirs. The remark had piqued Luke so badly that he’d sentenced Grogu to an early bedtime sans after-dinner snack and consigned Artoo to a review of his user-behavior protocols while on his charger.
At this point, Luke figured he’d give Mando another rotation or two, and if he still hadn’t heard from him, he’d send him some excuse about an urgent matter on Hosnian Prime, pass along the coordinates for Han and Leia’s apartment — both of whom would happily look after Grogu while Luke booked himself an emergency bacta tank session — and ask for forgiveness later. If the Mandalorian had a problem with it, then it’d be his own damned fault for not checking his farking messages.
Every other step Luke took down the hallway set off another phantom electrical zap near the base of his cervical spine, steadily chipping away at what little remained of his patience. With a thoughtless manipulation of the Force, the refresher door clicked and slid open.
Despair caught up with him the moment he stepped over the threshold. How could he have ever thought he was capable of doing this on his own? A little rain, and suddenly he was useless. Taking care of himself while he was like this was one thing; taking care of Grogu was another. If he could barely manage one student during a storm, what in the galaxy had ever possessed him to think he could cut it as the Grandmaster of anything, let alone the entire kriffing Jedi Order? How many more times would he have to mistake his own banthaheaded stubbornness for strength before he finally realized what a pitiful, broken, reckless, irresponsible, absolutely arrogant—
Fortunately, the next instant found Luke’s mounting spiral of self-pity stuttering to an abrupt halt.
Unfortunately, it was only because he finally noticed the blaster pointed directly between his eyes.
Luke blinked, gaze crossing slightly as he focused on the barrel leveled mere centimeters from his face.
It was hardly the first firearm anyone had leveled at him. In a weird, thoroughly kriffed-up way, the familiarity of it was almost comforting. At the very least, his much-beloved adrenaline response, which these days seemed to be the only part of his physiology that still functioned reliably, cut cleanly through the oppressive brain fog that’d plagued him for days. Suddenly, he felt startlingly awake, as though someone had opened the canopy of his X-wing after a long mission and let fresh planetary air rush in.
For one wild moment, Luke seriously considered asking the gunman to put him out of his misery right then and there, if only so he wouldn’t have to spend another minute feeling quite so terrible. Then the rational part of his brain, the one that sounded a bit too much like Leia for comfort, decided that was probably a little too dramatic, even for him.
“Oh,” he said instead, lifting his gaze until it met the smoked transparisteel of the Mandalorian’s visor. “You’re finally back.”
“Skywalker,” Mando growled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Luke raised a brow. “Wow. Good to see you, too.”
Mando remained frozen, his posture unnaturally rigid as he, confusingly, continued pointing the blaster at Luke’s face. Luke released a sharp exhale through his nose, barely restraining himself from massaging his throbbing temples.
“I needed something,” he explained tersely, not feeling nearly charitable enough at the moment to delve into specifics. “Sorry, I didn’t know that I required your permission to enter my own refresher.” He huffed a short, humorless laugh. “Kriff, I wasn’t even aware you were on-planet.”
Finally, Mando allowed the end of his blaster dip to slightest fraction of a decimeter.
“The light was on,” he stated, then paused. Then he said, quieter, “The lock was engaged.”
And just like that, the fog of Luke’s discomfort and irritation lifted from his awareness, like a beskar-filled camtono to the head, the reality of the situation set in.
Eyes growing to nearly the size of hovercaps, Luke took stock of the scene he’d thoughtlessly walked in on. Medical supplies littered the narrow ceramiplast vanity under the mirror cabinet, and a wet rag lay wadded up in the sink, tinged slightly pink. Not enough to signal anything imminently life-threatening, but it was jarring enough that Luke paled at the sight of it, his increasingly horrorstruck gaze immediately skipping back to Mando.
Which, upon finally fully registering the state of him, caused Luke to slap his hands over his face and eyes, biting his lip against a mortified scream.
The Mandalorian was naked.
Well — not naked-naked. All his important bits, including his face and chest, were covered appropriately, either by his helmet and a set of worn-in undershirt and shorts. But to Luke, who had never once seen the Mandalorian in anything less than full flight suit and armor, the amount of warm, brown skin suddenly on display was nothing less than shocking. Suns, it’d taken Luke a whole week of convincing and nonstop kvetching to even get the Mandalorian to take off his kriffing boots before he came inside, he was so incredibly body-shy.
Oh, this was bad. Worse than bad, actually. It was terrible. Violating.
Force, if Mando hadn’t kept his helmet on, Luke would have just ruined everything. The Mandalorian would’ve had every right to pack up and leave, taking Grogu with him, leaving Luke alone and a failure all because he’d been stupid and lazy enough to use the Force for something as petty as opening door without checking if it’d been kriffing locked—
“Oh, fuck,” Luke moaned, as his knees finally gave out.
Somewhere on the edges of his awareness, Luke registered a curse, followed by the clatter of durasteel against fake ceramic. The sounds dissolved beneath a swell of sour yellow notes in the Force — shockangerfearindignanceworryworryworry — that grew louder the longer he lay on the floor.
"Master Skywalker!"
For one absurd moment, Luke seriously considered the merits of playing dead.
Instead, he mustered up what very little was left of his energy, and rolled over onto his back. He squinted up at the fluorescent glowlamps recessed in the ceiling, dismayed to find them spinning.
“Oh my suns,” Luke slurred, finding no reason now not to give in to his earlier dramatic impulses, “just go ahead and shoot me.”
A shadow in the vague shape of a person suddenly appeared in his line of vision. Something warm landed on his shoulder, gripping lightly. It was broad, warm, and a little rough, as if covered in calluses. It felt almost sinfully good on his tingling, too-tight skin. Belatedly, Luke realized it must’ve been a hand.
“Master Skywalker,” Mando said again, his voice colored with a tinge of urgency. “Are you alright? Did you hit your head?”
“I’m fine,” Luke lied. “Just— Ugh. Help me up?”
With far more care than he deserved, the Mandalorian supported Luke as he maneuvered himself into a sitting position with his back against the door of the shower stall, his touch so gentle it ached. It made Luke realize he couldn't remember the last time another adult had touched him so casually, skin-to-skin and without any sense of urgency. The revelation left him feeling so profoundly lonely he nearly gagged on it.
Once Mando was satisfied Luke wasn’t about to keel over again, he settled himself on the lid of the toilet, just beside the vanity. Hanging on the towel rack mounted on the opposite wall was the Mandalorian’s cape and flight suit, both still damp from the rain. On the floor directly beneath it, his armor was stacked in a neat pile, arranged with utmost care. The sight made Luke swallow against another surge of bile.
Deliberately turning his gaze away, Luke managed to force his vision into good enough focus to take stock of the other man’s condition. To Luke’s relief, he didn’t look nearly so injured as the amount of supplies surrounding the sink might’ve implied. It seemed he’d already mostly patched himself up; he sported a few bacta dressings here and there, mostly in areas that coincided with gaps in his armor. Naturally, those areas sported a collection of scars, both new and old, but Luke had the decency not to let his gaze linger on them.
The only wound left still untreated on Mando’s body was a short gash along the outside of the Mandalorian's left thigh. It looked… strange. The edges were charred instead of cleanly cut, and it bled sluggishly despite its freshness, as if partway cauterized.
If Luke hadn't known better, he'd have sworn it resembled the shallow lightsaber nicks he'd given himself during his earliest months of training. More likely, it came from some sort of fancy vibroknife, one of those new models that came with the option for plasma edges.
Luke’s nose wrinkled sympathetically. “Oof, that looks nasty. Do you need any help with the sutures?”
“It’s fine,” Mando said curtly. “What just happened?”
Luke felt the dismissal like a slap. His immediate reaction was to curl in on himself, feeling strangely out of breath. All at once, he became conscious of his position, suddenly feeling very small and supremely childish with his legs splayed out straight ahead of him on the floor.
Gathering himself, Luke crossed his legs, laboriously maneuvering his body into something that resembled his usual meditation posture. Resting his hands on his knees, he straightened his back and squared his shoulders, lifting his chin so his eyes met the Mandalorian’s visor.
He instantly regretted it.
In trying to appear composed, he’d caught a glimpse of himself in the vanity mirror, belatedly realizing that any effort he made to seem any less pathetic than he actually was would inevitably turn out moot.
Luke was under no illusions he was the most impressive-looking human in the galaxy. Leia had inherited the nexu’s share of good genes in that department, and he’d long worked through any resentment he’d once possessed about that fact. Still, that didn’t mean he didn’t take some measure of pride in his appearance, or that he was somehow above typical human vanity. Perhaps it wasn’t his most Jedi-like trait, but it mattered to him that he presented a certain image of himself to others, one in which he was well-dressed and well-groomed, capable and self-possessed.
Right now, he was none of those things.
He looked… awful. Objectively, horrifically awful. His hair, which he'd recently decided on a whim to grow back to its pre-Dagobah length, was visibly greasy and sticking out in every direction, giving him an uncanny resemblance to a drowned popachick. His complexion had gone completely sallow, his face drawn from exhaustion, and the dark circles beneath his eyes were deep enough to pass for bruises.
And kriff, his scars.
They looked so bad, worse even than usual. He didn’t enjoy looking at them even on a good day, and preferred to keep them covered even in solitude. But ever since the storms had started, the hypersensitivity in his skin had forced him to wear as little fabric as he could tolerate. The threadbare short-sleeved tunic he'd pulled on was probably the oldest thing he owned, dating back to his days before Rogue Squadron, his original Red Squadron call sign still clinging in faded screenprint across the back. His sleep shorts — liberated from Han sometime during the war — hung so loosely from his hips that they barely brushed his skin.
Comfort came at a cost, however. Together, they left far more of his body exposed than usual, putting the angry tangle of his inflamed scars on full display, the branching burns crawling across his skin like particularly ugly tree roots.
He did not look like a Jedi, or a warrior. Stars, he barely even looked like a person, let alone one someone would entrust their kid with.
Then, a strange thought occurred to him.
As much as the sight of himself made Luke want to cry, it also left him with a weird sense of serenity. He realized, suddenly, that Mando’s opinion of him couldn’t sink any lower than it already was, especially not after Luke had made such a complete and total ass of himself.
He’d already hit rock bottom. There was nowhere left to go but up.
Kriff it. Whatever. In for a cred, in for a camtono. It was time to fake it until he made it.
“I owe you an apology, Mandalorian,” Luke started.
Mando cocked his head. “What?”
“Barging in on you was unacceptable, and the flippancy with which a potential violation of your Creed was beyond reprehensible. You had every right to point your blaster at me.”
“Skywalker, that’s not—”
“What I offer you now is not an excuse, but an explanation,” Luke interrupted him, the need to finish his speech before he lost his nerve temporarily winning out over his manners. “As you can probably tell, I’m not feeling my best. I don’t think I’ve slept more than two hours in the past three days, and I won't insult your intelligence by pretending it hasn't affected my judgment. It’s left me… not quite myself.”
Luke took a breath. At Mando’s expectant silence, he continued on.
“Still, had I known that you’d returned, I would have made sure to knock. And even then, I still shouldn’t have used the Force to barge my way in. Beyond what I need to care for Grogu, where you go and when you come back is your business, not mine. You, on the other hand, are entitled to all the privacy you need to feel comfortable here and then some. You aren’t simply a guest here. You’re — you’re Grogu’s father. This is as much your home as his. Though, after the incident tonight, I completely understand if you wanted to make alternate arrangements.”
At that, Mando reared back, as if struck speechless. Luke quelled the hope bubbling in his chest, determined not to read too much into it.
“Don’t get me wrong, having another adult organic around to talk to is nice, but my desire to engage in intelligent conversation with someone other than my astromech takes far less precedence than your sense of peace and safety within your own home. I’m open to any ideas you may have, whether that be the construction of another dwelling for your and Grogu’s use, better locks on the existing doors, or—”
“Master Skywalker,” the Mandalorian interjected again, and this time his tone was clear that he wasn’t going to allow Luke to brush him off this time.
Luke winced. “Yes?”
“Apology accepted.”
This time it was Luke’s turn to say, “What?”
“It’s fine. Clearly, it was an accident. You don’t need to build me another house.” He paused, as if considering something, then added, “Unless you want me to leave, but in that case I can figure something else out.”
Luke furrowed his brow. “Why in the galaxy would I want you to leave?”
The tilt of Mando’s visor turned severe, the sound suddenly emitting from his vocoder strangely reminiscent of a sputter.
“I pulled my gun on you,” he said, as if that explained literally anything.
“So?” Luke asked with a shrug. “It was a pretty reasonable reaction, all things considered.”
Mando just stared at him, inscrutable as ever.
Then he said, “You’re insane.”
Luke laughed, delighted and self-deprecating. “You’re not the first one to think so.”
The atmosphere in the refresher now considerably lightened, Luke took the opportunity to close his eyes, leaning his head back against the plex shower door.
Mando made a noise low in his throat. “Master Skywalker—”
“I think we’re a little past formal titles now,” Luke interjected. “Seems a little silly, seeing as you’ve now threatened to shoot me in the face and all. I only let my friends get away with that.”
“What do your friends call you?”
“Luke. Just Luke,” he said. Cracking open a tired eye, he shot Mando a wan smile. “I’d — I’d like it if you called me that.”
The Mandalorian was silent for a long time.
“Okay, Luke,” he said, quiet as always.
Of course, then Luke’s stupid, scarred heart chose that exact moment to go temporarily arrhythmic, knocking the breath from his lungs.
“Thank you,” he murmured, unable to keep the pleased smile from curling at the corners of his mouth despite his sudden struggle to breathe.
Fortunately, Mando didn’t seem to notice, his attention evidently drifting back to his own aches. The moment he let out a low, involuntary grunt of discomfort, bandages, bacta sutures, and antiseptic supplies sailed neatly into Luke’s waiting hands.
Chuckling at the way Mando startled as the medical supplies shot across the room, Luke scooted forward until he was close enough to examine the gash on his thigh.
Mando immediately tensed. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know what caused this,” Luke said, carefully inspecting the wound so as to have an excuse not to look up at him, “but I’ve gotten similar injuries during lightsaber training. I know how to treat them so they don't scar much.” He lifted the damp rag Mando had been using. “You're welcome to tell me to go kriff myself, of course, but I can... y'know.”
Once again, Mando simply stared at him.
“You don’t have to.”
Luke smiled. “I know. Consider it reparations.”
“...Okay.”
Beaming into his visor, Luke set to work.
The Mandalorian went rigid beneath his touch, the tendons of his muscular forearms jumping as his hands tightened into pale-knuckled fists at his side. Luke could hardly blame him, especially after barging in on him the way he had. Determined not to make matters worse, Luke kept his every movement tending to the wound as perfunctory and matter-of-fact as he could, cleaning it and patting it dry with utmost efficiency before spreading burn cream along its puckered edges. Then he sealed it with adhesive sutures before wrapping the whole thing up in bacta gauze.
“Well,” he said, testing the tension of the wrapping one last time before scooting back against the shower, “if that doesn’t heal cleanly, then I’ll eat my lightsaber.”
“Please don’t,” Mando deadpanned. Then, he added, “And… thank you.”
Grinning, Luke shot him a two-finger salute. “No problem.”
“What about you?”
Luke blinked. “What about me?”
“Earlier, you said you came in here for something.”
“Oh,” He glanced toward the battered tub of bacta cream sitting forgotten on the vanity. “I just needed some of this,” he admitted, holding it up awkwardly. “Used up the last of what I had in my room this morning.”
The Mandalorian leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. He tilted his helmet toward Luke.
“Do you need help?”
For one long, suspended heartbeat, Luke forgot how to breathe.
Logically, he should say no. This was Luke’s own burden to bear, and he’d already imposed on the Mandalorian far too much for a single night. He’d been managing on his own for years, and there was no reason to suddenly accept help now, least of all from the one person in the galaxy whose opinion of Luke mattered far more to him than it had any right to.
He should say no. He should.
But, Force. There were a lot of things Luke really should do.
Instead, because he hurt, because he was exhausted, because Mando had said his name, simply because Luke told him that what his friends would do—
“Sure.”
The word was out of his mouth before he could really consider the ramifications of it.
Before Luke could take it back, Mando rose without comment. He settled himself on the ground in front of the toilet, folding his legs so his posture mirrored Luke’s.
He held his hand out expectantly. Luke passed him the tub, then quickly turned his back to him, almost scrambling in his desperate attempt to conceal the hot flush blooming across his face.
His tunic was soft enough that rolling it over his shoulders only took a moment, fully exposing the angry webwork of bright red lightning scars stretching across his upper back and ribs. Cool air prickled across skin that was already far too sensitive.
The plastoid scrape of Mando unscrewing the lid echoed in the sudden silence of the refresher.
Luke braced himself. Less than a moment later, rough, ungloved fingertips brushed against the center of Luke’s back, and it was only by the grace of the Force that his resultant inhalation didn’t qualify as a gasp.
Oh, Luke thought, as the last of his remaining functional neurons promptly melted into useless goop. Oh, kriff.
Eyes fluttering closed, Luke physically couldn't keep back the small animal noises of pure pleasure that burbled up in his throat once the soothing chill soaked into skin that had spent the entire day feeling like it had been left to cook against an engine manifold. The tension bled out of Luke’s muscles in an instant, sheer force of will the only thing keeping himself upright.
Force, it felt good.
As it’d been before, Mando’s touch was extraordinarily gentle. He spread the cream in slow, careful circles, using barely any pressure, as though he harbored the absurd fear that pressing too hard would somehow hurt Luke in a way he couldn’t handle. For a man raised in a religion whose martial tenets were welded to an ironclad foundation of strength and suspicion, that level of tenderness couldn’t have been anything but a painstakingly learned skill.
“This is why you couldn’t sleep,” Mando said after a long silence, barely louder than a murmur.
Luke frowned sleepily. “Hm?”
The Mandalorian’s hand paused lightly between his shoulder blades.
“Your scars. They’re electrical burns.”
Luke attempted a smile, but judging by the way it felt on his face, he was glad the Mandalorian couldn’t see it. “Souvenir from the war,” he remarked by way of explanation. “Sometimes everything starts hurting when the weather turns. Stiff muscles. Nerve pain. A little drop in barometric pressure and my body starts convincing itself it's dying." He huffed a tiny laugh. "It's not a big deal."
Mando resumed rubbing the cream into his back. “Seems like it might be a pretty big deal if it keeps you from resting.”
“It sounds worse than it is. I just meditate instead. It’s… almost as good.” Luke forced himself to produce a noise that sounded something close to a laugh, then paused, before quickly adding, “I swear, I’m still okay to watch your kid.”
The Mandalorian didn’t reply immediately, as if weighing his words.
Then, he said, low and laden with meaning, “It’s not the kid I’m worried about right now.”
Something happened in the back of Luke’s throat, like a cross between his breath stuttering and choking on his own spit.
He folded into a coughing fit before he could stop it, spasms rattling through his ribs. Immediately, the pressure of Mando’s hands disappeared from his back. Luke was merely thankful he was too busy choking to do something as embarrassing as protest.
“Luke?”
“I’m—” Another hacking cough interrupted him, this time grossly wet and more intense than before. He attempted clearing his throat, only to moderate success.
“I’m fine,” Luke said again, voice wrecked. “Sorry. Shortness of breath isn’t uncommon during flare-ups.”
Even though what just occurred was clearly more than simple shortness of breath, Mando didn’t argue. He simply waited until Luke’s breathing settled before returning to his task with the same infuriating patience he started with.
Luke couldn’t have held back his relieved sigh even if he wanted to. The Mandalorian was tactful enough not to comment on it, instead focusing now on spreading cream down Luke’s right arm.
By the time Mando reached his elbow, Luke had drifted into something not quite sleep, but not quite meditation, either. His higher brain processes simply dissolved beneath the rhythmic glide of warm, steady hands, and cool ointment, until he barely registered where one sensation ended and the other began.
Then, suddenly, Mando stopped his ministrations, thumb resting against the smooth seam where synthskin met flesh.
“Oh,” he said.
Luke blinked himself back to full awareness. “What?”
“It’s a prosthetic.”
Luke glanced down, observing his own arm before barking a tired laugh. “Oh. Yeah.” He lifted his cybernetic hand and gave a weak waggle of his fingers. “What, did you think I wore one glove everywhere for fashion?”
A quiet puff of defensive static escaped Mando’s vocoder. “This is the first time I’ve seen you without your robes," he muttered.
“And this is the first time I’ve seen you without your armor.”
“I guess that makes us even, then.”
Between his exhaustion and the Mandalorian’s trademark deadpan delivery, Luke laughed harder than the joke probably deserved. “Stars, you’re funny, you know that?” he giggled, breathily wiping away a tear.
True to form, the Mandalorian didn’t appear to have any particular comment on that observation. His attention returned to Luke’s prosthetic.
“Another souvenir from the war?”
Luke’s smile turned crooked, to the point where he could feel it taking on something of a manic edge. “Got it in one,” he chuffed. “Only gift I ever got from my dad.”
The silence that answered that statement was deafening.
Luke froze.
“...Ah,” he breathed, squeezing his eyes shut. Sands' hells, had he really kriffing said that aloud? “Forget it. I have a mouth bigger than a meteor, especially when I’m running on two hours of sleep in a seventy-two hour period. It’s not important.”
Mando just continued to hold Luke’s forearm, somehow communicating more with his silence than Luke ever could with words.
Sighing, Luke bowed his head.
“I didn’t meet my father until I was an adult,” he said, staring vaguely at the floor tiles. “And when it finally happened, we were on opposite sides of a war.”
Another loaded silence settled between them with the admission, one that Luke wasn’t emotionally equipped to read at that moment. He decided to take the fact that Mando hadn’t shoved him away for being descended from an ostensible Imperial as a positive sign.
When he finally felt ready to speak again, his voice was much quieter. “My father and I were able to reconcile before he died, but our relationship…" He sighed. "It wasn’t the best, let’s just put it that way.”
Mando’s fingers squeezed over his pulse.
It was so simple, barely anything at all, but the sheer kindness of the gesture had Luke blinking back against the sting of tears.
“Grogu,” Luke started, swallowing hard. “He’s, uh— He’s so lucky, you know? To have someone like you.”
The words hung in the warm, close air of the refresher, heavy and significant.
“I’m the lucky one,” Mando said after a moment, soft and utterly sweet.
Another cough escaped Luke. Rubbing absently at his chest, he replied, smiling, “You can both be lucky, you know.” As he spoke, the Mandalorian started up again, switching over to Luke’s other arm and working the cream into muscles he hadn't realized were clenched until they began to loosen beneath Mando’s steady hands. “Watching you two, it’s… I don’t know. Therapeutic, I guess. Healing.”
Mando made a questioning noise.
Entirely out of his own control, Luke heard his voice soften to something bordering on dreamlike, answering, "It's everything I wished I had with my own dad when I was a kid, right down to the joint meditation.”
Mando’s vocoder emitted a long, thoughtful buzz.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked, hands carefully working Luke's left wrist between practiced fingers.
“Shoot.”
“Those sunrise meditations at the lake? I’m not actually doing anything. I’ll play along so the womp rat doesn’t spend all his time chasing frogs, but most of the time I’m reading a holonovel.” He paused. “Or taking a nap.”
Luke laughed, albeit weakly, fatigue sinking its final hooks into his body.
"I don't think—" He yawned. "I don't think you should be telling the teacher things like that."
"No?" the Mandalorian asked, the single syllable dripping with amusement.
Luke wagged a scolding finger and smiled, both without opening his eyes. "I'm going to have to give you a failing grade in Jedi."
"You aren't my teacher, Master Skywalker. Last I checked, I wasn’t a Jedi.”
“No... y’r not,” Luke murmured, his words slurring together as sleep finally began to overtake him. “And r’memb’r...” A lazy smile tugged at his lips. “...Call me Luke.”
He felt himself beginning to drift. The last thing he registered was the cool weight of Mando’s hand settling briefly against his shoulder.
The next thing Luke knew, he woke up in his bed with his blankets tucked securely around his body, feeling like he’d been run over by hoverlorry.
Sometime while he’d been asleep, the steady roar of the storm had dwindled to little more than a gentle drizzle pattering against the prefab's duraluminium roof. With a groan, Luke rolled onto his side to check the chrono on his bedside table, only to discover his view blocked by his tub of bacta cream. Frowning, he reached to shove it aside, his fingers brushing against a piece of flimsi taped to the lid.
Huh. A note.
Still squinting through the lingering fog of sleep, he peeled it free and held it close.
You fell asleep, it read in neat, block handwriting. Take the day to recover. I’ll handle the kid and your mech.
Luke smiled. Three short, matter-of-fact sentences; it was so entirely Mando.
Then his eyes drifted lower. Beneath the note, written in the same script, were two more words.
Din Djarin.
Luke frowned. For an embarrassingly long moment, they refused to mean anything at all, until, eventually, the wheels in his brain finally began to turn, and their significance clicked.
“...Oh,” he said at last, to nobody in particular. “Din Djarin. It’s a name.”
His chest tightened.
Din. The Mandalorian’s name was Din.
Luke gagged. Scrambling to the edge of his mattress, he leaned over the side just in time for his body to convulse, expelling the contents of his lungs in a single, massive, violent heave.
The last thing he saw before he passed out again were white petals strewn all over the floor.