Chapter Text
"Stay where you are, poor beast. This is no world for you. Stay in your forest and keep your trees green and your friends protected. And good luck to you, for you are the last."
— from the film ‘ The Last Unicorn’ written by Peter S. Beagle
“The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.
It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.
The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.”
― from the novelization of ‘Revenge of the Sith’ by Matthew Stover
Luke wakes in the dark.
Before he’s truly conscious, the Force is there for him to reach, a muscle to flex. That ever present hand of the universe stretched out for him to take. His physical senses are clamoring for his focus too. He’s cold where he’s curled fetal on the wet ground, everything hurts, a ragged scream caught behind his teeth, there’s an odd smell in the too dry air, his memory fuzzy, he—
He reaches back, greeted by the warmth of it flexed in his proverbial hand, almost eager, curious, with his attention. The bantha-ewe startled to discover she’s birthed a lamb. The world unspools around him in sound and feelings and light all just to the left of his physical senses, buzzing and frenetic in a way he’s never felt. It’s clouded too, like it hasn’t been since the fall of the empire, If not quite so exacting in its pervasive darkness but there’s a murky undercurrent that would be so easy to get lost in.
So he knows, in that first second before he really lets himself feel the bodily discomfort, sees how dark it is, how cold, that he’s not where he should be and something is very very wrong.
The push and pull threatens to batter him, but he rides outward on that tide, happily pulling him to find the few dozen soft motes of light belonging to the Force-inert lifeforms nearby, and a handful of those sentient but unfamiliar. Exuberant and young all of them, dangerous too, fresh from some battle or hunt. A tang like Rogue Squadron after a successful mission, high on adrenaline and accomplishment.
None near enough to worry over, but there is pressure on the periphery of him, a push to do something. Like a dawning threat he can’t quite parse.
And then something far more familiar overtakes it all.
Leia .
Her unconscious presence flitted along next to him, settling to lean snug against his in the Force, like a loth kitten finding a litter mate, or a pair of krayt basking in the suns. Warm and settled and belonging. It is too dark to see her, but she's too close in the Force to be far. It's a balm. Even if maybe he should be more worried that both of them are here, wherever here is, when last he remembers they were nearly a galaxy apart between Ossus and Chandrila.
Moving feels like sloughing through tar as he tries to pick himself up. One of them needs to be moving. But Forced to muddle reality outside of just the Force, take stock of where he is; The gentle hiss of skin against wet— slimy sand and stone beneath him as he shifts, his own breath loud in his ears, the cold pebbled surface at his naked back, the dark, the aching exhaustion in every living cell of his body… it might not be him.
He’s so tired. He hasn’t felt like this since his last full body bacta dip.
He shifts just an arm, reaching across the dark space ahead of him. Touching sand and smooth rocks: the slime on them is almost bacta-like but lacking the sour tang that usually accompanied waking with it clinging to his skin, or the cloying smell. This almost smelled nice, not good but not bad— almost green and earthy. So he hasn’t been foisted from a bacta tank into a pitch dark sandy cave still covered in slime.
He’s found himself in far more gross situations, but still, gross.
He reaches out through his connection to his sister.
‘Leia?’
He feels Leia’s half conscious discomfort right alongside his, like he could be breathing with her lungs instead of his own. The connection between their minds is more open than normal, but he can’t feel anything other than her presence in the Force.
She’s not here. The beat of her heart, the rise and fall of breath that should be so close to him, that should have been easily picked up by Force enhanced senses simply isn’t.
But she is here.
He braces himself on the pebbled rock at his back, it gives as he leans on it to lift himself up. More viscous slime spilling up over his arm with how whatever-it-is depressed under his weight before he hit a dense shape beneath the giving leather like surface.
It all takes second place to the feeling of Leia being with him, but not here.
“Leia?” voice rough from unconscious disuse, tongue like lead with overbearing fatigue. The soft whisper is too loud in the cavernous space.
She blazes to wakefulness, as alert as himself, like an echo beside him. Almost more present than he's ever felt her, none of her natural and well maintained shields present.
That’s alarming.
‘Luke,’ she calls back through the bond, though his mouth almost wants to move.
His stomach swoops with nausea.
He feels off kilter, as does Leia, playing in disconcerting echo. Winding up and over each other in suffocating tandem as their discomfort only ratchets alongside one another. He grabs hold of his shields and pulls himself behind them. Shuttering the doors between the two of them. Even that doesn’t silence her presence next to his.
He tries to push himself up further and but his body tries to fall back on his haunches at the same time. Only managing to squish more ooze out of the weird thing he was leaning against. His elbow catches on hair that yanks against his scalp.
Leia seems to find her proverbial feet before he does. Understands before he can. A truth just out of his grasp.
Sand sticks to his skin, abrasive as he shifts and the world tilts, and it’s still too dark to see.
He needed to move.
Something had happened. Something was going to happen. But It was not going to happen now. Hadn’t happened to them yet. And then— what?
They had to stop it, he felt it down to his marrow. They’d had to stop it.
“What?” His voice is wrong too, “Leia, what?”
“I don’t know!” it’s his own lips that move.
A memory catches him. It feels like a ghost. Facing off alone against a field of forces, almost like every rebel battle they ever fought— but not at all. He stands facing down that looming darkness. A man, a red blade. Facing down darkness he—
He gasps in the taste of damp cave air. That didn’t happen. Last he recalled he was with his new student on Ossus after the Mandalorian had presented him with a gift for the child. And then— What?
What had happened to Grogu, to Din?
What had happened to him and Leia?
Was he dead? One with the Force like his masters before him? You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Like his father— Was Leia dea—
No.
No. Not Leia. Leia couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
It feels ephemeral. Like a dream half remembered, something that could have been. Would have been. Not quite his.
Leia’s? But no, not entirely hers either.
What happened to us? How did we fail? How did I fail?
Her boy. Holding him, in the crook of his arm and seeing just how bright he shone. Unadulterated curiosity in those hazel eyes, Han’s eyes . He doesn’t know if it’s Leia's arms or his own cradling the baby. The images overlapped. The feelings are so alike. His nephew, her s—
Ben. Ben who’s just a toddler. Ben who was supposed to be safe.
Leia’s grief, a thunderstorm, nearly bowls him over. He has to catch her, hold her together. Wrap his own arms around himself as the sudden sob shakes out of his throat. Too high and different from his mouth.
None of her long built stoicism, compartmentalizing, can hold her together through this.
Ben would fall and Han would be gone, and Luke would be gone and— Ben is gone.
Ben is gone.
He feels wrong down to his bones. But so familiar: that intrinsic knowledge of, oh that’s Leia . That’s always been with him, before he even knew her name, her face, that she was at all: he knew her. The bond feels stitched into his very skin, muscle, bone. Leia is with him. They’re together. He Has known her star in the Force since Bespin, when he reached out to her, and she reached back. The one that was always there in the periphery, a song he didn’t know he had always been listening to, a part of him he had never known to miss, but always had— until she was in front of him in that cell on the death star. Maybe even since he saw her plea to Obi-Wan stored in Artoo. Now her star, her song in the Force, orbits with his.
And they’re together. They’re together.
Here. Wherever here is.
His confusion pales in comparison to everything Leia is feeling. Both of them wrapped in this wordless understanding passing between them. Together.
Both of them with memories not quite his and not quite hers either. A future horror clattering around inside their minds.
And Ben is gone.
Her nails digging into their arms like it might be grounding. His palms soothing after it. The same hands, the same nails. Not quite as broad as his hands, should, used to be. Though hysterically his sword hand is still mechanical while the other is flesh and blood. The blaster hole in the synth skin is still a stark reminder of every time since the end of the war that Leia reminded him he should have it replaced.
He shudders through the disquieting reality of them . Painfully aware that this body is not his own. Muscled and lean like he was but weight distributed wrong, soft in places he was never soft and Leia was more so. The plush press of breasts against his arms where he hugs himself— hugs Leia. The way his hands catch on hair that is too long. Other parts that feel wrong to him, and a certainty in knowing what won’t be there. The invasive otherness of it all.
He takes comfort in their still separate pieces, the twin points in the Force, their separate conscience. They are still their own persons despite becoming so physically tangled.
So they cradled each other, caught together in the fumbling mess between them remembering those they left behind.
Somewhere, over the sound of their labored breath, and hitching half sobbing, came the warbling of sounds. It takes a full minute to register that the sound is voices.
Voices drawing closer.
Leia tucks herself back, back behind those smooth shields she always had that made her seem like just one of the rest in a crowd. Back in their mind. With her grief and her memories just beyond his own experiences. Back with those stolen memories of a future not yet lived.
She shoves him outward towards the oncoming potential of danger ringing in the Force.
He can feel nine sentients drawing closer. Their motes of light in the Force are cheerful, jubilant almost. It must be the same few living points he had felt before the revelation of Him and Leia. It takes him a moment longer to stretch out his senses and recognize the voices as Tusken.
Well, they know where they are if nothing else. Even if it is Tatooine of all the places in the galaxy to wake up naked in the dark and completely unarmed with nine Tuskens approaching. They’re on Tatooine, and these are Tuskens, and there’s no way to know if they’re the sort of raiders who might kill you out of hand or the peaceful sort who’ll bring you into the tribe and test your mettle.
He pushes down, into the Force: to be unfelt and unseen. Let himself become an absent unimportant thing, cave moss, the whisper of wind over sand.
The soft sound of footsteps reached his ears, followed by the chattering of conversation drawing ever nearer to the cave. A soft light illuminates an exit, a dull glowlamp raised in the hand of the leading Tusken. Hardly enough to show more than the shadow of their figures across the room they wouldn’t see him from there. But if they came closer, looked into the dip in the cave floor—
The forbidding feeling rising up inside him. It was all like glass about to shatter.
Luke reaches out blindly in the Force for his saber. But the presence of the kyber was absent from this place.
In his still outstretched senses a thunderous reverberation crashed against him. Not quite like any Force sensitive he's ever felt. But alike enough to rein himself back behind his shields from it. He can still feel it reaching out. A cry for something, for someone, escalating to a lashing and furious rage.
His shields have held against greater threats.
The Force crescendos with a desperate and painful keen when no reply is returned to its song. The wild inferno storms towards them. Crackling and lashing. Claws scrape on stone.
The Tuskens still. For three beats of absolute silence no one even breathes.
The huff of enormous breaths stirred the cave air. A shadow loomed in the dark of a tunnel opening.
The Tuskens began shouting. The glowlamp was dropped cracking against the stone, slamming the cave back into darkness.
The dark cracked with the sparking of a slug rifle. Then another, and another. Lighting the world in brief snaps: the shape of the looming bulk, a five pointed crest, the reflections off a great eye.
An ear splitting sonorous howl cut through all other sound. Echoed in chambers that wound down into the earth.
Near blinding light lit up the cavern. Blue heat followed it. The nine Tusken warriors cast in stark relief: their head to toe leathers-and-cloth covered forms lit up in cyan, glass lenses reflecting the harsh light, shadows dancing against the claw hewn walls.
Acrid fuel spraying from the krayt’s maw and combusting where it landed across the stone and sand floor. A wall of flames with the massive bulk of the dragon on one side and the armed Tuskens on the other.
It gave enough light to see in the pit he found himself in and the punctured egg he was lent against. The hatchling within, nearly his size, had only pipped enough for its head and neck to rest against the floor. The other hatchling had half emerged from its egg: All sprawling limbs and body coils. Both were shot through with slug holes and carved open with harsh lacerations at the base of the throat. A trail of blood lead to what nearly blended in with the sandy stone with a pair of dead Tuskens at its feet: a greater Krayt carved open just like the others.
Despair reverberated through the Force. Grasping hands clutching, brushing up against his own presence and Leia’s along with him, pulling on their Light. Almost like a question. A plea.
The Force flared a warning.
Luke dropped himself entirely to the ground, pressed to the earth. A ricochet shot sank into the soft shell of the egg behind him. The sightless eyes of the hatchling watched him, like glass reflecting the fires.
The Krayt shrieked. Catapulting itself through its flames and over the barrow of the nest. Wings buffeting the air in Luke's face.
The lash of her tail sent three Tuskens slamming into the cavern wall. Their living lights wavered before two went out entirely, organs punctured by shattered bones, a cracked skull. The air filled with the acrid tang of fear and death. The third flickered on the edge of consciousness. Luke could almost taste the blood he was slowly drowning in.
The view of the rest of the Tuskens was blocked as the bulk of the krayt came between them. It’s body long but not quite as serpentine and many-limbed as the greater krayt who lay dead behind him. This one was only six legged, and adorned with a five pointed crown of horns. Its glistening scales put other sandy and dull hued beasts to shame, though it was too hard in the half dark and blue light of the fire to say what shade its scales truly took.
They looked blue.
The wings were the only thing more striking. Force, krayt were bad enough on the ground. Flared they gave the illusion of nearly tripling its bulk. Blood dripped from where they were punctured, but the Tuskens' weapons did little else. Its hide elsewhere was clearly too strong for more than bruising, but each shot stoked the rage it threw out in the Force. Acridly close to feeling like the dark.
He and Leia needed to get out of here.
One of the Tuskens charged from the side with his gaderffii raised while the others tried to fill the beast with lead.
The cave lit up again with whatever burning fuel this krayt spat. Hissing as it clung and seeped through the Tuskens' clothes before the snap of ignition flared with heat and light and pained screaming as the man died. Another light in Force extinguished. The others threw themselves at her, weapons raised. And in less than a beat three more went out like so much nothing under her claws and teeth, snuffed out forever.
Luke was sharply aware of just how young they had felt in the Force.
Somewhere in the fighting the last two had made it past the krayt to the path she had entered from. Luke could feel the spill of their fear, the drive to live. They ran as one dying man rained cover fire for their retreat.
The krayt swarmed up and over the pit to rake the rifle from his hands, pinning the Tusken down under one clawed forelimb. It rained a hissing splatter from its open jaws, some chemical reaction ignited the man in flames. The dragon bellowed hollowly as he screamed and died under its weight. The licking flames did nothing to its scales, shimmering blue on blue. It’s great chest heaving with thunderous breaths as it pressed down on the already dead body snapping bone.
Dissatisfied hurt laced the Force like a gossamer smoke, cloying in the back of his throat.
It was all lithe bulk and too many limbs but its movements sinuous and graceful. It turned to the exit tunnel, snout raised high as it scented the air, sharp crest glinting in the remaining wode-light. It tucked its wings close and with alarming speed chased after the last of them out the darkened tunnel.
He and Leia were left alone with the smoldering fires and corpses. The smell of seared flesh strong in the air.
He felt like a newborn nerf calf trying to get his legs under him. After two attempts he gave up, resigned to crawl. It was like he’d been hollowed out, spent days without sleep or rations or water and was running on the Force alone. He had to call on it to augment his movement. Shuffling to the edge of this central pit, careful of the dead bodies of the hatchlings and Tuskens. Ignoring how his flesh felt wrong, the micro abrasion scraped along his knees and palms from the grit, how the very Force felt new and old all at once. A slippery excitement to aid him. That same dancing made it hard to grasp.
It took four attempts to pull himself up to the lip of the nest, though it couldn’t have been more than three feet deep at the edge, before he flopped gracelessly to the ground once over the lip. The spilled albumin was growing tacky on his skin and sticky with sand as he caught his breath.
Leia, a reassuring weight next to him, if only in his mind. He pressed back against her, offering his own reassurance. They were losing light. Losing strength. But they were together.
Okay, okay. They needed to keep moving.
Continuing the pathetic crawl, lungs burning, muscles like jelly, they made it as far as the nearest wall. Luke could just see in the light given by the blue flames that still smoldered on. The almost circular cave, three exists, the central pit. He was closer now to the dead greater krayt. A young one by its size, dull scaled, half its body disappearing down one of the tunnels. Its crop was carved open and dark blood and half digested meat spilled on the stone.
He closed his eyes and felt out, hoping to find the way that would lead out, dipping into the crash and tumult of the Force around them. He would have to follow the route the Tuskens took in their leaving, he knew that was the way to the surface. But that way they would run into the other krayt— there was no way he could fight that thing like this, and without his lightsaber.
He could feel the lights of the last two Tuskens still getting farther and farther away like he was running in step with them out of the dark and into the night under Tatooine's moons. The fire of the krayt slammed into him, jarring his eyes open once more to the almost darkness of the cave. Its eye was on him, a press against his shields. He felt and heard the beast circling back even as the Tuskens got further and further away. The scrape of claws over stone as it navigated the tunnels. It was barely a blink, a second, and the dragon pressed in from the same tunnel it left across the cavern.
It swept over the dead it had left in its wake, crawling into the pit. With a warbling thrum deep from its chest it nosed each dead hatchling, the Force echoing with a call that begged response.
Luke pressed himself back against the stone wall of the cavern. Focusing on going unnoticed. Unremarkable.
The eyes still fell on them. Two great disks catching the firelight with reflective shine that pierced right into him. A hateful hiss reverberating deep from its chest.
Leia straightened their spine, back pressed to cool stone. She would not die bowing. His hands clenched for a lightsaber that wasn’t there.
The dragon shifted forward, step after crawling step, until they were all but sharing air. It reeked of cooked meat, ozone, the heat of the desert. The tips of its wings scraped the ceiling, its crest alone nearly as tall as him, its teeth daggers in a half open maw, it could have easily snapped a person up in two bites in those jaws.
It sniffed at them then let out a trilling croon, the deep base of it reverberated in his bones. Deeper than the sound was her lonely and wanting press at him, at them, in the Force. Laced heavy with feelings and thoughts, pictures and impulses. The impression of long months brooding over it’s— her clutch. The scarce ventures for food while her mate was tending the brood— dead now. She left, and the mate was dead now.
The hope. Her hope. In the two lights. Force sensitive. She and her brood were Force sensitive. Though she understood it not as that. Just her lights. Cradled in the coil of her body, growing strong.
Hers. Calling back to her.
Now this one. A strange thing. Smelling like hers. ‘Bright thing.’
‘False hatchling, whelpling.’
‘Brave thing. Strong thing.’
And that keening trilling want. That ‘Mine?’ reverberated off her in waves.
Pushed at him. ‘Want-need,’ and, ‘Bright thing.’
‘Mine?’
Her eyes shone in the last light of the dying fires. Disks of reflective black on disks of blue staring into him, into them.
The Force pushed him forward. Feeling like, ‘Yours,’ or maybe, ‘for you.’ That fluttering excitement in his chest. Like diving in his X-wing into enemy fighters and knowing if he listens he’ll come back from the impossible drop.
Oh.
He raised his left hand, pressed it to the side of The Krayt’s great snout. Scales, smooth and warm, shivered under his fingertips. Bared teeth hidden away again as she nosed into his palm.
Luke, with Leia wrapped close, opened to her call, and reached back.
