Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
Something’s wrong. He can’t keep his eyes open and there’s a sick, pulsing feeling rushing through his body.
An alarm blares and Din swipes a hand towards the series of switches on the control board to his left. Only he’s not on the Razor Crest and his hand meets air. The memory flits in between breaths: the Razor Crest is in for repairs with the covert’s mechanic and he’s in a borrowed gun ship one of the younger warriors stole from a would-be beskar thief.
He paws at the unfamiliar control board anyway, and the sound quiets.
He blinks again, and the planet he was flying towards is in view. He doesn’t recognize it by sight; the smear of green and gray indicating trees and clouds makes him feel ill. Did he lose time? He doesn’t remember coming out of hyperspace.
Din slaps a clumsy hand over the transceiver. “Coming in hot,” he grits out, and the words taste like blood and stone in his mouth and the world pulses too-warm around him. He doesn’t know if anyone is listening, or if anyone is even down there, but the ship is plummeting towards the gravity well and he can’t stop it.
He fades out again, but stays with it long enough to key in the automatic landing system. He sees trees, green and endless as their branches crash against the viewport, and then he sees black.
CHAPTER ONE
Luke lays flat on his back in the blazing midday sunlight, stripped down to his shorts and with his arms spread wide in the short flowering grass at the base of the antenna array. It’s hot here, but unlike Tatooine it’s humid, too, and he feels like his whole body is a puddle, like he could power ten vaporators back home for a week just by laying near them.
He’s the only sapient for a thousand miles, but it’s anything but quiet out here: birds flutter and caw in constant battle for territory, some mammalian creature he has yet to get his eyes on likes to howl like the reptilian dogs of back home. The trees themselves are teeming with buzzing life that could drown out even C-3PO.
In all that noise, all that chaotic life, Luke lays there on the ground and reaches for peace.
He hasn’t found it yet.
It’s been four months since Endor. He spent two weeks in medical’s clutches after they eventually left the Ewoks behind and returned to the fleet. Electrical burns were not outside the healing capabilities of a standard 21-B droid, but the damage caused was Sith in nature and was resistant to bacta.
And, of course, the real problem: the lighting that scarred his arms and his chest damaged more than his body.
He breathes in, out, and reaches for the Force.
It’s like touching a live wire-- violent chaos burning through his nerves-- and he shies away, wary of again being hurt. He closes off the connection.
He thought coming here would be good for him. Solitary meditation was surely a proper Jedi way to solve problems like this. And minding the antenna array this far out near wild space was doing the New Republic a favor at the same time, even if he did have to beg for the posting, seeing as he is both still technically listed as AWOL and also a highly valuable asset in the New Republic’s eyes. But what else is there for him but to just... go away for a little while and try to deal with this.
Leia won’t talk with him about their father. Han is too busy ignoring his serious relationship with Leia to deal with Luke and his ‘hokey religion.’ They have their own lives now; it’s better this way.
And yet here he is, still licking his wounds and getting nowhere... He reaches out again, frustrated and knowing Ben would scold him for the emotion, that Yoda would have whacked him with that damned stick. But they aren’t here. Like the Force, his ghosts are silent.
He’s jolted out of his half meditative state-- his melancholy state, if he’s being more honest about it-- by a boom. He’s on his feet because his hindbrain recognized the sound before the rest of him even knows why he’s racing for his boots: it was the sound of an explosion in the upper atmosphere.
He shoves his boots on one-handed and races up the skinny ladder that shoots up ten meters to the top of the antenna array on the hilltop, slippery and dangerous in the humid air. He longs for the set of binocs he’d had back on Tatooine; here he has nothing but his own eyes.
And, of course, the Force.
He puts a hand to shield his face from the sun and tentatively reaches out again. He’s not burned by the Force, not this time, but he doesn’t reach deep just yet. It points him north-north-east and as he turns his face up he sees the stomach-lurching sight of metal plummeting through the atmosphere at too-fast speeds. It’s got thrusters engaged and is slowing, but the ship-- which looks to be a small craft, but bigger than his x-wing-- isn’t going to land pretty. Smoke billows up and out of it, too, painting a dizzying picture across the sky.
At least the source of the explosion isn’t a mystery.
It’s going to land-- if landing is the right word-- two clicks out at least, the Republic's communication array is in no danger. There’s an emergency transponder stowed away in a case by the ladder and he rushes for it and presses the hard plasteel cup of the earpiece to his head with one hand, not taking his eyes off the falling craft.
“--ing in -- coming in hot--” is all he gets before the transponder clicks off. Which, yes. Luke can corroborate that assessment. There’s no way in Hoth that that ship will land in one piece.
He slides down the ladder and lets the metal burn his living hand. Leia would yell at him for that, but Leia isn’t here. He pulls on a shirt, grabs his blaster, saber, and one of the travel med packs from the emergency kit, and heads north-north-east on foot.
He finds the wreck; it’s not hard to track, what with the billowing smoke filling up the jungle sky.
Luke spends the long and humid hike into the valley trying to predict what he’ll find at the bottom.
An Imperial? Not likely from the comm call out-- an ex-Imperial or one of the dozens of splinter groups trying to retake control wouldn’t put out an all-chanel mayday like that. There’s the chance it’s someone else who got his location and has come to take him out. Not everyone after the infamous Luke Skywalker’s blood is an Imp, after all.
But he only told his location to Leia and Han, and his currently tenuous connection to the Force or not, he knows to his core they would not give him up unless tortured, and he would feel that.
His steps stutter down the ravine and he pauses to lean against a tree likely three times his age.
He would know if they had been tortured. He cannot accept any other possibility. He pushes the thought of Leia, captured again at his father’s hand, tortured for information on his whereabouts...
He shakes out his legs and walks faster. It is likely just some unlucky passerby.
Luke’s self-made trail bottoms out in the base of the ravine and he’s gifted the sight of a ship split asunder from stern to bow. It was a junk ship before it crashed and it’s a junk ship now, too, just one considerably more crushed. A heavily modified X4, maybe, but not the type he’s used to seeing from the Rebellion days.
“Hello, anyone there?”
It’s not on fire, just smoking alarmingly and leaking every fluid imaginable into the undergrowth. No bodies litter the ground, though. A small consolation immediately followed by a rock forming in his gut, as that means he needs to crawl into the belly of the wreck and see if anyone survived.
“I have a med pack!”
He doesn’t have much hope-- it’s not a pretty crash. But he’ll be damned to Hoth and back if he leaves some poor bastard to asphyxiate in a noxious wreck if he can help it.
The interior of the ship is as crumpled as he expected from its violent meeting with the valley, with a great big weal down the centerline where the welds have failed on impact. A line of sparks flicker from the cockpit and Luke climbs his way up carefully, only to find blood splashed around the controls and an empty seat.
He checks the hold and the tiny sleeper compartment to be safe before getting lightheaded from the fumes and stumbling back out into the forest.
“Kriff,” he says, as his head clears.
And then swears again as the whine of a blaster powering up fills the ominously silent jungle.
“Don’t shoot!”
Luke turns slowly, telegraphing his movements and keeping his own hands well clear of the blaster at his hip. He’s sweating and he blames the jungle humidity, but standing in the shadow of a blaster without the Force whispering to him feels like walking into a standoff blindfolded.
He twists to see who has him at gunpoint--
And he stops mid turn.
Standing in front of him is Boba Fett’s ghost, a blaster aimed at Luke’s heart. Suddenly the humidity is clogging his throat and he’s back in Yoda’s vision cave staring down a nightmare--
Until he realizes that the chest plate and armor are a rusty red and silver, not the green and orange of Boba Fett’s set of armor. It’s not Fett come back from the dead for revenge. Luke takes a deep breath and steadies himself.
“Hey,” he says, feeling silly. But the man is armed to the teeth, and Luke has no interest in making an enemy where one isn’t needed. The war is over finally. “I saw your ship crash, are you alright?”
Clearly the answer is no. The man is standing at a cant, guarding his left side, and though his blaster doesn’t waver, the rest of him does. And all that blood on the inside of the ship didn’t come from nowhere.
“I’m here to help you,” he says. It’s probably true. This armored man is not an Imperial, but he’s whatever Boba Fett was-- the armor is too similar to be a coincidence-- which still sets Luke’s teeth on edge.
He feels so blind without the Force.
The man doesn’t answer right away, just stands there. There’s a fine tremor running through his body that Luke recognizes from his own experience with exhaustion and injury.
“Where am I?”
“Eulior,” Luke answers. “Deep Outer Rim. There’s not much here, it’s a miracle I saw you go down.” A miracle, or the man is hunting Luke. Or he was sent by Leia or Han. Or the Force is playing with him...
Luke shuts down these thoughts and focuses on the present. “Do you need bacta?”
“No...”
And then the man’s legs go out from under him and he drops. The blaster stays up, but Luke ignores it and rushes forward, knocking the outstretched weapon aside and grasping at the man’s chest plate to keep him upright even as they both drop down to their knees in the soggy undergrowth.
“I promise I won’t hurt you,” Luke says, when the man flinches away from him. He can hear panting breaths translated through the vocoder of his helmet, pained and too short. Injured ribs, then, if not something more. The little med kit Luke grabbed from the base isn’t meant for gross bodily harm like this, he needs to get this man back to the antenna array and to the one tiny speck of civilization this planet has to offer.
“Don’t--” the man says, choking on the word.
Luke’s hands are white-knuckled around the sharp edges of the man’s breastplate, keeping them both upright in the sticky moss. And then suddenly Luke is holding up not a struggling weight but a limp one as the man abruptly faints and crumples, his weight pulling them both to the side.
“Kriff!” The man is slipping out of his hands and Luke loses the battle with gravity and instead does his best to guide him down onto the undergrowth without causing more damage.
Suddenly Luke feels a flush of fear wash through him; he can’t tell if the man is breathing, or if he’s even alive.
What if he just died in Luke’s hands.
His own breath and heartbeat are too loud and he can’t hear--
He reaches his living hand into the space under the man’s helmet and feels warm skin and a fluttering pulse of some sort. But there’s no way to see if he’s breathing through the thick cloth mail and armor, so Luke brings his other hand to meet the first and lifts away the helmet in a single swift movement.
The helmet is beautiful, set apart from the rest of his armor by some immutable factor that Luke can’t quite identify. Maybe it’s the Force telling him something; maybe it’s his own respect for armor and protection from growing up on a hostile planet, but he sets it down as gently as he can next to the man’s head.
The man is breathing, which is good.
But he’s also waking and his brown eyes are wild and filled with terror that Luke doesn’t need the Force to understand. He locks eyes with Luke, sucks in breaths that sound like a dying animal, and just as Luke’s about to reassure him, to tell him that he’s going to help him, a gloved and armored hand snakes out and grasps his wrist.
“You killed me,” he whispers to Luke, still staring him dead in the eye.
Still panting like a wounded thing his eyes flutter and rove sightlessly-- a seizure? And then they roll up and he goes still.
Luke stares down at him in shock.
“No... no, no, no.”
But he’s still alive, still breathing under Luke’s trembling hand. He’s not dead. Luke hasn’t killed him.
His arms and chest ache, the scars are healed and they shouldn’t hurt anymore, but he aches like he did back on the Death Star, holding his father’s heavy metal body, taking off that mask even though it marked the final breath he would take...
But no. The man is still breathing. The helmet is just a helmet, there’s no respirator inside.
And very clearly Luke decides that there will be no more pyres in the jungle. This may not be Endor, but he will not build a fire and watch this stranger burn out within his armor.
The war is over and he will save this man .
He dumps the meager contents of the travel med pack onto the ground. Two fluid ounces of bacta with a sponge applicator, a roll of anticoagulant bandages, and a pack of pain relieving tablets and antidiarrheals.
Kriff.
The bacta first. The two ounces won’t do much, but he can hopefully stabilize whatever head wound caused that disorientation with it. What he wouldn’t give for a bacta tank like the Republic had dunked him in on more than one occasion. The little travel applicator is a joke in comparison. But he is working with what he has, it’s just one more thing to remind him of Tatooine.
He gets as much of the bacta onto the back of the man’s head and spine as he can eke out of the applicator, but it’s hard to tell what is bacta liquid dripping off uselessly into the underbrush and what’s blood. Only the steady and visible breaths give Luke any sense of calm.
He reaches for the Force and it bites and it burns but he reaches anyhow, and he pairs its strength with his own to haul the man upright into his arms. The limp deadweight is compounded by the tremendous weight of his armor, but Luke manages because he refuses any other outcome. He walks back to his basecamp under the antenna array with the man dragging in his arms, all two clicks, and doesn’t stop once.
And all the while the Force burns.
By the time Luke drags the man back to the encampment at the base of the Rebellion’s deep space relay station, he’s beyond exhausted. He rallies one last burst of strength to get him up on the little cot, and then fumbles his way through the man’s armor enough to get access to at least a few patches of bare skin to ensure he’s breathing and his spine is straight and supported. Then he fishes though his own personal med kit to root out a tube of bacta gel Leia required he take when he left, shoving the other bits and bobs from the kit into his pockets. He should have brought this base kit with him, but he hadn’t realized the portable kit would be such a joke.
“I’m sorry,” he says to the man’s lax face. He rolls him on his side and smears the gel over the base of his skull and across the eye socket that might be broken, but there isn’t enough for what the man clearly needs, besides which Luke is hardly a 2-1B unit. He’s fumbling in the dark, somewhat literally.
Then Luke collapses on the ground next to the cot in a deep and dreamless sleep.
When he wakes the man is still alive. He’s breathing a little easier and the color of his cheeks has risen a bit. He no longer reminds him of his dying father, which is a nice start.
Luke snorts. Since when did he become this maudlin?
He tries to rouse him but fails, and instead does his best to make him more comfortable, removing the final parts of his complicated set of armor and laying them down nicely to the side, along with the helmet he’d dragged along with them.
The little shelter he has here is basic, but Luke likes it. It reminds him of days in the Rebellion, where luxuries were luxuries. He’s always lived a little on the edge of survival, and though Beru and Owen provided a stable life, it was one always at risk of disaster, like all homesteads on Tatooine were. It was just the way life was. Everyone was a drought or a raid or a corrupt enforcer away from losing everything. So this little shelter, with its single cot and its under-powered cooling unit, feels like home.
It feels much smaller with the man in it, though. Especially the man and his heavy armament.
The pile of armor and weaponry takes up half the available empty space and looks uncomfortably like a monument to the dead. Luke turns the helmet away so it at least isn’t staring at him, and goes back to the man he pulled it all off.
He washes him up a bit, without getting too intrusive about it, and checks his vitals again. He’s alright, more or less, so far as Luke can tell. In that at least he’s breathing and his heart is beating and blood seems to have stopped leaking out from wherever it was leaking out of. Between the bacta he plastered on the man at the crash site and the gel tube he exhausted of it here, it seems like he’ll recover. That was, of course, the end of his supply of the stuff, so whatever state they find themselves in from here on out is the one they’ll live with.
Or die with.
Kriff, he is maudlin.
He goes back to sleep.
When he wakes again it all goes to hell. The man is out in the rain, raving to the point that Luke is convinced the bacta failed to treat a serious head injury and he’s just dragged the man and his stupidly heavy armor all the way back here just to watch him have an aneurysm.
“Did you see?” he asks Luke, staring at the jungle and shaking like a leaf in just his black flight suit. His head is bowed and he shies away from Luke’s presence like a feral thing.
“Did I see what?” Luke says back, frustrated and frightened and not understanding.
He repeats the question several more times, and Luke just stands there trying to calm him without setting him off.
The rest of the home base med kit stock is still shoved into his pockets and he can feel the edge of a sealed sedative patch under his fingers. It’s risky to sedate a man who might be bleeding from the brain, but the alternative is that he works himself up into some sort of lethal fit or runs into the jungle to die of exposure.
No more pyres.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Luke says on slow and calm repeat. “You’re injured. Come inside.”
The man keeps his eyes locked on something deep in the dark in front of them, hallucinating, perhaps. “I can’t,” he says, gasping for air. “You saw.”
Luke slips close enough to him to smell the stale sweat and fear and dried up bacta gel clinging to his skin. “It’s alright,” he says as he rips open the sedative patch. It’s a small adhesive one, not a needle stick, which Luke is glad for. Easier to administer and a lot less traumatic for both of them. He presses it against the back of the man’s neck and holds it there while he flinches violently away.
But it takes effect quickly and his shaking subsides and soon they’re just two quiet men standing in the rain. He stops yelling nonsense, and he stops fighting Luke. He doesn’t faint again, which Luke is relieved about: no more bacta means him falling into a coma is probably a death sentence.
But he’s shut down the way Luke has before, the way most fighter pilots in the Rebellion did at one point or another, when too many people have died, when too many losses have stacked up. Or in Luke’s case, it still happens when he thinks too much about what it felt like when the million people on the Death Star all blinked out of existence at once. He hadn’t felt Alderaan. But by the time they destroyed the second Death Star, though, he was tuned in enough to the Force. He felt it all.
The world just shuts off and gets real quiet and you go away for a while. The sedative patch is helping, but it’s probably not what’s the root cause here.
“Come here,” he says to the man, and takes him by the elbow. He leads him back into the hut and out of the rain, sits him down gently on the cot, and sets him to eat a ration bar robotically while Luke wipes the rain water off his face as gently as he can.
“It’s alright. Whatever it is, it’s alright.”
Luke convinces himself of it, too, so of course it’s a tremendous surprise when he wakes from a second nap to find the man attempting to murder him.