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Of the two of them, it's Din who recognizes the changes in the sky, seeking out the patterns that measure the ebb and flow of the year. One might not find it easy to tell in that seeming-wasteland, but in the southern hemisphere of Tatooine, the beginning of winter was fast approaching and the longest night of the year only a day away.
Ben, who had apparently found better things to do in his years on-planet than learn the meanings of the meandering stars and how they served to mark the passing of time, is surprised to hear it.
"There is an old tradition — I've only had occasion to observe it a few times on longer missions, when I was a teenager — of sitting vigil on the longest night of the year."
"What, all night?" Din asks.
Ben shrugs, as if there should be nothing remarkable in that, and Din realizes he's probably spent half a dozen sleepless nights doing just that since Din came into his house. Given how questionable was the quality of Ben's sleep at the best of times, he probably found it more restful to just stay awake in meditation.
"Could I try it?"
So that's how Din finds himself here, wrapped in a blanket against the night chill, Ghomrassen chasing her sisters in a whirling dervish-dance over the distant horizon. He knows he's drifted off more than once, and brought himself back only to float away again, his head buzzing just a little, his spine tingling with electric light the way it always does when he's deeply concentrated.
Ben, beside him, is practically a part of the landscape. Din wonders if anything could disturb his focus now. He hasn't twitched a muscle, Din's sure, since they sat down.
To ground himself again, he recalls why they're doing this, how Ben had explained this custom to him; that it was about facing down the dark, staring it dead in the eye, until doubt of its ever passing away took hold in your heart, gripped you tight. And then you got to watch as with the slow inevitability of every dawn, the night gave way.
Personally, he finds the metaphor a little heavy-handed, but tradition is tradition. This was just one of those uncounted, uncountable customs that time had brought about and then worn smooth, sanding off the edges of detail and rationale, until it was simply what one did, because it was simply what was done.
"I'm awake!" he says, and it would be apropos of nothing, if he hadn't felt the grip of gravity drag him inexorably forward. He's dozed off again.
"Oh yes," comes a placid voice from over his left shoulder. "Wide awake."
He is wide awake. And he's sweetly snug under the blanket draped over his shoulders, the warmest one they have in the house. And the sand beneath him is so yielding and soft, promising a comfortable cradle for him as the swing of the moons and the song of the stars lull him deeper, and deeper...
Before he knows what's happening, he feels Ben' hands slip under his armpits, hauling him to his feet.
"I'm focused," Din insists, not at all petulant.
"Yes," Ben agrees, and shifts his stance to bear Din's weight better, his grip tightening on Din's waist.
"I can keep going," Din says, with emphasis, though the urge to do so frankly pales in comparison to the feeling of hanging heavy against Ben's side, reliant on the support of Ben's arm across his back. It's possible he exaggerates the extent to which he cannot hold himself upright, for the sake of prolonging that feeling of warmth, of enfolding strength.
"Mmhmm," Ben hums, even as they make their lopsided, halting way back towards the house, their shadows sharp against the sand in the moonlight.
They shoulder their way through the front door.
"Come on, to bed with you," Ben says, the promise of a chuckle coloring the edges of his voice.
He settles Din down on the edge of the mattress, then gets to his own knees. His hands expertly unbuckle and remove Din's boots in the pitch-dark, setting them aside, a tidy pair.
When Ben stands, turning back towards the front door, ready to return alone to the empty desert, Din strikes. Surging forward, he wraps both arms around Ben's hips and pulls him down onto the mattress beside him, too exhausted to feel shame in disturbing his discipline.
Coasting over the edges of sleep, all Din knows is this lazy hunger, cold craving warmth. He tangles their two sets of limbs together, pressing his chilled toes against Ben's calves, making him gasp and pull away in rare surprise. And sometimes the pleasure rests in just that, in evoking a reaction from him, any reaction, good or bad, right or wrong. It makes him feel like a little boy tossing rocks into windows, willing to risk any threat of future punishment for the thrill of shattering glass.
But he gets what he wants, this time. He gets his reaction. For once, it's Ben who kisses him first, reaching out for Din's cheek with a dry, cracked palm and pulling him in. He does it so well, with such patience, he doesn't even mind the way Din mimics him, mirroring all his tactics back at him because he still only knows what Ben has taught him. At least Ben could never accuse him of a lack of focus. He might have trouble concentrating sometimes, when they sit for too long and his feet go numb, or his hunger or the heat or the sound of the wind distracts him, but he never gets distracted doing this.
"Sleep now," Ben says, after several long, languorous minutes of this.
"Not yet," Din says, nibbling along the edges of Ben's jaw.
"Sleep, dear one," Ben insists, pulling away.
"Not yet .”
Under the blanket, Din can feel Ben gripping his hip under his shirt; not with intent, because this is going nowhere. These times, Din knows Ben’s affection as a delightful spiral, a leaf floating on still waters, spinning in the breeze. But still, it's as though Ben senses it's just the anchor Din needs, this one point of contact besides their mouths, and it lets Din keep his own hands to himself, keeps him satisfied.
Din gets his way for a long while yet, and sleep doesn't find them until the three moons have driven each other clear to the far end of the sky, and the grey light of first-dawn unfurls over the near horizon.
It's not easy for Din to see his whole head in the tiny, cracked mirror Ben uses for shaving, but he can tell his hair is getting long. He probably doesn't need to do anything about it; he only ever cared before when it threatened to peek out from under the rim of the helmet, or when his curls started to take up too much of the limited real estate within. He's used to just hacking at the ends of it with a switched-off vibroblade, but even as sharp as he keeps his gear, it never fails to hurt.
He used to weep and wail as a child, when it came time to cut his hair. His scalp had been so sensitive to even the slightest tug that his mother, ever-indulgent, had let the long dark sweep of it reach past his shoulders before his father insisted it be brought to heel.
"I could take care of that, you know," says Ben, appearing suddenly behind him in that uncanny way he has. He reaches out, and carefully fingers the very end of one curling tendril looped behind Din's ear. Din suppresses a shudder.
"Fine."
He sits Din outside, where cleanup will be less of a concern.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Din teases, while Ben runs his fingers through the strands to straighten them, humming to himself while he considers his approach.
"It's not the first time I've done this for someone else," Ben says.
And Din has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from asking the questions that inevitably percolate up; who have you done this for, what were they to you, what does this mean that you're doing it for me now?
"Whatever. You're the one that's going to have to look at it."
Ben settles on short-back-and-sides, and Din already feels better the moment he's finished, the desert breeze sweet on the unobstructed skin at the back of his neck. The rasp of Ben's calloused fingers over the buzzed spots as he considers his handiwork makes Din shiver. He jokes about leaving Din enough for a short little nerf-tail right at the back, and Din makes a face. Din considers asking him to just buzz the top too, while he's at it, save him the trouble later on, but he thinks about the way Ben's fingers like to linger there, buried in his curls, and thinks better of it.
There are some nights when sleep comes for neither of them, and not for good reasons. Nights when Din feels the lack of the grounding weight of his armor like a parasite crawling under his skin, an itch he wishes he could just cut out and throw away. When he can't help but remember who took it from him — who, exactly, is responsible for his lack.
Ben does not look at him at these times, does not touch him, but with unflinching insight still understands that for Din to be alone in this condition is a crippling impossibility.
Wisely, he never suggests Din try to meditate these feelings away. Perhaps, if Din were a true apprentice, a real student and not just a poor facsimile of one, he wouldn't be so soft with him. Din doesn't know.
They walk out into the dark together, aimless peregrinations until dawn. If the sand weren't too soft to allow it, Din would run, exhaust himself with running, run right back into the arms of his old captors and away from Ben's cloying understanding. But he doesn't do that.
"Talk to me," Ben will say, when Din gets like this. But Din can never find anything to say, so it's Ben who has to talk instead. He's much more suited to it, indeed Din suspects that once talking had been his great talent, before his circumstances changed. He can talk about anything, but what Din prefers are stories from the distant past. Ben spins tales about his youth and childhood that Din cannot for a moment believe to be real, that must be composed for his benefit. But they have their desired effect, confusing and amusing him in equal measure. Most nights, the desire to flee into the desert subsides.
It's worse than usual, tonight.
Instead of talking, Ben leads them out through the velvet-black shadows of the canyon, into the swept-out center of the garden. The moves they practice have no relationship to anything taught in either of their respective martial traditions; the kinds of holds and binds and dirty tricks learned in the middle of saloon-brawls, on pirate ships and in spacer's haunts. It’s fighting without honor, without discipline, without rules, and they are both alarmingly skilled at it.
Only Ben's perfect command of the situation keeps either of them from getting seriously hurt. Din can get vicious like this, when he's only half-sure that his body is really his own, and he barely feels the hits he's taking. Finally, Ben has no choice but to keep him pinned in the dust until he's calmed himself down, their chests heaving, hands furling and unfurling into fists and out again.
He knows better than to ask Din if he's feeling better, if this is helping. Of course it isn't. It can't.
But eventually, satisfied that Din has burned off enough restless energy that neither of them are fated to break a limb or lose an eye over it, Ben releases him and rolls away. Stretched out on his back, he stares up into the dense carpet of stars.
"It's not wrong,” Ben says, “for you to be angry with me."
"I'm not."
"It's natural."
"That's not the problem," Din says through gritted teeth.
And it isn’t. The problem is that Din is so full ; not just of anger, but of everything. Full of want and dread and a driving consciousness that he can't seem to silence even when he's doing everything Ben's taught him to do, when his mind should by rights be still as a sand dune on a windless day.
"You are young," Ben says eventually. "This is simply...how it feels."
Din knows this. It doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't even come close.
“When I was young,” Ben begins, “there was a teaching that I struggled with, more than any other. It had many names, but was taught to me as the ‘perfection of wisdom,’ and its purpose was to establish in one’s mind the essential emptiness of all things, their intrinsic lack of self. Even the doctrine itself, if you drilled down to its center, was a hollow thing, essence without substance. To grasp it was to understand that one cannot cling to anything; beings, feelings, even the Force. I used to lie awake at night, begging to be able to understand. It felt like the key to being a good Jedi was buried somewhere in that idea, if I could just unlock the meaning of it. I poured so much of myself into making it happen, but it never did.”
“That sounds…” Din trails off, unwilling to describe his own feelings, lest they be interpreted as an insult. It sounds, frankly, like something closely resembling despair, and it makes something within him clench, go cold. It aches, the thought of Ben as little more than a child, wishing he could carve away all the parts of himself that didn't accord with his vision of what a Jedi ought to be.
“It was meant to be a comfort, I think," Ben continues. “A way of reassuring, encouraging one to not take things too seriously. At least, I always thought so. I do think so.”
“And now?” Din asks. “Do you understand it now?”
“No,” Ben says, heavily. “Not even now.”
Din considers. It’s not as foreign an idea as he might have expected. In a way, it reminded him of the way one was meant to think of one’s armor. If the perfect Mandalorian existed, they would be a hollow suit of beskar. When he had imagined his future self, when he began to train to take the Creed, that was what he’d dreamed of being. He’d imagined he could hollow himself out, make himself nothing but a vessel of Resol'nare, something without a self.
“I’m glad you don’t,” Din says, at last. “I hope you never do.”
The morning after Longest Night, Din wakes up expecting what he always finds; an empty bed, and a trail leading out into the dunes. Easy enough to follow, but still a renunciation, an expression of distance far more than physical.
Today, though, he's surprised by the warm weight at his back, the brush of cool breath over the nape of his neck. Ben's hand is draped, careless, over the low curve of Din's abdomen, and he has to squeeze his thighs together to try and banish the sudden surge of his arousal.
He could stay like this, he thinks, all day. Hold Ben here until the suns reach their peak and sink low again, and find happy occupation for every passing minute of that time. But Ben has his routines, and he will not want to neglect his dawn practice.
Reluctantly, he slips out from under the blankets and Ben's hand, pads silently to the galley, and puts on the meager pot of water for their morning tea. When it's done, he crouches down beside the mattress, shakes Ben awake, and they pull on their boots, go out into the grey light together.
Din has started to crave this more and more, watching the sunrise with him, seeing the way the rose-light of morning strikes his face, changes the color of his hair, the color of his eyes. Even without the concealment of his visor, he still hasn't trained himself out of looking where he wants to, when he wants to. He was too used to it, and now he doesn't care enough to stop.
Nor will he stop, he thinks. Not until the moment Ben sends him away.