Chapter Text
Luke Skywalker can remember exactly the last time he had thrown up.
It has been after Bespin and Cloud City, when he had been back with Leia and crammed in a tiny ship not meant for so many people, when he had tried to reach for Leia and stumbled and fell because his balance was all off the realization had sunk in too deep and too fast that his hand was gone. Leia had only just managed to shove him in the tiny sonic ‘fresher as his dry heaves turned wet and violent, running a soothing hand down his spine as Luke threw up everything in his stomach and then some.
Luke felt like that now, realization hitting him so hard that he had to swallow down spit and bile.
“She’s a child.” He croaked out. He knew very well how the Senate felt about Rey. They were never subtle about it, and Luke had known the only reason Rey wasn’t in detention centers with the rest of the Imperial children was because she was under his care. Because he had claimed responsibility for her when he pulled her out of the Death Star instead of his father. But he never thought– “She’s just a child.” he repeated.
Leia’s face went sour, her lips drawing into a thin line. “That doesn’t matter to them.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you?” Luke pleaded, already knowing asking would do him no good. Leia was just one voice among too many.
Leia looked away, crossing her arms high over her chest. “Luke, I don’t—“ she toyed her bottom lip between her teeth. Her knuckles were white, her wedding ring looking too bright against her pale skin. “I don’t agree with it, but the Senate isn’t willing to compromise—“
“So you’re just going to let them put Rey on trial for war crimes?” Luke cut her off, his voice rising with each word. “She’s thirteen, Leia!”
“She’s also the only living relative of the Emperor,” Leia said softly. Carefully. Like she was trying to placate him. All it managed to do was make Luke more panicked. He would go so far as to say that he was even feeling hysterical. But Luke rather thought that he was justified in that. “The people want to see justice-“
“That’s not justice. That’s–they’re going to execute a child for things her grandfather did!” Luke was yelling now, but he didn’t care. “By that logic, Ben should be right up there with her!”
Leia looked away. “Don’t say that–”
“Why?” Luke demanded. “Because it’s true?”
“Ben didn’t do anything–”
“Neither did Rey!”
“Rey was training under the Emperor to be a Sith, Luke.” Leia spit out. Her eyes went wide a moment later, face paling to a shade almost as white as her dress. Luke felt himself go eerily still. He wondered what expression had settled on his face to make Leia look like that. “I didn’t–Luke–”
“I’ll see you tonight.” Luke snapped.
He turned on his heel and stormed out of her office, the doors and windows rattling behind him.
—
Luke knew that they should have left Coruscant as soon as Rey came into his life, but he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Despite everything he had done for the New Republic, despite how they called him the Rebellion’s Hero and praised him for the fall of the Empire, he was still just a moisture farmer from Tatooine with only the clothes on his back to call his own. There was nothing to the Skywalker name except an illegally modified x-wing he all but stole during the Rebellion, an astromech droid that had once belonged to his mother and then his father, and a grave somewhere in the dune sea bearing the name Shmi Skywalker.
The senate assured him they were working on providing pensions and backpay to everyone that actively participated in the rebellion, Luke included, but it had been months and they had nothing to show for it. As of right now, Luke had nothing except an apartment in the high rise buildings of Coruscant that was on loan to him.
Rey had even less.
Once she had been promised a galaxy. Now all she had was a room in the apartment that didn’t belong to either of them.
It would be so easy to leave it all.
If Luke just had somewhere to go—
—
“I don't know why you keep trying to protect her, Master Skywalker.”
Luke stiffened, clutching his flute of champagne tight while putting on an even tighter smile. He hated coming to these senate galas. It rubbed him all sorts of wrong ways trying to play nice with politicians and nobility, but Luke was also intimately aware that when the only things you had were on loan to you, playing nice was the only way you could keep them. “I’m not sure what you mean, Senator Hokl.”
The man hummed and moved closer to Luke. Luke stepped away, but the Senator just followed. “She’s not worth your time.” He placed a hand on Luke’s shoulder and squeezed. “She’s an Empire—“
“I appreciate your input,” Luke struggled to keep his tone even, shrugging Senator Hokl’s hand off him and taking a larger step back. He was never afraid to voice his dislike of Rey to Luke, but Luke was not in the mood to hear it today. “But it’s not needed.”
The senator didn’t seem at all deterred by Luke’s dismissal. “I thought Jedi weren't supposed to have attachments.”
For a moment, Luke didn’t answer.
The Order of Obi-Wan’s time, the Order that the Senators knew, would have said yes. Attachments were forbidden because the Council from a time long before them–when a Mandalorian had stood head to head with them and sat on their Council for years before walking away and declaring war for reasons no one knew anymore–had said they were too dangerous. Even if they had not been deemed so, it was difficult to love and feel during a war. Luke knew this achingly well. It had grown too easy to shut emotions out, Obi-Wan had said. It was a simpler thing to do than grieve and mourn and love everyone they met and lost. Simpler to say that a Jedi was not supposed to feel.
But the texts and tomes and relics that Luke had found told a very different story. Said very different things.
“It’s not that simple.” Luke finally said.
Senator Hokl put on a pinched look. “Isn’t it?”
“It isn’t.” Luke snapped. He set his glass of champagne down on the tray of a passing waiter and walked off before the senator could think to say anything else.
He ducked and weaved through the crowd on the ballroom floor, feilding wandering hands and curious touches as he passed with a firm push of his own hand. Luke needed air. He needed to see something other than Coruscant's bright lights and artificial sky and glass covered buildings. He needed–he needed to leave. He should have left months ago.
Luke tried to stumble towards an open balcony, but he was pulled back before he could slip through the velvet drapes.
“Where are you going?” Leia asked. She looked beautiful and fake and worried. Like a doll. Luke couldn’t even remember what this gala was for. There weren't any plants on Coruscant, Luke thought with a touch of hysteria. Everything was fake.
“Away.” Luke answered. “I’m leaving.”
–
Luke had heard the stories of Mandalore.
Everyone had.
During the Clone Wars they had been under what could only really be called a tyrannical rule—Duchess Satine Kryze had had good intentions, Obi-Wan made sure Luke knew that, but good intentions do not always mean good deeds. She loved her people, there was never any question in that, but it was entirely conditional.
The Duchess had erased so much of Mandalore’s culture and history without a blink of an eye. The things she wanted for her people didn’t allow for the violence and bloody history of the Mand’alors of old. The stories and songs of Mandalore’s people were left to gather dust. Their language was changed, the dialect and common tongue of the warriors falling out of favor and replaced with the hardly spoken dialects of nobelity. Age old traditions were tossed aside–including the Darksaber and the centuries old way of combat and mercy in which it was won.
Satine Kryze’s rule of Mandalore, in the eyes of many of her people and the old gods that they all pretended to not believe in anymore, was not legitimate. Or honorable.
So many of Mandalore’s people were already gone and lost before the Empire ever set foot on the planet. They were either forcefully driven away by the Duchess and her leadership, or they were not willing to change themselves to fit her ideal pacifistic world.
It was hard to deny that the Satine Kryze had a direct hand in Mandalore’s fall, however unintentional it had been.
Now Mandalore was nothing but a planet of dust and bones and ghosts.
They say it’s cursed.
Haunted.
Dead.
But Luke was intimately familiar with dead planets.
–
Rey was sitting in front of the couch, cross legged on the floor of their Coruscant apartment when Luke returned.
Her lightsaber was taken apart in pieces and scattered in an arc around her while she held the kyber crystal in her open palms. Her eyes were closed, not deep in a healing trance but lost enough in the Force that it took her a moment to realize that Luke was in the room.
“I think it’s starting to get color back,” she said, looking up at Luke as he gingerly sat beside her, crossing his legs and mirroring her pose. “See?” she held it out to him. “It looks–brighter, I think.”
“May I?” Luke asked, smiling softly as Rey passed the kyber to him.
It was quieter than his, less loud and exicatable in the Force, but Luke couldn’t blame it. It had been broken by Rey’s own hand when she had been hardly old enough to truly understand what her grandfather was asking her to do, but it had still bonded with her, still loved her even as it bled every time Rey ignited her saber.
It still loved her, Luke could feel that, warm and sweet in the Force and growing steadily warmer the more Rey coaxed the kyber back into the Light.
“It is,” Luke couldn’t quite keep back a giddy smile as held the kyber between them in his palm, pointing towards a thin line of pale yellow where the crystal had once been cracked. Rey had worked so hard to heal the crystal, had spent months sitting for hours at a time in deep meditation while she tried to repair and strengthen a weak and fragile bond. Yoda had come to Luke once, when Rey had first started, telling him it would be better to find another crystal for her, that it was near impossible to heal something that had been so damaged. Luke had kindly told him to fuck off. “See, right there?”
The old tomes that Luke had found in the wreckage of the Imperial Palace–what once had been Coruscant's Jedi temple before the Empire seized it and the Rebellion later burned it down–spoke only once of healing broken kyber.
But once was all Luke needed to see to know it was possible.
Rey rocked forward, peering at the kyber and squinting as she tried to see what Luke was pointing to. Then her eyes went wide. “It is!” she said gleefully, taking the kyber back from Luke and cradling it in her palm. “It is!” she repeated, her smile so wide that it looked like it hurt.
Luke couldn’t understand how anyone could look at her and see the Galactic Emperor staring back.
“Rey—” he started softly, his smile falling quickly. but Rey beat him to it.
“I know.” She said quietly. She looked away from him, eyes falling on the kyber. “I—I hear them talking.” Her bottom lip trembled, and with her hair pulled back and out of her face and her padawan braid the only thing obscuring her face, Luke could see her eyes growing wet. “The senators don’t—they don’t care if I overhear them.”
“Rey,” Luke said her name again, a little firmer this time. Rey didn’t look at him, but when Luke pulled her into his arms in a tight hug, she held him just as tight. “You’re not going to be put on trial.”
Rey dug her fingers into his back. “How do you know that?” she whispered.
For the first time since Luke took her from the detention center, since she had held a broken crystal out to him and asked him if he could fix it, she sounded afraid.
Luke hauled her into his lap and held her as close to him as he could. He could feel the jagged edges of the kyber dig into his back as Rey clung to him tighter, her crystal still nestled in her palm.
“Because we’re leaving.” he answered, and Luke could almost sob at the relief that washed over him once he finally said it.
—
When they broke Mandalore’s atmosphere, it had looked like everything Luke had expected just as much as it looked like nothing at all like what he pictured.
“It’s so empty.” Rey said softly. She lifted a hand to the window of the x-wing, like she was trying to reach out and touch the sandy earth. There were pockets of vegetation, more a swampy green than anything lush and vibrant, but they were few and far between. Luke could see more bones and rubble than anything else, bleached in bright colors of white by years of poisoned air and an unrelenting sun beating down on them without any respite.
Luke swallowed back something heavy.
Among all this, he knew there were people here. He could feel it in the Force, a faint tremor of something coming back to life, and even if he couldn’t the whole galaxy had watched as Mandalore was swiftly taken back only hours after the Emperor had died.
It had been ugly and violent and bloody–there was no other way to describe it other than a massacre.
The Mandalorians that had fought that day–only a handful, hardly enough for even a platoon–hadn’t taken any prisoners, and when a skeleton crew of a New Republic senate asked for the bodies of the Imperial officers a few days later, the Mandalorians responded by burning them until there was nothing but bones left. It was message enough that Mandalore was not and would not be part of the New Republic without the senate ever having to officially ask.
Luke couldn’t necessarily say he blamed them.
Mandalrore had suffered much more under Imperial rule than most, and they had suffered more before that when they were part of the Delegation of Neutral Planets during the Clone Wars. Any usable farmland was lost to the wasteland outside of the biodomes and the Dutchess refused to extend trade to anyone outside of the Neutral Planets, so caught up she was in not breaking a neutrality that was nothing more than a pretty glass stained window.
Luke could only imagine how desperately Mandalore would want to be independent after all that.
“That’s what war does,” Luke said quietly, not even sure why he was saying it because Rey was just as familiar with war as Luke was. “It makes things empty.”
The x-wings proximity alarms started blaring.
“Master Skywalker?” Rey looked back at him with wide eyes, and Luke only had a moment to undo his harness and reach for her and hold her tightly against his chest as they were shot out of the sky.
—
They crashed in a pit of mud.
Luke crawled out of his x-wing wet and sticky, the mud quickly drying on his skin once it was fully exposed to Mandalore’s harsh sun. His lungs ached as he took in a deep breath, and Luke wasn’t sure if that was just because of the mud he had swallowed or if he had broken ribs, or if it was because the air was still full of toxins.
Maybe it was all three.
Rey was less dirty, but there was still a smear of brown on her cheek and across her thigh from where Luke couldn’t quite cushion her fall, her padawan braid stuck to the side of her face by the sticky mud.
“Are you alright?” Luke took her cheeks in his hands, pulling her braid back and tucking it behind her ear before holding her still and looking her over for any obvious injury. She seemed to be breathing okay, and outside of the bruise blossoming across her thigh Luke couldn’t see any other wounds.
“I’m fine,” Rey said, trying to squirm out of his hold. “Are you okay, Master Skywalker?”
“I’ve had worse.” Luke automatically replied, ignoring the way he wheezed around the words.
Rey frowned. She moved her hands to place on Luke’s chest, but Luke easily caught them in his own before she could get any further. “Not here.” Luke said softly. He could hear the clinking of armor off in the distance, heavy foot falls in the sand. The Mandalorians who had shot them down weren't even trying to be subtle. And why would they? They were on familiar ground. Luke wasn’t. “We don’t know how the Mandalorians will react. It’s not safe.”
Luke figured it was a pretty safe bet to make that they wouldn’t react well anyway, not after they had shot the x-wing out of atmo. Which Luke supposed was fair–he had blatantly trespassed in Mandalorian space when they had made it clear that any uninvited Republic ships would be shot down.
“But you’re hurt—“
“I’ll be fine.” Luke said gently. Then he smiled. “I haven’t lied to you before, have I?”
Rey looked like she wanted to argue. “No.”
Luke could hear the Mandalorians moving closer. Two of them, maybe.
“Rey, listen to me,” Luke placed his hands on her cheeks again, holding her tight. “If we get separated—“ he started, reaching one hand down to ghost his fingers along the hilt of her saber. He could feel the kyber hum, reacting to the touch.“—this is not yours. And you are not—you’re just Rey. Rey from Jakku.”
Rey nodded slowly. “But we won't, right?”
Luke swallowed back something heavy, taking a deep breath as he lifted his hand to tuck a stray lock of hair that had escaped her bun behind her ear with her braid. “I can’t promise you that.”
Rey’s eyes widened, and then Luke was gently shoving her behind him and got back to his feet.
His head spun from the sudden movement, and it was all Luke could do to stay on his feet and draw his blaster as a group of three–he was off one–Mandalorians surrounded them, all in blue armor. Luke couldn’t quite blink away the stars that were hovering just at the edge of his eyesight, nor could he get in as deep of a breath as he wanted.
Rey reached towards him, holding tightly to his wrist.
“You’re trespassing on Mandalorian soil, Jedi.” The word was spit out at him by the man at the front of the group. He had his blaster pointed right at Luke’s chest.
Rey’s fingers dug into Luke’s arm. He could feel her fear leaking through their bond even as she did her best to try and let it go. Luke tried to push as much warmth and reassurance to her as he could, tried to let her know that it was okay to be afraid. That Luke was very much afraid right now because if he said one wrong thing–
“I wouldn’t be if you didn’t shoot my x-wing down.” Luke quipped, then wanted to hit himself.
The biggest one of the group snorted.
“Why did you come here?” The woman asked. She was looking at Rey, head cocked in curiosity while the sun reflected harshly off the visor of her helmet. Rey took a step closer to Luke.
Luke swallowed, and spoke as firmly as he could. “I’ve come to request asylum.”