Work Text:
HANNA CITY FOGS
Fog rolled in low and thick over Hanna City, damping down the smell of asphalt and exhaust and bringing the salt-and-kelp scent of the sea over the city. Luke breathed in deep and closed his eyes. The moist air soothed his sore throat, and the drizzle cooled the tired skin of his eyelids. He let the fog press down on him and breathed out slowly, his mind moving into a blessed blankness.
Fuck but there was nothing quite as exhausting as end-of-year parent-teacher conference days.
The sound of the walk signal brought him out of his brief reverie. He crossed the street, admiring the play of the streetlamps and the red and green lights against the fog and the damp ground. The asphalt shimmered, little indistinct grains of colored light and dark shadow. It reminded him of the glowing edge he’d wanted to achieve in his last piece. He’d come close, but not quite; in retrospect, he hadn’t picked the right color to contrast against the background, nor had he had enough time to get the precise control he needed to make it exactly what he wanted.
He’d get it right on his next one, he thought. Wildstyle, but his wildstyle, all curves and flow instead of straight lines and spiky edges. (He couldn’t help it if art nouveau was his favorite art movement.) He already knew that the white and linden green would really pop in this one – it was the perfect color for that glow, and it was going to look good tied in with the pure orange and butta yellow.
He was really looking forward to some time spent sketching.
The tension left his shoulders as he made his way back to the apartment. Walking Hanna City’s streets always calmed him. There was something about being out in the city that quieted him down, as if being out among other people, among the comings and goings and livings and dyings, made him stronger. Healthier. Happier. He felt a part of something when he was out in the city, a tree in a forest instead of standing alone.
He supposed he was an extrovert.
Besides, when he was out in the city he could see the art.
There was a new piece up on the side of the bodega down the street from his apartment. He recognized the artist immediately: Mando. Whoever they were, they had a distinctive color palette – deep reds and silver and greys, with occasional dashes of oranges and browns – and superb can control. They favored an especially angular and geometric wildstyle, strangely arrow-less, though their style definitely varied; they had a few bubbles over the highway overpasses, and a couple pieces in some more secluded spaces that even regular passers-by would recognize as real art. One of the latter was one of Luke’s favorite pieces in the whole city: A narrow, speedy-looking spaceship flying across a red-and-silver wheeling galaxy.
This one was simple, just a quick throw-up: Mando’s name in an abbreviated version of his angular lettering, in brick and silver matte with just a few accents of what looked like one of the lighter MTN 94 browns. It was quick, not much detail or shading, but Mando really did always have excellent can control – such smooth lines, Luke thought.
He smiled to himself, and let his feet carry him home, mind swirling peacefully with images of paint lines on brick.
THE BLACK BOOK
“Come onnnnn, Luke,” Han whined.
“Seriously, it’s really good. Like they’re both really good. Especially together.” Lando’s voice was languid but insistent.
“I have to teach in seven hours, I am not getting stoned with you,” Luke said. “But you should definitely hand me some of the Cheetos.”
“Nuh uh, man, Cheetos are only for stony snacks–” Han’s protest turned into a shriek as Chewie plucked the bag of Cheetos out of his hand and tossed it to Luke.
“Thanks, man.” Luke poured some Cheetos into his palm and swung the bag back to Chewie. Chewie placed it back in Han’s hands, reducing his protest to some murmured invective.
The living room was warm and cozy and absolutely filled with noise and smoke and surprisingly copious Cheeto dust. Han, Chewie, and Lando had a game of sabacc going on the coffee table, which meant lots of loud laughter and more than one hit off a pipe. Luke was exceptionally glad they had one of the corner apartments on the first floor. The apartment was supposedly only him and Han, two young professionals – a teacher and a mechanic, early to rise and early to bed. That was true except for the fact that it was absolutely untrue. Neither Luke nor Han had ever been quiet in their lives, and although no one else technically lived here, the apartment was always full. Chewie spent more time here than in his own apartment, Leia had her own key to the place, and Lando was known for passing out on the couch after games of sabacc or dejarik. (Then there’d been the brief period where Luke and Lando had that thing and Han had straight-up told Luke that even he found the noise a little much.)
In retrospect, it was lucky that the guy with the apartment across the hall worked night shifts.
Luke crunched a Cheeto out of his palm and turned back to his black book. He wanted to work on his next big piece – the forest temple scene was going to be fire – but he still wanted to practice those glowing edges, even if they were mostly just going to be in his signature for the temple scene. Better to do that in something a little less complex.
He turned the page, unsatisfied with the initial doodle he’d made for a wildstyle of his writer name. The spacing and flow of the lines hadn’t quite been right – too busy on the lefthand side and not busy enough on the right. He began sketching again, working it out. A little less space between the tittle of the j and the stem, a little more curve to the tail; much more curve to the ascender of the d; more reduced space between the tittle of the i and its stem, so that the glowing shadow he was going to add would be shared between tittle and stem.
He grabbed his colored pencils, started with layering light green over true green, outlining in white, before reaching for the full array of oranges. On a whim he grabbed his crimson lake and mahogany red pencils, his mind thinking back to the brick of Mando’s throw-up.
He didn’t realize that he’d been completely dead to the outside world – what Leia liked to call one of his “art trances” – until he felt something hit him in the forehead. He looked down to where a Cheeto was now in his lap.
“You’ve been ignoring us for the past fifteen minutes,” Lando said when he looked up. “Figures that it takes Cheetos to bring you back to us.”
Han snorted from where he lounged back on the couch, eyes red, a beer hanging loosely from his hand. “Didn’t you have to teach in the morning or something?” he asked, sipping from the beer.
Luke blinked his eyes, coming fully out of his art-induced daze. He looked down at the drawing he’d produced; this was it, he thought. The lines were balanced, and the colors were right – his usual greens and oranges and whites, but with striking streaks of brickish red that made the thing pop. Taking some inspiration from Mando’s work had been worth it. “What time is it?”
“Morning,” Lando said, nodding at the alarm clock on the side table. Luke pondered again for a moment what it meant that friends crashed at their place so often that there was an alarm clock in his living room.
He then looked at the time. “Oh fuck me.”
“Whenever you want, darling,” Lando quipped. Han groaned and Chewie just snickered. Luke threw the Cheeto in his lap back at Lando, who wildly swatted at it.
“I hate you all,” Luke said.
“Lies, you fucking love us,” Han said. He laid a set of cards down on the coffee table and looked Chewie in the eyes. “Fucking sabacc.”
Chewie raised his eyebrows.
“How dare you say I cheated–”
“Han, do you ever not fucking cheat–”
“Fuck off, Lando, you–”
Luke rolled his eyes and closed his black book. He had to be at school in five hours, and a few hours of sleep was better than nothing.
WILDSTYLE
The fog was rolling in, but the sidewalk – and more importantly, the walls – were still dry.
It wasn’t a particularly heavy fog, just the usual marine layer that crept over Hanna City after dark in the early summer. Luke was grateful for that. They’d had especially heavy fogs recently, and if it had been as deep as the fog after the parent-teacher conference night, he would have been utterly fucked – at least when it came to getting spray paint adhered to a wall, especially without drips.
The heavy fogs were rather nice for not getting caught.
He walked down the sidewalk as nonchalantly as possible wearing his usual writing uniform: black zip-up hoodie over a white tee, black handkerchief around his neck, black jeans, and black Converse. Since he usually wrote at night, the ensemble kept him less visible – and the hoodie and handkerchief were easy to cast off if he needed to book it quickly, which had happened more than once. His backpack – also black – was full of paint cans.
He pulled the hood a little tighter around his head against the chill of the fog, and then returned his hands to the pockets of the hoodie. His path to his chosen spot was a twisting one, taken entirely to avoid cameras (though there was a faster way home if he needed to dash). He’d picked a piece of wall a few blocks over, in a spot that wasn’t precisely out-of-the-way but which happened to have a bus shelter in between the spot and the nearby surveillance camera. It would be a nice spot to zone out for a bit and write.
He turned onto the street where the spot was, keeping his face turned away from the surveillance camera, and then frowned when he moved past the bus shelter.
Someone had already gotten there and taken up half the spot. He’d been by earlier today scoping it out – they must have thrown this up in the last hour or two.
A few seconds’ extra investigation showed him that it was another Mando wildstyle. He snorted. He didn’t know why, but it felt fitting: Of course Mando would take up half the spot he’d been targeting for something that incorporated one of the other writer’s colors.
Luke spent a few moments looking carefully at the graffiti. They’d left the edges of it a little – ragged wasn’t the right word; but the edge of the piece was extraordinarily irregular, points and lines coming out of the central tangle that made up Mando’s name. Mando’s work always made him think of art deco gone rogue, neat geometries spilling out past straight lines and right angles to go utterly wild.
Looking at it, he could figure out ways to not only compress his work to fit next to Mando’s – writing over his, especially so soon, would be paramount to starting a fight – but even link the two up. It was maybe a little much, incorporating one piece into another, but…
He grinned. This was going to be fun.
He dropped his backpack to the ground and unzipped it, grabbing the first can he needed from the top. He felt that familiar spike of fear that came with grabbing the can – what if a cop came? – and did what he always did: He took the moment to relish it. He shook the can and kept staring at the wall, visualizing what he wanted to see. After the can was shaken enough – he always thought of it as warming up the colors – he began to paint.
Oh stars, this was fun. He didn’t really have a writing crew; if anything, it was the opposite. Han and Chewie and Lando weren’t particularly interested in graffiti. Leia, on the other hand, thought he was absolutely insane and was sure he was going to be arrested. “I don’t want to bail you out at 4 a.m. on a fucking Wednesday, Luke, and do you have any idea how incensed Mom will be if she finds out? Let alone Dad? Let alone Uncle Obi?” she’d said, more than once, when she saw Luke’s black book or his bag of paint cans or one of his pieces on the walls around the city.
(Luke personally thought that his parents wouldn’t mind as long as he wasn’t arrested. Uncle Obi-Wan, on the other hand, would bail him out in an instant but also give him that look.)
And then there was work. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to find any other graffiti artists amongst the rest of the staff at Hannatown Elementary. If he got arrested – well. It wasn’t a felony in Hanna City, but that didn’t mean he’d keep his job. He loved working with the kids, most of whom would have loved his art and been fascinated by it, but their parents? That was another story. Graffiti made him a delinquent and a delinquent could never be a good teacher, even if they’d thought him an excellent one the day before.
So. It was nice to work off another writer’s work, even if they weren’t writing together.
He kept spraying, working through the butta yellow and pure orange pieces before grabbing the color he’d added on whimsy: brick. He placed the originally intended accent pieces in their spots, and then looked at the left edge of his work where it butted up next to Mando’s.
He grinned, and began to connect the pieces. Not painting over Mando’s – nope, that would be a stroke too far – but letting them move into each other, curving out from Mando’s straight lines and sharp angles into the undulating patterns of his work. It was easier than he would have thought to match up the edges of the two pieces. When he was done connecting the pieces, he stepped back a moment to look at them. A little more orange and yellow and – yep. There it was. Still two distinct pieces by distinct artists, but connected, flowing into each other.
Time, now, to get that linden green-and-white shadow work right.
He zoned out into the work, hand almost moving of its own accord as he worked the green and white in until it sprang out from the concrete, vivid and glowing, almost like a green laser beam.
His smile was soft on his face this time as he dropped the can back into his pack. It looked good.
He hefted the pack onto his back, and quickly booked it away from his piece.
SILVER ON GREEN
“What the fuck,” Luke said. It was a comment, not a question.
“What’s what the fuck?” Han asked. “I think it looks good.”
“It’s–” Luke stared at the piece that he’d finished four days ago. “It’s not what I painted. Fucking rude.” It was mostly what he’d painted, but there were changes: bits of metallic silver-grey against the linden-and-white effect he’d painted.
He looked at Mando’s piece next to his and narrowed his eyes. Mando used silver-grey a lot. Was the other writer pissed he’d connected the two pieces? Was this a way of telling Luke his work needed to be better? Was it a taunt? Was it just playful? What the fuck?
“I don’t get it, it’s your name? And you should be proud of me, by the way, I can finally fucking read that,” Han said. “And it really does look good.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t do the silver, and that’s– it’s–.”
“Silver looks good. Whole thing looks good. It’s bright and happy.”
Luke steamed. It did look good, the silver against his linden-and-white glow.
FOR YOU IN RETURN
Luke held the pure orange in one hand and the white in the other. He stared at Mando’s piece.
He began to spray carefully, accents appearing among the red and grey and brown. The orange popped against grey, the white between red and brown, adding extra bits of depth to an otherwise nice piece.
“There ya fucking go,” he murmured.
YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS
“I meant to ask, when did you start using brown in your stuff?”
Luke turned to Lando with suspicion already forming on his face. “Huh?”
It was a nice Saturday afternoon, sunny and warm, and they were sitting out in the park on towels along with at least two thousand of their nearest neighbors. It was always like this on a nice summer weekend afternoon, people packed into this park like sardines. They were early, or rather Leia, Han, and Chewie were late. Lando was tossing his frisbee up into the air impatiently as they waited.
“That one you put up on the bridge. I didn’t think you used brown.”
“I don’t. And I haven’t put anything up on the bridge since–” Luke stopped suddenly. Brown. “Oh are you fucking kidding me.”
Lando raised his eyebrows. “Uh, no?” He had that look on his face – the one that meant that Luke had gotten sharp and that Lando did not, in fact, appreciate it. It was a look he’d seen a bit too often at the end of their – situation – and it made him wince. Luke didn’t like being sharp, and Lando was his friend.
Luke rubbed the heels of his palms over his eyes. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to shoot the messenger. Seriously, though, brown in one of my pieces?”
“Yeah, I mean, I figured you went back and added to it, that one that’s real high up on the pedestrian bridge. The one you rappelled for or whatever, you know, when you almost gave Han a heart attack.”
Luke smirked. “Yeah, that was a fun one. Brown though?”
Lando looked exasperated. “Yes, Luke.”
“Sorry, sorry, thanks for telling me. That’s – it’s really interesting.”
Lando just raised his brows again at Luke, this time in that oh? look that usually made Luke spill his guts, but then he saw Han and Leia and Chewie and waved them over.
Luke sprawled forward on his beach-turned-park towel and let his bangs fall into his eyes, shielding them from the sun. This thing with Mando was turning into a thing.
THERE ARE DEPTHS TO THIS, YOU SEE
It wasn’t that he was stoned.
Okay, so he was totally fucking stoned.
But the issue wasn’t that he was totally fucking stoned. The issue was that Mando had made changes to two of his pieces, and one was a heaven spot that was fucking hard to get to, which meant that they’d gone to some real fucking effort to make those changes, and furthermore the issue was that Han and Leia did not seem to understood the import of this.
“They had to rappel to do it,” Luke said, gesticulating sharply with the bong stem to make his point. He held the bong itself, a small gold glass piece, loosely by the chamber in his other hand. “That’s kinda wild. Like. That’s really upping the ante. Do they really dislike me that much?” He placed the stem back in the joint and handed the bong over to Leia. She contemplated it for a moment and then passed it on to Han. Luke tossed him the lighter.
“I mean, yes, it’s kind of a ridiculous amount of effort,” Leia said. She took a sip from her beer. “But – it just seems playful? It’s not like he’s painting over your work.”
“I know that, it's just – I can’t explain it, Leia, I just don’t get it!”
“I mean, you painted on one of his, too.”
“Don’t be sensible, Leia. Luke isn’t in the mood for sensible.” Han’s voice was stiff and high-pitched as he tried to talk without letting out a lungful of smoke. Luke picked up Leia’s discarded bottle cap and tossed it at him, missing widely. Han began to laugh, and then choked, smoke pouring out of his mouth. “You fucker,” he wheezed.
“Rappelling, Han,” Luke said.
“Yeah, I’m just saying, it’s not like he’s actually painting over your shit. It’s nice little highlights. Teasing. I dunno. I’m just saying, sounds more like an art crush than an art war.”
“That’s ridiculous, no one rappels for crushes,” Luke said.
Leia burst out laughing, raising her hand to her mouth to keep from spewing beer over the table. “Luke, are you fucking listening to yourself?”
“I am perfectly fucking sensible and making perfect sense.”
Leia shook her head. “Get it together, big bro.”
SLOW MORNINGS IN HANNA CITY
Luke placed his thermos on the edge of the retaining wall and then carefully lowered himself onto it. He let his legs dangle over the edge and picked the thermos back up, holding it between slightly chilled hands.
He loved this spot. Hanna City was full of hills; the weather was mild enough that there was no need to avoid steep streets, and even in those places the people of Hanna City had instead resorted to switchbacks and stairs instead of forgoing building. This particular vantage point was about two-thirds of the way up one of the hills, a tall retaining wall that held the hill back from a neighborhood arterial. The wall was tall enough, and high enough up the hill, that he could look down over the highway that ran along the outskirts of his neighborhood, and beyond to the opposing hills, similarly covered in houses and apartment buildings and trees. It was early still, the sun having only risen an hour or two ago, and the fog was heavy. The buildings and trees on the other hills were barely visible, although he could see the cars whistling down the highway with relative clarity.
He took a sip from his thermos. The cocoa was warm, a pleasant contrast to the chilly air, and he let it relax him. It was a Saturday, and he had no plans beyond this one: sit on the retaining wall and watch the city’s early risers as they went about their day. He loved days without plans. It was one of those things that had always been an inexplicable difference between him and Leia: He felt so relaxed and calm when he had the time and space to do whatever he wanted, to let his whims and desires move him to whatever seemed best at the time. Leia preferred plans, wanted to be able to anticipate and maneuver and respond ahead of time. She’d once told him that it was fine if the plan was that there was no plan, she just needed to know that, and he’d boggled over that one for quite some time.
He liked that he and his twin were nothing alike, except in all the ways that mattered.
Maybe he’d see if she had time today to go down to their parents’ house south of the city and take Artoo for a walk. The old dog had vim and vigor still, and loved tramping through the tall golden grass of the nearby park.
That sounded nice.
He let his eyes rove over the tableau before him as he sipped his cocoa. It was so quiet this morning. The arterial below him was nearly silent – a car coming every few minutes at most – and even the highway traffic was reduced at this hour. Between his job and his hobby, he didn’t get to experience mornings like this during the school year. In the summer, though, he got to have the sleep schedule he wanted, got to experience the city at the times he wanted to experience it.
He was startled out of his calm reverie when he noticed a new bubble piece on the overpass below him. No one had painted anything on that overpass in a while; the highway was busy and well-patrolled, and the overpass very high above the road.
Luke recognized the color before he even processed the name.
BRIBERY
He ducked as a box fell out of the closet and nearly hit him on the head.
“Kark,” he murmured as another box followed the first one, slamming into his shoulder.
Whatever. He’d found his harness and rope.
He heard a noise behind him and turned to see Chewie surveying the mess that he’d just made of the hall closet. Chewie then gave him a very pointed look, his eyebrows almost up in his hair, as he saw the harness and rope in Luke’s hands.
“Don’t tell Leia,” he pleaded. “Um, don’t tell Han, either.” Han couldn’t keep secrets from Leia to save his life.
Chewie raised his other eyebrow.
“I’ll buy your burrito next time we’re at Gordo.”
Chewie lowered his brows, nodded, and walked away from Luke into the kitchen. Luke heard the refrigerator door open and close, heard a couple clinks and a hiss, and then Chewie was in front of him handing him an open beer bottle.
“Thanks,” Luke said. Chewie walked back to the living room.
I DON’T GET YOU BUT THAT’S OKAY
Of course Leia found out.
If there was a thing Luke had learned, it was that Leia always found out.
“Can’t you work on the one that’s gonna get you arrested instead?” she asked after she’d seen the distinctive glint of a carabiner poking out of his almost-fully-zipped backpack that sat on the living room floor. What a stupid error, he thought, forgetting to fully zip that backpack around Leia.
“Oh, I gotta do this one,” he said. “Definitely doing this one.”
“Yeah, but how am I supposed to tell Dad that you bit it and are in the hospital with like eleventy broken bones?”
“I’m not gonna bite it.”
“Luuuuuuke.”
“Leiaaaaaa.”
He was surprised when she suddenly changed tactics.
“Is this a Mando thing?” she asked. Something must have happened on his face, because she took that as a clear confirmation. “Ok. Yup. Mando thing. You’ve been weird about your – art – since the Mando thing started, you know.”
“I don’t have a Mando thing.”
“You have a fucking Mando thing, Luke.” She leaned back on the couch and studied him. “You absolutely have a Mando thing. You’re obsessed and you have no idea who they even are.”
“I am not–”
Fuck.
“Fine. I’m a little obsessed,” he said. He sat down next to her. “They’re a really good artist and–”
He cut off. He wasn’t sure how to describe the way he was feeling about this whole thing. He let himself marinate in that for a moment.
“I don’t know. It’s kinda frustrating that they’re making changes to my work. But it’s–”
Leia turned on the couch to face him, her face quiet but inquisitive, listening. This was one of those things he’d always appreciated about his sister: She pushed him, and told him her opinions with less than a spoonful of tact, but then she was there. She was always, inevitably there, a fixed point in his life that helped everything make sense.
“They never make bad changes, you know? It always looks good, and it feels playful. And it feels almost – I don’t know. Almost like I have this friend except I don’t actually know them at all? All I know is that they’re a fantastic writer and that they live or work on this side of the city, because this is where all their work is.”
He twisted his hands in his lap.
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment, and then turned to look at Leia.
She smiled at him, let her head drop onto the back of the couch. “You like what you know of them.”
He sat with that statement for a moment. “Yeah, I do.”
“You want to interact with them.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I still think this particular endeavor is fucking stupid. Isn’t there another one you can go and mess with?”
Luke shook his head. “This is the most recent, gotta go mess with that one.”
She sighed.
HEELS OVER HEAD
He hadn’t rappelled in months, not since that last heaven spot that Mando had edited a few weeks ago.
He felt his heart leap into his throat as he let go of the edge. The rope was tied short – incredibly short – and Luke was good with knots; he’d picked that one up as a child from their father, who among his many eccentricities had simply assumed that all people needed to know how to tie a wide variety of knots. Still, that moment of weightlessness always brought a rush – fear, and also exhilaration.
The harness jerked him up against the overpass, smacking his shoulder into the metal, and he grunted. Mando’s tag was right in front of him. It was a larger tag – Luke was going to have to get a little acrobatic for this – and simple, just that brick red that Mando so loved in his clear, confident strokes.
Luke gave the can of butta yellow one last shake, took another quick glance at the streetlights on either side of him, nestled under the lip of the overpass wall, and began to spray. He was giving the tag highlights, as if it were a raised thing spotlight by the two lights. This bit was quick work, and not difficult; it was just a matter of ensuring that he kept the location of the two lights solidly in mind. In under 10 minutes, he had the highlights completed.
Now was the part that needed some acrobatics. He drew his legs up towards his belly and then began to extend one leg up as he held his core tight. His body began to twist and tilt in the harness. He started to extend the other leg, and reached out to the flat wall off the overpass to hold himself in place.
This was awkward as hell, because he was going to be writing nearly upside down, but he could do it.
Very carefully, he sprayed his name in neat block letters under Mando’s.
He made the tittles over the j and the i hearts, just to be like that.
YOU AND ME
A sunset in white and yellow and orange, now with dabs and slashes of red bringing depth.
A red and grey wildstyle with tiny white stars sprayed at the edges and as an accent.
A green and white wildstyle with black lowlights.
A green and yellow parakeet sitting on the rump of a grey-brown fawn.
TOGETHER AT LAST
There was nothing like putting up a piece like this. It required focus – not thought, per se, but the ability to narrow his conscious world to just the can in his hand and the paint in front of him – and yet it also required him to monitor the area around him, senses on the lookout for anything that meant cops. He felt like energy was coursing through him, barely controlled.
He’d been working on this piece for so long in his black book and in his mind. It was a small stone temple set in a sunny forest clearing. The image had come to his head one day after a long discussion with his father and Uncle Obi about their childhoods in Coruscant and the temple school they’d attended, and then Uncle Obi’s tangent about the summer he’d spent walking from temple to temple on pilgrimage. He’d imagined a small, rounded building made of stone, moss in the cracks of the stone, surrounded by long green tufts of grass and a forest lush with leaves and vines, the whole thing cast in glowing gold light.
He wanted this piece to come out perfectly. He’d spent several months drawing versions of it and selecting the right place for it – he’d walked past the Skygarden one day and noticed the open stretch of wall on the visitor center. A botanical garden was the perfect place for a piece that was mostly plants.
Who knew, maybe they’d keep it up if he executed it well. The Skygarden was surprisingly friendly to street culture.
He took a moment to step back and look at the whole piece in progress before he continued on. He’d already put up base layers for the trees and grass and sky; he was using the plain gray of the concrete as the base for the little temple. He’d start adding detail there, in the temple; it was the focal point, and the place that most needed detail if he was interrupted.
He dug in his backpack for the next can; he’d brought over 15 colors this time, and the bag was utterly stuffed. He finally found the black can, and shook it while pondering. It was quick to outline the temple and then begin to outline the individual stones.
Luke was halfway through the outlining when he heard footsteps behind him. He understood, suddenly, that old chestnut about blood freezing in your veins.
He was about to drop the can and run when a soft voice interrupted his movement. “Don’t worry, man. You’re good.” The voice was masculine, a little deep, a little scratchy, and fuck Luke if that wasn’t a bedroom voice.
Luke turned to look at the person behind him. It was hard to see in this light, but he could make out some detail: It was a tall man, dressed in dark jeans and a charcoal-grey hoodie, a dark brown bag on his shoulder. Luke couldn’t see his hair under the hood, but he had tanned skin and dark eyes. He also had a grey bandanna tied around his neck in a way that Luke recognized instantly – it was the same way his own bandanna, the one that currently covered the lower half of his face, was tied.
The man peered around him at the half-painted piece, and Luke could see his expression change as he took it in. “Are you The Jedi?” he asked, and Luke felt his stomach flip in a moment of fear. This guy didn’t look like a cop, but that still wasn’t a question he wanted to answer.
“Uhhhh,” he said eloquently. If the guy was an undercover cop and wanted to arrest him, he could do it already, Luke was standing in front of a wall with a can in his hand, he was already fucked, how much worse would it be if he admitted to what was technically dozens of counts of vandalism– oh fuck yeah that would be worse–
The man smiled at him, a small soft thing, and fuck, he was attractive, and oh fuck that was a mustache. He shifted the bag off his shoulder and shook it lightly, and Luke could tell from the way it moved that there were cans of spray paint in that bag. He felt his hackles start to go back down at that. “I’m Mando,” the man said.
Luke’s stomach flipped again, but for a different reason, a wave of warmth following the flip.
“Hey.” He paused, and then felt his own face stretch in a smile that he couldn’t control. “Oh. Hey man, good to meet you.”
That small smile was still on Mando’s face.
“Yeah. Uh. Yeah, I’m The Jedi. My name’s Luke.”
Mando nodded. “I’m Din.”
Luke stared at him. This was Mando.
His brain was on auto-pilot, apparently, because he didn’t really realize that he’d made the plan until he was saying it: “I gotta finish this piece, man, but do you like – wanna get coffee or – something? I’ve been wondering who you were, and…” He trailed off a bit at the end.
Mando – Din – stared back at him. “Yeah, yeah, I’d like that.” He did a half-turn and looked around them. “I can be your lookout, if you wanna go to Francis after?” His eyes returned to Luke, traveling up his form before landing on his face.
Luke knew that he had just been checked out, and his heart beat in his ears. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.” He kept his eyes on Mando’s – Din’s – and then let his own eyes wander over the man before returning back. Din’s small smile widened.
“Get back to it,” Din said, nodding at Luke’s piece and still smiling.
“Yeah.” He let his eyes linger on Din, his heart still beating in his ears. “If you want to add anything to this, happy to be your lookout in return.”
“No, that one’s yours.” Din paused. “We could come up with something together, though.”
Luke blushed. “I’d like that.”
“Me too.”