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Luke watches with rapt attention as Biggs pulls a draw from a cig. The paper sticks to his bottom lip and he smiles around it.
“You can’t tell ma,” he says. “She’ll skin me.”
Luke nods, because he doesn’t want to tell Lady Darklighter that her son is sucking cigs behind the vaporator field. He wants to watch her son suck cigs anywhere in the galaxy. He’s sweaty, his dark hair is slicked back, and the beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip curls around his smile.
Luke is entranced.
“I’m serious, Luke!” and Biggs shoves Luke playfully, and Luke shoves back, and the cig falls out from between Biggs’s lips and Luke puts his own lips where it was.
He reals back, exaggerated horror across his face. “That’s foul!”
Biggs laughs. It’s too hot to do much else other than lazily kiss, so that’s what they do, in the half shadow of a set of cliffs a couple of hundred meters past the Darklighter homestead, hiding from Bigg’s mother and work lists.
“My secret is safe?” The cig got crushed underfoot, but Luke has no doubt that Biggs has a whole stash he has rationed out. Probably only smokes them to show off that he has them at all. He likes the attention.
Luke shoves at his shoulder again. “Course.”
Biggs rewards him with another kiss. “You’re a good one, Skywalker. I can always trust you to keep a secret.”
The statement from Biggs sits sour in his belly as they brush the sand off themselves and get to work for the rest of the afternoon on the Darklighter farm. It sits sour, still, when he takes the speeder back to the Lars homestead and spends a few hours working between one sunset and the next because the work never stops. When one thing is fixed, another is on the verge of breaking, and without the moisture vaporators at at least eighty per cent efficiency, they run the risk of the farm failing in the dry season.
Well. The dryer season. It’s always some level of dry on Tatooine. It’s all Luke’s ever known, and he’s learned to not hate it. Aunt Beru taught him how to look forward to the small changes between seasons. Like how in a few weeks the air will taste different as the planet rotates a few degrees in its orbit.
Biggs doesn’t believe him about the air taste. But considering Biggs is willing to smoke a cig and now Luke knows exactly what that tastes like on his lips, he doesn’t trust Biggs’s sense of taste worth kriff.
Aunt Beru takes one look at him when he stumbles through the doorway and then chases him back out to the droid shed to shake half the dune sea out of his clothes with a handheld sonic.
“Go rest,” she says when he shakes his hair and yet more sand comes out. “Owen worries more than he needs to. Always has. There’s no reason for you not to spend tomorrow out with the Darklighters again, the vaproators here will hold up just fine.”
She gives him a look, and Luke blushes.
“I don’t--”
He isn’t sure what he means to say. He isn’t sneaking off to the Darklighter homestead to snog Biggs anyhow? He isn’t in love with Biggs?
He can’t lie to Aunt Beru. It’s physically impossible, he’s pretty sure. She always just knows.
“Luke.” She kisses him on the forehead. “You are a young man. I’ll let you have your secrets.”
He falls into bed that night, shaken clean and worked to the point of exhaustion, and stares up at the ceiling. He’s almost too tired to think straight, but he can’t fall asleep yet. He can’t. He has to wait for her.
He doesn’t have to wait long.
“Hi,” he says, softly. The thick pourcrete walls keep the sound and the heat out both, but even knowing his aunt and uncle likely can’t hear him, it’s always felt right to speak softly to her.
She floats above his bed, beautiful and sad. She doesn’t have much color to her, but Luke just supposes that’s what happens when you die. The color is leached out of you, just like your life. She’s always been with him, as long as he can remember, always dressed in the same clothes that seem out of a wonder tale, her magnificent hair piled on her head with jewels...
Always waiting to hear about his day, to listen to him and smile along with him.
Sometimes he pretends she’s his mother, looking after him from the afterlife.
It’s stupid, she’s probably just the ghost of a former homesteader, stuck fast to the house. Maybe she stole all the fancy clothes and jewels from Jaba or some other Hutt and that’s why she got killed. She probably has nothing to do with Luke at all, it’s just only Luke who can see her because he’s got some desert sense and not everyone does.
She can’t speak; another thing that probably comes with dying. But she’s nice. He can tell. It’s in her eyes. She’s nice, and even if she’s just some former homesteader, she floats above and watches over him while he sleeps, and it’s nice. It feels like she’s protecting him. When he’s scared or upset, she’s there for him. And because she’s... well. Because she’s dead, he can tell her things he wouldn’t dream of telling his aunt.
He settles in, hands folded behind his head. “Biggs and I kissed a lot today.” He swallows. “He’s gonna ditch and go to the Imperial Academy soon. Real soon, I think. So I want to kiss him a lot before he leaves.”
He and Biggs haven’t talked about it much. Lady Darklighter doesn’t want him to go, just like Uncle Owen doesn’t want Luke even thinking about anything beyond the inner workings of a vaporator. But Biggs is a year and a half older than Luke, and he’s always been brasher and ready to get into an argument.
“He’ll get to be a pilot, a real one.” He turns his head into his arm. “I want to tell him about you, before he leaves.”
He needs to. He needs to tell Biggs about his ghost. He can’t stomach him leaving, going off and becoming a pilot somewhere, never coming back to Tatooine, and Luke not having told him about something as big as this.
His ghost looks down at him, sad, but she doesn’t have that look on her face, the one Luke associates with quiet judgment not dissimilar from how Aunt Beru looks at him before he hauls himself into speeder held together with plast and dreams to go shoot at womp rats. He often comes back with blood in his hair from a wreck, so neither of them are wrong. He just does it anyway.
Instead she looks... it’s hard to tell.
Luke wishes he knew who his ghost was, or what she looked like before she died. She looks like she wants to hug him, and he wishes she could do that, too.
He’s sixteen. He shouldn’t need hugs anymore, but he still does. He still melts into Aunt Beru’s side whenever he can, and he thinks his ghost would give hugs just as nice, if she could. But she can’t, so he rolls his face into his own arm and breathes.
“Yeah, I’ll tell him tomorrow, then,” Luke says. He’s well used to holding both sides of the conversation. “Goodnight,” he says, and closes his eyes, knowing that his ghost will watch over him.
Biggs isn’t showing off an ill gotten cig the next day, but he’s got a smirk on his face and a twinkle in his eye when the two boys go off tinker past the speeders on the Darklighter farm. “It’s gonna happen this month, Lukey.”
“I told you not to call me that!”
But Luke doesn’t push Biggs away when he slides his hands around his sides and rubs at his hip bones, teasing. It’s too hot. Luke lets himself be held anyway.
“I’ve got a spot on a ship, and a contact that will get me where I need to go.”
“I can’t believe you’re actually leaving. No one actually leaves.”
“Yeah, well, you could, too. If you wanted.”
Luke stays quiet for a while, sinking into the feeling of Bigg’s hands on his skin. Hot fingers tracing little circles on his hips. “Not yet. I can’t, not yet. I can’t leave Aunt Beru. Next year, though. Uncle Owen said next year.”
Biggs already knew that’s what he’d say. Luke’s been saying it for ages. “I’ll stay in touch,” he says, and stops fussing over Luke’s hot skin.
They both know he probably won’t. It’ll be too hard. Luke’s body is flushing, half with a desire to push Biggs into the speeder and kiss him until the suns set, and half with the urge to sock the young man in the mouth for making his life so hard.
“I...” He wants to tell Biggs about his ghost but he doesn’t know how. “I’ll miss you.”
“Maker, I’ll miss you, too! I hate the idea of you all alone out here.”
Luke leans, presses his weight against Bigg’s chest and kisses the daylights out of him. It’s too hot and it doesn’t matter. It’s always too hot. His hands are wrapped around Biggs’s wide, solid hips, and Biggs’s own hands are wandering up Luke’s chest under his shirt.
“I won’t be alone,” he says.
Biggs tweaks his ear. “Your aunt and uncle aren’t what I meant and you know it. You... you need people, Luke. You’re just built like that. And I worry.”
“I want to tell you something, but you’ll think I’m having sun stroke.”
Biggs pulls back and looks at Luke seriously. They don’t look at one another seriously very often, and it’s strange to see. He looks so grown-up and it makes Luke swallow.
He ducks out of Biggs’s gaze. “I can see ghosts. Well, one ghost.”
It sounds daft and he blushes fiercely after saying it aloud.
Biggs pulls away and holds him back by the shoulders, not so subtly looking for signs of heat sickness.
“I know, I know. It’s why I never told you. I thought she was imaginary for so long, I kind of just... forgot I could tell anyone. But she’s real. So I won’t be all the way alone.”
“Luke...”
“I had to tell you before you left. I had to! I haven’t told anyone else, not even Aunt Beru.”
Biggs’s dark, shaggy forehead comes down to rest upon Luke’s own. “I’m still leaving.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t going to make me stay.”
“I know!”
“I love you, Luke Skywalker.”
Luke swallows the reflexive, “I know!” that wants to leap from his throat. “What?”
“I love you. And your stupid, sun drunk visions of ghosts. And I wish I didn’t have to leave, but I do. If I stay here, I’ll become a moisture farmer, and... and I can’t. It'll kill me slowly. I wish I was different.”
Luke does sock him in the chin this time. Biggs stares at him, eyes wide and mouth open. His lips are a little swollen but Luke’s pretty sure it’s from the kissing, not the punch. It was a gentle punch, all things considered.
“I don’t wish you were different, Biggs, I would never wish that. I’ll join you. I’ll go to the Imperial Academy in a few years, and we’ll run into each other again. We well, I know it.” And he does, somewhere inside him. He knows it like he can taste the change in the air in the seasons. A desert sense.
Biggs must feel it, too, because he kisses Luke again, and they finish up the day and haul the broken parts of a scrapped spreader back to the Darklighter homestead for harvesting.
That night Luke waits for his ghost to appear before he goes to bed. Uncle Owen had been in a sour mood, so Luke had waited until moonrise to scuttle into the house, unseen.
“I told him. I think he’ll be gone tomorrow. Sometimes I just know things,” he says, and she nods down at him, like she knows, too. “It won’t be the last time I see him, though. I know that, too. It might be awhile, but we’ll see each other again. ”
He smiles up at her. “I wish he could have met you.”
He falls asleep, his face pressed into his arm.