Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
Leia last-name-unknown is not of Tatooine. She is no desert child and it shows. Her hands are calloused, yes, but from blasters, not carrying around boxes full of ill-gotten items for a slave-master. Her hair is darker than most that live on the planet. It has not been sun-touched. Neither has her skin, which remains pale and smooth in deep contrast to the Tatooinians’ cracked and tan. She carries herself like she expects others to make way for her, though she will also kneel for the kids in the streets. She has none of the wariness that comes from smugglers hoping to go unnoticed or slaves who wish to avoid any kind of conflict. The weapons she carries and clothes she wears, speak of wealth wisely spent. She is not of Tatooine, the inhabitants agree, but the sand welcomes her all the same.
On the other hand, Luke last-name-unknown is very much of Tatooine. He knows the planet like the back of his hand and it’s well known that he is the one to go to if you need to cross the sands alive. He knows intimately how to ration water and when visiting bounty hunters ask for a guide, he is the one they are pointed to. His skin is more worn than Leia’s but his smile is ultimately more cheerful. It is that happiness that some point to with dubious frowns as they ask if he really is a desert native. “Yes,” say those that have met him because he knows all of their names. “He knows the way of death,” say the former slaves who have never shared their funeral rites with anyone but he knows them anyway. Once he tells them, “my grandmother was a slave and she taught the man who freed her and he taught me.” He is of Tatooine and it is obvious to those that care to look at how the sand dances around his feet but never seem to cut his skin.
One is rarely seen without the other and it’s a mystery as to how they know each other. “They are nothing alike,” protest passing adventurers when the theory of relation is brought up. They would be saying something different if they saw how easily the two navigate around each other.
“Lovers mayhaps?” A particularly bold shop owner asks the two when they come looking for fabric. Luke jerks back with a disgusted look on his face that smoothly turns into a laugh when Leia sighs quite heavily. The look on her face is one of regret. The shop owner, a little startled at the reactions himself, apologizes briefly but is waved off.
“I know why you would think that,” says the woman, rolling her eyes, “but no.”
“She’s not my type anyway,” says Luke, hefting large rolls of white cloth over to the counter. The shop owner grins weakly as he finishes their purchase. He doesn’t miss the elbow to the side Leia gives her not-lover for his next comment that is too low for the shop owner to hear.
So they aren’t lovers but they don’t look quite similar enough to be siblings either. “They could be,” one of the former slaves mutters to her child as they watch the two argue over some mundane things. “They certainly argue like they are.”
“You’re going to get heatsick!” Leia yells, hand hovering over her blaster like she plans on stunning him if he continues to resist.
“I can wear black if I want to!” Luke screams as he runs away.
The woman grabs her son by the hand, tugging him out of the way as the two fly past them, faster than any normal being should be able to move. Her son stares after them in awe and the woman nods to herself. Siblings they must be.
She doesn’t share this particular revelation with the others and the rest of the planet continues to wonder.
Tatooine is a simple planet with simple people though, and they’ve never bothered too much with mysteries. Their motto is, ‘don’t look in the alleyway where the suspicious sentients are meeting and you probably won’t die.’ It’s a very blatant theme but one that holds true all the same. It doesn’t really stop the kids from trailing after stranded space pirates and bugging them for stories.
“I’m nine,” a kid tells them. “How old are you?” The two not-lovers-maybe-siblings glance at each other. Everyone surrounding them is not so covertly listening in, hoping to hear the answers themselves because Luke and Leia have been on Tatooine for years now and almost nothing is known about them.
“You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,” Luke says, passing the kid a snack from a nearby vendor's cart as Leia hands over the money.
The general consensus is that the two are just trying to be mysterious because if you squint, they hardly look older than 25. They still have the youthful energy of young adults but then sometimes they move like they expect their joints to hurt and are surprised when they don’t. But, mysterious ages and unknown last names aside, what everyone does know is the story of how the two appeared.
The older folk like to enjoy embellishing the story. “They appeared amidst a raging sandstorm. We had no way of knowing their names at the time, but the moment Luke raised his hands, the desert calmed.” The children like to gather around whenever they hear someone from off planet ask about the two. “The sun shone brighter than it ever had, like it was ushering a brighter age upon us.” Leia raises her eyebrows whenever she overhears that part but she never says anything. “At the time they appeared, Mos Espa was facing its worst drought in years. Our children were suffering and our people were dying. But Luke and Leia went into the desert and asked it to take mercy. The dunes recognized the two as its children and the water again rose close to the surface so the moisture wells could reach. They saved us and later when the woman was dressed in clothes white like the hottest fire you’ve ever seen and the man dressed to mimic her shadow they took the Hutts’ palace and freed us all.”
It’s quite the legend the two have built for themselves. The people of Tatooine like to call them their suns. “We’ve only been here for a few months,” Luke protests when they try to make him take the seat of leadership. The people keep pushing but Luke responds by disappearing off to who knows where with Leia for a few days.
Eventually though, all things must come to an end and Luke and Leia’s time on Tatooine is no different.
This story, though, starts earlier than one might expect.
Luke, for all that he is a desert child, was not born on Tatooine. He doesn’t know this but it’s true all the same.
Leia was not born on Tatooine. She does know this. She wasn’t born on Alderaan either. She also knows this. For all Bail and Breha were her parents, they never lied to her about her adopted status but they don’t know where she was born either.
The only person who does know is dead.
“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Leia remembers saying sometimes. “You are my only hope.” In the end, she never actually met the man. Not that she knows anyway.
So neither is born on Tatooine but Anakin Skywalker was and to the desert, there is no difference. When her children are in danger, she calls them.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
BEFORE
Leia doesn’t have empathy. It probably died with her planet. That’s not to say she doesn’t care– she does— just not as much as she used to. It’s almost funny that Luke only got to know her after her entire life went up in flames.
He finds her sometime after they’ve won and it is a victory even if it doesn’t feel like it. “Do you think he was evil?” He asks and Leia knows who he is talking about even if they never say any of his names.
Leia has no empathy but she loves her brother and so her answer is, “no.” Her answer is a lie. His choices were his own, she thinks, and even if he regrets them, he still made them. Luke, oddly enough, doesn’t look comforted by her answer. Probably, she thinks, because he can tell she is lying.
The Force is a bantha-kriffing tattletale.
She isn’t really sure how she’s supposed to feel about having a brother. She’s used to being an only child and it’s… different, especially now that they are no longer fighting an all out war. Though the Empire has ended, there is still a large call for help rebuilding worlds and Luke and Leia are stuck in the middle of it all. They’re kind of the face of the New Republic. It’s them who are sent out to the systems that suffered the most heavily under the Siths’ rule.
Leia has seen plenty of battlefields and it never gets any easier to see parents crying over dead children and children crying over dead parents. Because Darth Sidious and Darth Vader are dead but there are still those who thrived more under their rule and have started their own little rebellions that focus on causing the most damage. They bomb entire cities without care that any of their own might be there. They just want to see death. The misery in the air is suffocating. “I can feel them,” Luke confesses to her one night, bags under his eyes and fingers tearing at his skin. Leia sits against the wall with him.
“What do you mean?” She puts a hand on his shoulder awkwardly because she’s never been very good at comforting.
He looks at her, incredulous. “You mean you can’t?” He pauses. Leia shrugs. Luke sighs. “It’s like,” he struggles, at first, to find words. “Like– here.” He holds out a hand. It’s covered in dirt and dust and blood but Leia takes it anyway because recently her entire life has been dirt and dust and blood so what’s a little more?
Luke reaches for her wrist, thumb finding her pulse point as he lets his awareness sweep over her. It’s warm, a soft blanket that muffles the world around her. If Leia hadn’t been raised for war, the feeling might have been welcomed. All these ‘if’s. Leia was raised for war and when her senses go muted, she thinks ‘danger’, and throws all the sharp edges of her own consciousness outward. It’s the only Force thing she’d let Fulcrum teach her.
The world explodes.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The planet they appear on is sandy and dry. Leia chokes on her own saliva as a sudden burst of wind gets specks in her eyes. She’s half buried in sand and it burns.
“Leia!” She hears her name shouted right before Luke hauls her to her feet.
“Where are we?” She sputters in return, blinking the dust from her eyes.
“Tatooine, I think.”
Leia can hear the bitterness in his voice but then the words reach her and she jerks forward a few steps, taking in the endless plains of sand.
In the end, they’re there for 200 years and they never age a day.
It takes them a while to realize they’re still 22. In their defense they’re more occupied with the fact that they’ve gone so far back in time, Tatooine only has one sun. But then they see the kids they used to play with grow older and older until their hairs are greying and their backs hunched. Luke and Leia still look the same. They’re Tatooine’s best and worst kept secret.
The first time one of the kids– they’re not really kids anymore now that they have grandchildren of their own but they’ll still be kids to Luke and Leia– dies, their body is brought to the two not-lovers-maybe-siblings. (Nobody ever did figure out what they were to each other)
“You freed us,” the used-to-be-kids say. “We want you to be the ones to help us go.”
Luke coaxes a flower from the ground and folds it gently in cold hands. Leia weaves a length of cloth with the image of two suns on it in honor of the nickname given to her and Luke. She places it over the dead’s eyes. “So that he may always see the sun,” she bows her head before Luke helps her carry the body out to the sands. They force the sand into the shape of stone blocks and stack them hand by hand.
It is not an easy task and they do not use the force to help them. It takes them years and by the time they finish, all of the kids they used to play with, are dead. Each of them are buried in the Temple of Sand Bricks with a never wilting flower in their hands and suns over their eyes.
The night they finish laying the last brick, they dream.
The interesting thing about their dreams is that they share them. They’ve been sharing them since they both first appeared on Tatooine. Tonight they dream of Naboo. They’re in a field of flowers and Luke speaks first.
“Have you been here before?” He gestures around them because usually their dreams consist of the places from their memories. Many of their shared dreams take place on Tatooine and Alderaan but sometimes they find themselves in the midst of battlefields.
Leia shakes her head. “It was too dangerous,” she says. “ He was often seen visiting here.” There is no question about the he she is talking about. “I don’t know why this place was so fascinating to him.” (They don’t know who their mother is. Everyone who did know died before they could pass on such knowledge)
(“Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi”– Leia watches as Alderaan glows bright before ceasing to exist forever, taking her parents along with it.)
Luke bends down to pluck a few flowers and begins twisting them into the shape of a crown. He often does this whenever they find themselves in a memory with flowers. “Tatooine doesn’t really have flowers,” he told her once. He finds them interesting.
Leia sits in silence while Luke makes seven flower crowns, one for each of the kids buried in the Temple of Sand Bricks. He makes an eighth one that he places on her head and she indulges him in twirling around to show it off. “Here’s to our 223rd birthday,” he laughs in good humor. This dream is a peaceful one.
“Ahem,” someone behind them coughs and Luke and Leia turn to this new stranger in unison. It is not the first time they’ve seen someone else in their dreams but they never interacted with the twins before. Memories tend to not have that ability.
This new stranger wears long beige robes and there is a wild look in his eyes.
“Who are you?” Luke asks.
“I am Jedi Master Gundi,” the stranger says and Luke perks up.
“Jedi!” He repeats and Leia smiles at her brother’s enthusiasm.
“Take a walk with us,” she offers because she doesn’t expect danger from this stranger. She turns her back on him and that is her mistake. When did she become so complacent when faced with strangers?
“Are you the Force?” Gundi asks them. Leia shares an amused look with Luke.
“Some have called us that,” she says, turning back to face him. The Jedi looks her and Luke up and down, taking in her white clothes and Luke’s black. An invisible wind picks up around them, blowing her flower crown off her head. She blames the fact that she’s in a dream for her hazy countenance and lack of wariness.
It doesn’t stop the Jedi from drawing his lightsaber and cutting through Luke’s heart with a blade of many colors before she can blink. The last look on her twin’s face is of shock and Leia’s is sure her own expression is twisted into something inhuman as she watches him take his last breath before his body collapses limp to the ground.
There’s an unholy screech but it doesn’t come from Leia as she initially thinks, but the Jedi whose chest she has just shoved her hand into. “What have you done?” She cries, twisting her hand inside him. The Jedi gasps in pain but even still he has enough energy to gasp his explanation.
“The Dark Side needed to end!” He says and something in Leia’s chest cracks and turns to sand. Just like the desert she lives in.
Her voice is hard as stone when she says, “then you killed the wrong one.” Gundi looks at her in fear right before she crushes his heart in her palm. She withdraws her hand, ignoring how it’s covered in blood and staining the flowers at her feet. She collapses to her knees next to Luke and caresses his face, leaving a bloody handprint on his cheek to match the blood-soaked fabric of his shirt.
She wakes up screaming.
Luke is gone from his bed, leaving only wilted flowers in place of where he’d been sleeping. The ground beneath her shakes and Leia reaches for the Force. Luke had always been more adept at using it but he’d always told her that she could reach his power if she really wanted to.
She demands the Force give him back but the Force refuses. Her anger grows. She digs the knives of her consciousness into the fabric of reality, her power boosted by her dead twin’s. Tatooine’s sun takes the brunt of her fury, splitting into two as Leia looks everywhere in the galaxy for her brother.
She does not find him and her power begins to turn on her.
The desert has already lost one child and it will not lose this one. A sand brick from the temple falls, striking her across the forehead and forcing her into unconsciousness. The temple sinks into the ground, leaving nothing but disturbed sand in its place.
And Leia sleeps.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
It goes like this.
Anakin Skywalker is born on Tatooine. His mother is named Shmi. He has no father so the desert claims him as her own. The first time he is whipped, his blood spills into the sand and the planet clings to it as a reminder. Anakin Skywalker has two children. He doesn’t know this until he is worse than dead. Tatooine knows though. They share his blood but the desert only gets one of them. She still swears to protect them both.
“Desert Children,” the wind whistles.
It goes like this.
Luke and Leia are on a planet, aiding the rebuilding efforts. This planet, unnamed because the planet itself isn’t essential to the story, is soaked in civilian blood. There are those that were rich beyond belief during the age of the Empire and they resist the new government. They kidnap children from the streets and Leia has no pity for them when she shoots them between the eyes. She has had years to build up her walls. Luke isn’t so lucky. He feels every death; can feel the planet dying. Leia stopped feeling death when Alderaan ceased to exist.
“Desert Children,” the wind hums.
It goes like this.
Luke reaches out in the Force to Leia. The problem with this is that they are two sides of the same coin. The second they connect, their very souls cry out in agony. The Dark and Light were never meant to connect so deeply. Not without the Gray. Anakin Skywalker is dead. It is perhaps an oversight that it is his twins who share his Force-blood. But the Force picked her Chosen one and got his children too. Sister Dark attacks Brother Light, not in anger but in fear and shock, and lost in the memories of war. They’re killing each other.
The Force is Tatooine, is Everything, is Nothing, is the Inbetween, is Fire and Water, is Sand and Air, is Black, is White, is Gray, is Power, is Weakness, is Anger, is Fear, is Love, is Hope, is Life, is Death, and it refuses.
Time means nothing to the Force and it steals the two away to a time that is safer.
“Desert Children!” The wind cheers.
It goes like this.
Luke and Leia are as connected to each other as they are every living thing around them. Dreams are but one of the many things that they share. The night they dream of Naboo, Luke dies after being mistaken for the manifestation of the Dark side of the Force. Leia nearly destroys the galaxy in her agony so the planet drags her close to its core and holds her close while it waits for her anger and pain to cool. It takes millions of years before she wakes and everything she knows has changed.
“Desert Child,” the wind mourns. The plural is gone.
It goes like this.
The people of Tatooine have a legend. Back when the planet was still in its infancy, it was visited by the spirits of the sun. They brought the planet peace and refused to adhere to the tradition of slavery that had existed for years. The people called them the Light Sun and Dark Sun. They ruled the planet for centuries and were beloved by all that came to visit them. They walked among the people without pride and the expectation that they should be treated like gods. Eventually, they grew tired of their long lives and the Light Sun left the planet to become the second sun of Tatooine. The remaining spirit, the Dark Sun, mourned her loneliness and cried for three days and three nights before she fell into a long sleep, only to awaken when the Light Sun returned. This is why, every year when the suns lineup with each other, the sky rains for three days and three nights. The legend says that the Dark Sun is still asleep somewhere on Tatooine, buried in a temple called the Temple of Two Suns, only to awaken when the Light Sun returns from the sky. It is this legend that has given the people confidence to resist slavers whenever they come.
The legend is not exactly true but the people have the gist of the story. Tatooine remains free and the celebration held for the legend of the Two Suns every year is one of the biggest sights to see in the galaxy.
“Sorry, Child,” the wind whispers.
It goes like this.
Anakin Skywalker is freeborn and this changes everything.
The wind doesn’t say a word.