Rebellions are built on hope

notbecauseofvictories:

“I don’t think they’re staring at me,” Han says with a grim sort of certainty. He’s clutching his mug too tightly, his knuckles white around it, and even whiter where he’s holding Leia’s hand—Luke is too tired, exhausted down to his bones, to do anymore more than note it. Han holding onto Leia’s hand so tightly that his blood is chased out..

Luke blinks, and then exhales.

“I was…”

Kalix Darksky took their order—the Darkskys have owned this cafe since Luke can remember, but when Lando said, Hey, I could go for something to eat, and Leia, still dressed in the cantina-dancer rags said, I’m starving, Luke had found himself answering, I know where to go.

His hands were still aching from the lightsaber, how tightly he’d clutched at it as he’d killed them. (He didn’t have to, the lightsaber moved through them like they were just air, nothing there. And then there was nothing there.) His chest ached from—well, that too, but still he’d led their awkward little band to the Darksky cantina, because he didn’t know where else. 

“Luke?” Talesin Darksky had said, choked out. His eyes were wide as the sky they were both named after. “Luke, where…how…?”

“A table,” Luke had said, conscious of the hem of his black cloak dragging in the sand, and how Han was mostly draped over Leia; Lando’s still-bleeding side and Chewbacca, looming over them all. 

Talesin’s Darksky’s eyes were wide, he didn’t seem to be breathing.

“A table,” Luke repeated. “For my friends.”

“Of—course, sure,” Talesin said, and he’d moved by sheer instinct, his eyes still dark and trained on Luke’s face. Even as he’d led them back into the recesses of the dimly-lit cantina, he kept looking, darting glances from the corners of his eyes. “Let me know—”

“Thank you,” Luke said stiffly, and Talesin swallowed whatever he had been about to say. He bowed his head, and then he was striding away towards the kitchen.

Luke had collapsed to his seat, feeling as though all the blood had been very suddenly drained from his body. Han was still half-blind from the carbonite, even if he insisted he wasn’t, and he was staring somewhere over Luke’s shoulder. Thank—whoever for small favors, Lando seemed to realize this and announced that he and Chewie were going to help themselves at the bar, so it was just Luke and Han and Leia suddenly, the three of them.

“I was…” Luke tries again, and even though Han’s eyes are fixed somewhere over Luke’s left shoulder, Luke feels his skin prickle. “Yeah,” he finally chokes out.

“Yeah,” Han says with a half-shrug. “They’re not staring at me, that’s what I said.”

Luke’s sense of the Force is—humming, churning over and through the cantina. He can feel them, feel them, murmuring about him, staring. And it was different, stranger and heavier than it had been…before. (It’s not as though he hadn’t been an object of fascination, the Lars’ orphaned nephew who stubbornly insisted on wearing a slave’s surname. Even more when that nephew grew up odd and dreaming of the stars. But it had been light, the ordinary scrutiny of a small community where Irain Redstone dying her hair purple had been gossip for three cycles.)

“Maybe they’re staring at me,” Leia adds, with something of the old imperiousness, the princess, edging through her voice. However, when Luke looks at her, her eyes are warm.

“Why would they be looking at you?” Han asks, turning to squint at her.

“Well, I did kill a Hutt lord,” Leia says, flicking the tail of her long braid over her shoulder. (They ignore the unsteady note in her voice. The marks of the chain are still red on her neck, her hands.)

Han scoffs. “Sure, but they don’t know that.” 

Luke relaxes by increments as they argue back and forth—they’re not even arguing, really, their voices low and gentle, and Leia keeps smiling despite herself. But it’s a kind of normalcy they’re offering, from Yavin and Hoth and the cockpit of the Falcon and Luke’s grateful for even that.

They’ve progressed to debating whether Han would indeed look better in the cantina girl getup (“Are you saying I can’t pull off that shade of red? Luke, buddy, back me up here!”) when there’s a clattering and a sudden swell of noise from the entrance of the cantina.

When Luke looks up, Talesin is trying desperately to drag some woman away, his face contorted as though he’s speaking very quickly and too quietly for Luke to hear. There’s fear there too, and Luke wonders—

Talesin accidentally catches Luke’s gaze and goes ashen, freezing in place. The woman turns.

“Oh,” Luke says, because he isn’t sure if there’s anything else to say, except that. Leia looks at him sharply, and Han glances up, then he’s busy craning his neck to see who the hells Luke’s staring at.

“Do you know her?” Leia asks, but Luke is already getting to his feet.

He never really gotten along with his Whitesun cousins—too much older, they’d already been marrying, getting into trade or helping run farms by the time Luke was old enough to know them. Stiff conversation during the First Rainfall celebration and a gift on his life day, the occasional speeder ride when they were already headed into Toshe…Luke hadn’t known them well enough to expect  more.

But that didn’t stop something black and sucking, desperately glad and aching, from opening up in his chest as he stood in front of a woman who looked like Aunt Beru.

Younger, of course—Cousin Myon had been only thirty-some when he left, and her hair is still pure Whitesun gold. But here. Standing, alive and unburnt.

“We thought you died,” Myon says, taking an abortive step towards Luke. It is very quiet in the cantina. “With Owen and Beru, at the homestead. Everything was so badly burnt…”  

Luke swallows, shakes his head. “No, I was with Old Ben when it happened. He took me away, we…” He doesn’t know if there are any words to encompass it all—the hologram of a princess in white and Darth Vader, the Death Star and—Yavin and Hoth and Cloud City, Yoda and his father—

“I joined the Rebellion,” Luke says finally. He’s glad his voice doesn’t waver. “I became a Jedi, and I joined the Rebellion.”

The words ripple out, like wind over sand. Luke can feel them moving through the room, in and out of people’s heads. (They leave stranger shapes than he’d thought; he can see his dusty black outfit straighten, deepen to the color of night, his head held higher. The strange double-image of himself, outside himself, and taller.) 

Myon blinks, and opens her mouth, then shuts it again. “Oh,” she finally says. “What brings you back?” Home, she doesn’t say. It’s accurate, but the absence still stings.

“Jabba captured my friend.”

Han, because he’s Han, raises a hand in a lazy salute and grins. Myon blinks again.

“You’re still alive. What did you offer him?”

Her voice is hard, and accusing, and it takes Luke a minute to understand what it is she means. Luke is the youngest nephew, by marriage, but under the kin-ship laws of Tatooine he still could claim a stake in the Whitesun farms. Could use it as collateral. “No, no, we didn’t…offer him anything, I have nothing to offer. You know I wouldn’t—”

“He’s dead,” Leia interrupts, and Myon’s eyes go wide, when they take her in. “That’s what he’s trying to say. Jabba the Hutt is dead.”

It’s not what Luke was trying to say, but the cantina is so quiet he feels as though even just his breathing is intruding. Myon keeps glancing between Leia and Luke like she’s trying to look for the lie.

“Jabba the Hutt is dead,” Myon repeats.

Leia stands, and even in the bedraggled and torn cantina girl costume, she could be armored in white, standing in the Alliance command deck. She is close enough for her shoulder to bump Luke’s. (He could be burnt up by the fire of her, but he’s still just grateful—glad to have her here, beside him.) 

“I wrapped a chain around his ugly neck and choked him until he was dead,” she says.

Luke has to look away from the awe on Myon’s face. Belatedly, he notices Lando and Chewbacca at the bar, both of them watching the scene with hands too-casually resting on their blasters. Lando catches Luke looking, and raises his eyebrows.

Luke understands what he’s offering. He wouldn’t put it past Lando to have three escape routes in mind, an exit plan—but he can’t run from this. (Well, he could, but there wouldn’t be any point. His family finds him, is destined to find him, even swathed in black and calling itself by another name. Even from beyond the grave.)

Luke ducks his head, breathes out. “Would you want to sit down, Myon?” he asks, and when he looks up, Myon has turned all that awe on him. “I think we have a lot to discuss.”