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There is vomit in her hair when the Jedi comes to see her again.
He's standing outside of the compound, speeder off behind him, standing near the door like he isn’t sure how to knock.
She picks out Luke’s favourite sling, the one that Sentra Banai had sewed from her beautiful sunburst fabric.
“Up we go,” she says, as she picks him up, but she says it quietly. He's stopped crying, finally, and she doesn't want to start him off again.
It’s probably best that Owen is staying overnight in Anchorage; he doesn’t like the Jedi very much. Still, Beru wants to be polite.
“Hello?” she says. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
Beru still doesn’t know very much about Obi-Wan. He hadn’t been with Anakin, when he came to visit that one time. But the young Jedi had talked about him, to the woman he'd come with, the woman who had been kind with eyes like the desert sky. He'd been either his teacher or his master, and Beru hadn't been able to figure out which.
“Hello,” he says, standing with his hands held in front of him. “I’ve come to talk to you about the crying.”
She feels her heart sink down to about the level of her boots. For a moment, she wants to burst into embarrassed, furious tears herself.
Babies cry, she’s heard it from every other mother she’s talked to. But nobody’s baby has cried as much as Luke has, wailing his little lungs out until she’s sure he must have cried himself dry. And then crying more.
Beru hadn’t planned on being a mother, at least not this soon. Sometimes, she worries Luke can tell.
“How did you know?” Because while Luke’s distress is obvious to all the women in her social circle, there’s no way that Kenobi’s hearing is that strong.
"He is projecting his distress across several kilometers. Through the Force. It certainly makes the desert a colourful and noisy place, if you’re sensitive to the Force.”
"Oh," she says, trying to casually comb some of the dried vomit from her hair. "Can you tell why he’s sad?” she asks, embarrassed at the obvious desperation in her voice.
But … she’s fed Luke, rocked him to sleep, changed him, sang him songs, and none of it’s helping. And she’d rather look desperate a thousand times over than watch Luke like this.
“That’s not my area of expertise,” he says, very quickly. “But I do believe I know how to fix it.”
“How?”
"It’s standard procedure, at the creche, to put wards on the younglings’ Force sense. It’s like putting a blindfold on the part of them that connects to other people in the Force. We find that, otherwise, they tend to feel things strongly enough that they’re unhappy and difficult to deal with.”
She feels dirty and small and tired, especially in front of the well-dressed Jedi in front of her. He’s probably right. But …
"No," she says quietly, dropping the word like a heavy sandspike across the conversation. "No, you're not allowed to do anything with his head."
She gently smooths the soft fuzz of hair on Luke’s head. She’s heard that babies’ skulls are still fusing themselves together, that there are soft parts in between the bone. There’s not enough armour around Luke’s little brain for her taste; she feels like she could hurt him just by holding his head wrong.
He looks vaguely irritated, but mostly just confused. "It’s not harmful. We do it for every youngling in the creche, at least until they're old enough to do it on their own."
“Still no,” she says, and holds Luke close to her chest. He squirms in her arms, reaching towards wakefulness. When he opens his eyes, he curls his chubby little fists, and starts to cry again.
“Oh, don’t fuss, little heart,” she says, stroking his cheek with a thumb.
When she looks up, Obi-Wan looks a little too smug for her taste.
“I’m not going to change my mind, Master Kenobi,” she says. “You can help me or not, but I won’t let you do anything to change his head.”
She would be nicer, but her hair still smells like vomit and she’s slept about an hour in the past three days, and she has a headache which Luke’s crying isn’t helping. Obi-Wan hasn’t had to deal with any of that that, she thinks, uncharitably.
“Well,” he says, finally. “It’s hypothesized that, in some cases, young Force-users can feel the emotions of those they have links to. So if someone close to them, like family or friends, is sad or hurt, they might feel sad or hurt as well.”
“What do I do about it?”
“Nothing pleasant.” He sighs. “There’s not a terribly large amount of academic support behind the theory, but there’s an idea that if someone else close to the youngling leaves themselves open to the Force, then they can replace the link. The youngling reaches out and, instead of finding the hurt person, they find the other party.”
“How do I do it?”
Obi-Wan winces. “You shouldn’t. Leaving yourself open to the Force is … an experience of terrifying vulnerability. Even for someone who isn’t Force-sensitive, it will be extremely intense.”
Beru settles herself down on the ground. “Then I assume I shouldn’t try it standing up?” she says, smoothing out her skirt.
Shmi Skywalker had walked for half a day across the desert to find a healer for Anakin, when he’d been struck with sandsickness. She’d risked having her slave tracker detonated to save his life.
One of Shmi’s old friends had told that story, on the first Mantah Keliye after her death, and Beru’s heart had hurt clean through. She couldn’t think of anything more … more Shmi than that, not just love but love made physical and brave.
She can do this, whatever it means.
So she sits there looking up at Obi-Wan for a full four minutes before he joins her on the ground, sighing again.
“Are you sure you’re not the one related to his father?” he asks, wearily.
***
Opening her mind to the Force is, at first, mostly tiring and boring. Luke hasn’t stopped crying and the sun is beating down hot on her head, and if she weren’t so stubborn, she would probably go back inside.
“Open your mind,” he says again, with an edge of exhausted irritation, and she nearly laughs. The Jedi had chosen well to put him with the older students; there’s no chance he’d have been patient enough for the younger ones.
Slowly, a hum fills the desert air, and she can tell that her arm hair is standing on end, even with her eyes closed. It feels like her bones are rattling inside of her, at such a high frequency she thinks they might burst through her skin.
Truth be told, she’s a little frightened. She can’t tell what Kenobi is doing, sitting stock still in front of her, and she doesn’t like not knowing.
But Luke is crying. She may not know how to be a mother, all the complicated pieces that go into the word, but she does know this: Luke is crying, and there’s something she can do about it.
“Keep your eyes closed,” Obi-Wan says, “and breathe in.”
She breathes in, and feels herself filling with electricity, like the time she’d accidentally held both sides of a jumper cable for a fraction of a second before dropping it. This time, she holds on.
“Is this the Force?” she asks, and immediately feels silly and small for the question.
“A part of it,” he answers, from what feels like a very long way away. “You should be able to feel Luke’s presence, soon. Or the presence that he is feeling.”
It feels like her body is far bigger. Or, not that, like she’s connected to everything around her: the sand down the bedrock, the water singing in the far-off vaporators, the sky and the two suns wheeling above it.
Beru has always felt connected to her homeworld. It’s just never been this literal before.
And there are people, too, little points where the electricity swirls and warps, glittering like stars in the cold desert night. Beru can feel them spilling through her, so many thoughts that it feels like her head will crack in two.
Finally, she feels Luke. She has no way of knowing, not really, but … well, but the pattern of sparks flowing through him feels right, feels Luke.
She doesn’t reach out to touch him, with whatever electric sense she has right now instead of a body. She waits for him to come to her.
Then she gasps, because something is terribly wrong in the electricity, a circuit tugged loose, a wire torn open and spraying sparks. Something that hurts and hurts and hurts, without an end.
Is this the presence Luke is feeling? Oh, no wonder he’s wailing.
“I’ve got you,” she says quietly, and focuses on that, arms wrapped around him. And the cluster of sparks that is Luke reaches out to her in turn. It feels like the first time he wrapped his tiny fingers around one of hers.
She wonders if, laid open like this, Luke can feel everything she’s feeling. Every doubt, every frustration, every time she’s thought about ways she could kill him in a moment of careless inattention. It almost makes her want to pull away.
But Luke is crying.
The other presence fades, leaving just Luke and her. Luke in her arms, like when Obi-Wan had come to her planet with a face blank with sorrow.
She had been reluctant to take Luke, at first. She was going to be the first Whitesun girl not to have a child on the way by twenty, the first Whitesun girl to be ready. But seeing the baby Obi-Wan brought, lying there so helpless and soft, she’d taken him willingly.
Returning to her body is nearly as bad as leaving it. When she blinks her eyes open, the sky has gone dark, and the air is cool on her skin.
“What happened?” she asks, and talking makes her realize that there are dried tear tracks on her cheeks, as though she had cried hours ago.
Obi-Wan shakes his head. “Congratulations,” he says. “Your ridiculous plan didn’t kill you.”
And yes, Luke has stopped crying, and he’s breathing deeply against her chest. As she watches him, he pops a thumb into his mouth and starts sucking, the rest of his hand still bunched in a fist.
She tries to stand, and nearly falls over. Her legs are screaming at her, locked in place for far too long, and she barely manages to wobble to her feet.
“I told you this wasn’t a good idea,” he says, reprovingly. “You could have just…”
“But it worked,” she says. “Thank you,” she adds quietly, and the irritation in his face melts a little.
When Owen Lars gets back from his trip to Anchorage the next morning, he finds his wife and his nephew lying curled up together on their bed, sleeping soundly for the first time in weeks.
***
It’s strange being out under the desert sky without Luke.
Owen had insisted on “giving her a break” from him, letting her go out to collect mushrooms without a little squirming body attached to her at the arm. Thinking about it now, Beru smiles softly. Owen may struggle to say it out loud, but he clearly loves the boy and every second he can spend with him
Also, it means she can gather the vaporator mushrooms without having to worry about keeping track of both Luke and the bag of mushrooms. He’s getting too big for his slings now, and will wander off worryingly easily.
She kneels down on the rock, reaching under the vaporator. This time, it’s thick with mushrooms, thriving in the relative dampness of the dark space. When she pulls them out, they’re soft and purple, almost the same colour as a bruise. She pops one into her mouth and chews; yes, it tastes right too, dark and smoky with just a little bitterness.
The second one doesn’t go into her basket either; it’s sliced up with her pocketknife, in the palm of her hand, and laid out in slices at the base of the vaporator.
“Shmi,” she says, quietly, “your grandson is doing better.”
She leaves out offerings for the ghosts on Mantah Keliye, of course, little muul cakes to lure them into the house so they can rest for the evening. Shmi and Cliegg and Anakin all have a place at their table that night, and a place in the conversation.
But … even when the Mantah offerings aren’t out, she talks to Shmi. She doesn’t know whether her ghost can hear her but, out in the high desert, with the winds whipping around her and pulling at her skirt, it feels like she should be able to.
Besides, it’s comforting to think that she could be listening.
“He’s sleeping through the night now. I know Anakin had trouble with that too, at first.”
Suddenly, it seems impossible to her that Shmi won’t be at the farmhouse when she gets home, giving Beru her usual wry smile and wealth of stories, playing Stuta Cheeko with Luke with her hands in front of her face. It’s been six years, or something like that, and Beru still forgets sometimes.
“He knows about you,” she says, smiling, fighting tears. Shmi would have laughed, kissed her forehead, told Beru not to waste her water on her. “I tell him stories about you, I sing him all the songs you taught me.”
Owen has asked her not to talk about Anakin around Luke. Even now, he’s afraid that the boy will follow his path, burn up on the journey out of Tatooine’s atmosphere. And she’s happy enough to avoid the topic, especially with the little she knows about it.
But no power in the galaxy could stop her talking about Shmi.
“You would have loved him, Shmi, I know you would have.”
Sound on the sand behind her makes her whirl, hand on the blaster she keeps at her hip when she goes out to the vaporators. By the time she’s properly registered who’s there, the barrel is already aimed directly between Obi-Wan’s eyes.
He puts his hands up in surrender.
“Sorry,” she says, and drops the blaster back down to her side. “Instinct.”
Beru had trained herself on Cliegg Lars’ old blaster after Shmi died, using the activity to fill her grief. She’s a pretty decent shot now, and very quick to the draw.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, head to one side.
“Gathering vaporator mushrooms,” she says, hesitates, then continues, “and leaving offerings for the ghosts.”
Obi-Wan doesn’t believe in the desert ghosts and, although he hasn’t out-loud said he thinks they’re a ridiculous superstition, the words “ridiculous” and “superstition” are always hovering in his silences.
Beru is never sure whether to feel annoyed or worried for him over it. Kenobi lives out in the desert, out on his own. And just because you don’t believe in ghosts doesn’t mean they don’t believe in you.
“And you?”
He hesitates. “I wanted to speak to you,” he says, finally. “And I understand that Owen doesn’t want me around … the farmhouse.” Around Luke, is what he isn’t saying.
“About what?”
“How are his relationships with other children his age? With you and Owen?”
Beru laughs. “He likes people,” she says, with a shy smile. She doesn’t like to brag, but it’s easy to brag about Luke, for all he’s difficult sometimes. “He gets on with them well. He fusses and cries more than usual when I’m not with him, or when Owen’s not. He seems very attached to us.”
The other mothers had said that was a good thing, that it meant Luke had bonded with Owen and Beru. That, whatever his little infant memory had of his parents, he hadn’t been too hurt by their loss to put down new roots.
From the look on his face, Obi-Wan doesn’t agree.
“You’ll want to be careful of that,” he says, slowly.
Ghosts take her, that had been the one thing that she hadn’t been worried about! “Why?”
“Attachment can be … a dangerous thing, for the Force-sensitive. Which is why Jedi take care to limit our attachments. To act otherwise is to invite ruin.”
That hadn’t been an answer. “Why?”
He sighs, brushes a sweep of hair from his eyes. His nose has the beginnings of a sunburn. “Because attachment to people can make people do terrible things in their defense. Because it can blind you to their faults. And it’s too dangerous for someone strong in the Force.”
“I don’t think I understand,” she says, blinking sand from her eyes. “Do you mean that it’s a bad idea for Force-users to be attached to other people, or for other people to be attached to them?”
Obi-Wan gives her a small, brittle smile. “I would say that, for our purposes, it’s best to limit both.”
Beru is polite enough that she doesn’t laugh out loud “So, you want me to … what? Stop loving the boy? Get him to stop loving others?”
“Of course not!” he says, practically rolling his eyes. “Just … be careful with it.”
She’d made sure to drink a waterskin before she headed out into the desert, but she has a splitting headache anyways.
“I will consider it prayerfully,” Beru says, which is her stock response when she isn’t likely to consider someone’s advice at all.
She’d said the same when Matre Dismas had said she needed to stop Luke from flapping his hands when he got excited, had told her she needed to hold them down if necessary. Beru had delivered the line with enough venom that Matre hadn’t tried to order her around for almost a month.
She doesn’t need the same vehemence here: Matre should know better, but this clearly isn’t Obi-Wan’s area of expertise.
Be careful with love? Ration it out anxiously, sparingly, never too much for fear that it could do harm?
For all he knows about the galaxy, it’s obvious that he hasn’t raised a child.
***
When she gets back to their farmhouse, Owen is holding a vaporator disk in one hand, and making Luke’s toy dewback crawl towards it with another.
“… and, just like us, he needs water. Do you think he’s going to make it there this time?”
Luke nods from his position on the ground, head propped up on his hands, chubby cheeks squished up by his fingers.
“Oh, no, he’s attacked by a Krayt Dragon,” Owen says in his usual quiet monotone, dropping the vaporator disk so he can make his other hand into a mouth to bite at the toy. Luke gasps, and Beru can’t help but laugh.
Owen looks up, startled. “We were just … I was just teaching him about how the farm works,” he says, quickly.
Beru goes over to kiss him on the forehead, still laughing. “I’m glad you’re teaching him about the obvious danger of Krayt Dragons,” she says.
When she’d met him for the first time, at the party after Shmi and Cliegg’s wedding, she’d thought he was grumpy, unfeeling. But while he may be unsociable, while he may struggle to express his affection sometimes, it’s clearly there.
He goes to stand up, and Beru holds him down at the shoulder. “I can take care of lunch,” she says. “I think Luke wants you to finish the story.”
Indeed, Luke is looking at his dewback, lying on its side, with wide eyes.
“He’s not dead,” Owen says, quickly, and picks him up. As Beru brings her cargo of mushrooms into the kitchen, the story unfolds behind her.
She may ask Shmi for advice, but she doesn’t agree with all of her ghosts. When she sets out the Mantah plate for Cliegg Lars, she always asks him, silently, why he couldn’t have done things differently.
She knows he’d raised Owen as best as he could, but … but he can’t cry around other people, not even her, not even when Cliegg died. And every time he’s open and warm with Luke, it means effort, it means pushing past the way he’d been brought up to act. An unkind part of Beru can’t help but resent Cliegg for it.
Shit gets passed down easy as heirlooms, the old saying goes, meaning that ways of being broken go down through the generations.
Beru still doesn’t think she knows much about being a parent. But she does think she’s started to see the shape of what to do, like a speeder hidden under a tarp: you figure out what’s shit, and try not to pass it down.
***
Before Luke had come into her life, Beru would not have thought that an offering of food could be a strategic move in a long, difficult battle.
Setting the plate of squares down on the table, slightly closer to Obi-Wan than to her, she reflects grimly on how much she’s learned.
“Ah, no thank you, I’ve just eaten,” Obi-Wan says politely, like every other visit. It certainly isn’t true every time, because the man is noticeably thinner than when he came to Tatooine, the bones of his face standing out in a way she doesn’t like. “Gaunt” would be rude, but “thin” just doesn’t say enough.
These meetings, where Luke is banished to the garage to help Owen with his speeder, are only half so Obi-Wan can ask for updates about Luke. The other half, which she leaves unspoken, is to make sure the man hasn’t neglected himself to death.
“I haven’t,” she says, cheerfully, and takes a square, lets the crumbling sweetness melt on her tongue.
He doesn’t take the bait. “How is the family?” he asks, face almost completely impassive.
“We’re still getting some of the vaporators back online after the last flashflood,” Beru says, and Obi-Wan winces. He’d certainly have been able to feel the storm, out there in the deep desert with no other buildings around. “Meera Ashaad’s daughter came to stay with us for a few weeks, to help us get them back up.”
Trenva Ashaad had been near-silent the whole time she was there, but a handy mechanic. Even Owen had approved of her, in his usual gruff way. And Luke …
“She didn’t talk much to us, but she loved Luke.” She smiles. “He must have told her every lizard fact he knew, and she still didn’t get tired of him.”
At sixteen, Trenva was both old and young enough to have looked at Luke with haughty disregard. But his terrible jokes had made her laugh, and his incessant offers of help or water had made her smile rather than sigh.
“Luke is as he always is. Sensitive. Excitable. Kind.”
Obi-Wan’s expression sharpens to a kind of quiet hunger, as it always does when she talks about Luke. And, like he always does when she mentions Luke, he always pretends to be less interested than he is.
Who is he trying to fool? Certainly not her.
“He’s enjoying school more than the last time we talked. He has more friends now, even if some of the children think he’s a bit of a strange bird.”
Truth be told, some of the teachers think he’s a strange bird too. It’s hard to feel any other way about a boy who spends a lot of time staring into nothing, who asks you about problems you barely even knew you had, who can move silently even through sand.
“Strange” is okay, to Beru. But she’s had to go correct several teachers who thought “strange” was the same word as “bad.”
“And how are you?” she asks.
“I was in Mos Eisley last week,” he says, and the corner of his mouth curls down.
“Oh?” Beru asks, innocently. “And how was your visit?”
She’s being unfair, she knows. She and Owen doesn’t like Mos Eisley much either, but … but it sounds all different coming from a man with a Coreworld accent, who calls things uncivilized far too much for her taste.
“I was able to get what I came for,” he says. “Information.”
“And?”
“The Emperor is, by all accounts, trying to raise a private army. The Inquisitors, he calls them, his pet Force users. Former Jedi, and Jedi washouts, and … and Force-sensitive children taken from their parents.”
“Could they find Luke?” Beru asks, deadly quiet and deadly serious. Luke is in the garage right now, helping Owen strip down a vaporator, but he sometimes has uncanny hearing, or senses, or … or, well, there’s no pretending around it, the boy is incredibly sensitive to the Force. Sensitive enough that the Emperor would certainly want him.
Obi-Wan shakes his head. “None of them are powerful enough. I’m hiding him, and he’s difficult to find in the first place. His signature in the Force is … spread out, diffused into the world around him. It makes it look like the whole of Tatooine is a little more Force-sensitive than a planet should be.”
Luke always does seem to be half in his body and half out of it, always listening for something she can’t quite hear.
“And what about Darth Vader?”
Beru has nightmares about the Emperor’s enforcer sometimes, that she is in a maze with him at the center. That she can hear the sound of his breathing and the noise of his lightsaber burning through the air, always just close enough behind her that she has to run.
Obi-Wan’s face grows even more drawn. “Darth Vader won’t set foot on Tatooine, not willingly.”
“Why not?”
“Can you imagine that suit? In the desert sun? I can’t imagine it’s particularly temperature-controlled.”
That isn’t the real reason. Beru has gotten good at recognizing Obi-Wan’s lying voice. She’s had a lot of practice.
But she’s not going to force the truth out of him. She’s more than satisfied by the conviction in his voice earlier; Darth Vader won't come to Tatooine. Her gentle, sensitive nephew, who reaches out to other people as naturally as plants to the rains of Tatooine's flashfloods, won't be harmed.
“Besides,” he says, “we have another asset on our side. I realized, recently, that you’ve been protecting the boy in the Force, as well.”
“Me?” She crosses her arms. “What does that mean?”
"You're Force-sensitive," he says, and there's a look on his face, as though he's looking beyond her out to the horizon. "Very slightly. The Jedi send, sent scouts out to find Force-sensitive children, but some slipped through the cracks.”
"Oh," she says, not sure what to think. She’s pretty certain that she’s supposed to react more strongly.
She'd never thought of herself as a wizard, but ... she knows things about people sometimes, like when her sister Janek got pregnant by that sleemo when she was only fifteen. And she’d known, even before Meera pulled her aside, that the same had happened to Trenva.
"We never caught it." He looks at her with a strange mixture of sadness and wonder, shakes his head. "What a waste."
"A waste," she says, and makes her voice dead flat, like she does when she's talking to Matre Dismas.
" I mean, you're too old for most of the training, now, and you're -"
"My life is not a waste," she says, and now she's proper angry. Doing fixes on the vaporators to ensure they don't lose their harvest isn't a waste. Bringing food to the Centh family because they lost another child and holding Iria Centh in her arms as she cries out all the water in her body isn't a waste. Singing old sand songs to him to make Luke laugh instead of crying isn't a waste. "Just because I'm not a Jedi does not mean my life is a waste."
"I didn't mean it that way," he says, apologetically, palms up.
He did, she knows. He didn't mean it unkindly, but he had meant it. Like anything other than being a Jedi was less-than.
“…. Uncle said I wasn’t really helping as much as I … Oh, hello!”
Luke is standing in the doorframe, scuffing at the floor with a toe. He always seems to show up when he’s most in the way or, looked at from another angle, when he’s most-needed.
Obi-Wan goes to stand, but Luke is on him before he gets out of his chair, presenting his hand to be shaken. “Auntie says that I need to introduce myself properly to people, instead of just running up to them and talking about lizards or stuff right away. She says it’s polite. I’m Luke Skywalker.”
Luke has been sucking his thumb, again, and his wet thumb has collected a coating of sand. To Beru’s half-surprise, Obi-Wan takes his hand gravely, with only some hesitation.
“Ben,” he says, stiffly, “Just Ben. I’m your … I’m just a friend of the family.”
“Oh, are you staying for dinner? Auntie Beru said she’s making slee pudding, and it’s really good, and she almost never makes it, and -”
“No,” Obi-Wan says, with difficulty. “In fact, I was just leaving.” He gathers his cloak around him, stands up.
This is the child he asks after with a kind of wondering hunger, and he can’t manage more than this chilly reception?
“It’s okay,” Luke says, in the longest-suffering voice he can manage, sounding like the veteran of a thousand bitter wars. “If Auntie hasn’t made enough pudding, I can share mine with you.”
Obi-Wan stifles a laugh and why? Why bother to hide that he’s charmed by the boy? Why be on his way so quickly, when Owen could hardly blame him for Luke bursting in on their discussion?
“At least take some of the squares with you,” she says. “We can’t eat them all.”
She shoots a glance at Luke, silently informing him that this is not the time to say that he could happily eat them all.
“Your offers are generous, but I’m afraid I really do need to be on my way.” He pulls his hood back up over his head, his thin wrists swimming in the fabric of his sleeves.
To anyone who didn’t know him, Obi-Wan’s exist would look dispassionate, totally without regret. Unfortunately for him, Beru does know him.
And she knows him enough to watch him after he passes through their front door, the grieving look he shoots back through the window.
***
Luke doesn’t ask about Ben, in the days afterward. Her curious, social nephew doesn’t bother to ask about the stranger who had been in their kitchen.
It’s entirely possible that Luke’s excitable, fast mind had decided on another topic to leap to. It’s entirely possible that the thought of pudding for dinner had overshadowed all other thoughts. It’s entirely possible that he wasn’t in a mood to care about old Auntie Beru’s equally-old friends.
It’s also entirely possible that Kenobi did something to him, to make him forget.
Him forgetting is probably for the best. Stars know Beru doesn’t want to have to sit him down and say something like, “This is the man who trained your father before the collapse of their entire order and your father’s probably-violent death, which broke his heart in a way he refuses to acknowledge. No, he probably doesn’t want to talk about lizards.”
Still. He should have asked.
***
Beru knocks at Obi-Wan’s door, so hard her knuckles hurt. When she doesn’t hear a response right away, she knocks again.
Eventually, he comes to the door, opens it a crack, and then wider when he sees who it is. By that time, one of her knuckles is bleeding.
“We need to talk about Luke,” she says, arms crossed.
Obi-Wan isn’t a natural host, but he is a polite one. He pours her his strange Couruscanti tea, which she’s tried before and found not bad.
“What seems to be the matter?” He only has one cup, so he’s drinking his tea out of his bowl. Were she any less agitated, that would sadden her.
“We were in Mos Eisley,” she says, taking her tea, in small sips so it doesn’t burn her, “and we passed the slave market.” Her face twists up at that. The Whitesuns are three mothers freed, but that doesn’t make it any easier to pass the Market. “I was ... distracted.”
She isn’t sure whether the smell of fear is something that comes to her through the Force, or whether it would be out there for anyone who had a functioning heart. The buyers certainly have no problem ignoring it.
“And Luke, Luke slipped away from me. When I found him, he was talking to one of the women, the girls. She was trying not to cry and Luke said, he said…”
“My friend is coming,” he’d said solemnly, so quiet Beru could barely hear him. “My friend is coming, wearing gold, and she says she’ll free you all.”
It had taken everything in Beru to quietly take his hand and lead him away, not to pick him up and run. Running away from the Market was how you ended up with a blaster bolt in your back, free or not.
Obi-Wan frowns at her explanation. “Luke is an imaginative child. While I understand that’s probably not the best thing to discus in the middle of Mos Eisley, I don’t see what it has to do with the Force.”
“He said his friend was someone from his dreams. He said she was a princess. Like … like the girl. The other one.”
And there had been something in his voice that went beyond imagination. Beru doesn’t believe in future-telling, doesn’t like the idea that the future is written down in stars or cards or animal guts, but the hair on the back of her neck had stood straight up when Luke had said that, like it had meaning. Like it was some kind of prophecy.
Now, Obi-Wan looks alarmed, which perversely cheers her. At least she isn’t being alarmed on her own.
“A bond that strong,” he says, quietly. “It’s over a hundred parsecs to Alderaan.”
“Pardon?”
Obi-Wan looks at her with an intensity she can’t understand. “You need to teach the boy to be more mindful of his attachments. His sister is halfway across the galaxy, and he’s never met her in his life, and he still talks to her?”
Fear. That’s what it is.
He hadn’t been afraid to fight off raiders. He hadn’t been afraid of sandstorms. But he’s afraid of the girl from Luke’s dreams, or what she might mean to Luke.
“Beru, you need to listen to me. Luke is powerful enough to be dangerous, and you can’t let your feelings about him get in the way of recognizing that.” His voice is bordering on frantic, and he’s looking past her, not at her. As if he’s seeing someone else.
Something comes to her, then, like a wisp of cloud sailing high through the desert air: there’s something he’s not telling you.
“You’re hiding something,” she says. “Something about the boy, and,” the feeling hovers just below words for a moment, before resolving, “and about his father.”
Obi-Wan practically jumps in his seat. Jackpot, Beru thinks.
He certainly makes an effort of not telling her, taking a long sip of his tea, probably to see if she’ll fill the silence. But her impatience has made her patient; there’s no way she’ll let him get away with not elaborating.
"Before Luke’s father … died, he made some very bad decisions,” he says, every word scraping against his teeth on the way out. “Decisions that I do not want to see Luke repeat.”
Beru thinks about the statement. “When you say that, do you mean, “blew all his money on ronto races in Mos Eisley” level of bad decisions or “the family has to pretend not to know him when the Stormtroopers drop in” level of bad decisions?”
Obi-Wan looks like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone. “More like the latter one,” he says, after an obvious struggle.
She waits for an explanation.
“He never learned how to control his emotions. He never learned how to control his attachments. And he suffered for it. We all did.”
That had not been an explanation. “What did Anakin do?”
“The particulars aren’t important.”
She does what she’s taught Luke to do, takes a five-second breath to calm herself before reacting. It helps her exactly as little as it’s ever helped him.
“If Luke is in danger, of something bad happening to him or doing something bad, I need to know. I need to know, because I can’t help him otherwise!”
“I’ve told you what to do. You’ll just need to trust me on the why.”
The casual arrogance of it stings so hard she almost gasps, like sticking her hand into an entire clump of desert broomnettles.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi, don’t you dare piss me around!” she snaps, breaking the family’s rule on language and not particularly caring. She’s gratified to see the other man jerk back in his seat at her tone. “I took the boy in without any explanations, and now I’m asking for them, and you owe me!”
She isn’t angry. She’s terrified, which is far worse. Her anger, at least, has its course and its limits. Her fear for Luke goes all the way up to the sky, and then some.
“What kind of sunbrained idiot do you think I am, to take rules without reasons? To hurt Luke like that, and yes it would be hurting him, without you giving me a proper explanation? Would you do the same?”
Beru has heard about how rocks erode, the wind scraping away at them until they finally become stones, or sand. Obi-Wan’s face goes through a whole century of erosion in a moment, grief finally visible.
It’s only half-arrogance, she realizes, only half the conviction that he shouldn’t have to explain himself. It’s half that he can’t.
“I know you love Luke. We both do,” she says, quietly. “Please.”
He stays silent. Whatever sorrow he carries has sealed his mouth, like a cave cut off from the air by a devastating rockslide.
Suddenly, Beru is exhausted. “Goodbye, then, Master Kenobi,” she says, and walks off towards the door, towards her speeder, towards home.
She can’t help someone who won’t talk to his ghosts.
***
When she knocks on the door to Luke’s room, she doesn’t hear anything from inside, at first.
“Luke,” she calls. “It’s your aunt. We need to talk.”
“Uncle Owen already talked to me,” Luke says, and she can tell that his high voice is thick with tears.
“Luke,” she says, reprovingly.
He sighs. “Fine!”
When she slides the door open, Luke is sitting on the floor of what is normally his room. Right now, it looks like the scrap heap out back of the mechanists’ in Mos Eisley, with blankets, speeder parts, and papers flung everywhere.
He’s one of the most powerful people in the galaxy, or will be. But he’s got a trail of snot dribbling down almost to his upper lip, and his eyes are red with weeping. There’s no way Beru can be afraid of that.
“What happened?” she asks, sitting down in front of him.
“Uncle Owen’s mad at me. Again.” He picks up a ball of paper, throws it across the room. “He said I was being irra … sponsible, and I could’ve got all of us in trouble, and that I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
He looks up, and she can tell he’s trying, hard, not to cry. “But it wasn’t fair!” he says. “She was sad, and I wanted to make her feel better, and you always say it’s important to be nice and care about people and make the galaxy better. And it’s not fair!”
Her heart breaks for Luke, and for the boy his father had been, and all the wounded lives in the galaxy.
“Your uncle’s right,” she says, quietly. “You need to be careful when you say things, especially in public. Because you could have gotten hurt for saying that. Not only that, the girl you were talking to could have gotten hurt for you saying that. She’s a slave, Luke. That means she’s always in more danger than you are.”
Luke looks down at the floor.
“Luke,” she says, tipping his chin up with a hand. “Look at me. Trying to help isn’t enough, if you just get people hurt. Do you understand that?”
He nods, miserably. But Beru needs him to understand it. Even in a galaxy filled with stormtroopers and Hutts, she’s seen enough damage done by people with good intentions.
“But you were right, too.”
He looks up again, teary eyes confused.
“It wasn’t fair. You’re right, it wasn’t fair, and it will never be fair, no matter what people say. People are always people, and people shouldn’t be in chains.”
She takes a deep breath, because she wants to say the next thing right. “You have a good heart, little starpilot. And that’s a hard thing in this galaxy, but it’s not a bad thing. Your heart wasn’t the problem.”
It couldn’t have been the problem, not for Luke and not for Anakin, either.
“ ‘m I still grounded? Uncle Owen says I was grounded.”
She rubs the soft fuzz of his short hair. “Yes, you are very grounded. Uncle Owen told me some of the words you used, and you are very grounded.”
Luke scowls again, but there’s no heat in it.
“In fact,” she says, “You’re going to help me with chores right now. We’re going to bake muul cakes.”
Luke’s face wrinkles. “But it’s not Mantah Keliye.”
Beru smiles. “Sometimes, we need to set places for the dead on other days, too. Especially when we miss them.”
Sometimes, she thinks, we need to set places for the living, too. Those so lost inside themselves that they might as well be ghosts.
“Do you remember what we did last Mantah Keliye?”
Luke’s brow wrinkles. “We said stories?”
“Yes,” she says. “Stories about the dead. Stories about people we remember. Stories about people we’ve loved.”
She reaches out a hand to him, helps him up. “Let me tell you a story about your grandmother.”
***