Chapter Text
~*~
Of all the places on this broken, freshly-fractured earth, Luke Skywalker never expected to end up in Scotland. But it was a promise made with someone else’s blood on his hands, and he was nothing if not a keeper of his few and tenuous oaths.
Saint Andrews, he had gasped, Kenobi; clinging to Luke’s wrist and gripping so fiercely his fingertips slipped along the tendons standing out on the backs of Luke’s numb, trembling knuckles as the smell of burning fuel built like a hideous song in the air. Promise me, Luke. S-Saint Andrews.
Soothing him, knowing he would certainly not make it out of the wreckage around them and highly doubting his own chances in the moment, Luke had thought at first the old officer was begging the name of something holy to deliver him—Kenobi was never terribly religious, yet war tended to make pious even the most stubborn of the lot.
But it was a place. His home. And so when the hospital spat Luke out with an honorable discharge and a medal for his troubles after everything was over and done with, turned out into the aftermath of victory parades he had missed on account of his convalescence, they asked him where he would go from there and he simply told them Home . They did him the acute courtesy of not asking whose, exactly, he meant.
The plains of Luke’s childhood, deep in the heart of Montana’s dust, felt so far away that they might as well have been fairytales. Now that he had been broken like a bad colt, perversely tamed by the routes he flew between the continent and his station in Britain in all those small hours of the night trying to pretend he was only flying a bush plane and not a bomber, the marvel of the sea below him had long worn off. In St. Andrews, the ocean clutched close around the little town was no longer so breathtaking as the first. Like the permanent twinging that remained in Luke’s right hand— Lucky boy, he could still hear the night nurse tutting as he watched her change its dressings the first time he was conscious enough through the dope fog to see it, almost had it right off— and the leaden heaviness banded around his heart that took to squeezing when the howl of the wind drew a bit too close to the sound of Spitfire engines in the dark, it simply was.
There was a pub in town that became something of a passable acquaintance after Luke’s first year spent drifting, wandering from odd job to odd job with a room in a squat little tenement house by the coast that was terribly affordable if not a bit leaky when the wet got thick with weather. He knew the barkeep and, and the barkeep knew what Luke liked to drink—as well as, perhaps more importantly, when to cut him off—so it was, five or six nights out of seven, where Luke spent most of the waking hours he had left in hand after his days filling others’ shoes with his time.
If nothing else, it kept him from remembering. It kept Luke from falling up into the stars and drowning there, as though the sky was one great blanket waiting to smother him from the inside out.
He met Mr. Owen Lars in the midst of such distraction, a terrible dose of it making his tongue thick and mute behind his teeth as he stared hard into his pint.
“Trying to get it to talk back?”
Luke slid his eyes over to find an older gentleman watching him, the source of the well-intentioned grumble. His beard was like steel wool, short and thick and tangled grey, and something fraternal and sage twinged deep in Luke’s belly. “It’s telling me it needs a companion.”
The man snorted. He raised a hand in the vague direction of the barkeep, which summoned a second beer dark as teak. Luke nodded his thanks, raised his first glass, and downed the dregs in one gulp.
“Seen you here before,” the man said. He stuck a hand out, chapped and ruddy. “Owen Lars.”
Luke’s palm, even so work-worn by the past year, was almost laughably small clapping against Owen’s. “It’s a good haunt. Luke Skywalker, pleased to meet you.”
“Take jobs all over town, don’t ye?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir, what’s sir. I got ye a pint, we’re past sir.”
A sideways smile jittered onto Luke’s mouth. “Yes, Owen, I do.”
“There.” Owen clapped him on the shoulder. “Where were ye, Italy? All the towheaded lads went to Italy.”
Luke snorted and shook his head. “I’m American. My flight was stationed in Gatwick with the RAF.”
“American, ‘course I knew ye were American. Sounds like you’re chewing coins, arr-ayy-eff. Good you didn’t stay in Gatwick, bah, Sussex. Terrible place. Drag and a half.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice.”
Owen narrowed his eyes at the far wall as he sipped off the top of his pint and nodded. “Long way from Gatwick up here.”
Luke drew a fingertip through the sweat collected on the edge of his pint, steeling his shoulders against the feeling of Kenobi’s hand going cold in his. “Good work to be done here. The right kind.”
“You drive sheep, lad?”
The memory rose like the sulfuric scent from a striking match: of springtimes on horseback behind his father as they ran the flock up and back down the hills, the sunset picking out the broad and serious line of him astride the black stallion Luke had to shoot for a shattered foreleg two summers before he was drafted.
Luke shook himself softly, blinking slowly to dispel an anachronistic and unasked for bolt of guilt in his belly. “I do. Need a hand?”
“Need more’n a hand.” Owen sighed and slogged a mouthful of beer with a sour look. “One who’d come through each year ahead of lambing season got shipped off to North Africa, ended up with his bleeding leg blown off. Don’t suppose you’re keen on heading a whole flock?”
Luke raised his eyebrows. “Where’s the barn?”
“Outside of town. Remote. Unfortunate place, but…I dunno. Calican always said he liked the quiet, and maybe all ye squaddies are the same.”
Quiet. Luke had been chasing that very thing since he had torn up the boat ticket back across the Atlantic and folded himself back into the crowd at the dock, his heart in his throat as he disappeared; melted into the proverbial aether along with the names of so many men who would never go home again from the much more permanent place beneath the dirt. Luke turned Owen’s offer over in his hands, silently inspecting its edges. Quiet. Even the privacy of his rooms couldn’t have been called quiet on the best of days, the walls bleeding with the mutterings of so many other lives carrying on around him.
He dug into his pocket for his wallet. “When would I start?”
Owen’s hand came out and stilled him, a sideways smile hitched on his craggy face. “Could drive out now and show ye ‘round. Put yer money away, this one’s on me.”
~*~
“Surprised ye weren’t here for the university,” Owen all but shouted over the roar of his truck, the engine growling like the barrel-chested turnover of a boat.
“I’m American,” Luke shouted back, as though Owen hadn’t already plucked apart his rangy otherness at the pub and explained anything at all. He couldn’t have corrected with the whole truth— I promised a dying man I would come here, for nothing but the need to feel like I could fulfill something that wasn’t destruction —and sounded like any sort of sanity at all.
Owen lit a messily-rolled cigarette with both hands while he steered briefly with his knee, the truck bouncing merrily over the dirt road carved open by the headlights in the weighty wash of night. Luke tightened his fingers on his knees to keep from reaching over to stabilize it.
“So, American Luke,” Owen said when the cigarette was lit and he had one hand, blessedly, back on the wheel. “Where’d ye learn sheepherding?”
“Montana. My father’s business.”
Owen grunted. “Great big things in those parts, aren’t there?”
“Big as in how?”
“Bears,” Owen barked as the engine gunned a bit over the shallow rise of the hillock they climbed, “wolves, toothy bastards.”
Luke shrugged, thinking to himself for the first time how the most threatening thing he’d come across while lending work to the farms here had been a poorly-sanded paddock that drove splinters into his palm. “We had dogs to spook them. Guns too.”
Owen made a low sound to himself that didn’t quite translate over the noise of the truck. “Only think you’ll need to spook here are the ghosts in the house proper,” he said after a moment. “Don’t even need bullets to do it.”
The sense that Owen was joking quivered faintly in the air, but Luke figured if there was ever a time he would be unsurprised to find the roof over his head haunted by something stuck behind in its own past, it was now—now that he had his own ghosts in the mists of his memories, both from home and the front, looming in the dark behind his eyelids.
Owen parked the truck at a jutting angle a fair length down from the house, wheel ruts driven into the mud with regularity frozen in the midwinter cold and making the earth wavy with it. Luke stumbled over his first step down from the cab and righted himself before he spilled to his knees.
“Feeding ‘em,” Owen began rattling off as he legged up toward the house, breath pluming in a brief cloud of steam in the air, “shearing ‘em, checking ‘em over for blight, all that. Then once spring breaks, up to the hills for a couple weeks for lambing and that whole business. Ye ever camp out here?”
Luke’s feet slipped along the crusted ground, keeping purchase but not knowing the way half so we’ll as Owen’s surefooted trek toward the dark smear of the house against the purpling sky. “I camped in Lorraine for six days in the dead of winter,” he called up at Owen from several paces back. “Nearly lost two toes for Christmas.”
Owen cracked a laugh. “Least the sheep won’t shell ye in yer sleep.”
They slouched into the house, knocking the dirt from their boots as Owen flicked the lights on and moved through the low-ceilinged rooms with an instinctive rote. Luke followed him and marked the dry, tidy way in which living seemed to persist here—no photographs, no real decoration at all, but all the walls solid and the furniture angled as if in quiet invitation to sit.
Although, Luke mused as he marked the faded stripes of an overstuffed armchair beside a half-filled bookshelf with a sagging middle, how much of that sensation came from the pieces of him that still found any sense of permanence terrifyingly rare and surged toward it with a desperate kind of possession?
“Gets cold this time of year, but Beru has a knitting knack. Extra blankets in the hall cupboard there,” Owen was saying when Luke came back to himself, slowly turning in place beside the dining table to take in the cozy clutch of the rooms rising around him in silence. He jutted his bristly chin at the kitchen over Luke’s shoulder. “Hob runs on gas, heat too. Fee would come from yer wages to cover the usage, otherwise consider board included.”
Luke nodded slowly to himself. “Any neighbors?”
Owen made a rough sound and scratched at the back of his neck. “Big fella has a cottage out at the edge of pasture. Makes crockery, bowls and such. Keeps to himself, ‘ve gotten maybe six words from him in full, but he mends the fences when they need for it. Otherwise, town’s the closest thing to anyone else.”
Nodding again, Luke felt a strange knocking of foreignness at his chest that beat for several weighty tolls until he realized its shape: the angular identity of peace, wedging itself into him for the first time in a very long time indeed.
“Could I stay here tonight?”
He almost didn’t mean to ask it aloud, but the wash of relief and a deal well-made over Owen’s expression kept him from backpedaling. “‘Course! I’ll be heading back, but come morning I’ll show ye the barn and run out to pasture with ye. Anything left behind?”
It took Luke an extra beat to realize Owen was asking in the present— Anything left behind, in town , not Anything left behind, in the cosmic sense; in the way they never made their way back across the chasm of being broken.
“A trunk,” he said, his throat sticking only slightly as he made it work. “Just a trunk, I rent a room.”
Luke gave Owen the address, clasped his arm goodbye in a bracing handshake baffled by all their separate layers of jumpers and jackets, and watched from the mouth of the doorway as the truck snarled to live at the bottom of the lane and trundled back into town on the disappearing ribbon of road in the dark.
In the dark, left alone and in a steeping sort of quiet, Luke walked through the house one more time on his own. Trailing the fingertips of his good hand along the wall, he catalogued the space—slouching walls, creaking floors, scrimmy thick-glass windows, a low ceiling—before hunting out that cupboard of blankets and rooting out an armful of them to pile on the bed.
Luke’s mouth still tasted faintly of beer, he should go scrub his teeth, but a deep and dragging sort of exhaustion took him the moment the wool-and-clove cloy of the blankets met his nose from the bundle in his arms. He arranged the blankets in layers before burrowing underneath them and undressing in it the warmth, shuffling his limbs a little to generate a kinetic well of heat around him.
He laid alone in the dark after pushing the wrinkled lumps of his clothes back out to the floor, the catches of his suspenders clanging softly and his jumper heaping atop his shoes. In a fetal curl, running his fingertips idly through the wisping curls of hair along his shins, Luke stared through the window at the cold wash of the moon.
Ghosts, Owen had said. The crescent hanging in the sky blurred in and out of clarity as gauzy clouds lazed through the dark to cover it; bare it; cover it again.
There were plenty of his own ghosts taking up space in Luke’s body. Perhaps they would appreciate the company.
Luke drifted off to the distant sound of the barn buzzing with the distant burr of the occasional bleat in the dark. In the cottony press of exhaustion thick between his ears Luke found silence deep in the faraway of absent dreams when he finally dropped hard into that suspended surreality.
Silence—deep and dark and uninterrupted for the first time in a very long time.
~*~
He didn’t wake steadily anymore, hadn’t since before Normandy. But there in the farmhouse—radiator knocking, walls wheezing softly as the pipes churned, the morning breaking over the hills outside like the yawning stretch of some wide, yellow frill of potential—Luke opened his eyes to a relative silence so still that it broke him.
Not a shattering break, nothing so jagged, but rather a great give of every weight strapped to his shoulders; the face of a cliff taking one step closer to sloughing into the ocean. Luke’s face crumpled, his first thought forming in a shallow rush of emotion running up to choke his throat: Why am I the one who lives?
Supine, he reached up and pressed his good hand hard over his mouth as though holding in the sick of it. Tears broke around his squeezed-shut eyes, chasing down the edges of his face, and he cried quietly as his shoulders heaved against the sheets that smelled of clove and a home that should not be his.
Saint Andrews, he could still hear Kenobi gasping over and over again with the wet thick of his speech burbling as he drowned on his own mortality. Saint Andrews. Saint Andrews.
It should have been Kenobi’s peace to have, to wake and greet with the grim heaviness of his limbs and this ever-aching draw of breath. But fate’s dice were not his to cast, so Luke sniffled deeply and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw swimming spots in the dark.
“Get up,” he bid himself, hoarse and damp, and he obeyed.
Owen came with his trunk as promised at sun-up, when Luke had already dressed and stumbled blearily out to the barn to wake the sheep and let the dogs hound them out to pasture. It took some doing for him to figure out the lock on the paddock, but the black-and-white shepherd who sat at his feet and watched curiously as Luke fiddled with it and cursed softly at his cold, stumbling fingers on the mechanism lent him some measure of ease in the newness.
“Artoo’s already made yer acquaintance then!” Owen called in greeting from the driveway, hailing Luke with a raised hand. Luke looked up from absently scratching behind the shepherd’s ears to see him bound after Owen with a greeting bark, jostling a pair of ewes already at work on a dewy knob of grass, and raised his hand in kind. Owen gave a whistle and flicked his hand, spurring the dog to the far end of the tract where he settled in with his nose low and his eyes sharp. “You’ll have to be a bit firm with that one,” Owen sighed, stopping beside Luke with his hands on his hips, “fancies himself a hero.”
“Forgot to ask last night, how often do you go to market?” Luke brushed his palms off on his trousers and squinted at the sun breaking easily over the hills.
“More on that later, day by day, lad,” Owen said, waving a hand. “Come help lug this trunk of yours inside.”