Luke

[terresdebrume]

✗ Technical details

FANDOM: Star Wars Movies
RATING: Teen & Up
WORDCOUNT: 3 777
PAIRING(S): -
CHARACTER(S): Luke Skywalker, various OCs
GENRE: Rebirth in the desert.
TRIGGER WARNING(S): Slavery is a theme throughout the series. This story also contains mildly explicit instances of blood, gore and amputation (via an explosion).
SUMMARY: Luke isn’t the first to be sent North, and he won’t be the last. His master, however, probably never suspected what Luke would find in the desert.
NOTE(S): Thanks a lot to @kavkakat/ @artemisiagentileschied whose insight made this story a ton better than it started out! :)

TEETH OF THE DESERT: [LJ Masterpost] [AO3 Series] [More info on Tumblr]

✗ Before reading

My Tatooine verse is very inspired by @fialleril’s slave mythos, if not in the form at least in some key points of the culture, notably the fact that the slaves of Tatooine have their own language. Though I don’t use Amatakka (Fia’s language) in my verse, this fic contains words in the slave language anyway, as well as some reference to the local mythology. In order of appearance:

• Sarmakti – Adjective (masc.), means indifferently dead and free.
• Krayt(s) – Krayt dragons. Used alone because the word originated from Tusken
  and spread through Jawa and slave languages. The way people use this word in Basic (as a noun or a substantive) is usually a good way to tell people who know (about) the slaves’ language from those who don’t and, by way of consequences, friends from foes.


• Krykutte – The island of plenty. In the slaves’ mythos, Krykutte is a mythical heaven in the form of a tropical island where the children of Tatooine (loosely: everyone but the masters) go when they die.


• Kryku – Name, means indifferently water and life.


• Luakka – The first slave of Tatooine, who was brought there with the masters and was later adopted by the desert.


• Raamaro – Legendary dragon, mother of all krayt and protector of Tatooine’s
  children.

Note that you can read Luakka’s story in the previous TOD installment From the first grain of sand.
It’s not necessary to read it to understand the plot of Luke but it’ll make the mythical motives and implications easier to grasp.

The Falcon’s boarding ramp rises up to R2’s optical sensors, and the last thing Luke hears as he sinks into darkness is the shrill of a scared droid shouting his name in binary.

***

Luke comes back to a shaking world, red pain and sand-brown anger simmering at the edge of his ribs even as a low voice whispers for him to wake up—dammit wormie, wake up before they—the blue lights of night-service flood the hangar, and the glow of them makes the green of Akes’ skin look spirit-like even as their four eyes widen with fright.

“You’re being sent North,” they say, high-pitched voice reduced to a wheezing whisper that wakes Luke up faster than a slap, “Take this, and don’t be too—”

The main door opens and rattles the whole building, bits and pieces shivering on Luke’s bedside table, and Akes sends Luke a terrified look before they take to the ceiling and slither back to their own alcove. Luke dives under his bunk, tears his father’s transmitter
detector out of its secret compartment and shoves it in the pouch against his neck—Akes’ knife cuts at his hip when he slides it in the waistband of his pants, but the low whir of wheels has already reached his part of the hangar, and Luke doesn’t have time for more.

Xuwelta’s most trusted droid—the one that only comes when someone is being sent North—stops below Luke’s bunk and calls out his name. Luke’s mouth goes dry with fright, heart hammering against his ribs as his limbs turn to lead—but he moves, still. He crawls to the edge of his alcove with stilted movements—swallows the irrational instinct telling him to jump headfirst, and focuses on the rhythm of his feet as he climbs down the ladder.

Howling winds buzz at his ears as he lets the nameless droid drone the same instructions it gave countless others—go to the Tusken in the North, broker a trading deal for Xuwelta, you have three days.

In the alcoves, the slaves lean out to watch him go with distraught faces, touching the center of their foreheads in farewell. We won’t forget you.

The closest Tusken camp, up North, is at least a four days walk away.

***

Luke dives behind crates full of ship parts worth more than he is, blaster shots singing long black marks on the wall behind him. He curls in on himself, makes the smallest target he can manage while Han covers Kenobi and the droids as they board the ship.

“What are they gonna do to you?” Han shouts in Luke’s direction, tight and too loud even for the circumstances.

Luke’s stomach tightens, chest cold as Tatooine’s nights, but he manages to keep his voice steady when he shouts back:

“Send me North, I guess!”

“There’s nothing North!”

The furious roar of a Stormtrooper charging for the ramp cuts through their conversation and Luke throws his foot forward to trip them.
They fall to the ground in a messy heap as the ramp starts to close.

***

Hangar Nine groans as its door slides shut, louder than a pair of krayts, and Luke throws himself into the streets until the wind freezes his cheeks and Mos Eisley becomes a blur of dirty grays and dark ocher stone—until his heartbeat drowns the quiet, and the fear at the
back of his stomach turns colder than the night.

The pouch around his neck beats at his chest and Akes’ knife cuts at his hip until blood runs down his leg and he runs and runs and runs until he forgets where he is—until the suns of Tatooine rise in his lungs and fill them with fire, until his head swims with the voices of the countless slaves who took that road before him screaming encouragements and whispering condolences at the edge of his mind until he’s ready to pass out.

Sarmakti.

Dead.

Free.

***

“I know a pilot,” Luke admits, unable to take his mind off the girl in the hologram and the Rebels she spoke of. “In Mos Eisley. I’ll take you to him, but that’s all I can do.”

Artoo shrieks with joy, Kenobi breathes a sigh of relief and Threepio fusses. Luke’s mouth is dry, and he’s not surprised to find no amount of swallowing can change that.

***

Luke spills into the desert and keeps running until the moons rise, until he can’t run anymore and then he walks and walks and walks until it feels he’s been walking forever—until sweat drips down the back of his clothes and into the desert and the krayts’ canyons creep up on him, forcing him to lower his head and hope no Tusken raider will shoot him down.

Around his neck and at his hip, the detector and knife grow heavier with each step, drag him into the sand even as the first echoes of mighty krayts roaring boom around him and shake the stones with ancient anger.

There’s nothing North but Tusken raiders, and Raamaro’s shadow—but Luke listens to the krayts’ rage and it’s like hearing his own heart engulf the world.

He keeps walking.

***

“What do you mean, gone?” Luke asks, but cold fear crawls up his spine already.

 

He grabs a pair of binoculars from the first Jawa he can find and scans the desert as far as he can see. When he finally spots the blue droid and his friend, he doesn’t wait for the Jawas’ apologies before he sets in pursuit.

***

He reaches a fold in the cliffs as the sky starts to pale and the moons sink into the horizon. It’s late—far too late—but he couldn’t bring himself to stop sooner, couldn’t help but hope maybe he’d wake up, realize this was all a dream and he wouldn’t have to be
here, shaking and struggling for breath as he throws himself into a crack in the rocks. With shaking hands, Luke pulls his shirt off his shoulders, sets it aside and away from his bloodstained pants before he takes his father’s detector out of its pouch—almost lets it
slip onto the ground—flicks the switch to the correct position and runs the scanner over his left arm, his chest, stomach—blue light.

Now’s the time, he tells himself, do it or die.

***

“Master Xuwelta is angry with you,” Tuule says as she gives Luke the food and water he’s been allowed for his trip to the Jawas, “If you’re late he might just detonate you.”

“I know,” Luke answers with a tight nod, “I won’t be late.”

Find the Jawas, buy droids, come back. It’s a simple mission, and Han isn’t involved—Luke won’t be skirting disobedience this time.

***

He’ll be freed no matter what he does—alive or dead, he’ll never have to say ‘yes, master’ ever again—but if he stays put Xuwelta will get the last word. Freedom will come to him with the slow, painful pace of a punishment, and Luke can’t accept that.

Do it now. Do it or die.

When he steps on Krykutte, he wants to walk free with his head high and his hands
unbound. He will not carry chains into the place of freedom.

“Let the desert have it,” he hisses through gritted teeth, prayer shivering in his voice as he swipes the detector over his stomach once, twice, thrice more and struggles to mark the exact spot where the lights come on. “If I’m going to die, let the desert have my life!”

He breathes in, purposefully slow, and forces the cold grip of terror out of his chest and away from him, reaches for anger and love and resentment; reaches for the countless chaffing marks Xuwelta’s chains have left on his soul and brings them into his heart until his resolve hardens into something stronger than the bedrock under him.

He wipes the moisture from his palms into the sand, prays his offer of kryku
will grant him safe passage, if nothing else, and places the point of Akes’ knife against his skin.

Do it—now Luke! Do it or die!

***

“Master Xuwelta needs new protocol droids, and he’s given you a day off to
go buy them. Aren’t you grateful?”

“Yes, master,” Luke says in a flat voice, “thank you, master.”

The intendant nods, satisfied, and Luke’s lungs fill with the harsh wind of a sandstorm.

***

He screams when the blade pierces his skin, twists in the flesh until the sand in front of him turns crimson—then the pain vanishes, numbness taking its place as he reaches inside and feels his way to a piece of metal no larger than his thumb. He tries to fling it away and screams when it blows up in his hand, tears flesh and blood and bone off him and onto his face, sharp bits of rock flying and cutting at the skin of his cheek.

He screams and sobs and bleeds, and it’s like all of him pours into it like pus drawn from a wound until nothing is left but the clean flesh—until the weight of Xuwelta’s chains has melted into the sand and he finds himself lying on soft wet ground, staring at dark leaves while hot, humid wind caresses his hair.

The girl above him has brown hair and brown eyes—her dual buns are gone, replaced with a sober plait and the grave, tempered air of one who has seen too much already. She looks shocked, scared, furious, and when she bends over him with hurried words he can’t comprehend,
he can’t help but talk to her in his language—the one that matters—tell her his name and where he comes from and what brought him here.

Let the desert have it.

He tries to tell her he’ll leave Tatooine if he survives, but she hushes him down, righteous fury hardening her lips as she presses a light to his stomach—so hot it makes him scream, and then again when she does the same to the stump at the end of his arm.

He screams until his throat turns raw with it—until the edges of Krykutte grow dark around him and the spirit girl looks at him with a question in her eyes and he nods, understanding washing over him as he whispers Luakka’s words to her—the price is worth paying. The
price is worth paying.

The price is worth paying.

The girl nods, intent and grave, and he closes his eyes.

***

“You need to stop giving Solo and his pet special treatment. They’re never going to free you.”

“That’s not why I do it,” Luke scolds, hard enough to make Akes’ top eyes blink. “And it doesn’t matter,” he adds with the stubborn confidence of a sixteen years old boy, “I’ll free myself.”

***

The world he comes back to shakes with the furor of a thousand storms, sand-filled wind pushing at his stump, his chest, his lungs—he tries to crawl away and cuts his hand on something sharp, even as his other arm finds fabric he can’t possibly have brought here—he
pauses. Feels his way around the shards until he recognizes a vertebrae, some kind of shoulder, teeth too small and sharp for any species he’s ever seen, and then an oblong and hollow piece of metal, with slits and circles where the eyes should be—Tusken. He’s
sitting on dead Tusken, their bones and masks discarded as if left over from a meal, but he’s not afraid.

He saw Krykutte—what awaits him when he truly does die—and he saw a spirit and she knew, the same as Luke always has: the price is worth paying. Now, the price is paid.

Luke is freed.

Luke is dead.

***

“I like that one,” the slave catcher laughs, pointing at Luke as he clings to Aunt Beru’s hand, “He’s got guts. Bit a whole ear off Bantha when we captured him.”

Aunt Beru’s hand presses harder against Luke’s fingers, draws him closer to her the way she did when he was still a very little kid.
He’s eight now, and he’s had the taste of blood at the back of his throat for hours. He’s not a kid anymore.

He straightens up, presses back against Aunt Beru’s hand, and tells himself Luakka’s story again.

***

He’s not on Krykutte anymore when he wakes.

The wind still howls outside, and there is a tongue laving at his face—it’s big enough to cover the whole of it with one lick. He follows the length of it to a set of razor sharp teeth, a crown of stone-like spikes, and closes his eyes as the storm picks up its pace and the krayt breathes its life into him—fills him with heat and pushes water out of him until nothing but sand is left to him—until something in his chest unwinds and it’s like a whole new side of him burst into life so fast it drags him out of his own body.

It stretches and slithers to the edges of the cave—slides through bedrock and sand, caresses each and every grain of it as they follow the edge of the krayt beyond the cave, bump against sleeping womp rats and panicked sand bats and growing black melons. It reaches into the sky and into the ground, rock and rock and rock and more wind than he knows what to do with and the rising burn of twin suns against his soul as this new part of him pushes through the walls of Mos Eisley, tickles one, ten, a hundred people with the countless fingers of a sandstorm as he reaches further and further for Mos Espa, for Anchorage, for the Lars farm on the other side of inhabited land. He stretches further still—goes into the harshest parts of Tatooine where the world ends and Sarlacc’s mouth begins, sideways and down, down, down where rock heats up and softens and toward places where the sand is so fine it slides like water into the skins and mouths of things he’s never seen before and they’re small and large and fast and slow all at once and they’re free and Luke may be dead but he’s still here, and he laughs and laughs and laughs until he almost can’t breathe
anymore as he revels in the life he finds and the places he explores and the people he touches as he takes in more and more and more of the world around him, ready to take on all of it, to feel—the krayt nuzzles his chest, brings him back inside himself like a rubber band
snapping in place, and he stares.

***

“How did Luakka know Raamaro wouldn’t kill them?”

“They didn’t, love,” Aunt Beru said. “But they’d been freed, even if it was only for a while. They were prepared to pay the price.”

***

The krayt nudges him again, snout marred with scars, and this time when he holds his breath it’s as if the world outside grows still...it only lasts a second, if even that. But when he looks up into the krayt’s eyes, he still finds them filled with the same storm that pressed against his ribs all these years and the same fire underneath.

Strangely enough, being scared doesn’t even cross his thoughts.

He was brought back.

Slowly, like a mountain getting ready for a long journey, Raamaro slides out of the cave, leaving him alone with the bones and clothes of long gone Tusken—and Jawas, and Humans, and half a dozen more species he can’t quite name—the deafening silence that settles over the
desert after a storm, and the maddening itch of burned flesh healing back together all over his stump and the center of his stomach.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been here, but it might as well have been seven days.

***

“Your father built it,” Aunt Beru says as she slides the transmitter detector into its pouch. “He left it with your mother when he was freed, and she left it with me. And if we have to leave this house behind one day, this is the only thing we can’t leave without. Do you understand, Luke?”

He doesn’t, but he’ll be eight soon, and Aunt Beru said it was a very, very important thing to know, so he nods anyway. At the edge of his bedroom, Uncle Owen’s eyes are still red from the way he cried earlier—Luke isn’t supposed to know but he heard him anyway—but he nods and tries to smile.

Luke still doesn’t know why they’re telling him this now, but he has something of his father, and it’s enough to compensate for the strangeness of it all.

***

He stumbles out of the cave just in time to see the sky grow paler as the suns come up and, if not for the stump at the end of his right arm, he’d almost think no time has passed at all—that he’s still running and about to take a knife to himself. He’s hungry though, hungry and light in a way he’s never been back in Hangar Nine, and that’s enough to convince him he’s not dreaming as he lets his feet take him back to the southern entrance to the canyons.

Xuwelta’s slave catchers are well known on Tatooine—his ship business brought him money, but it’s the slave catchers that brought him Jabba’s friendship. With those people, Xuwelta manages to repurpose roughly half of the slaves he detonates—in the desert or in the gorges—and turn indebted farmers into Jabba’s shiny new toys with little to no difficulty. Tatooine hates them, they hate Tatooine—it’s a very predictable relationship, and he’s not surprised to find them floating in a landspeeder when he reaches the southern point of the
gorges.

He does, however, blink at the presence of what looks like an unusually tall Tusken between them, hands raised in defense against the mass raised against them—he cries out for them to stop before he even thinks about what it might mean.

“Well well well,” Bantha says as soon as he recognizes the newcomer, one hand coming up to finger at the place where his ear is missing, “You look like you’ve barely sustained any damage! It’s perfect. Means we can have a little fun before we take you back to Xuwelta.”

“I’m not coming with you.”

There is more certitude in his chest than there ever was before, and even though the Tusken firmly caught in Leesha’s grip has frozen in fear, it’s easy to gesture for them to be calm.

He has, after all, been infused with a mission.

“I’ve had quite enough to play with lately,” he says, using his stump to point at the large crimson stain around his hip. “You can take back my message to your master, though.”

“You’ll have to tell him yourself!”

He sidesteps Bantha’s charge, takes a deep breath in, and blows air toward the slave chaser as hard as he can—no storm, as predictable, but a column of sand springs up from the ground and catches Bantha full in the head, sends him flying several yards away until Leesha cackles with cruel glee. She reaches for the blaster at her side, but the Tusken manages to kick it away—gets hit in the head for their troubles—before they run and force Leesha to turn back on her original target with a furious look.

“You filthy little slave,” she says, spitting the last word out like it tastes bitter on her tongue, “I’ll—”

“You won’t do anything to me. I’m not a slave anymore, and Xuwelta can’t have me—or anyone else. I will walk with the storms on Mos Eisley and take all his slaves from him. Then, when they’re freed, I will take all the other slaves of Tatooine and free them, and we will chase the Masters out of our lands. You should tell Xuwelta to take you and his other servants away while he can still reduce his losses.”

Bantha, having risen from his spot on the ground, bellows in laughter, shaking with it so hard even Leesha’s smirk seems louder before she says:

“So what are you now, a storm-walker?”

“Yes.”

He can be a Stormwalker, if that’s what he needs to be. He can be the teeth of the desert, and the fist of Tatooine’s slaves. He can be all of this and more. He has Raamaro’s breath in his lung and his father’s fire in his belly and Aunt Beru’s love and stories to
guide him.

He can be anything, and he has a mission.

“Right,” Bantha says, wiping tears of hilarity out of his eyes, “And what are you gonna do then? Hope you get lucky about sand bursts again?”

He considers showing Bantha, right then and there, just how powerful the desert has made him—he could bury both slave catchers under a storm faster than he’d run back to Most Eisley, if he wanted.

***

“Why can’t I hear stories about my father, Aunt Beru?”

He’s six, and all the kids he knows have heard stories about their father, even Biggs who lives with his grand mama. He’d like to stop being different.

“Because,” Aunt Beru says, “some stories are better left for those who can understand them.”

Luke has no idea what she means, but she looks so sad he doesn’t dare ask questions anymore after that.

***

He decides against it—has better things to do with this than terrify a couple of underlings—and besides, he doesn’t want to be the kind of person who torments unarmed adversaries. He’s spared from trying to explain that, though, when the high pitched sound of a Tusken whistle echoes against the canyons and becomes two, ten, a dozen whistles at once.

Bantha and Leesha race to their landspeeder and leave without a backward glance for their prize, who watches them zoom away with grim satisfaction. Then, because the sand behind him feels oddly different, he turns around and finds himself face to face with the—lone—Tusken from earlier.

They walk toward one-another and stop with several arms’ length between them, shuffle on their feet in hesitation, until the Tusken seems to brace themself, points at their chest and says:

“Miiri.”

He smiles, points at himself and answers:

“Luke.”