Wake up besties the dinluke faves collaborated !!!!
To which @swedenis-h had this super sweet comic idea and I wanted to do it justice :D
Comic sketches (courtesy of the lovely @swedenis-h)
Oneshot (courtesy of me lol)
Dusk on Tatooine had always been filled with heady purple and the last licks of sweat the day tried to cling to, the day like an overenthusiastic mastiff trying to be led away.
Two dots of red on the horizon, a flickering fire- Tatooine shed its warmth like washing slobber from skin. The day’s heat lingered, and lingered… and vapourised without warning.
A flicker of silver, a spark of gold.
The smell of hot circuitry, huddling closer to the fire. Luke tried to stay still as Din removed the wiring tool from the open wiring panel of his robot hand.
“It’s beautiful work.” Din complimented gently, lowly, his gloved fingertips tracing the palm lines of Luke’s prosthetic hand. Almost as if he was tracing the lines of a map, learning the routes by heart. Luke imagined it would feel really nice, if there hadn’t been a dull edge of metallicism to every sensation from that hand.
“It doesn’t…” Luke fights a frustrated noise, feelings stuck in his throat like backed up Tatooine traffic. His throat tightened.
A breath.
“It’s not.” Luke admits finally, gaze shifting to meet Din’s. A warriors fire sparking in his eyes for the tiniest moment as he resigned himself to unravelling this particular insecurity for Din the way he had cracked the circuitry of his robotic hand wide open.
Young, immature. The harbingers that were supposed to breed wisdom and maturity… may have only just hurt the people he loved.
How could it not have? With Han’s sight affected for the rest of his life and Leia having nightmares about watching the empire take Han away…
Forces, he’d been so stupid. Too wrapped up in the thrill of getting to finally use Force for good to realize the time had been wrong.
Would the situation had resolved itself without his intervention? Had Luke lost his hand for nothing?
“This is going to sound weird…” Luke trailed with a reluctant smile, struggling with the words- embarrassment reigning them in until they crowded in his mouth. Hesitancy to lay bare; a fog he couldn’t shake. “But…”
He grimaced.
“It’s not your hand?” Din asked, ripping the words right out of his mouth. Luke blinked back at him, surprised.
Luke gulped thickly, but the tight knot of emotion wouldn’t unravel.
“Yeah.” Luke murmured reflexively, casting his gaze down- back to his hands. They were both held aloft in front of him, palms up. In theory there wasn’t much visible difference between them, but…
“Mine had calluses,” Luke began, his voice cracking at the admission as his eyes darted to where the calluses used to be. “from my work at the farm.”
An image of his hand before the injury conjured itself in his vision, like an overlay, as he studied the robotic one. Sticky blackness climbed his insides, his skin crawled.
A ghost he was haunted by day and night.
Din paused in his ministrations, and the silence yawned and waned in the space between them.
Luke was drawn back in.
“It had scars from working on ships,” Luke explained, his left, real, hand reaching out to point to the vulnerable stretch of skin around his wrist and the skin on the other side of his hand. It was pale in a way that was uncharacteristic of Luke’s tanned skin tone. The skin looked less durable than the rest of him on the robot hand, a constant chink in his armour.
A breath. Luke could see the ghost clear a day, like a sort of glitchy holo projection.
“It also matched my left hand.” Luke’s voice was small as he stared at the robot hand, the gaping hole where the circuitry he had been showing Din spilled out. The visible circuitry when he fixed it made it both more and less easy to see the hand as his, paradoxically.
Luke had almost lost more than his hand.
The price of his hand was nothing compared to the company of his friends. His loved ones.
He knew that.
He knew that.
But why was there such a bitterness there? A guilt and shame- the robot hand meant more than just a second chance at mobility; it meant an unspoken forgiveness from his loved ones.
AndForces, that was hard to digest.
Leia, Han and Chewie had almost died that day. It would have been his fault that their stars had blinked out, and Luke would probably never forgive himself for it.
He’d just dove in unthinkingly, all of his mind on the need to save them that he hadn’t thought it through-
The robot hand was just one big scar he’d never be rid of. One big forgiveness he wasn’t sure he deserved.
Why was blind, reckless, heroism worth any forgiveness?
Luke would always be haunted by his old hand- the one that had just always been a part of him- it followed him when tinkering and sparring, the loss a thing of endlessness.
A gloved hand grabbed out for the wrist of Luke’s real hand, cutting Luke’s absent movement short. He’d been unknowingly tracing the places his right hand used to have character and definition. Startled, Luke’s thoughts fell away.
“I-I… I sound insane.” Luke back-pedalled, feeling self-conscious and awash with a hot and sticky shame at the vulnerable oddity about it. Fuck, he’d opened up too much there-
A tug.
“These are my real hands,” Din’s warm voice followed, and Luke looked up at him with a moment of flustered confusion.
Din looked down at his own gloved hands, studying them anew. “The ones you see now.”
“I know their weight. Their durability.” Din flexed his hands like he was about to pick up a rifle.
“The ones underneath the gloves, I haven’t seen as mine for a long time now.” Din admitted softly, looking at his hands now like they were foreign to him. “They were soft, and reaching for something that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Oh.
And then-
Oh.
Din had lost his parents, but he was talking about the new relationship with his hands that his gloves gave him after the loss of his home. The gloves being used both to bring about vulnerability for others while protecting the vulnerability of Din’s open and wanting palms from his youth.
The side of himself that never had the opportunity to mature slowly. The side that grew up too fast but there would always be a sliver of, crying out for home.
Luke blinked, looking back up at Din.
“They were hidden away with a pain I never want to feel again.” Din’s voice wavered, and Luke unconsciously reached out, cradling one between his cupped palms, resting it on his knee.
“Yes, these hands have seen my mistakes, but they’ve seen my successes, too.” Din reached out with his other hand, trailing it along the territory of the faux skin of Luke’s robot hand with a reverence that made Luke’s face hot with something. Something between tears, appreciation and gratefulness.
Perhaps all three.
“The hands I know now were a gift.” Din concluded, looking Luke right in the eye. Luke could puzzle out his message now.
“A second chance.” Luke finished for Din, and he nodded affirmatively.
Not a mark of forgiveness. A possibility to start again.
“They may not have the scars to prove it, but they are mine. Just as much as the hands under the gloves.” Din softened, gloved fingertips lingering around the fleshy part of Luke’s robot wrist, near the open wire access panel.
Luke felt himself flush, flattered by the way Din so deftly applied such a simple yet all-encompassing type of logic to find a solution.
There was earnestness to it, fresh and raw. A hopefulness.
“Hm.” Luke hummed back, letting Din’s truth wash over him and settle, clinking, next to the old one.
Perhaps Luke had been thinking about the robot hand all wrong.
He took in Din with their hands still intertwined in the space between their knees, a pang of warmth filling him.
Look not to the past, but to the future.
Luke smiled. How Jedi of him.
Din’s helmet looked back down at their joined hands, and then back up at Luke.
All of a sudden, Luke was very aware they were still holding hands.
Luke blinked, blushing a deep red, letting go at the same time Din did and pulling his hands in to his chest like they had been burned.
