Chapter Text
...So to me, in a doubtful day
Of chill and slowly greening spring,
Low stooping from the cloudy gray,
The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing.
Luke gets his first look at Mandalore from his X-Wing after exiting hyperspace. His first thought, admittedly unkind, is people live there?
The entire portion of the surface that Luke can see is either dry, barren sand or glass, resultant from the fusion bombs dropped in the Mandalorian Purge. If Luke didn’t already know better, he would have assumed that the planet was entirely uninhabitable. The air should have been toxic, and any natural resources the planet may have once had have long been stripped or destroyed by the Empire.
But Luke does know better, and so he takes his ship down into the atmosphere and finds a spot to land that’s close enough to the once-great domed city of Sundari, but not so close as to pose an immediate threat.
The large sand dunes, the harsh heat of the sun beating down on him upon exiting his ship, is so similar to Tatooine that Luke can’t help the way his lips tug into a sad smile. He helps R2 down and pulls the hood of his cloak over his head and starts in the direction of Sundari. It looms large before him, though sections of it are still under repair, undermining some of its inherent intimidation.
It doesn’t take long before figures emerge out of the city, moving toward him and R2 on landspeeders.
Luke stops where he is when they get to him. There are four of them; one hulking figure in blue armor who radiates barely banked aggression into the Force, aiming a blaster right at Luke’s head. A woman also wearing blue armor, but in a different shade, a man in red and white armor, and a man in green armor.
Luke raises his hands above his hands in the universal sign for not-a-threat.
“Who are you?” The woman with blue armor asks.
“I am Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. I’ve come to seek an audience with the Mand’alor. I mean you and your people no harm.” He’d recited what he would say again and again while on his way here, and he hopes it comes across as peacefully as he intends it to.
He isn’t sure if it works.
The big one moves forward, pulling the hood back off his head with one hand and putting the blaster up against the skin of Luke’s forehead with the other.
“Darjetti,” he spits, and Luke has spent enough time poring over what little Mando’a he could find to know what that means.
“I’m no Sith, I assure you.” Luke says with a smile.
“And yet you wear their color,” the woman in blue says with obvious derision.
Luke only smiles serenely at her.
Eventually, Luke manages to persuade them to bring him before the Mand’alor. The walk into the city is silent, Luke’s hands still above his head and his lightsaber being held hostage by the big Mandalorian. Anger and caution leak into the Force from his escort, and a small fissure of what he realizes belatedly as fear. He can’t say that he blames them. The Jedi are the ancient enemies of Mandalorians, and Mandalore has only recently been retaken. They’re nowhere near stable enough to handle a potential war.
Luckily for them, Luke isn’t here to start a war.
Luke is here for the being that called to him so loudly through the Force. Luke is here following an inexplicable tug in Mandalore’s direction; a siren call he just knows that he must follow.
Once inside the hastily reconstructed dome, Luke takes in his surroundings with grim astonishment.
Rubble lines the streets, pushed out of the way to clear a path for walking. Buildings lay in ruins. Luke can feel the lingering pain and fear in the Force. This place is steepled in the terrible things that happened here. The sheer scale of the destruction is awesome in the worst way imaginable, and the phantom sensation of the deaths of millions nearly brings him to his knees.
The closer to the center of the city they get, the cleaner the surroundings become. The rebuilding efforts begin in the heart of the city and spiral out from there. Soon enough, Luke hears voices, the shrill sounds of children playing, can smell spices and cooked meat. They come to a town square, of sorts, where the buildings that held up best are. It’s clearly a mix of a business and residential district.
Heads turn as Luke and his escort pass, Artoo rolling along behind them, and maybe Luke should feel afraid at the sheer level of hostility he feels radiating from the Mandalorians, but all he feels is awe at what the Mand’alor has been able to accomplish in such little time.
These people obviously feel safe enough to allow their children, so important to them, to play outdoors. They feel they can set up vendor stalls and small businesses. Some that they pass are even helmet-less. The Mand’alor called these people home, retook what was once theirs, has begun what looks to be a challenging rebuilding effort, and has ultimately made these people feel safe.
A truly awe-inspiring feat, if one were to ask Luke.
Luke is led into a small building with a single room. Inside the room a long table takes up most of the space, with chairs situated on both sides and at the head. The chair at the head of the table is no different than the rest of them, but it's clear who it belongs to.
The Mand’alor sits with both feet flat on the ground, his arms on the armrests of the chair, and his helmet aimed right at Luke. For all intents and purposes, he appears to be perfectly calm, if alert. But Luke knows that despite his relaxed exterior, the Mand’alor is furious.
The Mand’alor rises slowly to his feet, all that shining silver beskar on display, and Luke feels something twist in his stomach at the sight.
“We’ve brought the auretti to you, Mand’alor,” the man in red and white announces, the first words Luke hears him speak. The Mandalorian in green remains silent at Luke’s back, his hand still firmly on his blaster. His Force signature is the calmest in the room, at the moment.
“What do you want?” The Mand’alor demands. His voice is quieter than Luke expects; the low, smooth tenor of it pleasing to the ear. Luke sincerely hopes he isn’t blushing.
“I am Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. I’ve come because I felt a Force-sensitive call to me, and with your permission I’d like to find them, and speak with them if possible. I mean you and your people no harm.”
The T-visor of the Mandalorians’ helmet is tinted, but Luke somehow knows that he’s locked eyes with the Mand’alor.
“You said you’re a Jedi, and yet black is the color of your enemy. An odd choice of clothing for one claiming to be a Jedi,” a poshly accented voice rings out. Luke turns his head slightly and finds a woman with a gold helmet and a fur lining across her shoulders. Luke isn’t sure how he missed her before. Perhaps her serene disposition in the Force was drowned out by all of the hostility.
“I wear black to honor my father. He was a Jedi before me,” Luke answers without hesitation. He doesn’t want to elaborate, but he will if he must. He wants these people to trust him.
Luke’s attention is called back to the Mand’alor when he steps closer. “You can lower your hands. Paz, Reeves, let him go.” He commands his people, and they obey without hesitation. The big blue one, apparently Paz, steps back and puts his blaster back into the holster on his thigh, and Reeves, the woman, let's go of his shoulder.
Luke sighs in relief at finally being able to rest his arms. They’d begun to go numb.
“Do you know who you seek, Jedi?” The Mand’alor asks him. His voice is steady, and yet Luke feels sickly fear trickle out of him into the Force.
“I don’t. The only thing I know is that the being is young, and that the call came from here,” Luke replies gently. More fear leaks into the Force, and Luke is beginning to suspect that the Mand’alor knows exactly who Luke is talking about.
Rather than grace Luke with a reply, the Mand’alor looks to the Mandalorians still behind Luke. “Find him somewhere to stay. Keep him under guard until I say otherwise.”
“Elek, Mand’alor!” Paz replies, and then Luke is being marched out of the building and back into the city. They walk until they reach the very end of what Luke has dubbed the habitable zone, and then he’s guided into a small house. The inside is just one room with little furnishing, a kitchen at one end and a bed in another. Luke, having slept on the cold, hard ground more than once in the Rebellion, deems it perfectly reasonable.
His guards slam the door behind him, but he can still feel them right outside the door. Luke sighs and makes the decision to meditate, for lack of anything better to do. He drops down into the meditation pose in the middle of the space, closes his eyes, and sinks into the ebbing flow of the Force.
ΔΔΔΔΔΔ
A sharp rapping at the door brings Luke out of his trance. His eyes flutter open, but before he can stand to open the door its already swinging open. Standing at the entrance of the house is the Mand’alor. Luke calmly gets to his feet.
“Mand’alor,” Luke acknowledges him with a slight bow of his head.
“Master Skywalker,” he returns, in that soft voice of his. Luke notices that he feels much calmer in the Force, now. Not friendly, exactly, but certainly no longer furious. “I thought you might be hungry.”
The Mand’alor hefts a satchel that Luke hadn’t noticed before, presumably filled with food.
Luke steps forward to take the bag from him with his right hand, and when he hands it over, their gloved fingers brush. Even through the layers Luke feels a small shiver. From this close, Luke has to tilt his head up slightly to look at his visor. Luke realizes with a start that the man isn’t that much taller than him. His commanding presence makes him seem so much larger than he actually is.
Luke steps back away from him and peaks into the satchel. It’s filled with bread and fruits, which at this stage in rebuilding must be precious. Luke smiles at the Mand’alor.
“Thank you, Mand’alor. This looks wonderful.”
The man gives a short nod of his head, and then his Force signature feels momentarily hesitant, as if he were going to say something but bit his tongue, and turns sharply and walks out, shutting the door behind him.
What an odd man, Luke thinks, still blinking at where the Mand’alor had been a moment ago.
It isn’t until later that Luke realizes that there was no reason that the Mand’alor had to bring Luke food himself.
ΔΔΔΔΔΔ
For the most part, Luke is left alone. His guards are ever-present outside his door, changing shifts in an unpredictable pattern. He spends the three days since his arrival meditating, mostly. R2 stays powered off in his little charging corner, and without any of his luggage or access to the outside world, there isn’t much else to do. He does some light exercise as well, which at least has the added benefit of tiring him out enough to sleep.
The Mand’alor has yet to return, and none of his guards have checked on him. Luke supposes that’s fair; he is a prisoner, in a way.
During his time meditating, he realized that he could feel more people on the planet than he had originally assumed. These people had heeded their Mand’alor’s call back home, and that’s no surprise. From the little Luke had seen of the man he can tell that he’s an incredible leader; firm, but no less kind for it.
The number of people on the planet wasn’t the only thing he’d found in the Force, though. He’d felt the echoes of the Great Purge the second he’d entered the atmosphere, but unfortunately that feeling is commonplace in the Galaxy – war isn’t a rarity, and so Luke had grown used to the impressions left by wars long past anywhere he went in the system. But down here, in a city where millions used to live and thrive, the vestiges of their pain and suffering still linger. He could still feel the deaths of so many Mandalorians, their desperation to protect their loved ones, their fear, their righteous fury at what was being taken from them.
The ruins of Mandalore might as well have been screaming her people’s misery into the Force. When he’d first tapped into it, he’d been bowled over flat onto his back, and he’d cried for hours until he’d sucumbed to sleep. His guards had not checked on him, but he’d briefly felt their concern for him. At least he knew that they didn’t entirely despise him.
When he’d woken in the morning, he rose for the day determined not only to find the child that had called for him, but to help these people in any way that he could. He is a Jedi, and despite the long blood feud between the Jedi and the Mandalorians, it was his duty to help those who needed him, so that was what Luke would do.
At the end of that third day the guards opened the door for the first time since the Mand’alor’s visit. It was the big one again, Paz, and a woman whose blue armor and owl signet was familiar, but whose Force signature was not. It was her who spoke.
“The Mand’alor requests your presence.” It was not a question.
Luke smiled, the picture of the serene Jedi master that he was doing his best to be. “Of course. Will you be escorting me?”
“Yes. Move.”
They moved out of the way so that he could walk outside, and then the woman was at his left and Paz was a half-step behind them. Neither of his escorts spoke, and Luke didn’t make any overtures for conversation.
Once inside the council room, Luke’s guards left him to align behind where the Mand’alor was seated, next to the woman with the fur lining and gold helmet. The Mand’alor stood, but he did not speak.
“For three days, you have been under guard,” the gold-helmeted woman decreed in her smooth posh voice. “You have not attempted to escape. You have not harmed or killed those that have kept you imprisoned. When you arrived, you made no threats, and have made none since. The Mand’alor, with consent from his council, has decided that you may seek out the child that you came for, but if you wish to train it, then you must remain on Mandalore for the duration of the child’s training. Is this condition acceptable to you, Master Skywalker?”
Luke, being the reckless and impulsive man that he was, agreed without really thinking it through. Leia was going to skin him alive.
“Very well. Paz, if you could return Master Skywalkers’ lightsaber?”
Paz unclipped his saber from where it had been hanging from his belt and tossed it to Luke without ceremony. Luke caught it and clipped it to his belt. Though he could get by without it in a dire situation, one of the first lessons that Master Yoda, and Ben before him, had driven into his mind was the importance of always keeping ahold of it. He already feels better with it back in his possession.
“How will I be permitted to search the child out? I’ve felt their presence in the Force while I’ve been here, but they haven’t reached out to me again.”
The Mand’alor finally spoke. “That’s...already taken care of. I know who the child is.” His voice was hesitant, and he leaked fear and resignation into the Force, though it seemed to be tempered by...hope?
Before Luke could ask who the child is and where he can find them, the Mand’alor continued.
“The child you seek is my son.”
ΔΔΔΔΔΔ
Luke is stunned silent for only a moment before all the pieces come crashing together. The Mand’alor’s fury at Luke’s arrival. His insistence that Luke be guarded until he was deemed non-threatening. His fear and resignation.
It wasn’t the righteous fury of a king whose territory has been enroached on, but the desperation of a parent afraid for their child.
Abruptly, Luke knows that he’s made a mistake. Obviously, some clarification is needed here.
“Mand’alor, if you’re worried about never seeing your son again, you have nothing to fear. If the child agrees to being trained, then I will do as I agreed and train him on Mandalore.”
The Mand’alor and his companions are silent for a long moment, and then he turns his head to the Gold-helmeted woman. “I want to speak with the Jedi alone,” the Mand’alor demands in that soft voice of his, strangely deferent to someone supposedly his inferior.
The woman nods to him, and she and the others file out.
The second the door closes behind the others, the Mand’alor all but collapses back into his seat with a weary sigh. “You can come sit, Jedi.”
Luke takes the chair to the Man’alors’ left, trying to keep the blush off his cheeks from sitting so close to the other man.
“How old is your son, Mand’alor?” Luke asks, figuring it might be a good place to start and to get an assessment of his first student.
“He’s fifty, but his species ages slower. He is only an infant.”
“An infant? To be able to call out to me as strongly as he did, he must be very adept in the Force,” Luke asserts, astonished. He’d known the child to be young, but not so young as to still be a baby when species is accounted for.
“How soon can I meet him?” Luke blurts before the Mand’alor can say anything else. He’s silent for a long moment, his tinted T-Visor aimed at Luke, and Luke knows that they’re making eye contact behind it. Luke holds steady, not daring break it lest the man not find what he’s looking for.
And he does seem to find it, because he says, “now,” and gets up without waiting for Luke to respond.
Luke scrambles to follow him out the doors of the council room. Outside, the citizens of Mandalore stare at them as they pass. They’re going in the opposite direction of where Luke was being held, toward where Luke can see the ruins of the palace rising above the other buildings. Surely the Mand’alor isn’t staying there with his son? It doesn’t look safe to inhabit.
But Luke needn’t have worried. They eventually stop in front of a house only slightly larger than Luke’s. The Mand’alor pauses outside the door, hesitating for only a moment before he opens it. Inside, it’s sparsely decorated with few personal touches, barring the toys littering the floor. Luke knows the child is in this house. His Force signature had gotten stronger the closer they’d gotten, and the child knew Luke was coming. He’d felt his curiosity and excitement battering against his mental shields, but hadn’t let the child in out of respect for his father.
Now, Luke can feel the child’s presence like the combined luminescence of Tatooine’s suns.
The Mand’alor says nothing, but Luke hears a door slide open further in the house, and the sound of boots on hard flooring, and then a helmet-less man in red and white armor emerges from the hallway with a wiggling bundle in his arms.
“You can go, Fenn. Me and the Jedi have got it from here,” the Mand’alor tells him, already reaching for his babbling, green son, who is the spitting image of Luke’s old master. Luke can only stare with wide eyes as the child settles in his fathers arms, clawing at his helmet and chestplate.
Fenn nods with a quiet “Mand’alor” and then is gone.