young supernovas

There’s an electrical storm coming in from the north, already kicking up debris in a cold buffeting wind and splitting the atmosphere with the sharp smell of plasma discharge. The two of them have to hurry down the rocky slope with the sound of lightning ringing in their ears — the speeder is docked safely a ways back, but the promise of foul weather means doubling back on their trail is off the table, and they won’t make it to a higher altitude until morning. It’s not predators they have to be afraid of as much as the near-certainty of getting lost.

Their home for the night is a cave carved out of a split in the rock. Their guide had marked it for them with a stack of oblong stones, but in the shifting greenery there might well be other markers left behind by careless travelers. It’s still better to approach with some degree of caution than barrel in shouting.

It could certainly be worse – electrical interference is nothing to take lightly, but at least it’s not snowing. The temperature drop after second sunset on this planet is still pronounced and Luke is already beginning to regret the light gray layers of his summer robes. The fading binary light almost makes him nostalgic. Ben wouldn’t know about that.

Luke lays a hand to the rock, and Ben must take it for hesitation — even if this place is sturdy and out of the open air, there’s the potential to encounter other travelers in a less than companionable mood, or the local variety of armored insect sheltering from the storm. He ought to say something about patience or something, but Ben scrambles up the shallow steps before Luke can, in a gesture of slightly misplaced bravado, and calls back to him before Luke has even caught up. The walls are narrow enough that he can track his fingertips along either side, feeling in the Force for any seam of instability. Ben’s guess would be as good as his concerning what they’d do if they found one, and the area’s not known for landslides or cave-ins, but the convenience of it feels deceptive anyway.

When Luke clambers up and into the low entry passage, Ben is there to guide him down by the hand.

For a moment he suppresses a shiver, and not because of the feeling that they’re walking into a stale refrigeration unit. They are very close to their intended goal — the ruin of an old Jedi temple somewhere in the highlands, inaccessible to visiting pilots and damn near inaccessible to locals too. It shouldn’t be too hard to find — there’s a perceptible eddy in the fabric of the Force that corresponds with the last given coordinates, somewhere up in the dense blue-green tangle of rock formations. It could be nothing, judging from surface scans — a naturally occurring irregularity — but Luke’s not so sure. Just as easily it might be another looted temple, or a complex surrounding a funeral pyre, or a circle of dwellings whose inhabitants abandoned them long before anyone else dropped by. Not volatile, but still relevant to the work of reconstructing the history of the Order.

The interior passage is damp, in stark contrast with the papery foreboding in the air above ground, but the shock of moisture drops off by the time they’ve reached the central chamber. There are niches scraped into the walls, a sure sign of previous inhabitants, and Ben is in a hurry to strip off his belt and set aside his training lightsaber. He’s been agitating for one with a little more kick ever since Luke helped him make it, used to the immediacy of a blaster, but the next time he assembles one of these he’ll be on his own — he’ll have to overcome his own impatience and construct the weapon that will be at his side for the rest of his life.

This isn’t a place to be slinging around a weapon anyway. What Luke’s feeling is the distinct sensation that they’re being disrespectful. He shuts his eyes for a moment and tries to call up a couple words of gratitude — this used to be somebody’s home, and any passing guests should treat it that way.

“I hate moss,” Ben grumbles in a peel of breath, shucking off the rest of his baggage and wiping his palms off on his big thighs. “It’s wet, and it’s slimy, and it’s all there is on this forsaken planet.”

“It’s better than snow, isn’t it?” Or sand, for that matter. Sand was fairly self-consistent in that it wouldn’t poison you, gas you, or melt, but it could be relied on to grind down anything and anyone it came into contact with. Luke drops his pack and switches on an analog lantern. It won’t provide much in the way of heat and it’s not stark enough to cast any shadows, double-edged or not, but it’s enough to maneuver by without spoiling sleep, and won’t attract any curious wildlife or shatter in a static surge. It sends out a dim greenish radiance that reflects off the minerals threading the stone of the far wall.

Ben manages to restrain himself from an eye roll, or a fish-eyed adolescent look of scorn, but not a distinct twist to his mouth as he unwraps his ankles. “Barely.”

Of course, Han has probably performed a dramatic recounting of the Hoth story about a thousand times. It’s less harrowing now with the passage of time, though Luke hasn’t gotten any fonder of extreme climates since. They don’t talk about Han very much these days.

“Anyway, I hope you don’t mind the close quarters. We’re not far now.”

Ben shakes his head and hauls himself back, close against the wall and rubbing at his upper arms. “Doesn’t look like we have much of a choice.”

“You’re going to want to keep your boots on.”

Cozy this place might be, but well-defended it isn’t. They’d better keep alert to a nocturnal ambush or the need to relocate Fatigue hangs relatively light on the pair of them — a quality of the local atmosphere as much as the churning storms and oversaturated flora. But it leaves Luke half-drowsing for a few long moments — it might as well be hours, he’s dimly aware of the last spill of light leaving the sky and the temperature dropping further, Ben giving up on his haughtiness and creeping in closer.

Luke pillows his head against the crook of his arm, and does not dream. When he opens his eyes, Ben is very near to him indeed.

Ben’s broad chest is flush to Luke’s spine — Luke had been amused enough by the low ceilings and close quarters while they situated themselves, huffing thin clouds of steam in the unsettlingly clear air, but Ben hadn’t seemed to find it especially humorous. (Was this another impromptu lesson? Had Ben taken it for one? Luke isn’t in the habit of contriving survival scenarios, even if as far as survivalism lessons go the stakes could certainly be higher. The relative peacefulness of this planet must come at some cost, and the locals aren’t talking. Is the answer somewhere above them?)

The outer layer of Luke’s robes is thrown around the two of them. Luke knots one end of it in his mechanical fist and tries not to notice the damp huff of his pupil’s breath against the back of his neck.

His apprentice stirs in his sleep.

Ben’s arm hitches up to brace his chest. It sends a quake of feeling down to the pit of Luke’s stomach — like an electric zap that he has to consciously will back down into something responsibly dull. This must be embarrassing for his apprentice, even if it’s not enough to be embarrassing for Luke — compared to slitting open the corpse of an animal and sheltering inside it, a slightly damp alcove that mostly smells like exotic moss is pretty luxurious accommodations.

Ben smells like salt-sweat and ozone from their long hike, cleanly boyish and smudged with grease from a borrowed speeder. It’s difficult not to think of Han. Luke shuts his eyes and tries to clear his mind — the circumstances aren’t all that conducive to meditation but he can catalogue his thoughts frankly and be rid of them.

The usual mix of curiosities and frustrations rise up in his mind to greet him — anticipation of what they might find, the uneasy memory of Endor closer to the surface than usual these days. He’d half-expected to dream some significant dream out here — maybe his apprentice is dreaming now, restless with what he’s seeing.

Conscious thought gives way to instinct. In the cool dark the puzzle-edge of contact between their bodies is something precious.

Nobody has touched him in so long. Some guilty part of his mind wants to savor it — to catalogue the individual parts of their closeness and the weatherproof snugness the Force has wrapped them in, sheltering a kernel of warmth against the cold uneasy air. Stiff joints, legs against legs, the radiant heat of Ben’s body and the solidity of his arms and legs.

Luke’s prosthetic has gone stiff from cold and lack of use, its metallic parts moving unevenly under the synthetic skin when he tries to unfold a fist. He grips it in his other hand and rolls his fingers to eliminate the painless strangeness. The memory of how he lost his hand is no longer a daily presence in his mind, but he can’t help thinking about choices now, about precipices, about long drops. He listens for Leia in the darkness, reaching out in the galaxies of his mind maybe not as probingly as he should — but her stubborn-burning star is dimmed and veiled and he couldn’t navigate by it if he wanted to. She’s doing her duties now wherever she is, martialing her many successes against the shadow of her failures, and even if she’s not happy Luke knows she is contented with the work. Leia is beyond his reach. They have found one of the dark places of the universe.

Ben’s big, warm hand slinks over his, with unmistakable deliberation, and the cozy feeling afforded by shelter and warmth and darkness vanishes in a cold snap.

Luke has never felt this old, pressed into proximity with warmth and youth and promise — Ben has his whole life in front of him, he’s always known about the Force and what it can do, he should be in the fullest position to take charge of his abilities and do something with them — to make something of himself. He’ll never be a diplomat, but he could be a scholar, a peacekeeper, a pilot — anything.

And Luke is a teacher now, committed to tracing the steps of his predecessors and learning from their mistakes, not replicating them. This isn’t a day trip with old friends — all Luke’s friends are dead by now or settled into their own lives, captaining flight crews of their own or governing cities under the long shadow of what they did during the war. He has other students who deserve his attention and respect. He has obligations now. He has responsibilities, and when they get up six hours from now he’ll still be Ben’s master. Ben will be his very dear apprentice and nothing else.

Luke could allow this to become something else. He might even want it to. They’re alone, and the banked heat of another living body next to him has made Luke weak.

But this isn’t about what Luke wants.

His apprentice’s big hand with its familiar bitten nails covers Luke’s throat — not for long, for a moment — and Luke lets it happen. He leans into it, even, despite the flicker of fear elicited by light pressure. Ben would never hurt him — not on purpose, anyway. There is an unmistakable hardness digging in against his hip.

Luke has to strain not to make a sound, and can’t stifle a smile in the dark— close quarters and benign friction strike again. But Ben’s voice is dark as pitch, so quiet and immediate that Luke can scarcely believe he’s spoken out loud at all: “Don’t laugh.”

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Luke says wryly, without much heart in it. His pulse leaps in his throat.

“You want this. I know. I can feel it.” What had Luke been broadcasting without ever intending to? Loneliness, maybe, but loneliness didn’t equate to this — and if he’d ever given Ben the impression he wanted his company on this kind of trek because he wanted the use of a warm young body, he had a lot of apologizing to do. Ben’s voice is a subsonic rattle, Luke can feel it in the pads of his fingertips and in the palms of Ben’s hands flush against his frame. “Say that I made you do it.”

(It wouldn’t be hard to hold him off, if Luke felt the inclination — or the need, if an emphatic refusal were to spark off Ben’s temper. But he doesn’t want to think about that. If he thinks about a reality where the two of them might come to blows in full earnestness, the possibility becomes more pressing than he is comfortable with.)

Luke is not smiling now, here in the dark. “I don’t think so, Ben. Take your hands off me and we can talk.”

This isn’t him, or Luke would know about it — he knows his apprentice’s moods, upside down and backwards at this point, usually fraught. Luke knows his sullen face, and the set of his mouth — there’s a barely confined tempest of emotion at the heart of him but Ben knows it too. That awareness of his own maladroitness will help him one day, but for now it’s nothing but a burden on him.

Luke can feel it here, too — the flicker of darkness in him that Luke cannot avoid, and cannot bring himself to look away from. If this brings Ben some kind of peace, who would Luke be to deny him that? If it’d quiet his stormy mind to be held for once without expectations —

Ben withdraws, arching flush against him, nuzzling ruefully against his neck — breath fluttering against the exposed skin beneath his collar.

“Ben—” Luke rolls over to face him, in the eerie graying light of their lantern, and is even more aware of their flushed proximity chest against chest. “Is there something you want to ask me?”

Ben’s long sharp face is shocked into rigidness, but for a split second he is illuminated by the flooding white light of an electrical burst — black eyes huge and circled in lashes, nostrils flared and lips convulsively parted. There’s a patch of pink color in the middle of both his cheeks.

He’s almost handsome that way — with the severity of his features in sharp relief — but he says nothing. Outside, the thunder rolls.

The old Jedi would know what to do — banish him to the outer dark to meditate on where he’d gone wrong, probably, followed by swift judgment before some higher governing body. But Luke can do better than that.

Luke reaches to touch his arm through his sleeve.

“Then ask.”

Ben lifts his head sharply and the passing beauty is gone, with only twisting discomfort left in its place. “No one will touch me. No one will even look at me. What have I ever done that makes me such a pariah—” His shoulders jerk roughly as he shifts against the ground, as if he’s preparing to roll over and ball up entirely in an exaggerated gesture of refusal. It would be funny if it weren’t Ben, and if it weren’t here.

“They’re frightened of you, Ben.” (It’s obviously not what his nephew wants to hear, but he doesn’t protest, either. He makes a low rattling sound of concession.) “And you haven’t done much to try to counteract that, all things considered. But they don’t hate you.”

None of them do. Ben’s older than most of Luke’s students, older and more physically imposing and far too candid about what he thinks and feels to anyone with even the mildest awareness of the Force. Living with Leia had been painful for both of them, and it had taken a toll — her own kid broadcasting all the fears and frustrations of adolescence at the top of his mental lungs until she couldn’t stand it any more — and as hard as he and Luke both try, Ben can’t strengthen the skills necessary to quiet his mind, not fast enough to do him any good. (Can’t, Luke has wondered despite himself, or won’t? But not here.)

His peers know who his parents are, and that chafes him. He’s stronger than they are — too strong, too thirsty for friendship and too prickly to accept what his own peers offer. He breaks things. They think he’s a young monster, and only Luke knows better.

There are things Ben won’t tell him, things that weigh on his mind that Luke can feel him dying to ask about and holding back anyway. There are conversations Ben will need to have one day, but it’ll be with his parents, together or apart. Not with Luke.

“And you’re not,” the boy mutters, blinking convulsively and rubbing at his face with one big hand. “You’re not frightened.”

“Not even a little,” Luke says, and “oh, Ben,” and pulls his hands back to kiss him.

Ben’s kisses lap like fire against his mouth even when he tries to break away, sharp and urgent. The kid’s been biting his lip again, and the worried raw spot brushes the corner of Luke’s mouth as Luke accepts what he’s given — feeling his breath on his face, the warm tremor that he can only hope is satisfaction and not a spiritual bruise in the making. Ben nudges against his face with kisses, nervously raking at Luke’s teeth with his tongue and only allowing for shallow reciprocation.

“I want you,” he says against Luke’s mouth, “I want to feel you—”

There in the cool air Luke is all but in his lap. It’s kind of sweet, in a clumsy way, to have Ben’s grip bracing on his shoulders and raking down his sides to grope and probe. Luke clasps his face in his hands, thumbing a little at his cheek cautiously — he’s awfully warm-blooded — but when Ben kisses a messy track down the side of his neck he’s even less sure what to do. He won’t fail him, whatever it is his apprentice wants.

The collar of his shirt has fallen open. Ben’s teeth dig in against his shoulder in a clear sharp line and Luke gasp-laughs, pressing his hands through the thick braid at the back of Ben’s neck. His arms link around him like a wreath.

Seventeen, hulking, and Force-sensitive. Ben doesn’t exactly add up to a legendary charmer, which is just as well. If he’d inherited that from either parent, let alone both, he’d be both unstoppable and unbearable. It occurs to him that whoever Ben has been with can’t have taught him much — he doesn’t know what to do with his hands except rake and grab and tug at Luke’s hair, he doesn’t know what to do with his squirming hips or with his legs except pin Luke in place for furious grinding. It’s both flattering and distressing in equal measure — as much as Luke wants to release the tension of the past months and years and melt into the pressure of it, there must be better places. It almost makes him feel young again.

Luke wasn’t exactly an adept in having love affairs either at seventeen, back on a desert planet with chores to be done — on a good day he had a cordial relationship with his own left hand and on a very good day Biggs’ mother was away negotiating a shipment and they could get down to business, all knees and elbows, on an ancient bantha-hide couch that still smelled like the original bantha. In hindsight those stretches of sunbaked tedium were probably healthy — Luke knew what he wanted before long, and what he wanted was out. His apprentice has never had that kind of luxury.

Luke’s nearly on top of him, losing the outer layer of his robes in the process and feeling the dim peel of cold down his back — Ben’s hands are on the backs of his legs now, bracing him as they slink back in the dirt. He breaks away panting against Luke’s chin, looking back at him from under his eyelashes for a split second’s consideration before he dives back in — grasping at everything, digging through layers in search of Luke’s body. He proceeds to feeling at Luke ineptly with both of his big hands, exploring places on his weary body that aren’t precisely erogenous zones or any kind of zone at all — it occurs to him that it’s much more likely Ben’s never been with anybody at all. He can still remember how it felt, being young, waiting to be touched. Ben must be made of sterner stuff.

Ben begins, somewhat breathlessly: “I thought, here—”

“I know, I know,” Luke hurries to say before Ben can bite his bottom lip again. He does not know what it is Ben meant to do when he began all this, out here in the wild. “You’re all right.”

He’s safe, here in Luke’s grasp with the wind whistling outside and the sharp pull of air pressure coming and going with the storm, like the lurching rise and fall of Ben’s ribcage against Luke’s chest with every uneven breath. Swallowed up by wildness and shadow. He has nothing to be afraid of.

Luke needs to stop. Luke needs to clear his own mind.

Ben’s back springs up in chilly pebbles beneath Luke’s hand, pressing down to rub a circle snaked beneath his collar and between his jutting shoulder blades — disarmingly enough he’s naked beneath his clothes and in a standing sweat despite the chill. It’s an innocuous touch — the clothed equivalent must have passed between them before, among the hundred thousand casual touches the two of them have shared. It’s the smallest thing Luke can offer. It’s only a touch.

Arched beneath him, Ben makes a sharp choked sound against Luke’s shoulder. There is a distinct sharp breath of chemical salts in the air, like something electric bound up in clean cloth.

Well, that’s something.

Ben’s shaking his head faintly like a confounded animal, surprised with himself. Luke goes to untie his belt for him and loosen his tunic, which elicits an indignant noise. It may have been louder than Ben intended.

“It’s all right, it’s very — it’s very common when you’re young.” Luke’s shaking his head now too, trying to get his hair out of his eyes. It is very difficult not to laugh. “I guess I’m the one responsible for that, aren’t I? It’s completely normal—”

“I know,” Ben snarls with arresting harshness, and Luke can feel the shove accompanying it as tangibly as if it were physical — a gesture in the Force that sets the hair on the back of his neck prickling. Ben’s hands are flexed out like white spiders at his sides.

(What would happen if he were to close those hands into fists?)

“Easy,” Luke half-mouths, his own temporary ardor more effectively cooled than if you’d dumped a bucket of cold water on the pair of them. His dismount amounts to rolling off Ben’s lap, scuffing his legs on the stones and reaching out half-consciously for his weapon. Or to steady himself — in the oceanic half-dark there is really no difference. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Ben, you’re just young, that’s all — we can always wait until you’re ready. But I can’t do this for you here.”

He shouldn’t have tried, he should never have begun anything at all. It’s a whole lot worse than attachment, whatever Luke is guilty of, it’s worlds worse —

“Don’t touch me, then,” Ben spits through his teeth, hugging the gray cloak around himself like a talisman.

Well, all right. Luke scuffles to a place against the far wall, pressing his back to the stony edges there and casting about in his mind for wholesome thoughts. It isn’t attachment that’s the problem, if there’s any single pattern that’s emerged from his reconstruction of Jedi history it’s that, but Luke’s spoiled it for both of them all the same. Trading in years of trust for a couple minutes of distraction. Fifteen years of celibacy gone beyond recall, all because Luke thought it might help.

Ben lies there on his side, voice drowsy, his eyes slashes of shadow. His stillness is unsettling, like something in a vision: real and unreal all at once.

“We need to leave. We need to go somewhere far enough away that no one’s ever heard of us. Find some planet and live there. Get stronger. Be alone.”

If there’s some dark corner of the universe that hasn’t been touched by the shadow of Anakin Skywalker, Luke would like to find it. There are whole star systems that haven’t even heard of the Jedi, and many many more where there’s not a soul alive who still puts any stock in the old ways of the Force —

The older he gets, the more tempting it is to retreat — maybe that was the original purpose of the Jedi Order, a structure that enforced more than obedience to a rule: scrutiny on all sides, at all times, anchoring individual Jedi to their place in the right order of things. No room for personal indulgence, or selfish decisions, or self-imposed exile. Where would the two of them go?

“You know we can’t do that, Ben.”

“Nobody else would ever know.”

“Your mother would know.”

Luke finds himself twisting Ben’s long hair between his fingers. It’s impossibly soft, the way his mother’s hair is soft when she takes it out of her braids. Ben looks breathlessly lost, eyes turned toward the rocky ceiling. The set of his jaw is fixed and stiff.

Outside the rain has broken through. The wind has stilled.

“Maybe one day,” Luke begins again, knowing that this is very likely a lie. The fingertips of his left hand worry at the corner of his mouth. “We’ll go somewhere with a bed. I’m too old to roll around on the ground. You deserve a better experience than this.”

Ben snorts, and turns his face away.

“A positive experience. I shouldn’t have done that.” And Ben shouldn’t have either, a thin voice says in the back of his mind, like it’s coming from a distance. What had either of them expected would happen? “I should have let you be. I mean it.”

“Just stop. I hate you.” Ben’s voice is hoarse, a nothing. “I hate that you can be like this. More than any of them. I hate you more than anything.”

The rest of the night they are close but not touching, feeling the chill until the first sun rises