Luke was changed. Everything about himself was sharper, harsher without baby fat to soften it. His face was more angular. If he stretched, his bones would proudly show themselves and were almost tangible if he didn't.
He also felt older. A lot had crammed up since he had changed his diet to match Obi-Wan's. It felt like a year had passed instead of a month.
He had learnt a lot. Obi-Wan was teaching him the Force along with usual subjects. Now that he felt it, touched it, he couldn't comprehend what it was like to be without it again. He had voiced his thought to Obi-Wan.
"I couldn't have either."
Couldn't have. Oh.
Luke had never felt so stupid.
Every meal was a bomb about to go off, a volcano about to erupt. Luke could taste tension in the air, so bitter it ruined his appetite. Obi-Wan would cut all his food into tiny pieces and ever so slowly eat it one by one. He then chewed it for countless time and swallowed with a grimace, like doing so physically pained him.
Obi-Wan would say he had enough and Luke would urge him to go on. A weaponless duel began. A saber-less sparring. Tension spun and whirled like a sandstorm.
It would end with their table being wiped up, dished being washed.
If it was dinner, Luke would go outside to collect water and tinker with vaporators and come back just in time to glimpse the two suns sinking down to the sand.
At night, he stared up the at the domed, synstone ceiling almost identical to one in Obi-Wan's room and if it was his unlucky day, hunger reared its ugly head.
Hunger was like a petulant child, Luke thought. It wailed and threw a tantrum in order to get what it wanted. And like the child, Luke learnt, it would only stop when he made it clear that it wouldn't get the attention it demanded.
Luke ignored it, like he normally did.
It bit at his gut, twisting his insides. It writhed. Don't ignore me! Notice me, feed me.
Luke didn't react to it. Even the worst sandstorm would pass, he told himself. He would be an unresisting flatland. It would come over him and be gone.
Alas, there seemed to be no wind to blow the storm away on its course tonight.
He gave up on sleep.
"Couldn't sleep?"
Luke gazed up from the book he was reading. "Yeah."
Silence followed.
Silence closed the rift that grew between them. Silence knitted up the tear in their tapestry. Silence healed.
Hunger, in its envious pettiness, growled inside Luke.
Silence broke.
Two pairs of eyes fell upon it, one accusing, one unreadable. Obi-Wan slipped away.
Avoidance was their family tradition. What they weren't ready to face, shove it away. Ignore it, bury it. Forget it if one could. Act like it wasn't noticed if one couldn't. What wasn't acknowledged didn't happen, never existed.
It was a messed-up way to deal with issues, but both of them were messed-up anyway.
"You're hungry." Undecipherable and monotonous. Obi-Wan came back from somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
With tea. Hot tea. No one in the desert was insane enough to drink hot tea but Obi-Wan. Tatooine was hot enough as it was.
Luke shook his head as Obi-Wan handed him a cup. He didn't particularly like it.
"Tea helps." Obi-Wan said.
Luke eyed brownish liquid doubtfully but took the mug.
Hot liquid burnt its way down his esophagus. Hunger subsided.
Silence stretched between them, driving them away from each other. As vast as the distance between stars. As void as cold darkness of space. A chasm opened its great mouth and roared.
Silence suffocated. Luke longed to eliminate it. But it stifled his tongue when he tried to speak.
Silence consumed them both.
Obi-Wan changed. Since that night, he ate.
Luke hummed under his breath as he came home, he had finish replacing all the vaporator's battery.
The two suns were still blazing.
He headed to the 'fresher to clean up the grime and paused. Obi-Wan was in there. But the door wasn't fully closed and Luke saw.
There was no sound because Obi-Wan had long since perfect the art of suffering in silence.
And there was still no sound as Luke had long since perfected the art of watching Obi-Wan in silence. No. this wasn't what he think it was.
It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't.
Luke slipped out. Because avoidance was their gift and he wasn't ready to face reality. He made sure the smile was on when he 'came home' for the second time.
But reality couldn't be avoid when he came home minutes earlier the next day and saw things from the beginning.
Obi-Wan did this to himself.
Obi-Wan made himself throw up.
Luke felt nothing but he felt everything. His world was crumbling.
"You're fucked-up," Luke must have said that as he heard it and Obi-Wan's lips wasn't moving.
He must have wrapped himself around Obi-Wan tight because he felt bones. Tight enough to know that Obi-Wan wasn't comfortable and he couldn't bring himself to care.
But he cared that he felt the bones.
He was two and his world was Obi-Wan and binary suns and desolate land.
Everything else was extraterritorial.
Town, any town was alien because there were people, stranger everywhere. It was too much. Too loud.
It wasn't his world.
He would cling on Obi-Wan. both legs wrapped around Obi-Wan's waist, both arms around his neck. Like a monkey, that's what Obi-Wan said. He would bury his sense in Obi-Wan, squeezing his eyes shut against Obi-Wan's chest. He would feel rumble deep in Obi-Wan's sternum as he conversed with strangers Luke didn't care to know.
And it was his world again because all he could sense were Obi-Wan and heat from scorching suns. And bones, because his curious hands would slip under the tunic to feel more of Obi-Wan when he was busy with whatever he wasn't doing and didn't bat away Luke's hands fast enough.
So when he was five and too heavy to be carried that way, bones were safe because bones meant Obi-Wan was with him, not some stranger.
But Luke was fourteen and bones also meant Obi-Wan was starving himself. Bones meant Obi-Wan made himself throw up when he ate. Bones meant Obi-Wan was killing himself.
He must have cried because his face was salty and Obi-Wan's tunic was wet. Because he was clutching the front of it and his hands seeked bones and shied away from them at the same time.
Because they meant he was safe and Obi-Wan was not. Obi-Wan wasn't safe from himself.
Burning ice, biting flame; that is how life began.
And that too would be how it ends.
Tatooine natives believed this. That their desert planet would end with winter, one Tatooine had never seen since the beginning of time.
Tatoo suns would be no more. Only frigid night after another.
Then it would rain until Tatooine drowned.
After that, fire. Sanctifying and burning hotter than Tatoo suns.
And there would be nothing left.
Nothing.
Now, the world was ending. It was so cold that frost hung in the air and covered every surface.
But Tatooine's heat was still oppressive.
It was just his world that was cold.
It was flooding. His own tears dripped and dripped to form an ocean. The world swam in its tide.
And the world was on fire. Burning brighter than life yet colder than snow, bluer than cloudless sky.
His world was breaking, torn from its seam. But the pieces were there waiting to be picked up and glued back as Obi-Wan was still here, still alive.
Obi-Wan…
Luke glanced up and realized; water that flooded the world wasn't from him alone.
AN
Burning ice, biting flame; that is how life /
I quote this from The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings by Kevin Crossley-Holland. And Tatooine's belief on the end of the world is not canon. What I write here is based loosely on Norse's Ragnarok.
