Written for Angstober Days 4: Heat and 7: Never Again.
The homestead was in exactly as awful a state as he'd expected. He'd been hoping otherwise, but he'd known it was just that: hope.
Flames still engulfed the building, staining the horizon the bile-yellow of fake dawn. Black smoke belched and groped down his throat, making him hack and cough, his eyes streaming. But he kept looking, kept searching.
There they were. They weren't difficult to spot. He'd just not allowed himself to believe it.
Two skeletons. They could be anyone's—they could be two stormtroopers'—but that too was wishful thinking, and too much of Luke's galaxy had already changed today for him to believe that anything else could remain untouched. The flesh had been scoured away to the bone. His aunt's loving face, his uncle's worn one, had been consumed.
He stared at them. At his burning home. The detritus of nineteen years of life, nineteen years of love, consumed in an instant.
It seemed wrong.
Instinctively, he ran towards it, head already spinning from the fumes, and ducked inside the homestead. The larger skeleton—Uncle Owen—was shielding the smaller—Aunt Beru—and backing her into the doorway. Luke stumbled and felt his foot go into his aunt's ribs; he shouted, thumped down the stairs in several jarring, shocking movements. His head slammed into the side of the bottom step. Something hot and red slurred the edge of his vision.
He could feel the smoke around him. The heat was closing in, sealing him inside like an airlock.
When he squinted, there was an off-white oblong in front of him. A skull that had bounced down with him, still dubiously attached to its scarred spin and scorched ribs. Luke stared at his aunt's fleshless face, tears and blood pooling under his cheek. Bile dribbled out of his mouth to pool there as well. At least he didn't throw up on his aunt, dishonouring her remains even further.
Why had he tried to come here? He should have taken their remains out of the violent, vibrant fire, dug a grave for them to lie in beside his grandmother, his grandfather. He should have shown them that respect. Instead… what?
What had he been trying to do? Recover what little was left of the life they had sacrificed everything to give him?
This was his fault. He shouldn't have told Uncle Owen to get R2, no matter what C-3PO had said. He shouldn't have left them alone this morning; if he'd have been there… if he'd have been there…
He should have dug two graves. Instead, their home would become three.
He tried to stand, to move, but the fire was all around him. It was on the rushes they threw on the ground to protect against the sand; it was on his clothes; it was on him. It ate his skin and flesh as hungrily as it had his family's, and maybe that was how it should have been.
They were dead. Uncle Owen didn't need him to stick around for the harvest anymore. He could stand up, cut through the distant, deafening buzz of overwhelming agony and escape back to Ben, to Mos Eisley, to Alderaan, but Alderaan suddenly seemed so far away. Had seemed that already.
That's your uncle talking…
Uncle Owen needed Luke to talk for him now. He couldn't do it himself.
He continued blinking, slowly, even as the smoke grew too thick to see even Aunt Beru's gleaming forehead or jaw. He should stand. They had given him his life nineteen years ago, and they had fought in his absence to protect that life now. He should honour their sacrifice and run.
But he could not leave them here, graveless and exposed.
Flames adorning his skin like an over-punctual funeral shroud, he staggered to his feet and scooped up his aunt's bones, cradling them to his chest as if they were engine parts, or a new-born. He staggered again, up the stairs, and kicked Uncle Owen's remains by accident but he gathered them up as well. Bones clattered against bones; he didn't know whose were whose, but it didn't matter.
They'd been a team in life. They were together to the end.
He had no shovel to dig with and hardly any strength left to stand, but inconsolable grief let him tap into a source of fortitude he hadn't known he possessed. His bare hands were enough to scrabble in the sand beside Grandma Shmi's grave—still neat and clean, with cacti growing happily at its base, freshly watered last night—and the hole he made was small, but an armful of bones was far smaller than two human bodies. They spilled into the hole he had made as its walls caved in around them, burying them in the only way he could, anymore.
The fire on his skin had burned out, smothered by the falling and rolling and messing around in the sand. His skin glowed red under the caustic caress of the twin suns, his eyes sore and streaming still; his hands resembled paddles of meat more than hands. Nonetheless, he continued digging.
He needed a grave for him.
Whenever it was he fainted, it was before he was done. He watched his own body, curiously detached but still present, as breath fluttered in and out of fragile lips. But he did not—could not—move.
Someone else could.
Ben Kenobi ran like a sandstorm was chasing him. He looked to have been running for miles. He skidded to a halt when he saw Luke, a red assemblage of flesh in the sand, and his agonised cry was the worst thing he had ever heard.
"Not again," he was muttering. "Not again, not again, never again—"
He knelt down next to Luke, and cupped his face, impossibly tender.
"You're alive," he whispered to him—promised him. Behind him, the flames of the homestead died down, as if by his sheer force of will. "You will live, Luke."
He hoisted him into his arms, as shapeless as the pile of bones Luke had carried himself. He carried him back into the now cold and destitute homestead. Perhaps there would be something left. There would need to be, if Luke were to live. Luke would live.
"I couldn't save your father, Luke," Ben told his unconscious form as he laid him on his bed and ran to the half-melted kitchen. The Force bunched around them like fate. "But I can save you."
Luke would wake heavily bandaged to a medbay in Mos Eisley. The news feed running in the corner of the room declared with great sorrow that Alderaan, the planet of beauty and adventure that Ben had promised him, had been destroyed.
