Title: When I Wake
Summary: The price of being a hero can be high...
Author's Note: This has been posted elsewhere under a different username, so it may look familiar.
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars and make no profit from this.
R&R is greatly appreciated!
He sits on his bed in the sandstone room. An ancient toy starship lies before him, all grey edges and faded lines. A twisted and discarded piece of scrap metal beside it becomes a scout transport. Another piece of metal is the enemy fighter.
The ship lifts in a small hand, brown-skinned through exposure to the sun. It speeds through air that tastes earthy, because the air is shaded differently underground …
It glides, riding the air with the elegance and deadly grace of an ahl-dragon, the mythical beasts that swam in the sky like sand-snakes swim beneath the sand.
The enemy stutters and ducks, climbs and weaves, the pieces of scrap fanning together and apart, trailing glory in their dance of imagination…
"Sir! We've lost the left fighter wing—"
"I'm under attack! I'm under attack!"
"Rogue Leader, we need backup!"
"I'm under attack—"
Gloved hands flashing over instruments. Stars wheeling overhead, either side, around, unnoticed, unheeded— "Rogue Five, cover Gold Wing. Rogue Seven, on him." Voice strained, harsh, blunt – When did I become so brusque with men's lives? – But no time to wonder, as a fireball explodes to one side, turning the canopy dark.
"We lost Rogue Three!"
Bye, Yano. No time. "Cover that gap! Cover that—"
"I'm on it!"
Wheeling again, stars spinning, death in glowing, sparkling red and orange – the shriek of a droid in his ear – familiar, unfamiliar, he doesn't know—
"Rogue Leader, get these TIEs off us!"
"Someone cover that—"
No time, no time…
Too late, sighted, another flight group, TIEs – lifeless balls of callousness with clawing arms, pale grey, invisible on the black of the stars – a whole group, where did they come from—?
Rounding the capital ships, descending like a sandstorm, inhuman, harsh and deadly.
No time.
"Five, Seven, pull back! Incoming TIEs, a squad of them." Jolting, teeth locked in grimace – a TIE of his own, behind, can't shake it, not now—
"I can't see—"
"They're right on you! Get out of there!"
Head ringing as the dull thud of his helmet hitting the canopy obscures for a moment the sound death and fury in his headset. Alarms ringing, stabbing with glove-blunted fingers, can't think with this noise—
TIEs descending –
"Get out of there!"
X-Wings, metal they gave their lives to, faster than light, but too slow when it mattered, in that glistening split-second that defined life and death.
Orange and red, the fires of death. Roiling outwards. Expanding to fill—
The galaxy.
His heart.
A TIE dies under his lasers. Voices jabber in his ears. This is war, this small death.
"—have to pull back! A retreat—"
"Copy that." His voice – When did I become so dulled to men's lives? – a stranger's. No time to reflect. Barely enough time to notice.
"There's a TIE on my tail—"
"I've got it."
"I'm clear—"
"I've lost my stabilizer!"
"Rogue Leader, we need cover—"
"Ten, Nine, Six, on the flagship. Two, gather your wing. Eight, on me…"
More TIEs blossom to death under his lasers. Metal vessels of death glide in blackness, against stars that watch on coldly. They fly through space's void like…
Metal. Because they are that. Metal. Weapons. Flying damned coffins.
When the starlines spew at last before his cockpit, trailing milling light, he gathers a breath, coughs on something like a sob but probably a snarl, slams his gloved hand into the instrument panel before him. He lowers his head against his arm and closes his eyes. His breath comes unevenly, and tastes cold, like defeat – no, worse, like numbness. Like flat grey nothing.
He realises he doesn't remember Seven's name.
He wakes. It is dark; the air is close. He breathes it, silently. There are others around; he feels them there, hears them breathe, mutter in sleep, roll over. He blinks the unmoving numbness from his mind. The taste of terror fills him, the hardness of dread, the invisible wash of horror that coats the skin after the mind's night forays into the wasteland of memory. He shifts. Shifts again. Sits up, hoping to leave the lingering traces of anxiety behind in the sheets, a shed skin of shock.
But then will it be waiting, when he returns to the darkness of sleep, that hold between life and death… Waiting to embrace him again in its grasp.
"Luke?" The voice in shadow startles him; it seems the darkness speaks. Don't be stupid. It was Wedge's voice, Wedge sleeping opposite him in the long narrow room. "You… all right?"
The others, he thought, had noticed his night terrors. It was not uncommon. At least he didn't wake screaming and fighting, with blood in his eyes, like some did.
They were supposed to report these things, for fellow soldiers to receive the uncertain kindness of notes in files, of medical examinations, of conversations with attentive people who took notes and nodded and said, in voices so judicious, Hmm.
They didn't report them. They just watched quietly in the night, and asked, You all right? And maybe the next day, sometime, at a mess table, alone, Do you want to talk?
Because they all knew what it was like.
He sighs, "I'm fine."
" 'Night," Wedge says after a moment.
His murmured response is unintelligible, little more than a grunt. Lying in the darkness, he watches the shadows creep.
Eventually he sleeps again, dreaming of greyness and not waking.
He wakes. He breathes familiarity; familiar air, familiar shadowed metal overhead, familiar warm-smelling blankets that seem to smother him with heat and discomfort and the imagined scent of horror. He pushes them away.
"Kreth, Luke," murmurs a voice from the darkness, a voice shaded in brown tones of friendship, a voice uncomfortable in comfort – "You make enough noise." An edge is offered beneath the words: Joke yourself a shield, if you want. I can pretend.
But he's too shaken, too tired and aching, to venture that way. To weary for a smile, however weak. The coldness in him saps and spills, draining warmth. He's never had Han's gift of concealment, anyway. Han, so skilled at hiding himself in himself.
He sits up. The processed air of the ship feels cold on his skin, wiping away the clinging heat and horror. His skin lifts in tiny bumps, and he begins to shiver.
"Luke?" Han's voice moves in darkness, shifting as silences expands, uncurling into long fingers that reach through the gloom.
"Sorry," he mumbles numbly and by rote, the words blocky and meaningless, odd behind lips that won't move properly. "Didn't mean to wake you."
"Luke—"
But he's full, full of words, tired of numbness and sleep. Standing, he walks across the cold metal floor, uncertain though having walked it many times before. Not uncertain of the floor; uncertain of his legs. And other things. "I'll be fine," he says, still by rote, because other words might spill if he lets himself think.
He will be fine. Only rarely do dreams hurt, and only in the shadows of night and lingering shards of sour sweat and terror. He exits the room, to sit cleanly in darkness and breathe alone for a while.
He wakes. The bed is soft, the sheets are cool, twisted around him like living things, like vines of the forest, like clawing fingers trying to squeeze his life away. The light has a dull orange hue. Callista is beside him, curled on the other side of the bed around her silent cold misery, the emptiness inside of her. She used to sleep against him, warm and soft, unaccustomed to wake to; but now she rolls away, asleep, and curls in on herself.
The light is orange. Yavin is rising, somewhere on the edge of the sky, painting a line of burnished gold across the horizon beneath dark-edged stars. He rolls and sits up, with care, not disturbing her. Her sympathy is a warm thing; he doesn't feel ready for it now. He would likely snap at her for gladness of a living thing to fight instead of the coiling edges of his own thoughts; but she is delicate in her ivory pain, and he shies from breaking something.
He doesn't believe she could understand. His coldness is deeper than nightmares; the nightmares are deeper than memories. They are intricate things, descending far down into darkness. They are the accumulation years of battles, of fighting, of war's inevitable inhumanities – however noble the cause, however just and true the fight.
Metal machines dehumanise. In that final ball of orange fire, human and metal are one. And he has seen far too many deaths by coldness and fire, in the void of space.
Is it possible, he wonders, that all those deaths denied under fire, the men I sent to be blown apart, the ones to whom I couldn't grant more than a bare instant of pain on the moment of their deaths…
Could they build, inside? Could they seep away into a corner of the subconscious, a silent memorial ground, a bleak graveyard of futility where grey clouds whisper over neglected markers and long pale grass…
Perhaps that was where the dreams came from. Perhaps they were the ghosts his guilt invoked, ashen spectres wisping in voicelessness through the edges of his mind.
He rises, though morning is yet hours away, and goes to watch the orange planet rise over the shadows of his jungle world.
He wakes. Light plays across his ceiling, pale and washed-out, grotesque in garish colours. His bed is wide and cold, and the air is tasteless with Coruscant's impersonal excess.
This is what he hates most; waking alone.
And yet he always wakes alone…
He sits, drawing his knees up under the soft sheets. He's shivering. He runs his fingers through his tousled hair, rubs at his numb cheek to scrub away the savour of grey.
His fingers are trembling, still.
He wants… not to talk, no, that doesn't help. Just to have someone there not to talk to. To have someone to reach out to if he needs it, to touch with his fingers and know he's not alone in the cold…
Leia and Han are a call away; but it could be a galaxy separating them, for all that's worth to him now. He doesn't want to talk, just to not think…
He's tired of words, and tired of being alone.
Tired of this coldness that clings like sand against sweat, grating and scraping the softness of skin, impossible to get rid of, only scratching deeper when you rub at it until the skin is red and raw and stinging and the sand is still there.
He's tired of always fighting, of being a hero when no one knows the cost.
He's tired of being superhuman when he's only a man.
He's tired of paying everyone else's price.
But he is Luke Skywalker, and he doesn't know how to stop, so he just lies in the gloom, watching faded lights play over the ceiling, staring at the reflection of other people living through the night. Eventually, it is day, and he gets up. His despair curls and withers under the light, and, carefully, he tucks it away.
He wakes. The sheets are tangled around him in the gloom, and he is at the edge of the bed. There is warmth behind him, pressed against his back, something silky and tickling against his shoulder. He shifts, grunts, and the warmth stirs. He rolls. Mara is behind him, her eyelids shifting near wakefulness. She is curled against his back, not letting him escape even in sleep, even when he's twisting and rolling away in the thrall of nightmares.
Her eyes open, shadowed deeply in the night, bleary with the mist between sleep and wakefulness. She blinks at him, and her gaze softens. She touches his cheek, a caress lighter than her gentlest kiss. Her fingers are warm. She doesn't say anything, but he knows she has seen the nightmare in his eyes.
Mara knows what it is to have ghosts on your soul.
He rolls against her, breathing the softness and spice of her scent, losing himself in the warmth of her embrace. She puts her arms around him. She doesn't ask him any questions; doesn't try to offer words that are pale and small and futile in the shadows of the night. She just holds him.
And so she holds him in the years to come, as ghosts multiply…
He's tired of fighting, but the fighting never seems to stop.
It's a medley of battle and blood and death and sacrifice, unconscionable choices or lethal ones, and the nightmare is slow to end.
He waits and hopes, someday, to wake.
-fin-