A Companion Piece To This Post

A companion piece to this post

Luke Skywalker is many things. He is a pilot, a moisture farmer, a nephew, a brother, a rebellion commander and a Jedi Knight. These are the things that he knows, these are the things he claims. He bought them in blood and sweat and tears and hope. They are his.

Above all, Luke is a Skywalker.

Luke was born to a world of sand, on a world of slavery and subjugation. Luke was born under twin suns (twin, twin, half of a whole, something out there something missing). Luke was born and given to a family to raise named Lars. Lars is the name of moisture farmers. It is the name of harsh, desert people who tear back the very water the sands and heat take from them. It is the name of oasis. Lars is not a slave name.

Names mean things on Tatooine. Skywalker means things. It means pilot, mechanic, space-farer. It means the trickster in the night, it means metalworker. But above all, it means slave. Skywalker, Darklighter, Sandhoms, Simwaste—they are all slave names (they are the only thing the slavers cannot take from them).

Luke is born with the name Skywalker but not with what it means. He reaches with hungry hands for scraps of a history that should have always been his, for the sand in his bones and the sky in his eyes (that never should have been his, child, child, you are the joy of us—). But he was raised by Lars, and they do not know what to tell him. Uncle Owen will not speak of the man Luke got his name from, snarls and spits and turns away with a coldness that is better found in the desert night. But Luke has a slave’s name, chipped blood running through his veins; he is the culmination of everyone that came before him. He wants to know. He needs to know.

Tell me about them, he asks the desert. It is bright and it is burning and it is not kind. In the whip of sand around his feet, in whispers back; There was a woman, and there is such quiet tragedy in that, dripping blood and bruises and burned bones, though it is not the desert’s sorrow. She was brave.

Tell me about them, he asks the old, creaking Wookie in the slave quarters. She is old, the oldest slave on Tatooine, and she has been there for longer than some settlements. She knows every family, remembers every soul. There was a woman, she says after a long, long moment. She was kind.

There was a woman, Luke hears, in the spill of blood and of sunlight; in the fire and the sand and the solemn sunrise. She was steady; she was holy; she was a slave; she was free; she was wise.

Luke goes to his Uncle, and asks. Tell me about her. My grandmother. Uncle Owen looks down at him in the heat of the desert day, and sighs. Her name was Shmi…

Luke grew up knowing nothing else about his father other than he was a pilot. He was a spice trader. He did not come back. Luke grew up learning about a sandstorm-stone woman with gentle hands and oil beneath her fingernails.

Luke learned his history from desert and family and slaves (the lines between those last two are blurry and indistinct but still sometimes there). Luke is the first child born without shackles. He is the first child born free. He is the first child to be born with starlight in his blood that is allowed to run free, the first child who gets to walk the sky under his own power, to take his first steps and have them be nothing but his.

He is the first. He is not the only.

Leia is the First Free Daughter, grown tall and strong and hard on a world where she had water and food and love and life (Look at our daughter, the desert whispers. Look at how she has not suffered. Look at how she prospers.).

Leia is dark haired and dark-eyed and water-born. Her brow is heavy with crowns of gold and grief, a ruler of a dead planet (but not a dead people, never a dead people). She has many names. Princess Leia, she snarls. Senator Organa, she introduces, General Organa, she dares, steely-eyed. Leia, she says, and smiles.

She is never Skywalker. She is the politicians daughter, the Queen, the leader, the warrior with righteousness smeared across her teeth like blood bitten and ripped from the throats of the unsuspecting, the undeserving. She is a sea serpent, never a krayt dragon. Her spine is straight and tall and when Luke looks at her, a crown on her brow and fire in her eyes, staring down battles of politics he’ll never really get, he can’t imagine she was born for anything else.

I didn’t grow up like you, Luke, she says. I grew up on Alderaan. I’m from Alderaan.

I’m not from Tatooine, she doesn’t say, but Luke hears it anyway.

She does not want their name, and she doesn’t want to know of their father (the father he never knew, the father who’s name he bore, the father with shackle marks on his wrists and a lightsaber at his side, the son of the woman who loved him, Skywalker, Skywalker, Skywalker). But Luke does not push, does not ever push. She doesn’t want him, the slave-turned-Jedi or the Jedi-turned-Sith or the Sith-turned-savior; she doesn’t claim him. He would never ask her to. Their father has torn the holes in her barehanded that he left in Luke by leaving (rubble and ash and voices screaming right before they go silent, silent, and somehow that’s worse).

No, Luke doesn’t tell her.

But he tells her of a woman named Shmi, in the quiet of the night, curled up in the bunks of the Millenium Falcon, Aunt Beru falling falling falling whenever he closes his eyes. He whispers it in the forests of Yavin VI with the death knell of the Empire still in his ears and his father’s last breaths echoing in his chest. When they sit, collapsed in the remains of an Imperial Stronghold, it spills out of him to pool on the floor with the blood drip, drip, dripping from Leia’s shoulder wound.

All these pieces of them, he gives to her. Skywalker and slave and First Free and Free Born, mechanic and metalworker, skyfarer and pilot and all the things that have loved them. Leia listens, because she loves him and Luke cannot love her and not tell her. She tells him of Alderaan in return, sometimes. Of Breha and Bail and the way they used to braid her hair in the early morning light. She tells him of blue skies and things Luke did not grow up knowing. She tells him of the people who raised her.

What he doesn’t say is this: Leia Organa is a stolen child. Leia is a child of chipped blood and shackled wrists, of sand and wind and sun—and yet she knows the turn of tides and the fall of rain, the rise of mountains and the cover of trees. She knows the sea spray on her face and the break of waves against the rocks, the cold snows of winter. She does not know the whip of sandstorms. She does not know the twin suns, the language they wrote because nothing else was left for them, the Grandmothers and Grandfathers in the slave quarters that shielded them at every turn. She does not know how proud they are of her (child, child, you are the joy of us, look at how you prosper).

Leia says she is not a Skywalker. She has not lived a Skywalker’s life, has not lived the hardship of a Tatooine child, desert sand and twin suns. She grew up in a place far from her grandmother’s bones, in a place where water grew up in place of sand. She was taken away from that. She doesn’t know her history. She doesn’t know what is hers.

Luke doesn’t know how to tell her that she’s lived just as much of a slave’s legacy as he has.

But, Leia loves her adoptive parents. She loves her planet, her people, and Luke knows she will not take it the way he means it (he does not blame the Organas, but the people who love you cannot fill the places that never should have been empty. They cannot fill the beach with lake water and make an ocean). So he doesn’t tell her. She is his only family, the only one that could claim the name of Skywalker along with him, but he holds her hand in knee-deep water and lets her lean on him when Organa weighs on her shoulders. He calls her sister, twin only when no one can hear them (he can claim Leia or he can claim Skywalker, but not both. Not when the tall shadow of their father looms behind him). She is his family and he hers, but he listens to her tell him of things that are just hers, of a water-calm father and a snow-bright mother who raised her tall and strong and determined and royal. Because she is his sister, and he would do anything for her.

Even carry Skywalker on his own.

dustin endlessly pestering eddie to get together with robin until eddie tells him he’s gay, and then dustin just blinks, takes a second and then starts pestering him to get together with steve

Boba: Okay, so I know most people get the whole Jetti Attachment thing wrong, and it's great you've got strong family bonds in your culture, very Mandalorian of you-

Luke: Thank you.

Boba: -but I'm pretty sure they also didn't shack up with kings and, you know, legally adopt 50% of their students.

Luke: *Drinking a blue milkshake while chilling on his husband's throne, draped in approximately a dozen little force sensitive children* Tragic.

Sometimes it’s people, his important people. Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen feature at least once although there’s more of Han and Leia and the others. There’s a page for Biggs, made up constellations in the background, and there’s a double spread of an old Ben Kenobi and his younger counterpart smiling opposite him. There are quite a few of Grogu, of the child sleeping or playing in the garden. There’s one Luke is especially fond of with Grogu holding his favourite silver ball and smiling, his little beskar pendant he likes to teeth on hanging around his neck.

But of course, out of all of the pages that his notebook has to land open on it’s the drawings of Mando.

From my latest DinLuke fanfic The Weight of Words (click for better quality!)

I know the incest jokes between Leia and Luke are annoying to say the least, but I just can't help but get hysterical when I think that Din also just wonders what the status of the relationship between the two is, like the Skywalkers screwed up as always and just forgot to say that they are brother and sister.

Din: Luke, who was your first kiss?

Luke: oh that was with Leia..

And Din can't help but become very depressed, because he begins to think that he is far from this beautiful strong girl and Luke certainly has strong feelings for her. He sees how Leia always visits Luke, kisses him on the cheeks, hugs him, brings all sorts of goodies and Luke always looks at her with such loving eyes.

Din: Luke I should leave, I don't want to be the third wheel, you love Leia

Luke: yes of course, I love her madly

Din: here, I don't want to disturb you, you love her, she loves you

Luke: of course I love her, she's my sister

Din: 🗿

And that would be a brilliant reference.

Han: Do you love Luke

Leia: Of course I do, he is my brother

Luke: she's my sister

Din and Han: 🗿🗿

*Din and Han who thought there was romantic love between Luke and Leia* :🤝

“Din, you’re naked!” “Focus.”