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The ship hums along steadily through hyperspace, rumbling almost imperceptibly beneath the soles of Luke’s boots where they’re planted on the hard durasteel of the medbay floor. The smell of his blood hangs in the air, stale and metallic, and Luke really thought his days of second-rate first aid were behind him, but here he is: sitting on a spare-crate-turned-makeshift-medbed (the ones that came with the ship long-since pawned off or deprioritized when the ship needed to lose weight to get out of an unforgiving atmo) as Din, his knight in shining Beskar, helps patch up his most recent trophies of war.
Luke’s shirt is half-undone and untucked from his pants, the right sleeve completely slipped off his shoulder and dangling down his back to give Din access to his fresh blaster burn. They had to carefully unstick the singed fabric from Luke’s arm to get it off, the fabric tacky with dried blood and Luke cursing under his breath at the way it clung to his aching wound. Din had offered to cut it off, but Luke’s still stubbornly hanging onto the slim possibility that he might be able to mend it afterwards, as if he has the time to play tailor while running back and forth across the galaxy playing intergalactic peacekeeper.
The bacta spray stings when it lands on the raw tissue of his burn, irritating the tender skin that still aches from the disinfectant poured on it just moments ago. Despite his best efforts, Luke hisses and instinctively tries to pull his arm away from Din's line of fire, drawing out an annoyed huff from the other man in response. He’s crouched down to Luke’s eye level, forced to keep close due in order to see his work through the tint of his helmet. The lights overhead catch on the curves of his armor, reflecting the light onto the walls and miscellaneous clutter around them.
"Hold still," Din admonishes, fingers tightening their grip just above Luke's elbow to keep him from squirming away on reflex as he gives the bacta can a few firm shakes. The heel of his hand overlaps with Luke's own fingers, the two of them working together to keep the weight of his injured arm aloft.
"I'm trying ," Luke counters, gritting his teeth as Din applies another layer of the spray. The initial shock is beginning to fade, replaced by a cooling numbness that's a welcome relief to the uncomfortable heat of the burn that cuts deep into his muscles. Luke’s no stranger to being shot, but the aftermath of it doesn’t feel any better with each subsequent occurrence. Really, he’d be perfectly happy to give up the habit altogether.
Din hums in reply, but doesn't offer any additional rebuttal to Luke's comment. A silence settles between them, with Luke trying his best to keep still so as not to further jostle his injured arm as Din turns his attention back to the open medikit by his feet. The can of bacta spray is set on the floor with a metallic tink , followed by the rustle of Din shuffling through the haphazardly stocked bacta patches and plasters, cold packs and extremity warmers, auto injector pens filled with epinephrine, anesthetic, and stims, and other various random first-aid standards to find what he's looking for. His hand, the one still wrapped around Luke's arm, shifts down ever so slightly, the leather of his glove catching on the ridge of Luke's bare knuckles.
After a moment, Din finally unearths a sterile bandage pack, and his hand reluctantly slips away from Luke's to tear open the package. Luke obediently holds himself still, centering himself on maintaining the even flow of his breath as Din carefully sets a square of medigauze over his wound, now shiny with bacta, applying a gentle pressure that invokes another involuntary hiss of pain from him.
"Easy." Din's voice is low, only barely registered by his vocoder. The line of sight of his helmet is affixed to his work, his thumb smoothing the edge of the fabric, orange leather contrasting against the sterile white of the bandage and the angry red of Luke's burned skin. His thumb presses a seal down either side of the gauze, the other hand wrapped under the opposite curve of Luke’s arm to keep it still, the pressure something almost like a caress as he holds him close.
Luke stares down at the assured movements of Din’s hands, which are surprisingly dexterous despite the confines of his gloves. Once he’s satisfied with the patch of gauze covering the brunt of Luke’s blaster burn, he reaches back to the kit for the fabric bandage, crumpling the flimsi packaging it came in and tossing it aside to deal with later. Din carefully unwinds the bandage, pulls it through his palm, and holds it taught between his thumb and the top of his index finger. Leaning forward another fraction closer to Luke, he presses the edge of the bandage to the inside corner of Luke’s bicep, holding it firm with his thumb as he painstakingly wraps the fabric around Luke’s arm, carefully striking a balance between tight enough to keep the gauze from slipping but not so tight that he inadvertently turns the bandage into a tourniquet, which Luke appreciates. He’s already lost that hand, he’d prefer not to lose the whole arm too.
There’s a heavy silence between the two of them, huddled close together in the dim quiet of the medbay. Every brush of Din’s leather-encased fingers over Luke’s bare skin feels impossibly heightened, his motions careful and tender in a way that makes Luke’s heart ache so acutely that he finds he can’t look directly at Din for fear of how intense the feeling will wash over him. This strange, unnamed thing between them is so fragile, like the child that sleeps in the hammock above Din’s bunk, like the New Republic Senate that Leia holds together with plastoid tape and sheer force of will, like Han’s patience while chasing after his son as he toddles around the extremely non-baby-proofed Falcon , like the scrap of Luke’s sanity when he came to the gut-punch realization that he was tumbling head-over-heels for a man whose face he’s never seen.
The bandage makes it around the full circumference of his bicep before Din speaks again.
"I wish you would be more careful," he says, a whispered confession as he kneels at Luke's side, his hands reverent as they slowly wind the bandage around Luke's tender flesh. The words waver slightly, betraying his nervousness as he keeps his attention trained towards the task at hand, as if that will help to steady himself.
"I am careful," Luke counters, skin prickling uncomfortably with the heavy weight of intimacy in this moment, of Din's undivided attention as he cares for his wounds. His discomfort, as it usually does, comes out as ill-timed humor. "It was a lucky shot."
Din sighs, a soft breath made ragged with static as it's echoed out of his helmet, but his words are fond, if not slightly exasperated, "I thought you were supposed to be the lucky one. With your wizard laser stuff."
Luke huffs a laugh at Din's dismissive tone. For all those in the galaxy who see him as something only a few centimeters shy of a deity, Din's unwavering refusal to regard anything related to the Force or Jedi with a grain of salt is almost deliriously refreshing. Or maybe Luke’s just dizzy from the decay of mid-battle adrenaline slowly leaving his bloodstream. The longer he sits still in the medbay the more his tiredness sinks into his bones, weighing down his shoulders and his eyelids even as he stubbornly forces himself to hang onto consciousness for just one more standard hour.
"I blocked most of them," he offers, the exhaustion inadvertently seeping into his voice makes him sound even more petulant than usual, and Din snorts, pulling the bandage taut as he wraps it around Luke’s arm once more. “Besides, I got out alive, didn’t I?”
“Hhm.”
Another stretch of quiet as Din continues to wrap the bandage around his arm, each layer overlapping the one previous. Luke watches him work, trying to align this vision of Din with what he knows of him, the walking contradiction that lies tangled up beneath his armor. The hands that can shoot a man between the eyes from a kilometer away and tend to a blaster wound not hours later. The clipped tone of his commands in the heat of battle and the soft hush of his voice raspy with sleep. The driving force that pushes him forward on to the next bounty and the next, the lone gunman on the horizon and a force to be reckoned with. The paternal instinct that bounces between spoiling Grogu with yet another stuffed toy but insisting that he eat his vegetables before he has dessert, the devoted father cradling his child against his chest, mumbling the words to a lullaby he remembers from a lifetime ago.
“You know,” Luke starts, glancing up at the dark reflection of his pale skin in the t-visor of Din’s helmet. “We could use you. You’re strong, smart, a good fighter.”
“Flattery won’t get you anywhere, flyboy,” he teases, the playful intonation of his words still captured by the vocoder. They’ve had this conversation before, various iterations of Luke singing praises of his sister’s leadership and Din’s continued distrust of any kind of centralized organization that claims to represent the needs of all and not just the wealthy.
“I mean it.”
Din sighs and gives a small shake of his head, his voice tight, “This isn’t my fight.”
Luke's jaw tenses. “But it’s mine.”
The other half of the sentiment goes unspoken, hanging above their heads like a stormcloud about to erupt. Luke turns his head away, training his gaze on a stack of MREs stacked in a small pile on the other side of the room, still wrapped in tight bundles and looking like they were pilfered from a rudely-interrupted military supply run, hopefully not the New Republic Navy. Even with his attention turned away, the thoughts still rattle around in his head. ‘Is what’s mine yours?’ he wonders, not for the first time, ‘I would give you my everything, but would you take it? Could you stand it?’
Din ties off the bandage. His touch lingers on Luke’s skin, almost apologetic. One of his hands skates up the curve of Luke’s shoulder, traces the shape of each bundle of muscle before curling the tips of his fingertips over the outer ridge of his clavicle. His other hand slips back down towards his elbow, thumb tracing an arc over Luke’s skin, their hands overlapping once again, making Luke’s fingers twitch in anticipation.
“I got the kid now,” Din offers as explanation, his voice soft. The gaze of his helmet finally shifts away from him to stare at the floor between their feet, but his hands stay on Luke, warm leather on bare skin.
Luke nods in understanding, as much as he really can understand secondhand, from watching his sister and her husband and their child, from holding little Ben and cradling his tiny head and thinking, ‘ I will move the stars and the planets if it would keep you safe.’ There is Din, and there is Grogu. Sometimes there is Luke, and in those sometimes he dares to wonder, to hope, if there is any chance of a Din and Grogu and Luke. Quiet wonderings that he feels terribly guilty for, guilt that somehow drowns out the cavernous yearning that screams in his chest when he sits awake in the cockpit of his X-Wing, staring out at infinite darkness and wondering if there will ever be a place for him in the known universe that doesn’t feel incredibly, painfully lonely.
“All the more reason to permanently knock these Imps out of orbit,” he offers, turning his face back to Din with a forced smile and trying once again to make things feel less serious than they are. “Make the Galaxy safer.”
Sometimes Luke worries that’s all he’s good for, that he’s been fighting for so long that he wouldn’t know what to do without a weapon in his hand. That he’s spent so many years at war that he can’t fathom the idea of peace. He tries to envision it, perhaps a school of people like him, attuned to the Force and willing to practice and become stronger within it. Luke does his best to teach Grogu the scant lessons he knows of Jedi long-past, only for it to become clear that all he ever learned from his masters was how to become strong enough to fight, to face Vader and take down the Emperor. He worries if all he knows is how to hurt, that he never learned how to heal or how to love, even though he can feel it brimming inside of him until it spills over, the love that he has for his family and his friends and those he lost and for Din, even though he’s terrified to admit it.
“You don’t need me,” Din corrects with another shake of his head, the hand on Luke’s chest drawing back, the ghost of his fingertips over his pectoral muscle before settling on his knee, still covered by the dark fabric of his pants.
And Din is probably right, that Luke doesn't truly need the help, not when his training with the Force has made him capable of taking down a small army without so much as breaking a sweat. But, for once in his career, he wants to be selfish, wants to have Din by his side and covering his six. Wants to know that he's not alone, that someone cares for him so deeply that they'll follow him to the outer reaches of star systems and go along with his half-baked plans. Wants someone to bandage his wounds and ice his bruises and admonish him for being so reckless. He wants Din so badly it aches, far worse than any blaster burn ever could.
"You kidding?" Luke grins, the slightly-wobbly shape of it reflected in Din's helmet as he finally meets his eyes. “One glint of Beskar on the horizon and they’d be shaking in their boots and running for the hills.”
“I’m sure that’s an exaggeration.” Din chuckles fondly.
“Just you see,” Luke teases back, “I'll prove it to you. Get a bucket and chestplate of my own. I've been meaning to try out my Mando impression."
“At least it would keep you safe," Din replies, and suddenly Luke doesn't feel like they're joking anymore.
With that seemingly offhand comment still simmering in Luke's head, Din slowly rises to his feet, his bad knee letting out a mildly upsetting creak as he stretches it out. He offers Luke a hand, and he takes it with his good arm, keeping the other tucked close to his chest even as his grip on Din’s fingers tightens.
“C'mon," Din urges gently, "You look like you're about to pass out."
"Am not," Luke attempts to protest, only to be undermined by a yawn and the way he sways on his feet.
Din huffs another soft laugh and gently tugs Luke out of the medbay and down the cluttered halls of the ship. Luke follows obediently, carefully scaling the ladder up to the second level of the ship with one arm as Din follows close behind, his hand slipping out of Luke's to press steadily against the small of his back. He steers Luke away from the cockpit, where he typically sleeps in one of the spare copilot chairs in case of emergency, in favor of his own sleeping quarters, which heretofore Luke has carefully steered clear of. The door opens with a soft whoosh , and Luke lets Din peel off the rest of his probably-ruined shirt in the quiet of the captain's quarters, silent save for the hushed snores of Grogu fast asleep in his own hammock.
Under Din's careful guidance, he sits on the edge of the bed, staring up at his tall form, a shadow in the near-darkness. Luke can feel the steady thumping of his heart, the rush of blood in his ears. He can't remember the last time he was this nervous.
Din reaches one hand out and tucks it under the curve of Luke's jaw, drags the pad of his thumb in a slow arch over the line of his cheek to the corner of his mouth. His voice is a barely-audible whisper, "I don't like seeing you hurt."
Luke is so very, very tired. He is tired of fighting. He is tired of hurting. He is tired of ignoring the cataclysmic force that is his love for the man that stands between his knees and caresses his face and binds up his injuries.
"I'm sorry," Luke whispers back.
A moment passes, and then another. They breathe together in the darkness and Luke wants . He aches . Din pitches forward, presses the cool metal of his helmet against Luke's forehead, and Luke finally lets his eyes slip shut. He loses track of time like that, feeling three steady heartbeats cradled in the Force.
"Go to sleep, Luke," Din finally says, reluctantly pulling away from the embrace, his fingertips still curled around the shell of Luke's ear.
"Where will you-" Luke mumbles back, even as his thoughts become increasingly cloudy and the softness of the bed beneath him whispers sweet nothings of blissful unconsciousness.
"Don't worry about me." Din takes a step back, and Luke bites back a whimper at the loss of his easy proximity.
"I always worry about you," he protests, mind hazy as Din's hand slips down to his shoulder and nudges him to fall back on the bed. But the lull of sleep is increasingly impossible to resist, and Luke's body sings as he finally tips horizontal, head cushioned atop a pillow that smells like Din. "Goodnight."
Din's quiet laugh rings in his ears, followed by the careful pace of his footsteps back across the room. "Goodnight."
