roane72:

peradii:

• Luke’s first love isn’t Leia
• It isn’t Han either
• Or a pilot with eyes full of sky and a heart full of adventure who dreams of a blue-green tree– 
• Look: listen. Here’s Luke, eight years old and so in love he feels like he could split at the seams. “She’s beautiful,” he says, something like reverence in his voice and later Uncle Owen will clip him round the ear for that – bad negotiation tactic that, letting them know that you want it, Jawa’s smell a sucker a mile off. 
• Uncle Owen says – with a snort and a sigh – that it is okay, maybe, but by and large it is garbage and twenty credits is daylight robbery, really they should be paying him to take it away for salvage. And it’s an old model anyway, the engine barely functions, what’s the fire power? Womp rats out here grow frightful big, Uncle Owen says, stretches, clicks his joints out. The boy likes it, the Jawas say and Uncle Owen says, what kind of parent would I be if I went buying everything the boy liked. 
• But they buy it. And Luke Skywalker falls profoundly, madly in love. From that moment on, she’s all he thinks of. His T-16, his very own, his skyhopper, his Womp rat slayer, his freedom, his wings.
• She’s held together with spit and prayer, and skips over the dunes, sometimes blustering smoke and sometimes light as a whisper, and she never breaks. She should, really, the age she is, the amount of time he spends on her – but she doesn’t, not ever, even when Luke (nine years old and an idiot and hungering for the horizon and there’s too much of his father in him because before Anakin was Vader he was also a boy, and an idiot) careens down Beggar’s gulf and upends himself half a dozen times, cartwheeling wild and free, a boy who doesn’t think death will ever catch him, ever ever ever. If you watch him, for a moment you believe it as well. 
• She’s beautiful. She’s his angel. He takes her hunting – or she takes him, or both – and they obliterate every womp rat nest on Uncle Owen’s property. That season – yes, Tattooine does have seasons, of a sort: hot and hotter – Luke rents his services out to every farmer in the district, slaughters womp like they’re going out of style, kills them every night and comes home sticky and red and wipes his darling clean with a damp rag before getting into the refresherblock. He slaughters womp until one day, one dreadful day, when the stink of their corpses (mounded high, accruing faster than Behu and her friends can dry the skins, cure the meats) draws a krayt dragon, pearl-breasted and ravenous. She’s huge, hungry, bloody-mouthed. 
• and Luke flies his t-16 at her too, and he’s nimble and small and lethal and he brings her down, him with his t-16 and biggs delivering the killing blow with his slugshooter, perched atop a dune, and he’s the one who gets the skin, the pearls, the credit. Luke pouts. Owen says too much of his father in him late at night, when the boy can’t hear. Owen says, I’ve never seen anyone kill like him. Owen says we need to be careful.
• Luke hunts womp still, of course, but never in the neighbouring farms. Never again does he kill until his t-16 (his first love) is red and tacky with womp blood, because – well. As Beru says: they kill womp rats because if they did not they would be overrun. Because womp rats are pests who take water and give nothing in return but pain. Like Jabba’s goons. Like the slavers. And that fierce, feral glee in Luke’s smile when he came back from a hunt, his t-16 glistening and his hands red and his face red – well. What is he learning, she had said. That he can hunt, that he can fend for himself, that he can – Owen said, then stopped, realising.
• that he can kill every womp for miles and miles and then kill the krayt dragons when they come and one day this boy will see the slavers take someone, or the hutt ooze arrogant into our town and take our water, and he will see that and think, perhaps, of the womp rats and how easily they died. he will think, maybe, that the world is unfair and can/should be changed. and he has the power to do that. am I afraid of this boy – no, no I am not, but I am afraid of what he could grow into. 
• Vader started off with the best of intentions, Owen does not say. Vader slaughtered Sand People like animals, they were animals but – 
• He’ll get himself into trouble, Beru says, gently.
• Once there was a boy with fire in his eyes and an aching to change the world –               
• Yes, thinks Owen. Yes. The boy keeps the t-16, his first and greatest love, and – for the time being – focuses his efforts on subduing the local womp. For a time, it is enough.

oh my god I am SO SO glad that @peradii is on a Luke Skywalker kick right now. best. thing. ever.