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Luke knew what she must look like from the cockpit of the approaching ship; bulky, androgyne, bundled up in the thick furry coat that was common garb for the winter months on Vandor. She stood in the open snow-door to the house and watched as the ship came in for a landing, first hovering above the flat plateau of fresh snow, then settling down in a shallow pond of melt with a low, dying whine.
The melt had re-frozen by the time Din came down the ramp. He was in full armor, as he always was, cape a dark silhouette in the gray halflight—nowhere near enough coverage for a climate such as this—and Luke felt her heart clench instinctively at the sight of him. After so many months of deliberate numbness, it was like a shock. She did not go out to meet him; she was busy reassembling herself, moving the nascent swell of emotion back out to an appropriate distance, and as it was she barely managed to regain her equilibrium before he was there, standing in front of her.
She regarded his helmet. In nearly a decade of friendship, she had never seen his face. To her, looking at his helmet was almost the same as meeting his gaze.
Din said nothing. In the quiet of the Razor Crest II’s engines, it was exceedingly silent on the high plain of the mountains; not even the wind blew. Luke exhaled. A humid cloud formed around her mouth. She felt that to speak would be to admit that this was the end of her solitude, so she didn’t. She only turned and led him into the house.
There were no windows above the snow-line, transparisteel being too hard to insulate once the temperature dropped far below freezing. Luke set a chemlight lantern on the table and started the gas-burning stove for tea. She could feel Din’s eyes on her, taking in the changes time had wrought on her appearance now that her coat was off: her hair in the corded braids that were customary for Vandorians in the winter months, her body leaner than usual beneath her thermal undersuit, winnowed down by the planet’s grain- and egg-based diet, her exposed metal fingers twitching as if they were real muscle, spasming.
The kettle squealed. Luke poured two cups of karhidish tea and set one down before Din, joining him at the table. He had never again removed his helmet in front of her, since their first meeting all those years ago on the Imperial destroyer, but after a time he had become comfortable enough to tip it over his nose.
He did so now, hooking his thumb under the edge of the helmet to sip steaming tea. Luke watched, and had to fend off another rebellion of feeling in her stomach at the familiar sight of his chin, his lower lip, his matted mustache.
Things moved slower on Vandor, she had discovered. It felt like an age, but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes later—their tea still scalding-hot—when she finally spoke.
“So,” she said. Her voice felt rusty. “I guess you’re here to kill me.”
***
On all of Vandor there were less than 15,000 beings, most of them humanoids of the gethenian variety, most of them permanent residents at Fort Ypso. At Karhide, the small northern outpost near which Luke had taken up residence, there were about a hundred people, gethenian except for a lone family of wookiees, with three large hearths and a number of smaller islands between them. Luke’s house was a satellite residence of a monastery up in the Corubalni mountains, usually reserved for visitors to the Foretellers, offered free of charge. When she had arrived at Karhide nearly a year ago, the monks had immediately suggested that she stay with them; she did not think they knew what she was, exactly, but their order were very strong in the Living Force, and they could sense that she was not a normal wanderer. Their hospitality had since been bottomless but distant; they placed no end-date on her welcome, but had not supplied her with any rations and had not seen fit to check on her since they had first installed her in her lodgings. Luke didn’t mind, she respected their ways and had not come to Vandor to make friends, but it meant that once every few weeks she had to make the day-long journey down the mountain to Karhide, for supplies.
Din, as he was not, after all, there to kill her—he had said that he wasn’t, and Luke had never known him to lie—accompanied her on the trip next morning. Luke had enough rations to last the week on her own, but with Din here she thought it would be prudent to stock up; she was getting good at predicting snowstorms, and this morning the air had smelled wet and rich with the promise of precipitation. The Razor Crest’s hydraulics would likely freeze, and in Luke’s admittedly limited experience, a snowstorm this time of year could leave them stuck in her house for up to a month.
She had outfitted Din this morning with a fur coat and a fleece hood for inside his helmet, and had talked him into taking off most of the beskar, which would only make him colder, but she could sense that he was having some trouble adapting. He was uncomfortable. Luke had been uncomfortable too, for the first few days.
It is not a matter of the body, a Vandorian had told her, then, as she sat shivering in a tavern. It is a matter of the heart. Harden the heart, and the skin too shall harden.
Luke didn’t offer Din the same advice now; she knew it would be unhelpful to do so. For all that he was a man of few words, a purveyor of violence, acolyte to an old and merciless creed, Din was a being made entirely of heart. To ask him not to feel—to numb himself as Luke had numbed herself—would be tantamount to asking any other being not to breathe.
So instead she asked, “Who’s looking after the kid?”
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard Din’s breath catch inside the helmet. “Cara,” he said, after a moment.
Luke had to fight down another tide of feeling at even the tangential mention of Grogu. She had undergone the same struggle numerous times last night, alternately lying awake in her hammock-bag and sitting crosslegged in abortive meditation on the geo-heated floor. Din’s arrival on Vandor—as yet unexplained—was wreaking havoc on her emotional control. He’d slept in the Razor Crest last night, long yards of frigid air between them, and still she’d felt his closeness, his proximity in space, as if he were snoring in a hammock-bag next to her. It was a dangerous thing to feel, affection.
“Why don’t you take your X-wing?” Din asked, an hour or so later.
They were nearly to Karhide. The sun was high in the sky, and Luke’s stomach was grumbling. “They don’t know who I am, here,” she said. “The X-wing makes me Rebellion, and from there it’s only a short jump to…”
She swallowed what she was about to say. The word ‘jedi’ had associations that she wasn’t ready to invoke—the Academy, her students, the massacre. It didn’t matter that she didn’t speak the word, that she didn’t invoke the associations; Din would know anyways. He would be thinking, now, of her failure.
She squinted down into the valley of the mountain. Avalanche shields obscured the village like shimmering heatwaves, but beyond she could see that there was activity around one of the hearths, a gathered crowd in bright reds and yellows. In the vast sprawl of snow and ice that made up this region of the planet, the colors were a welcome spot of warmth, like the first flower of spring.
Din had seen it too. “What’s happening?” he asked.
Luke smiled faintly. “Someone’s sworn a vow of kemmering.”
“What?”
“It’s like a marriage vow. A vow to only mate with each other.”
“What’s ‘kemmering’?”
“The Vandorians. They’re gethenian.” Off his confused look (a slight tilt of the helmet), she elaborated, “They’re natural androgynes. Their sexual organs change when they’re in kemer—in a fertile phase. They become male or female for the process, then revert back to androgenous if they aren’t…well, you know.”
Another confused tilt.
“Fertilized,” Luke said. “If they don’t become pregnant. I understand it’s different everywhere, but here they have communal kemmerings between the three hearths. I’ve only seen one other vow of kemmering since I got here.”
“Seen it?” Din asked, sounding strangled.
Luke graced him with an actual smile—brief, teasing, but real. “I’ll tell you about it later,” she promised. “Come on—and don’t let anyone hear you say ‘orgy,’ alright? It’s offensive.”
Din might have made another strangled sound, but he followed her all the same.
Had Luke been alone, she might have taken the time to pass reverently through the kemmering house with the Vandorians, looking upon the vowed pair as they consummated their union in dim firelight—her connection with the Force had brought her many things, and in her view an easy appreciation of the cultures of others was the greatest—but she didn’t think Din would be comfortable with the experience, or comfortable being left in the tavern while she went to be Present. Mandalorians, and Din especially, were fiercely private people, as protective of their hearts as their faces, and she knew that the concept of sharing a marriage, let alone sharing the physical act of lovemaking, would not translate.
Luke had attended one kemmering soon after she arrived, when summer had turned the mountainside bare and rocky and rains had turned the streets of the village to mud; she had eaten and drunk and lingered at the periphery of the hall, not coupling with anyone. No offense was taken. Had she chosen to participate, she would have been welcomed with open arms in the spirit of hospitality, but she was an outsider, and they understood that she did not share the same mating urge their people did, that her body did not respond to the same 26-day cycle. Still she had been received warmly, had been visited throughout the night and touched gently in greeting and spoken to in friendly cadence, and the sense of togetherness, of community, had moved her nearly to tears. She’d laughed, later, alone in her house, at the absurdity of it—of being moved so profoundly by what was essentially an orgy—but in the moment there had been nothing funny at all. She had felt connected. Cared for.
She had been invited, politely, to two more kemmerings since, but had sent her regrets. The first had brought buried emotions too close to the surface. To raise them again would be counterintuitive to what she had come to Vandor to do.
At the trading post she bought dried rations for two months and observed Din being very careful not to say the word ‘orgy.’ She knew well enough that it must be all he could think of now, moving through the shelves while he waited for her to pay, nodding politely to the other patrons. He would be blushing under the helmet, suddenly hot under all his furs, looking at their bulky coats and wondering what sort of sex they had, how many people they had it with, what it looked like. What it felt like.
Even with her jedi vow of celibacy, Luke had been unable to stop herself wondering as much.
***
She had wondered the same thing about Din, in a simpler time. Ages ago.
Would he touch her, be assertive, or would she have to be the one to touch him. To hold him down, sit astride him. What would his hands feel like on the insides of her thighs, brushing over her, breaching into her. She had seen his hands, had felt the leather palm of his glove against her cheek and patched shredded knuckles in the medbay at the Academy, all the med-droids put to sleep. She knew his hands better than she knew the memory of his face. She knew that they were gentle in some things and rough, violent in others; she wondered if he would tug her hair, if he would pin her to the bed and spread her knees as wide as they would go, if he would hold his mouth lightly, tremulously against hers as she sank onto him. If he would do all three. If his body was as versatile as his heart, possessive and patient in turn.
Her heart had wanted him long before her body, and perhaps wanted him more, but there was less mystery there; Din was not the sort of man to flaunt his affections, but he also didn’t hide them. He wasn’t ashamed of them, the way some fighting men were. He spoke plainly once he trusted her enough to speak at all. He told her, sitting up long after her students had gone to sleep, looking out over the blue moonlit jungle of Yavin IV, that when he had discovered not all Mandalorians followed the same Way, he had decided that it didn’t matter, that to him the face was still a sacred thing, a private thing, not to be shared with those outside his clan. That his clan was now only his child. Luke had met his heart, she had held it in her hands, been entrusted with its safety far before she recognized what it was; she was certain that without first knowing his heart she would never have come to want his body so vehemently, with such attention to detail.
Now, on Vandor, those twin desires of heart and body had both been stowed neatly away, banished beyond the moat of detachment she had built for herself. She did not want him, did not yearn for him. She was not cold.
***
“Why did you think I was here to kill you?” Din asked, the first night after they were snowed in.
They were nestled side-by-side in hammock-bags beside the hearth. Din had strung his bag up—on Luke’s instruction—so that they were close enough to share body heat in the night, the convex curves of their spines abutting like fruit on a vine. Past the edges of her blindfold Luke could tell that the chemlantern was still on in the kitchen, nearly burned out, bathing the house in a pale yellow glow. Din’s helmet was off; she could hear him breathing beside her, calm, sleepy, getting deeper as they swayed here. Outside the wind howled.
“There’s a bounty on me,” Luke said, after some time. “Two million credits.”
“And you thought—”
“No. I thought you might want your pound of flesh, that’s all.”
She said the last with a lilt of self-recrimination, trying to lighten it, but Din didn’t laugh. The chemlight was running out. He was very close to her in the dark, close enough that he could’ve reached over and put his hand over her mouth, reached over and grabbed one of her braids. He did neither.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. Without the helmet his voice was softer, more human, intimate. Even if he’d been saying something benign—good morning; be careful; Luke—it would’ve cut straight through the soft part of her belly. “I want you to come back with me.”
“Back to where?” she asked, in lieu of something better to say.
“Nevarro,” he said. “Mandalore.”
Luke stared at the darkness behind her blindfold. It was a strip of fabric that Din used as a headband inside the helmet when it was hot, recently-cleaned, but it still smelled like him: sweat and body heat and Djarin. Her eyelashes bent against it. She felt as if she just come out of a bacta tank, tender with freshly-healed skin but still numb to the pain.
“I can’t,” she said at last.
Din didn’t press her. He said nothing as the chemlantern went out and they drifted to sleep.
On the third day, doppler showed that there was a break in the storm, and Luke tried to turn on the automated heaters around the snow door. The relative silence she and Din had been coexisting in—reading, meditating, playing endless games of sabacc—was not uncomfortable, but the oxygen recyclers were making things stuffy, and a breath of fresh air sounded hellishly good right about now. Unfortunately, the heaters were broken.
Luke lay on her back on the loft by the snow doors and popped the control panel off the wall, so she could get at the wiring. Normally, Artoo would’ve done this for her, but she’d left Artoo with Leia when she made her escape from civilization, so it was up to her. She didn’t mind; the tech wasn’t all that different from a vaporator, just in reverse, and she’d fixed enough broken vaporators in her youth that she could do it in her sleep.
Down in the kitchen, Din was on a holo-call with his son, letting Grogu apprise him of all the newest cookies and frogs. Luke wasn’t hiding; she hadn’t come up here to avoid being seen by her littlest student. Really. But she could feel the happiness coming off Din in waves, the quiet burble of his contentment in the Force, and it brought pinprick tears to her eyes even before Cara got on the call and Din asked her, “How’s he doing?”
On top of everything else, all the lives cut short and futures lost, Luke also bore the weight of this: that under her care Din’s son had witnessed the second massacre of his young life. The second destruction of home, of safety, of family.
“He misses you,” Cara said.
Luke had the sense that she was sparing Din some greater guilt, omitting mention of the child’s nightmares, his fear, his crying for his father. Cara didn’t need to make him carry that, she didn’t need to tell him to come home soon. He had come here to ask her to return with him; she had refused. As soon as the snow cleared—as soon as she fixed the heaters—he would be gone.
She was so preoccupied trying to get the anticipatory ache in her chest under control that she almost didn’t hear it when Cara added, “Both of you.”
Luke’s left hand slipped, and instead of cutting a wire, she cut off a metal finger.
By the time she was finished swearing, Din was there, crouching beside her to help her slide out from under the control panel. His bare hands were warm on her waist, through her undersuit. Spasms shocked up her arm, not the nauseating pain of a flesh and blood injury, but a cold mechanical alert: damage, damage, damage. She folded up into a sitting position by no power of her own, his hand between her shoulder blades, his body supporting her weight.
“Okay,” he was saying, quiet. “You’re okay.”
Later, as he sodered her finger back on, careful and precise in a way that reminded Luke of Aunt Beru, she gazed at his downturned helmet, at her own reflection in it, and wondered—as she had before—if it was easy to talk to him, to be honest with him, because it felt like talking to herself. Which was not to say that she held herself in high regard, or thought herself the best candidate to offer counsel, but that Din had over the span of nearly a decade come to feel not like another person, not like some separate entity, but a part of herself.
Probably that was why she could say, “I saved him.”
A brief motion of the helmet; Din, glancing up at her. “I know. Thank you.”
She shook her head. “No. I mean—I saved him.”
Din stopped working. He set the tools on the table and looked up at her, giving her his full attention. It always made her feel small when he did that, when he deliberately set aside what he was doing to focus on her—small, and grateful. Though he wore his helmet, he’d left off the rest for an undersuit and a thick woollen sweater, and it made her want to touch him in ways that the beskar didn’t. It made her want to conjure his face, call it to mind in her distant memory, but she couldn’t; she wouldn’t. To do so without permission would be an invasion.
“You saved him,” Din repeated.
Luke looked away. It didn’t make sense to feel shame here, with this man who would’ve done exactly as she had, but still she felt it. “Ben,” she said, haltingly. “Snoke’s men, they were…It was chaos. I probably would’ve been too late to stop it, no matter what. But I didn’t even try. I knew exactly who I needed to save, and that was it.”
Din watched her for a long moment. The wind was howling again outside, but the house had long since been buried and it was distant, unthreatening. Luke wanted to press her flesh hand against her stomach, to try to hold something in, but she felt that the second she moved it would all spill out anyway, so she held very, very still, staring at the crooked mess of her cut finger.
At last, Din said, “If you’re looking for a reprimand, you came to the wrong place.”
“You came to me,” Luke said, knee-jerk.
Din picked up his sodering iron. He picked up her hand, fingers gentle against the spasming circuitry of her palm. “Yes,” he said, plain, matter-of-fact. “I came for my woman.”
***
Time moved slowly on Vandor, like it was as frozen as the climate. The cold and the lethargy were, in a way, purifying.
Luke had heard talk of purification in terms of water and in terms of sand, back in the deserts of Tatooine, but she had never heard of ice as purifying. And yet it was. Winter on this world was a crucible. One did not pass through it without a serious and dedicated test of their own mettle, a trial, conducted internally, of their ability to self-govern. To balance. To put aside that which was not useful.
She had visited the Foretellers twice in the weeks following her arrival, making the trek up the mountain, on footpaths craggly with frozen mud, to the monastery near the summit. Once to confess to them who she was—she felt uneasy accepting their hospitality while lying to them and as they were fellow Force-mystics, trusted them to understand. And once to ask a question.
The Foretellers were priests of Vandor’s religion, a faith which had scant few supplicants but whose roots ran deep within the character of Vandorian culture. They were simple people, celibate all of them despite being ruled by the kemmer-somer cycle, intensely dedicated to the process of un-knowing. When they were alone they applied themselves to the pursuit of Presence, of existence without interpretation—as far as Luke could tell, becoming conduits for the Living Force by setting aside that which made them individuals, their thoughts, their ideas, their desires. But in the minds of most Vandorians, the Foreteller’s Presence was a secondary pursuit. What they were most known for was the ability which had given them their name: to give the answer to any question which the petitioner might pose. They did not do this through their own power, but through the Living Force, which guided one of them, the Weaver, in a trance-like state.
Luke had, at first, not wanted to ask them anything, but she had sensed on her first visit that her not wanting to participate had been interpreted as a lack of trust in the process, and not wanting to insult her hosts, she had meditated on the issue for some days and, arriving finally at a question, had returned to them.
“Why did Ben fall?” she’d asked.
The Foretellers did not need to understand a question to answer it, she’d been assured. They were, after all, not producing the answer—it was the Force that did that.
She had sat on the petitioner’s bench for thirteen hours while the Foretellers entered their trance. One, she understood, was in kemmer, but they had asked her to make an effort to remove herself from the Force, so as not to interfere with their process, and she had difficulty telling which. Still, the kemmer of one had induced a sympathy-state in the others that Luke could feel even without her Force-sense, a heightened awareness of sight, of smell, of connection.
Other outsiders in Fort Ypso had warned Luke, derogatorily, of the ‘orgies’ that the gethenian natives threw, whispering that even their religion was a wretched hive of lust and adultery. And Luke could not, sitting there on that bench, have denied the sensuality of the proceedings, the Foretellers whispering and rocking, hands entwined, channeling base, ancient energies, but there was nothing vulgar about it. Inasmuch as anything so overtly tied to sex could be pure, it was.
Pure—like ice, like fresh snowfall, like the uncomplicated nature of love.
Luke knew that kemmering was, in some ways, a natural evolution for people that lived in such a difficult, desolate landscape—two days from a 26-day cycle were dedicated wholly to lovemaking, and the rest of the time Vandorians cared not for sex, felt no hunger for it and no drive, able to give all their focus to the tough task of survival. But she thought that it was more than that, as well. It was preordained companionship. A small but abiding promise of warmth, written into the base code of gethenian biology.
At dawn, the fourteenth hour, the Weaver had stood, come to Luke, bowed.
“He fell because he was not loved in return.”
She had nodded, had found words to thank him, but had not been present in her body.
Oh, Ben, she’d thought, over and over, immeasurably sad. Oh, but you were.
***
On the tenth night Luke woke with a choked sob.
Her eyes were wet with tears under her blindfold, and her hands went to the fabric for a hot, panicked moment before she caught herself, grabbing the edges of the hammock-bag instead.
She heard motion next to her, Din getting out of his own bag, swearing, saying words she couldn’t really understand, her name and hey, and I’m here, and then he was climbing into her bag with her, the whole hammock rocking under his added weight, holding her tight to his chest, so she could hide her face while she shook and shook. He was overwarm from sleeping in thick furs, and in the end it was the steady drumbeat of his heart, the undeniable aliveness of his body wrapped around her that brought her back from wherever the dream had taken her.
“You can tell me,” he said, after a time, his voice a low rumble beneath her. “If you want.”
Luke shook her head. She was too old for nightmares, she thought. Too old to have to crawl into bed with someone to fall asleep. But she felt safe and cared for in his arms, in this sleepy pocket that was so removed from the snowstorm and the vast expanse of the cold, empty planet, from the past, from the future and its expectations. For a moment she thought that it wouldn’t be so bad, to turn her mouth against his neck, to trace out the stubbled line of his jaw with her lips.
You are loved in return, she wanted to tell him—with her body, if she couldn’t manage it with words.
“Let me tell you something else,” she said instead.
Din pressed a kiss to her sweaty hairline, lingering for a moment, breathing against her. One of his hands cradled her metal one, as if it were real. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me something else.”
So Luke told him about Hoth, about the wampa and her poor doomed tauntaun and how she’d wandered the snows for hours, delirious, before Han had found her. How his innovation had saved the both of them, how they’d both smelled like the tail-end of a rancor for weeks after, even with all the time Luke spent soaking in bacta. How on Tatooine hell was a cold place, and how her experience on Hoth had only cemented that superstition, that maybe—her voice faltering, Din’s hand tightening on her hip, the hammock-bag swaying gently—that was why she’d come here, to Vandor.
“Luke,” he murmured, hurt.
Before he could say anything else, she was asleep again.
In the morning the snow had stopped, and while she drank her caf, Luke fixed the heaters on the snow door so that they could get out onto the icy layer on top of the snowfall. Din was oddly quiet—a different sort of quiet than his usual quiet—as he cleared the snow from around the Razor Crest II, making space to start chipping ice from the hydraulics. Luke shouted to him that she was heading down to Karhide for chempacks, and he barely raised a hand in acknowledgement. She suspected that, with the breaking of the storm, her time was up. He would leave today.
She didn’t ask if he would wait for her to come back, to say goodbye; she had only just got herself back under control after last night, and felt that his answer—either yes or no—would put her right back in that childlike state. Besides, she would see the Razor Crest take off from the village. She would feel his leaving, either way.
The path down the mountain was covered, but the way was marked with tall, plastisteel stakes. Luke slid and skidded most of the way, catching herself with the Force when she was too slow to catch herself with her muscles, and made it to Karhide well before midday.
“Big storm,” commented the proprietor at the trading post, as she counted out credits to pay for the chempacks. “You do alright up there by yourself?”
“Fine, thank you,” Luke said. She wasn’t feeling particularly friendly, but she didn’t want to come across as rude, so she added, “I had company.”
The proprietor gave her a knowing look. “You should bring your guest down to the hearth-hall. There’s a big kemmering today.” A chuckle. “Half the town seems to be in kemmer after all that time cooped up.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think—”
“Just a suggestion, you know. All are welcome. All are welcome.”
Luke nodded, smiled politely, and made her escape.
Halfway out of the village, she paused, stopped by something she couldn’t put her finger on. How long, she thought absently, had it been? How long had she wanted Din, but not dared touch him—five years? Longer? How long had she been landlocked inside her own body, yearning for the ocean, denying herself the connection of physical love, all in endless waiting for someone she could never really have? Someone she would never really deserve to have?
She had come here, to Vandor, seeking solitude, thinking it would either bring her peace or force her to penance, but it had done neither. Something at the base of her spine seemed to pull her toward the hearth-hall. So she went.
In the anteroom outside the main hall, a gethenian in somer smiled in greeting, led her to a cubicle and left her be. Luke knew this part; she had done this part before, when she had attended as a courtesy early in her hermitage. Now she repeated the actions she had been guided through then, shucking her heavy coat, unwinding her scarves, tugging off her two-fingered gloves, toeing out of her snowshoes, until she stood in the transitory cold in nothing but her undersuit. Even that must go, but she waited a moment, listening to the human noises in the other room, feeling the chill of the air from the just-closed door on her skin, wishing that she were not alone.
But she was not alone. She unzipped her undersuit, folded it, and stowed it on the top shelf of her cubicle. Her skin now bare except for the clinging shorts she had slept in, she moved into the hall.
The smell of sex was thick on the air. Though there were no windows, the lights were on full brightness; the Vandorians were not shy people, felt no shame in their lovemaking. Luke stepped carefully over bodies, around entwined couples, surprised to find, now that she was really looking instead of just politely half-seeing, that she could hardly tell which gethenian had taken on the male role, which the female role in each coupling partnership. Something about that—about the writhing heat of these pale, androgenous bodies—made her pulse quicken, goosebumps whisper across her bare breasts. She thought maybe it was the lack of knowing which warmed her, the unimportance of knowing. It was not the sexual organs which made this love, not the impersonal mechanism of penetration, but the couple. The organs were secondary.
A gethenian not yet in full kemmer came up to her with a questioning smile, brushing their fingers over her shoulder, and all at once the prospect of really doing this—of having sex with someone who was not Din—was daunting. She intimated that she needed a moment, and they told her to find them later, if she wanted. Shaky, as if someone had reached inside her and turned all her insides over, Luke found a seat along the wall and sunk into it.
She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, doing her best not to think of the man she had left up the mountain. Her best was not very good. Someone moaned in the hearth-hall, loud and wanton and clear as a bell over the wet noises of mouths and cocks and cunts, and it was as if she was hit by a bolt of lightning, her body suddenly warm and jelly with arousal.
She imagined that he was here, that he was kneeling before her, taking her bare foot in his hand and mouthing up the inside of her leg, over her knee, his mustache ghosting over the baby-soft skin inside her thigh, taking his time getting to where she wanted him most—he would breathe her name, and she would sink her fingers in his hair, leg hitched over his shoulder as she let him move her wherever he wanted, small and malleable in his hands. Luke, he would murmur, reverent, and she would pull at him desperately until he stretched up to kiss her, crowding her back against the bench and the wall, his body sheltering her from the hungry eyes of the rest of the revelers in the kemmering-hall…
“Luke,” someone said.
She opened her eyes, embarrassed to find that there were tears on her cheeks.
Din stood before her, in nothing but his shorts. And his helmet, of course—which only made the rest of him seem that much more naked, broad chest and dark body hair. But of course, Luke thought distantly, she had seen him more naked than this, the first time she met him.
He knelt before her, as she had imagined, but did not kiss her skin; he couldn’t have kissed her skin, even if he wanted to. He reached for her instead, grabbed the nape of her neck, said again, “Luke,” and drew her forehead in to rest against the cool beskar of his helmet. She exhaled, shuddering, and closed her eyes. Put her hands on his shoulders, for steadiness. Under her palms she felt the motion of his breathing, the tension in the great huge muscle of his body, his total focus on her.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, quietly.
Luke laughed. It was a sad sound, no humor in it. “I didn’t want to be alone.”
“You’re not alone,” he said. “You’ve never been alone.”
Tears flowing freely, she turned to kiss the visor of his helmet, the temple, the crown.
His hands tightened on her. “Luke,” he said, a third time. “Marry me. Please.”
She drew back abruptly to look at him, shocked.
He was, as always, difficult to read, but she’d had a lot of practice. He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t under the influence. She’d seen him under the influence a handful of times, and this wasn’t that. Din was earnestly, wholeheartedly kneeling between her legs and asking her to marry him.
Her breath stuttered. The moat around her heart was choppy, upset.
“I can’t,” she said.
He was calm. He didn’t pull away. “Do you want to?” he asked, patient.
Luke’s fingertips dug into his shoulders. “I can’t.”
He smoothed his thumb over her cheek, soothing. “That’s not what I asked, cyar’ika,” he said. “Do you want to?”
“Of course I want to.”
“Then do it. Marry me. Come home with me.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
Din huffed, frustrated. Gently frustrated. “Why not?”
“I failed you. I failed everyone, Din, my students are all dead, I don’t deserve—”
“Hey.” He pressed his thumb to the corner of her mouth, like a kiss. “We have a saying, in Mando’a. Great weight cannot be carried alone.” His body moved closer against hers, hot, blanketing. “Let me help you carry this. Please.”
That was why she’d come here, she realized. Not to Vandor, but to the kemmering-hall. More than not wanting to be alone, she didn’t want to be alone with her grief.
She regarded Din for a long moment, and remembered his face—the soft, kind lines of him—and didn’t feel like she had broken his trust in doing so. She took a deep breath, centering. Letting go.
“Mhi solus tome,” she began, when she was able. She knew the words. She had learned them a long time ago. “Mhi solus dar’tome,” and Din sucked in a breath as he recognized what she was saying, what it meant.
She held his helmet in her hands and pressed her forehead against it, so that even the motion of her lips was hidden, only for them. “Mhi me’dinui an,” she finished, “mhi ba’juri verde.”
Din repeated the words back to her, slow and certain even as his voice trembled, then stood and picked her up from the bench in one smooth motion, carrying her quickly out from the hearth.
***
It started snowing again as they trekked up the mountain, a light dry snow that flew sideways in the wind, but Luke hardly noticed. All of her attention was on Din. They didn’t touch—it was impractical to hold hands moving over such terrain—but she was nevertheless aware of the space he occupied, the constant reassuring presence of him over her left shoulder. She knew she should not have done what she did, that it was selfish and brash of her, but she had said the words to him and she would not renege on them now. Even if she did not deserve Din, she had taken him, and she would keep him.
He had come to her in her solitude, had searched the galaxy and found her here, but it was more than that, wasn’t it? He had known, somehow, when she had not even known herself, that it wasn’t solitude she needed. That she had seen her village ripped from her, and that in its absence she had no way of processing its loss, no way of moving through the experience. So he had presented himself; he had said, I’m your village.
He was her husband, she allowed herself to realize. They were married. They had sworn a vow which, like the vow of kemmering, could be broken but never again sworn to another, not by the Mandalorian creed. For years she had wanted to know what he looked like when something got him out of bed in the middle of the night—something not traumatic, not life or death. Something like her sliding in to join him. She had slept next to him for ten days and had not seen him—not even thought to see him, her image of him complete enough in the rhythm of his breath and the long warm line of his body, pressed against hers through two hammock-bags—but now she could. Now it was her right and her privilege, as his spouse.
Now they were in the house. Now the snow door was closed.
Wind battered the structure outside, but in here it was still and quiet. Their eyes took time to adjust to the light, after so long in the snow. Din had stopped on the raised platform of the snow door, and Luke stopped with him, content to wait, but unwilling to put the distance between them that it would take to get down the ladder to the floor.
For all that they had never had a relationship based on talking, the words of their marriage vow seemed to have robbed them of all others, at least for a time. It didn’t matter. They didn’t need them.
After days, after minutes, Din reached up and slowly, slowly—as if he were handling a bomb—removed his helmet.
He was, now that Luke had allowed herself to visit the memory without guilt, exactly as she remembered. Soft, kind face. Earnest eyes. A way of looking at her that was straight-on, totally focused, that she thought now must be a byproduct of a life wearing a helmet, how he turned his whole head to look at her hand as she took off her glove and reached to touch his cheek. His skin was flushed—not with cold, like hers, but from the humid heat inside his beskar—and when her fingertips touched skin, light as a feather, his eyelids fluttered and he gave a full-body shudder.
Luke couldn’t help herself anymore. She grabbed her husband’s face and hauled him into a kiss.
Din made a noise against her like ice calving away from a glacier. For a moment his hands hovered at her sides, as if he didn’t know where to put them, and then all at once he seemed to decide that it didn’t matter—that he could put them wherever he wanted, so long as he was touching her. He backed her up against the wall and followed her in, covering her, pressing a knee between her legs. She pushed at his coat until it fell to the floor around their feet, and he did the same for her, until they were standing in a pile of furs in nothing but their undersuits—and Din quickly stripped her of hers, cold hands skimming under to palm greedily at her small breasts, as if he had been wanting to touch them since he’d seen them, and maybe he had.
Maybe he had been thinking of this all the way up the mountain: falling to his knees and pulling her against him with a big hand splayed at the small of her back, Luke reaching out with the Force to steady herself as his nose dragged up the center line of her navel, laving kisses over her stomach, nuzzling under her breast with a hum before taking her nipple in his mouth. She gasped and held on to the back of his head, as much for stability as to keep him in place, because her spine felt as if it had been liquified but she couldn’t fathom the idea of him stopping—not when he was peeling her undersuit down over her hips and taking her shorts with it, her skin cold but his mouth scalding hot as he opened it against the inside of her thigh, one knuckle teasing over her soaking cunt, nosing over her clit and then sucking. Luke’s fingers tightened in his hair, her body bowing forward around his head as all her muscles drew taut, and she would be embarrassed about how fast she came except that it was Din.
He licked her through it, one finger curling inside her, and when she passed from pleasure into oversensitive pain she made a soft noise of protest and drew him back to his feet. He was still, in the grand scheme of things, fully-clothed even while she stood naked, upper thighs slick with her own fluids and his saliva; the ends of his hair curled with sweat and his chin glistened faintly, and when she noticed that her heart sped and her toes curled in the furs.
She went to the ladder—kissing him as she passed, feeling the bulge of him through his undersuit against her hip—and led the way down to the floor, relying on the Force to keep her woozy muscles from falling. He followed, and shucked the rest of his clothes as soon as he reached the bottom, so that as they unclipped the hammock-bags and laid them out on the floor, a sort of makeshift bed, he was completely bare. Luke looked at his cock, at his erection which stood nearly at a right angle from his body, the base nestled in dark hair. So often, she thought, the idea of the cock was separated from the idea of the man, so that a woman could feel more for the cock during sex than for the man, but to her, now, with Din, they were inseparable.
It was Din who she pressed back into the furs, digging her nails into his chest; it was Din who she took in her mouth, resting her tongue against the fluttery pulse on the underside of his shaft, his knees bending on either side of her like bulwarks. Din who hauled her up and rolled on top of her, Din who chased his own taste on her tongue and held her open with two fingers as he speared into her; Din who speared into her, who pressed into the tight grip of her cunt, the hot solid rod of him so thick that her muscles could barely flutter as they tried to clench.
“Din,” she gasped, clutching at his shoulders, the back of his neck, his head, as he buried his face in her throat and moved, just once, a thrust so hard and good she went boneless all over again.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, hooking her ankles together, and he pressed short kisses to her cheeks, her chin, her eyelashes, as if he was too overwhelmed to focus his energy. Wanting to help, she held his face between her hands and kissed him, feeling as she did the involuntary stutter of his hips, the short jerky motion of his cockhead, nestled deep inside her.
When they broke for air, lips still close enough to touch, breathing together, she said, “Move.”
He smiled, the helpless, exhausted smile of a man on top of a mountain, kissed her again—bracing—and did.
Later—much, much later, by Vandorian or any other time—Din rolled over beside her, propped on one elbow, and ran his fingers absently through the tangled strands of her hair. She had untied her braids. She felt it was time to untie her braids.
“Come home with me,” he said again. Not a question, but not a demand, either. A prayer.
Luke thought, if she stepped outside right now, she would turn to a block of ice. Her skin wasn’t tough anymore, wasn’t suited to the weather. The moment Din arrived, she’d forgotten how to protect herself. Forgotten that she should, maybe.
And here in the womblike warmth of their hearth, in the midst of what she thought would be a long, maybe two-day-long kemmering, consummation, hibernation, she decided that she didn’t want to remember. She loved; she was loved in return. It wouldn’t help anything to pretend otherwise.
“Yes,” she said, and pulled him in for a close, urgent kiss. “I missed you. Stars, Din, I missed you so much.”
“Luke,” he said, voice rough, and kissed the tears from her eyes, and told her, “I missed you too.”