Charting the Stars - Dinluke AU

Chapter Nine: The Apprentice

Notes:
Just as a precursor: there are a lot of time skips in this chapter because it covers Din and Luke's time apart, which ends up being quite a while. Also, I don't go super in-depth on Luke and Leia's training on Dagobah because y'all have already watched that in Empire Strikes Back and I don't think I could add much more to that other than the plot-relevant stuff, so that is what I focused on. Obi-Wan is a tad different in this fic vs in cannon, but he has also gone through a lot more. This chapter is about 2/3 Din and 1/3 Luke.

Warnings:
Violence, Luke regresses back to how he was with Din after their argument back in chapter two where he doesn't speak much, but it's brief and with good reason, references to child abuse (nothing specific)

More warnings that contain very minor and vague spoilers:
Someone loses an eye and it's kind of graphic, but not overly so given that said person is in too much pain to describe it much. If you want to skip go from "Din and Tracinya ran a total of eighteen missions before it happened" to "When he woke up again, they had already landed on Glavis." A brief description of events will be given in the end notes for those who skipped.

I threw in an OC that actually gets to stick around as a side character because Din needs someone to talk to that isn't Grogu since he is incapable of talking back and I didn't want to write his whole portion of the chapter as internal thoughts.

---

Luke meditated more on the way to Dagobah than at any other period in his life. At first, it was just a suggestion by Leia to help him balance his emotions since he was struggling with leaving Din and Grogu. He hadn't prepared the child enough for his departure and he realized that now as his cries echoed in Luke's head. When they left, he was able to feel Grogu attempting to reach out to him for hours afterward. He did his best to reply, to act as a comforting presence in the Force, but eventually, it was as if they fell out of range.

It had been utterly heartbreaking and he wondered how Din was coping with it all. He hoped that Grogu wasn't being too difficult for him and that the child would adjust quickly to lessen the burden that Luke had placed on them.

So, he meditated. He released his fears and worries as best he could in the Force as Leia's calming signature brushed against his own. She was more than ready for this trip, anxious at the prospect of becoming stronger to defeat their father, a feeling Luke did not fully share. Logically, he knew that Vader and Palpatine had to be removed from the equation, but he wished there was another option besides just killing them. If the Jedi were meant to be peacekeepers as the Armorer had stated, then surely the old Order wouldn't have approved of this course of action. Then again, they had participated willingly in the Clone War, which decimated large swaths of the galaxy, so perhaps she was also correct in her assertion that they carried bloodshed with them.

Luke didn't want to carry more bloodshed along his legacy. It had to end with him, he didn't want Grogu to grow up in a place where killing was deemed a necessary evil. He hadn't focused on it that day, but in hindsight, he realized that he had felt every death on Kamino. As he and Leia had fought against Vader, he had seen fighters falling in the distance, the casualties of the air battle. Some of them had been Imperial and others Rebel, but they had all died the same in the Force, like candles suddenly being blown out.

He wondered what the two billion people lost on Alderaan had felt like, or the Death Star with two million people aboard. Was Master Kenobi affected by either? He knew that with the experience that man held, he was likely able to feel things more acutely, but that also meant he was capable of blocking them out. He figured that was how the Jedi before him must have gotten by, blocking all of the death and destruction they participated in for the "greater good."