Chapter Text
It was relatively quiet in the temple hangar bay when Ezra and his Master landed back on Coruscant.
His Master stood the second they touched down and headed to the loading ramp with an unspoken trust for Ezra to turn off all the ship’s switches and knobs while he did an external check.
Once satisfied all was well with shut down, Ezra headed out to the hangar, grabbing his travel bag from beside his chair and tugging it over his shoulder as he jogged.
“Do you need any help with unloading, Master? Or am I good to go?” Ezra called, ducking his head around the corner where his Master stood, running his hand over what Ezra assumed was a small bit of carbon scoring with a wince.
The mission had gone well, which usually meant that Ezra could negotiate to shower in the good shower in their apartment first. Since unless he was being punished through manual labour of unloading and repairing a star ship, his Master would be at least an hour behind him getting caught up in post-mission repairs or conversation.
His Master glanced over and put his hands on his hips in thought, tucking his thumbs into the front of his belt.
“We shouldn’t need to debrief with the council until tomorrow, so no,” his Master decided with a tip of his head before giving Ezra a warm smile. “Go take a break Padawan, you’ve earned it. Just don’t get into any trouble, alright?”
Ezra gave a toothy smile in return at the praise.
“I’ll try, Master. No promises, though,” he said, giving a two fingered salute and a wink as he walked backwards, only turning to dash towards their apartment when his Master gave an affectionate eye roll and waved him off.
There wasn’t much trouble he could get into anyway. Arriving back at the temple usually left Ezra with only one thing on his mind and it wasn’t trouble.
Technically.
Clean, changed, and smelling significantly better after a quick fight and a long flight, Ezra did a lap of the temple grounds, only finding what he was looking for once he reached one of the garden courtyards.
He jogged past knights going through katas and dodged around squealing younglings running after each other to arrive underneath a ledge—one that when sat upon gave a view of the whole garden as well as the legislative district.
A foot dangled down from above, giving away the position of Ezra’s closest friend.
Ezra backed up so that he could see him better.
His head was tipped downwards towards a book as he rested his elbow on the knee of the leg that was still tucked neatly on the ledge. Sunlight shining from above filtered through the golden tips of his blond hair and cast light over the slope of his nose and the edge of his cheekbone.
Luke was like a pendulum, always in motion—although the crèche masters had called it ‘fidgeting’. At times it seemed like he had been born with unending restless energy, which wasn’t uncommon in Jedi. Ezra’s own Master had a similar sort of quality to him where he was only settled when in motion.
Luke’s foot that was dangling swung gently as he read, like he was a part of the soft afternoon breeze programmed by the Coruscant weather control. Ezra could see his lips moving slightly, mouthing along with the words until he brought the tips of his fingers up to his mouth, delicately biting at his nails in thought.
“Hey! You know anyone that can find a guy a vintage J-type twin engine?” Ezra called up to the ledge once he decided that staring unannounced for any longer would be creepy. “I’m trying to rebuild an N-1 from scratch.”
Luke frowned and paused for a moment in recognition as the words filtered though to his brain and he glanced down with surprise and excitement.
His eyes landed on Ezra, rewarding him with a wide smile—one that made Ezra’s heart skip a beat.
Ezra, meet trouble. Trouble, meet Ezra.
“You’re back!” Luke called down brightly, closing his book and setting it beside him on the ledge. “I thought you were gonna be gone way longer.”
“I was,” Ezra said, using the force to elegantly jump up so he could join him in sitting on the ledge. Once comfortably seated he bumped his shoulder against Luke’s in greeting. “My Master managed to resolve things quicker than expected.”
“In a good way?” Luke asked with a laugh, pulling one of his knees to his chest and hugging it.
“Any way is a good way if it means I get to see you and Leia. Where is the other twin engine, by the way?” Ezra asked, leaning back on his hands and looking around as though he might spot Leia playing with the younglings in the garden. “It’s been like, at least a couple months since I last saw her. Is she on a mission or something?”
He felt Luke stiffen beside him and turned his head to see him suck his cheek into his mouth for a moment, shifting uncomfortably.
“She’s uh, decided to knuckle down so she can prepare for her trials,” Luke said awkwardly, causing Ezra’s eyebrows to shoot up.
“Wow! That’s huge!” Ezra said, earnest in his excitement despite how concerned he was about the way Luke’s tone had left him feeling unsettled.
His Force presence felt slightly mixed up too, muddled.
“I mean, we always knew she’d be a knight before us two, but I didn’t think it’d be so soon,” Ezra continued as he watched Luke’s guarded expression for some kind of a tell. “But you don’t seem too happy about it.”
Luke winced at being caught.
“I am happy,” Luke insisted carefully, a variety of emotions flashing over his face. “I’m not jealous or anything like that, but there’s a lot of…” He took a moment to consider his choice of words. “Complications.”
Ezra raised an eyebrow.
“Complications?”
“Yeah,” Luke confirmed with a nod. “Complications.”
Ezra sighed in irritation by his friend’s vagueness.
“And are you gonna tell me what those complications are?” He prompted, watching Luke grind the back of his teeth together anxiously.
He gave Luke time, staring at him and pressuring him with silence full of expectation.
The tension eventually brought Luke to a breaking point and he sighed, moving his hands to rub at his eyes with the heels of his palms.
“I don’t know if I should,” he agonised, his voice slightly muffled.
“Well, it’s not exactly doing you any favours to keep it to yourself,” Ezra pointed out, resisting the urge to reach out and pull Luke’s hands away from his face. “Think of telling me as a way of releasing it to the Force.”
Luke thankfully moved his hands off his face himself to attempt to give Ezra a very Leia-ish withering look.
“That’s not how the Force works, Ezra."
Ezra shrugged.
“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t,” he said. “Either way, I won’t tell anyone about it. I promise.”
“I don’t want to burden you with this, Ezra,” Luke continued to hesitate.
“And you’re too nice for your own good,” Ezra said firmly. “You’re not burdening me, I’m helping you bear the load. That’s what friends do.”
Luke gave him a smile of appreciation, one so soft that it caused Ezra’s heart to beat just a little faster and for guilt to creep up in the back of his throat.
‘Friend’.
Ezra was such a shitty liar.
“Thanks,” Luke said, shifting so that he was hugging his shins again. His head tipped towards Ezra so that the softness of his cheek rested on the apex of his knee.
Ezra gave him a smile.
He didn’t know exactly the moment he fell for Luke.
He had been a weird and somewhat scrawny kid. He and his sister had been Ezra’s saviours when he had come to the temple at the significantly late age of five years old. Something about having memories of his family and a prominent Lothal accent made him a real freak in the eyes of most of their crèche mates
Like it had been Ezra’s fault that Caleb and Master Billaba had stumbled on him later than most.
But the twins were different. They hadn’t hesitated to befriend him and they gave him a social in with other younglings that otherwise would have avoided him for being different.
The twins were… something else.
They were freaks in their own right, and in absolute opposite to Ezra they were some of the youngest to have ever been admitted to the crèche at just a few days old. They were both fairly small compared to the other kids—Leia especially. They were absurdly strong and moved parallel in the Force with each other—less in synchronisation, but complementary of each other. Where Luke was shy and patient, Leia was forward and borderline bossy to compensate.
To this day they made a powerful team for both negotiations and ‘aggressive negotiations’ as Ezra’s Master termed it. It was awe inspiring to watch them dance in conversation or battle together, listening to each other and the Force as they worked.
It was said that this was typical of Force sensitive twins. It was genuinely hard to imagine one existing without the other.
Throughout their time in the crèche they had been a tight knight trio up until their respective Padwawanships had forced them all to part ways.
Luke had remained small but slightly gangly in his first few years beyond the crèche as he awkwardly stood at a little over double the height of his new Master—a feat that wasn’t as impressive as it sounded. When the Grandmaster of the order took Luke on as his Padawan it had caused a significant stir of conversation around the temple, since everyone had assumed that Count Dooku would be his last.
Somewhere during those years of their training Luke had changed, grown taller, and filled out into a lithe but deceptively strong man. His childhood goofiness eventually settled into a calm confidence and was often seen elegantly dashing, running, jumping, and flipping through the temple with his Master as cargo on his back.
And somewhere between that time and now, Ezra had fallen in love with him.
Not that falling was the right word in Ezra’s opinion anyway. It was too associated with the dark side and the Sith for his liking—although if you asked any of the Masters, they would insist that the seductive allure of love and attachment and that of the dark side where one and the same.
But no, it hadn’t been a fall.
It had been more like being gently lowered down to rest and only realising how tired you were the moment you hit the mattress. It was like the memories Ezra still carried with him of his family on Lothal. It was the feeling of being safely and softly placed down on his bed after a long day before his mother or father tucked him in.
That’s what loving Luke felt like, a hand pushing his hair from his face and pressing a kiss to his forehead, punctuating with a whisper of ‘goodnight’.
It felt safe, like a home.
“It’s nothing,” Ezra eventually said with a shrug once he had re-stabilised his emotions. He leaned bump their shoulders together again as a small gesture of physical support. “Now come on. Quit stalling and tell me already.”
He was actually patient this time, politely averting his eyes to stare out at the city to give Luke space to gather whatever courage he seemed to need.
His eyes landed on where Chancellor Amidala’s penthouse was like a homing beacon, being able to spot it from anywhere on coruscant.
He should probably pay her a visit soon. It had been a while.
“I’m scared that Leia might end up leaving the order,” Luke said quietly, tightening his arms around his legs and hugging his knees closer as he spoke.
Ezra’s head whipped around so fast that his braid flew around and whipped him in the face.
“What?!” He asked, completely blindsided. “What do you mean ‘leaving the order’? What does that even mean?”
“Hey, keep your voice down,” Luke hissed, sitting up straight and glancing around to scan the courtyard for any eavesdroppers.
“I’m quiet, I’m quiet,” Ezra said, holding his hands up and in surrender and actively lowering his voice into a whisper. “But you just said before that she’s preparing for her trials!”
“She is, but I’m worried that she’s doing it to,” Luke wriggled his mouth as if he were actively trying to force the next words out of his mouth. “Avoid her feelings.”
Ezra had to suppress a sigh of irritation.
“Can you stop being so vague?” he complained. “You spend way too much time with your Master. In five more years you’re gonna start talking exclusively in riddles, I guarantee it.”
Luke let out a small chuckle, seeming to settle a little from Ezra’s joke.
“She rescued this guy in the outer rim,” he explained. “Managed somehow to get him out of trouble with the Hutts—I don’t know the details, but he lives on Coruscant now. He’s a cool guy. A smuggler. I like him, but he’s completely in love with her.”
“You’ve met him?” Ezra probed, leaning in closer, almost conspiratorial.
“Of course I’ve met him. He’s Leia’s new favourite debate partner,” Luke said. “We went to Dex’s together and she didn’t even notice I hadn’t said a word for like half an hour!”
Ezra’s eyebrows raised.
“Oh,” he said, knowing that more or less confirmed all of Luke’s fears.
“Yeah. Oh,” Luke sighed. “Even if she’s not in love with him right now, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before she is. I think she thinks that if she focuses on her trials and is too busy to see him, her feelings will just… go away.”
“Well maybe they will,” Ezra suggested optimistically. “Do you think she’d really leave the order for him?
“I think she’d want to do the right thing,” Luke said, staring out at the city in front of them. “It’s what you’re supposed to do, right? If you can’t follow the code and forgo attachment, then you’re supposed to leave."
“That’s what they say,” Ezra said noncommittally, joining him in staring out at the skyscrapers beyond the temple.
“And let’s be honest, Leia’s the best of us,” Luke continued. “She always has been.”
Ezra snorted.
“Speak for yourself,” he said with an exaggerated eye roll, feeling a small bit of relief as he elicited another small laugh out of Luke as intended.
“Still, I’m terrified,” Luke admitted. “Which I know I shouldn’t be—fear leads to anger and anger leads to hate and so on and so forth—but I’m still afraid.”
Ezra nodded thoughtfully.
“Okay, then let’s talk it out,” he suggested, shifting so that he was slightly more angled towards Luke. “What part of it scares you?”
“Everything. Some of it’s the fact that if she leaves, then—“ Luke paused in his rambling to calm his anxiety with a deep inhale of breath. It was obvious that this had been eating him up for a while. “Have you ever noticed that there’s kind of an expectation on me and Leia? No one really brings it up, but it’s definitely there.”
“I’ve noticed it,” Ezra confirmed with a nod. “Master Yoda doesn’t exactly take people on as a joke.”
“That only proves you’ve never heard him make a joke,” Luke said with a laugh. “My Master is wise and all that, but he has a real twisted sense of humour.”
“Huh, I’d never have guessed,” Ezra said with genuine surprise. He hadn’t spend a huge amount of time around the Grandmaster of the order since he was a youngling, other than the occasional debrief with his Master in front of the council.
Those were never really funny, even if the mission had gone well.
His Master had a weird and strained relationship with the Jedi council. He had once mentioned that they had been against him beginning his training at the age of nine, but Ezra didn’t think that alone was enough to cause such a loud unspoken rift.
Still, he wasn’t exactly inclined to dig either.
“Anyway, I guess I feel nervous that if Leia leaves the order, all her half of the expectation will fall on me,” Luke continued. “I don’t think I’m ready to carry all that.”
He sighed for what felt like the hundredth time today and stared down at his feet.
“Not to mention it would break Master Windu’s heart.”
“Yeah, that’s probably true,” Ezra agreed, shifting to rest his forearm on his knee.
The famously intimidating Master had developed a significant soft spot for his current apprentice. His relationship as a mentor to her was something that could be described as indulgent, or even doting.
“How does your Master deal with it? The expectation,” Luke asked, turning to look at Ezra with something like hope. “I mean, I’m not exactly ‘The Chosen One’, but he’s the only guy in the temple with a higher midi-chlorian count than me and Leia so…”
Luke made a vague gesticulation with his hands as Ezra let out an awkward cross between a chuckle and a cough.
“Deal with it? I don’t think my Master really deals with anything,” he said honestly, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the sky. “I’ve got no idea what happened to that guy during the Clone Wars but he’s locked up tight.”
“Ah,” Luke said, sincere disappointment colouring the sound.
“But I can ask him for strategies if you want,” Ezra suggested in an effort to be helpful, looking back at Luke’s furrowed brow. He wanted to wipe the worry from his face. “He gives good advice. He helped me a lot when I got homesick for my parents back in the day.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Luke declined.
“You sure?” Ezra asked.
“Yeah,” Luke breathed in a way that made Ezra want to reach out and touch him. “I guess this is part of growing up.”
That made Ezra let out a sigh of his own at the stark reminder that they weren’t teenagers anymore and were each standing on the precipice of knighthood.
“Yeah,” Ezra said simply, not quite able to find the words to express the mourning of their childhood.
They fell into a silence as they each wrestled with the inevitability of their fast approaching futures.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Luke begin to fiddle with his fingers, scratching at his nail beds anxiously.
“There’s also… the other thing,” Luke added quietly, nervously.
“Hm?” Ezra prompted.
“It’s the part where I’m afraid of Leia leaving, because I’m afraid of losing her,” Luke admitted, his face twisting in guilt. “It’s kind of made me confront the fact that I’m… attached, I guess.”
Ezra snorted and rolled his eyes.
“That’s dumb. You’re being too hard on yourself,” Ezra said dismissively.
“It’s not dumb!” Luke protested.
“It is!” Ezra insisted. “She’s your twin sister, of course you’ve got some kind of attachment. It’s practically expected of Force sensitive twins. If they didn’t want you to get attached they wouldn’t have raised you together.”
“I don’t think think that’s true,” Luke said.
“I mean, let’s be real, the whole attachment boogeyman thing is a bit…”
Ezra made a face as explanation while Luke shot him a look of confusion.
“A bit what?” He prompted.
Ezra took a second to decide what he wanted to say.
“Okay, I mean, they all say attachment is of the dark side and yada yada,” Ezra said, choosing to throw caution to the wind. If anyone were to understand, he hoped it would be Luke. “And I get that, but then there’s the other side of it all, where we’re all attached but we just pretend we aren’t. If we didn’t all have bonds and weren’t attached, then why does my Master call his old Padawan once a week to check she’s still alive? Why does Master Kenobi practically sleep in the halls of healing every time my Master gets hurt on a mission?”
They were all hypocrites in their own way—his Master especially. The way he preached the importance of non-attachment to Ezra while having an insane ‘will they won’t they' dynamic with Chancellor Amidala was something else.
Ezra would never admit it out loud, but often he did think of Master Skywalker and the Chancellor as his pseudo-surrogate Father and Mother respectively. But he knew it was safest to keep those thoughts to himself since it would be far too much ‘attachment’ for the Jedi order to handle.
He had a suspicion they might view him the same way, but he kept that to himself too.
“Yeah, but Master Kenobi sleeps in the halls of healing when I get hurt too, so I think he might just kind of be like that,” Luke reasoned.
Ezra’s mouth fell open.
“What?! He doesn’t do that for me,” Ezra said, aghast with an unexpected jealousy. “Kriffing hell. Grandmasters, am I right?”
Luke gave him a look that reminded him that Luke’s grandmaster had likely lived close to a millennium ago.
He wondered if Master Yoda even remembered their name.
“Right, right. Duh,” Ezra said, giving himself a light tap on the forehead before the two of them began staring out silently at the city again.
The sounds of younglings filled their silence, the laughter making Ezra nostalgic for simpler times when it was Luke, Leia, and Ezra spending their days causing trouble around the temple.
It had been easier then, when their life had been dedicated to exploring the Force and learning basic katas. Life now was so complicated, mixed up and thrown around as duty fought in an endless tug of war against feelings that they could never act on.
In a way, Ezra was comforted by the news of Leia’s predicament. It made him feel slightly less alone.
“I try to imagine it, what life would be like without her here,” Luke said softly, barely audible. “And it hurts. The idea that she could make the choice to never see me again and be happier because of it—“
Luke cut himself off and Ezra could feel him stifle his hurt and guilt in the Force beside him.
“It sucks,” Ezra supplied.
“Yeah,” Luke agreed weakly. “And then I feel horrible about how selfish I’m being that I would want her to sacrifice her happiness for my own. It all just balls up and spirals and sometimes it feels like there’s no way out of these feelings.”
Ezra hummed and nodded.
“You know, Master Skywalker used to always tell me that it was okay to miss my parents. Even if I’m happy to be where I am," he said, sincere with empathy. “You’re not a bad person for feeling like this.”
“Then why does it feel like I am?” Luke asked, his voice breaking and his eyes slightly damp as he looked at Ezra like he actually had answers.
Ezra sighed in quiet frustration.
As much as Ezra loved Luke and felt a certain amount of privilege to be allowed to see this side of Luke—the melancholy, the overly reflective, the profoundly sad, weighed down by self-blame version of Luke that so few were allowed to witness. It was exhausting to manage and nearly impossible to pull him out of.
His Master would slip into this headspace every so often too, and was equally as frustrating to deal with—despite him trying his best to keep it from where Ezra could see it.
Maybe excessively self pitying slumps were the price of power.
“What I’m trying to say is that everyone in this temple is attached, whether they admit they are or not,” Ezra pressed on. “So what if you love your sister? I still love my parents even if I haven’t seen them since I was five.”
“But we’re not talking about love as in compassion, we’re talking about love as in possession or attachment,” Luke pointed out. “It’s not like you’re gonna turn to the dark side to see your parents again, right?”
In all honesty, Ezra didn’t see much of a difference. But like the other thoughts he had on that same topic, he kept them to himself. It would be pointless to argue with Luke’s reasoning as to why others were allowed to love but not him anyway.
“Well if that’s what we’re defining it by, do you think you’d turn to the dark side to stop Leia from leaving to order?” Ezra asked.
Luke paused, thinking about it for what was nearly a concerning length of time.
“I don’t think so,” he eventually decided. “I think I’d choose to be happy for her, I guess. Even though I know how much it would hurt.”
“Of course you would be!” Ezra encouraged, reaching to clap Luke’s shoulder supportively. He knew Luke’s urge to emotionally martyr himself would win out in this conflict. “You’re a selfless guy! Maybe it won’t be so bad anyway. Maybe she’ll become a Jedi associate like Ahsoka. She left the order ages ago but she still goes on missions for the council sometimes.”
Luke gave Ezra a hint of a smile.
“Maybe,” he said softly, though Ezra could hear enough hope in his tone to satisfy him.He would take what he could get.
As much as Ezra wished he could fix this for Luke, all he could really do was sit with him.
Something something accepting and embracing what he couldn’t change.
“What do you think you’d do?” Ezra asked after a while, avoiding looking at Luke as he spoke.“If you fell in love, that is.”
He could feel his heart beat roughly in his chest from raw nervousness. Fear.
It was a bold segue, but not entirely unheard of. Growing up in an environment like the temple inevitably resulted in hushed bedtime philosophy on the topic between children and teenagers alike.
Answers evolved from faces screwed up childishly at the thought of something gross like love coming between a Jedi and their duty to quiet admissions of nervousness and uncertainty as they grew older.
Ezra had never been part of the first group, even as a youngling. He mostly removed himself from those conversations.
He was different than the others. He remembered what love was.
He and his Master were alike in that way. They both came to the order knowing what they were giving up—Ezra the love of his parents, and his Master the love of his mother.
“I have no idea,” Luke breathed, leaning forward to rest his chin on his knees again. “I can’t imagine ever loving someone more than I love being here.”
“I know what you mean,” Ezra said, watching Luke’s expression carefully, evaluating, judging, gauging. He rolled his shoulders and sat back in an attempt to look causal. “Besides, everyone I love is here already. So I guess there’s no point in worrying about it.”
Luke seemed to relax at his words, filling Ezra with a relief that his words seemed not to have been unwelcome.
“Thanks for letting me talk to you about this,” Luke said. “I really mean it.”
“Any time,” Ezra said.
“I’ve been feeling guilty for keeping it a secret, so this has really helped,” Luke continued, his expression turning to worry again. “I know I should tell Master Yoda about these feelings but…”
He let out a sigh, his head hanging shamefully.
Ezra watched him, hypnotised the brush of his lashes against the tops of his cheeks, the way his hair fell to the nape of his neck.
His eyes traced the line of Luke’s Padawan braid over his shoulder and down the length of his arm, finally reaching where their hands were resting side by side on the brick, nearly touching.
“Don’t feel so bad. I mean,” Ezra began, deciding to take a chance.
He carefully moved his hand to rest over Luke’s and began to stroke his thumb over the knuckle of his pinky.
Ezra’s heart was in his mouth, leaving him half convinced that it would beat so hard and force its way past his lips to land on the grass below them.
He swallowed it back down and finished his sentence.
“We all keep secrets from our Masters sometimes, don’t we?”
He watched as Luke’s head slowly turned to look down at their entwined hands before his eyes dragged up Ezra’s form, lingering on his lips before finally meeting his eyes.
His bottom lip receded into his mouth for a split second, wetting it.
“Hey,” Luke said, his voice slightly unsteady, almost dazed. “Do you wanna get outta here?”