Luke Skywalker didn't remember the screams. He didn't remember the blood, or the heat of Mustafar still clinging to Obi-Wan's cloak as the man handed him off like a sack of guilt. He didn't remember Padmé's final breath or the sound of his father's voice twisted in agony. But the galaxy didn't care what he remembered. It only cared that he was alive.
Tatooine did not welcome him. It didn't cradle him or whisper that things would be okay. It baked him in twin suns, scoured him with windblown salt, and dropped him into a broken home barely surviving. Owen worked until his back seized. Beru rationed water like it was blood. The boy was another mouth they couldn't feed—but they fed him anyway.
At one, Luke was already quiet. He didn't cry unless he was starving. Even then, it wasn't the wail of a normal child—it was a sharp, short sound, like someone testing their voice for the first time and finding it inconvenient. He watched things too closely. Tracked shadows on walls. Watched Beru's hands as she cooked, Owen's as he repaired machinery, the stars above the ceiling grate as if they might lower themselves to speak.
By two, he had begun climbing. First up onto boxes, then ledges, then the vaporator scaffolding when no one was looking. Owen yelled. Beru panicked. Luke just looked down at them, utterly calm. He fell once. Split his lip open. Didn't cry. Just tasted the blood, blinked, and tried again.
That year, Obi-Wan left a ration crate by the vaporator pipe at night. Inside: protein cubes, two canisters of water, and seventy credits in Imperial coin. No note. No footprints. But Owen knew. He cursed the ghost watching from the rocks and told Beru not to take it. She took it anyway. Luke needed boots. The soles of his feet were already cracked.
At three, Luke wandered outside during a market trip. It wasn't long. Maybe three minutes. But long enough for him to see it.
A woman with a collar. Filthy. On her knees. Eyes swollen. A chain dragging behind her like a tail made of rust. She wasn't screaming. That's what disturbed him most. The silence. The hollow way she sat while the slaver barked numbers to the crowd and someone laughed.
Beru found Luke standing in the sand, staring at the woman, unmoving. She picked him up. He didn't look away.
Later that night, when the fire was low and the wind had died, Luke sat on the floor, drawing circles in the dust with a broken bolt. When Beru asked what he was thinking, he didn't answer. Just looked toward the ceiling where the stars would be, and whispered,
"I'll kill them all someday."
Beru didn't understand what he meant. Not yet. But Owen saw the way Luke's eyes didn't blink when he said it.
From then on, when Beru prayed at night, she stopped praying for peace. She started praying that the boy wouldn't lose himself to the fire growing inside him.
Obi-Wan never came close. He left packages. Left weapons sometimes, wrapped in cloth. Left old Republic manuals burned around the edges. But he never spoke. He never watched from nearby.
He couldn't.
Not anymore.
He was busy working jobs in Mos Eisley and beyond. Guarding spice runners for coin. Hunting bounties in armor he hated. Drinking to silence the Force. He didn't kill for glory. He killed for water, for food, for that child he'd abandoned in the desert with nothing but a name and a legacy cursed in fire.
By the time Luke turned four, he didn't believe in heroes. He believed in heat. In survival. In eyes that watched too long and mouths that said too little. And deep down, even as a toddler, he already knew—
if no one was coming to save them,
he'd have to become the one who could.
---
By the time Luke turned four, he had stopped asking questions and started watching everything. He watched how Owen tightened vaporator valves with only three fingers after the fourth was torn off in a raid. He watched how Beru smiled even when the water filters failed, how her hands shook just a little more each week, how she cried into her sleeve at night when she thought no one could hear.
He watched Mos Espa when they visited—saw the way men grabbed girls by the hair and called it business, saw offworld traders laugh as beggars were kicked back into the alleyways. He saw a boy his own age beaten with a stun rod for touching a crate that wasn't his.
Luke never looked away.
He never cried anymore either.
When Owen scolded him for not helping with a broken pump, Luke stared back and said quietly, "I was watching how you fixed it. Next time, I'll do it."
Owen didn't have a response for that. He just handed him the wrench.
By then, Luke had started making his own routines. He didn't ask for permission. Each morning, before the first sun rose fully above the ridge, he ran. Circuits around the property, barefoot. He climbed the dome, hung from the scaffolding until his arms gave out. He stacked rocks and unstacked them. He practiced hitting targets with bolts from a slingshot until his knuckles bled.
He didn't do it for fun. He didn't know what fun was.
He did it because the world felt like a knife pressed against their throats, and he was tired of waiting for it to draw blood.
When Beru asked him if he was okay, he said yes. But she noticed he never played with toys. Never laughed. He just listened, watched, and trained.
One night in Mos Eisley, Owen left Luke alone in the speeder while he haggled for replacement filters. Luke climbed out. He walked past three stalls, saw a crowd, and wove between them. A Rodian girl, maybe seven, was being held by two Nikto thugs—auctioned to a crowd of sweating men while her eyes darted in all directions, silent, panicked.
Luke didn't scream. He didn't even move. He just stared. Long enough for one of the men to notice. The Nikto laughed, turned toward him, raised a hand to shoo him away.
Luke didn't move.
A moment later, Owen grabbed him by the collar, yanked him back into the speeder. No words. No scolding. Just fear. And something else.
Owen had seen that look before—on men who'd survived the Clone Wars.
Later that night, Luke asked, "Why doesn't anyone stop them?"
Owen didn't answer.
So Luke did.
"They'll wish someone had."
Beru sat up most of that night, staring at the ceiling, holding Luke's tiny shirt in her lap like it might start to burn in her hands.
When he turned five, Luke asked Owen for a weapon. Not a toy. A real one.
Owen told him no.
Luke made one out of scrap pipe and twine.
He started listening to old Clone War holos on a cracked datapad he found in the junk pile. He mimicked the stances of troopers, tried to copy Jedi lightsaber forms with a stick in the yard until Owen caught him and threw the stick into the fire.
"That's not who you are," Owen said.
Luke just stared at the flames, jaw clenched.
"I know," he muttered. "That's the problem."
Owen walked away after that. Beru just stood in the doorway, watching her boy—half-shadowed by firelight, muscles already forming under the dust and bruises, eyes that didn't blink when the wind howled.
It wasn't right, she knew. A child shouldn't carry the weight of blood before they even understood the value of life. But this was Tatooine. There were no childhoods here. Only delays before the fighting began.
And Luke wasn't waiting anymore.
---
By the time Luke turned six, he was no longer just a child surviving the desert. He was something else now—something more watchful, more controlled. He still ran every morning, still climbed the tower bones of the vaporators like they were part of him, but there was a new weight behind his movements. Precision. Calculation. The training he invented for himself wasn't for strength anymore. It was for readiness.
He wasn't building muscle.
He was building a weapon.
He'd stopped asking for help. He fixed things on his own now—water valves, circuitry, power couplings. He could gut a power droid and wire it into an old sunlamp in under ten minutes. He started sleeping in the workshop some nights, too tired from training to walk back inside. Beru found him once, curled up under a table with an empty canteen and oil smeared across his forehead like war paint.
She didn't wake him.
The next day, he'd rebuilt the workshop door to close silently.
At the market, he started paying attention to the way bounty hunters walked. How guards stood with their backs to walls. How slavers scanned crowds not for faces, but for fear. He watched. He learned. He mimicked their posture in the dark at night, practicing how to blend into the background. How to see without being seen.
That year, he found an old Clone Wars data core buried in a salvage bin behind a Mos Eisley scrap dealer. He pried it open with a broken spanner and spent the next three months studying everything inside. Battles. Tactics. Field medicine. Sniper angles. Field reports on Jedi kill zones. It was supposed to be restricted to command officers. No one had ever told Luke he couldn't read.
He started keeping notebooks. Scrawled diagrams. Combat theories. Maps of sandcrawler routes. Tusken hunting patterns. Slave trade lanes. Notes on how long it would take to kill a man with a pipe if you struck the right points. He never showed them to anyone. Not even Beru.
Sometimes she found his drawings in the trash—people in chains. People fighting. People dying. And always, a child in the corner, watching.
One evening, news reached Anchorhead that a neighboring farm family had vanished. Just gone. Their homestead still smoldering. Vaporators destroyed. Animals slaughtered. No survivors. Tusken symbols left burned into the sand around the house.
Owen didn't say anything. He just cleaned his rifle that night. Luke asked if he could help. Owen told him no.
So Luke sharpened a screwdriver into a spike and hid it beneath his bed.
He didn't sleep well after that.
One night, Beru caught him awake in the kitchen, crouched low, holding his breath. When she turned the light on, he didn't flinch.
"I heard something," he said flatly. "I was listening for footsteps."
She knelt beside him, touched his face, and tried to smile.
"You're safe," she said.
He shook his head.
"No one is. Not here."
And he was right.
That was the year he found the corpses outside Anchorhead. Not people. Jawas. Two of them. Skinned. Torn apart. Gaderffii marks carved into their flesh like symbols. No one buried them. No one even looked twice.
Luke stared at the bodies for five full minutes.
He didn't throw up.
He didn't run.
He just stared, memorizing what fear looked like on something that wasn't human.
Later that week, he told Owen he wanted a blaster.
Owen laughed.
Beru didn't.
That night, Luke snuck out and stole one from a collapsed outpost four kilometers out—rusted, power cell cracked, but it still charged when he rerouted the leads. He practiced with it in the dunes, hands blistered from the heat of the barrel.
The first time he fired it, the recoil knocked him to the ground.
He smiled through the pain.
That was when he started hearing whispers in the town.
Rumors.
A ghost in the desert. A man without a name. Seven feet tall. Wore scars like armor and could kill a man with his bare hands. No one saw him twice. No one followed him and returned.
The kind of story that made normal children afraid.
Luke wasn't afraid.
He wanted to find him.
Because Luke was starting to believe something he'd never said out loud—something sharp and buried in his chest like a blade slowly twisting.
If no one else was going to change this planet, then one day, he would.
And he'd need someone to show him how to win.