A/N: Canon-compliant oneshot.

RANCOR BAIT

"Luke? Luke, what's the matter?"

There was a grunt, like a bantha bull being kicked awake, except the bull was actually Uncle Owen, and normally Luke would rather scrub every vaporator on the farm with a toothbrush than wake up Uncle Owen, but he was so scared he didn't care. He ran right to Aunt Beru's side of the bed and dove headlong into her chest, still crying and trembly all over.

"B'ru?" grunted Uncle Owen. Luke could hear him fumbling for the lamp switch. "S'wrong with him now?"

"Luke, honey, what's wrong? Was it a bad dream?"

Luke nodded, sniffling and clinging to fistfuls of her sleep tunic. She sighed. "Nightmare, Owen."

Another grouchy grunt. "Again? What is it this time?"

"Luke, can you tell us what your dream was about?"

Luke hunkered up against her and shook his head, ready to dissolve in tears all over.

"Oh for the love of—"

"Owen," Aunt Beru shushed him. "He's very frightened." She maneuvered back up against the wall and pulled him up onto her lap, stroking his hair. On the far side of the bed, Uncle Owen's questing hand finally found the lamp switch. Soft orange light, thin and sparse like most things were on the farm, chased the shadows back from around him. Uncle Owen was sitting up, hair sticking up everywhere like a dust devil had gone through it, scowling like anything. Luke whimpered and clung tighter to Aunt Beru.

"Luke," she said patiently. "It's alright. It was just a bad dream. You'll feel better if you tell us about it, won't you?"

Luke shook his head.

"Why not?"

He gulped. "Cause—cause—Uncle Owen's angry."

There was a rather odd silence after that and Luke figured Aunt Beru was Looking at Uncle Owen. She was good at saying things without saying things; she could make Luke stop complaining and drink his blue milk with just the Look, and sometimes it worked on Uncle Owen too, except not about blue milk but about adult things that didn't make much sense. A minute later Luke heard Uncle Owen sigh. The bedsprings muttered, and then Uncle Owen's big calloused hand patted his back. "I'm not angry, Luke."

Luke wasn't sure that was quite true, but Aunt Beru said sometimes you had to decide to not be angry before you actually could be not angry. He peeked out nervously at Uncle Owen, mopping tears off his cheek. The last bits of angry went away right while he watched; Uncle Owen ruffled his hair and even smiled at him, sort of, like he couldn't quite remember how you did it. "Now," he said, "you go on and tell us about it."

Aunt Beru rearranged him on her lap so he could look up and see her, or look ahead and see Uncle Owen. "Was it about the Sand People again?"

"Uh-uh." Luke looked down at his hands, fiddling with the blanket edge. "It was…it was…it was about…it was about"—he looked up and saw Uncle Owen starting to frown again—"about the rancor."

"The rancor?" asked Aunt Beru, and Uncle Owen said, "What the hell's a rancor?"

"It's—it's bigger'n a krayt dragon, an' it has teeth bigger'n a Jawa, an' it has claws bigger'n a speeder, an' it can eat people right in half!" Luke cringed against Aunt Beru, terrified all over again.

"Teeth bigger than a Jawa doesn't take much," muttered Uncle Owen, and Aunt Beru had to Look at him again to tell him not to say any more grownup jokes. He cleared his throat. "How'd you hear about these, what-a-ma-call-its, rancors?"

"Buh—buh—Biggs said—"

Uncle Owen groaned and dropped his head in his hands. "I don't know why you let him spend so much time with that kid, Beru, I really don't. First the Sand People horror stories, and now—"

"The same reason I don't complain when you swing by the Windbeaters' farm for drinks every weekend," said Aunt Beru. "Because the friendship is worth the occasional bad influence." Uncle Owen huffed, going a bit red in the face. "Luke, honey, I don't even know if rancors are real—"

"Yes they are! Biggs and Tank found a holo of one at school an' they're from Dath—Dath—Dath-somewhere. An' they eat people right in half!"

"Well," said Aunt Beru, hugging him close. "That would be very scary if you met one, that's true. But you don't need to worry. We don't have any rancors on Tatooine."

"Yes we do!" Luke wailed. "Tank said, Tank said, Tank said that Jabba the Hutt has a pet rancor that lives in his basement an' if he gets real angry at someone he feeds them to it!"

Uncle Owen was muttering under his breath again. Luke usually listened very hard when he did that, because words people didn't want him to hear were the most interesting ones, but right now he was still too scared.

"Luke," said Aunt Beru. She sounded like she was trying very hard not to smile. "Jabba the Hutt is not going to feed you to his rancor, I promise."

"But—but—I yelled at his robbers! When they came and made us give them our water an' I yelled at them an' I kicked the one with the snakes on his head! So Tank said Jabba would get mad an' come kidnap me an' feed me to his rancor!"

"Why do you think I told you to stay in the house when they showed up?" said Uncle Owen, and Luke burst into tears all over again.

"Owen," snapped Aunt Beru. "That's not helpful."

Uncle Owen muttered under his breath again. Aunt Beru tucked the blanket around Luke's legs and rubbed his back. "Luke, you don't need to worry about that. Uncle and I are here to take care of you."

"But Tank says Jabba can do whatever he wants." Luke sniffled some more. "He made Uncle Owen give him our water! And he didn't even pay anything and it made Uncle Owen really really mad but he didn't even yell at the robbers!"

Uncle Owen made a face, like he'd like to go find the robbers right this minute and wake them up so he could yell at them now. Aunt Beru sighed. "Well, Luke, Jabba the Hutt is very powerful and can make a lot of trouble, so it's better not to fight him about things that aren't that important. Uncle Owen might let him steal water, but he would never let him steal you."

"But what if you were gone, or it was night and they snuck in and you didn't hear them—"

Aunt Beru sighed even bigger. "I really don't think it's true that Jabba has a rancor in his basement. And even if he did, I don't think you could make him so angry he would want to feed you to it."

"But what if I did?" Luke wailed.

Aunt Beru shook her head and looked at him like Luke looked at his math problems sometimes: trying to think hard but all out of ideas. "Well, Luke, I—"

"For one thing," said Uncle Owen loudly, "you don't sit there and cry about it."

"Owen—"

"I'm being helpful," Uncle Owen cut her off, fluffing his pillow behind his head. "I'm telling him what to do if he gets fed to a rancor."

"He's six!"

"What do you do if you get fed to a rancor?" Luke asked in a small, hopeful voice.

"What do you do if an anooba or a womp rat tries to eat you?"

Luke remembered this one because of the very big womp rat in the garage last week. Womp rats got very big sometimes, so big that if they stood on their nose and stuck their tail up they could be taller than even Uncle Owen, and sometimes they ate little kids if they got really hungry. "Kill it 'fore it kills you?"

"Owen!" Aunt Beru sounded like there was a womp rat right there under the sheets. "He's six!"

"Exactly," said Uncle Owen. Luke frowned, thinking this over. It was a pretty good plan cause a dead rancor definitely wasn't going to eat him in two, but he was worried there might be some gaps in it, like…

"…but what if I don't have a blaster?"

"What'd I tell you about the womp rats?"

"Smash its head with a rock," Luke said promptly. Uncle Owen had showed him exactly how you had to smash a womp rat with a rock to make it good and dead; it was gross and there were brains everywhere and Luke had cried some, but then Uncle Owen showed him how you got the brains all out and got the fur and stuff off it and baked it in the sun for a few days and scoured it clean with sand, and then you had a womp rat skull all yours with the hole in it where you whacked it with the rock, and even some of the big kids at school like Biggs and Tank didn't have their own womp rat skull that they'd killed themselves.

"There you go. If you don't have a blaster just smash its head with a rock."

Aunt Beru tried Looking very hard at Uncle Owen, but it didn't work, so she said, in her voice that meant when Luke goes to bed again we are going to be talking about grownup things, "I need some tea." She put Luke down on the mattress, got up, pulled on her housecoat, and went out to the kitchen.

Luke, now thinking very hard about everything you'd need to know to kill a rancor before it killed you, didn't mind very much. "What if its head is too big?" Rancors were lots bigger than womp rats, probably.

"Well," grunted Uncle Owen, crossing his arms back under his head and looking at the ceiling, "find a bigger rock."

Luke squirmed down into bed alongside him and crossed his arms under his head too. There was a pretty pattern on the ceiling to look at. "What if I can't pick up the rock 'cause it's too big?"

"Well, the more you practice, the better you'll get at picking up bigger rocks and the more rancors you can kill."

"Oh." That made sense. He'd better start looking for rocks to practice on. "But what if I don't get good enough before Jabba feeds me to it?"

"Well, stick something else in its mouth. That way it can't eat you."

"Like, when you give a bone to a 'nooba so it doesn't chase you?"

"Just like that." Uncle Owen reached down blindly and ruffled his head. "You be its worst nightmare, you hear me?"

"Uh-huh," Luke murmured.

"Good," said Uncle Owen. "I'm not going to all this trouble just so you can be rancor bait someday, got it?"

He was trying to sound grumpy, but Luke thought he wasn't really, and that was pretty nice. "I got it." He yawned, turning over in his side. "Thanks, Uncle Owen…"

There was one of Uncle Owen's weird silences. "Any time, Luke," he said after awhile, as Luke's eyelids started getting too heavy for him. "Any time."

FIN

A/N: Watching ROTJ recently, I noticed the expression Luke makes when he first sees the rancor, and thought—OF COURSE he and the other kids on Tatooine grew up telling each other horror stories about the rancor in Jabba's basement. It's the GFFA version of a sewer gator. Also: bashing womp rats to death would of course be pretty gruesome, but…it's Tatooine.