coolhandluke | Ahch-To, Baby

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Ahch-To, Baby

There were a lot of things Luke hadn't asked himself in the years since arriving on Ach-To. Some because he didn't want to know--or imagine--the answers. Some because there was no reason to borrow more trouble than he already had, and the litany of regrets was already long enough. Some because, well, they just weren't thinks that Luke Skywalker ever thought of.

Like the fact that he looked like some old Jedi hermit, complete with beard and unkempt hair and dingy robes. It hadn't exactly been part of the plan, but then, there hadn't been anyone to comment, or even a mirror.

That was the outside, however. Inside, something in Luke had died long ago, stopping in its tracks. Meeting himself, he would have assumed wisdom and calm, if a little eccentricity. But that hadn't been why Luke had come here, and it hadn't been what he'd found. No, it wasn't the Jedi Master who had retreated. It was the scared farm-boy, who'd flown too high and been brought crashing to ground. It was Luke from Tatooine, who had tried to be Master Skywalker, the hero, and failed.

That was what he'd been running from. That expectation, and his failure at it. That, and the disaster he knew his presence would bring to what was left of what he and the Rebellion had built, if Ben knew where he was. Better, he'd thought, to close himself off and shut down before he hurt anyone else. By his own hand, or by leading Kylo Ren to exact revenge.

It was not so simple a thing, however, to die. Unwilling to take any more lives, including his own, he lingered. Unwilling to open himself up to the Force, he nevertheless existed within it, his body sustained by it as much as by the food he caught. For awhile it seemed that he would just continue, in a sort of limbo of his own making, unwilling to make a move that would upset the galaxy even further than his presence already had.

Until she came.

Rey held a mirror up to him, one he wasn't always willing to gaze into but one from which it was impossible to escape--not least because she simply wouldn't go away. At first resentful, he quickly became resigned.

And then, suddenly, he became expectant. Not hopeful--he would not go so far as to say that--but there came a morning when he realized he would be disappointed to find her gone, given up. Despite his fear, despite his warnings, he wanted her to persist.

Maybe because he hadn't. And as much shame as he felt over that fact, the shame was at least an emotion. And as much as he'd tried to suppress those over the past years, the irritation at her arrival had begun to wear away at his resolve like grains of sand until emotions he'd thought long buried began to unearth themselves.

The truth was, Luke Skywalker was every bit the mess he looked. And yet, the longer she stayed, the less he could find it within himself to resent it. He'd been too long alone, and too long waiting. It only stood to reason that he'd bend to the first wind that came.

Wasn't how this had all started, to begin with?

The sun had barely risen when he took position, waiting outside the hut she'd claimed, unwilling to seem too eager but having to quash a small stirring of impatience, just the same. Warnings not to get too close, too attached, flickered in his mind's eye like a glitched holovid. But Luke had never once detached from anything--and if going to the most remote location he could find hadn't done it, he didn't know that it was worth trying, anymore.

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Rey wasn't sure why he was staring at her like that, given that the question had been straightforward enough. Hadn't it? She'd only been watching him for a few days, but that hadn't been nearly enough time to get a good idea of what he'd done all these years. He couldn't have spent that entire time just... surviving.

But his answer made her wonder if that was exactly what he'd been doing. Stunned and not bothering to hide it, Rey blinked at him for a few moments and remarked, "No, but if you don't do anything for fun, you're going to need one before you go insane. Do you swim? Draw? Collect interesting-looking rocks?"

He thought it was rather kind of her not to assume he already was insane, especially considering he couldn't swear to that himself. Especially when faced with questions like this. This was the sort of thing he should be able to answer. It was basically the simplest question you could ask--what have you been doing?

"I... don't know," he said, after a moment. His brow furrowed slightly, as if bracing for the fallout to his admission of failure at basic humanity.

She almost thought that he was just trying to be elusive - after all, how could someone not know what they enjoy doing to pass the time, especially when they have so much time to pass? But something about Luke's expression told Rey that he was being genuine with her. He honestly didn't know, and that-... that was sadder than she would have thought.

"Do you... know how to swim?" she asked softly, trying not to sound as though she was quietly judging him. "The water looks a bit choppy for it, so maybe that's not the best activity to try, but-.... If you have something I can use to draw, I can make make a few sketches for you. Or teach you some of the games I'd made up as a child. They'd probably be easier with two people, anyway."

Not that she would know, of course, since it would probably take her some time to even remember them, never mind being able to explain the rules to someone else.

This was almost worse than her thinking he was insane. Luke was not interested in her pity, and that was what this felt like.

"I'm a hermit, not a child," he said, a little too peevishly. "I didn't come here to swim or learn new hobbies." He'd come here to die. And to avoid anyone else having to.

The truth--though he was scarcely self-aware enough to know this for himself--was that he had come here under a cloud of such despair that he had simply been surviving. His soul had not been ready to take in anything else, and while he had not been able to die, living was hardly what he'd been doing, either.

"Games aren't just for children," she replied, her voice even. She didn't want to antagonize him, and she certainly didn't want to patronize him. Maybe they were just in very different points in their lives, but she couldn't imagine just sitting locked away in a hut all day, every day, for years on end. It was thoroughly depressing.

"You also didn't come here to sleep or fish, but you do those things. Because your body is telling you that you need to survive. And if you don't do something to make that survival worthwhile...." His body might just give out on him. Or his mind. And she couldn't take that.

"I've only just found you, Master Skywalker," she told him, giving him a small smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "I'm not going to do anything to risk losing you. So I don't care if we have to weave baskets or pick flowers or build a whole new hut from scratch; we're going to find something to do together and you're going to enjoy it, whether you like it or not."

Luke pressed a hand to the bridge of his nose. She didn't understand, and how could she? She was absolutely right, in a sense--it's what he would have told anyone else. But the point she wasn't getting was that survival wasn't worthwhile. He wasn't trying to live or stay sane. He was just... waiting.

For her, a tiny voice whispered before he could squash it. He wanted to fight her on this, but the fact was, she'd broken the spell he'd put himself under. He could no longer ignore the emptiness with her yelling about it. She made it tangible, and therefore, a problem.

He couldn't just pretend to already be dead. He'd tried. She'd woken him up, despite his best efforts.

"I mean," he said finally, "you don't have to coddle me like I'm a bored toddler. If you want to do something, I'll... I'll help."

It was begrudging but it was the best he could do. He was unready, and unwilling, to admit that he was awake or interested. The best he could do was pretend he was doing it for her sake.

He looked exasperated, and she was about ready to let the topic drop and reluctantly go off on their separate ways when he finally relented. Sort of. But sort of was the best she could ask for from him most of the time, so she'd take it.

With a small grin, she told him, "You're not a bored toddler. You're a bored adult. Which is just as well, since I have no idea what to do with children." She'd had to grow up quickly, after all, and other than her parents, no one left children on Jakku, or at least not by the outpost where she'd made most of her living.

If you could call that living.

So she knew how to entertain herself with very little raw materials. Now it was just a matter of how to entertain herself and someone else, especially when he wasn't giving her any idea of what activities he actually liked.

"I want to talk," she remarked with a small shrug. "And get to know you better. And, of course, do as your sister asked me to do even if it involves enlisting Chewie's help to bodily drag you onto the Falcon. But then you'd hate me, and I don't want that. So talking will do, maybe over... breakfast? Did you have breakfast already?"

Luke had no idea what to do with children, either, but he didn't say that. It just reminded him of all the children he'd failed. One, in particular, who had, in the end, caused the death of the others.

It was strange, how much that still hurt. Indeed, the pain was sharper than it had been in some time. Like limbs long numb, his emotions were feeling the burn of disuse.

"You... want to talk," he repeated, his voice tinged with disbelief. "About what?"

He could barely remember what breakfast was. Mealtime was really illusory, here alone on an island.

"About you," Rey replied simply, as though it was the most obvious answer in the world. Because to her, it was. He was a literal legend, so he had to have had some interesting stories to tell. And even if he didn't want to tell those, the mundane stories of his pre-Jedi years would be every bit as fascinating to her.

"Or... me, I guess. Or your sister, or-...." Her chest tightened a bit just at the oblique reference to Han, and she wondered how long it would take before that sort of reaction just wore away. She'd never lost anyone she cared about before, given how recently she'd begun caring about people. A potential father figure had much more emotional weight than an anonymous fellow scavenger or two.

"Or anything, really. I don't mind talking so long as it's with you."

Was he really so unused to company that the prospect confused him? Or had he always been like this? It was hard to remember, now. He knew friends had never been something he'd had a lot of, and he'd once blamed that on the harsh landscape of Tatooine. He later wondered if it was him, but it hadn't really mattered by that point--his destiny had seemed fixed, locked in. And friends were not something a Jedi Master really had the luxury of worrying about.

"I'm not especially known for my conversation," he said hesitantly, after a moment. What if he began talking and couldn't stop? What if he began talking and she figured out he was just a crazy old man on an island? What if she realized he wasn't an old man at all, but a confused Outer Rim rube gone rusty?

He doesn't want to get to know her, because he is afraid to be known.

He turned unerringly to the side of the path, where a porg nest lay protected by rocks, and picked up a fresh egg. They always laid at least two, and there were enough of the birds on the island, so he doesn't feel bad about leaving fewer mouths to feed. He'll pick up a few more on the way back to the old huts.

"Tell me," he said, "about Leia."

There was a lot in that one word, a lifetime of love but misunderstanding, too. Leia was the other piece of his soul, and losing that connection had broken him as much as the rest.

Edited 2018-02-02 20:18 (UTC)

The look she gave Luke when he claimed not to be known for his conversation was a perplexed one. Who was? Probably only people who talked too much, or about things that were irrelevant, or other negative aspects of conversations. She'd met chatterboxes before. They had a reputation for being just that, and she'd made it a point to avoid them whenever she caught sight of them at the outpost.

But then he picked up an egg and asked about Leia, and Rey heard it. The way he said her name-... no one's ever said her name that way, and she doubted anyone ever will. As far as she knew, she was no one's sister, after all. And she was certainly no Leia Organa.

"She's... the strongest person I've ever met." Not one of the strongest people, or the strongest woman; Leia was the strongest person Rey had ever met, period. The low, respectful way she spoke was proof enough of that.

"She's so dignified, but not in an uncomfortable way. You could talk to her. She encourages it, even if she won't shy away from telling you what you'd just said was stupid. But even when she's doing that, she's not being malicious. She's just being... Leia."

She thought about the very brief interactions she'd seen between her and Han, but her heart threatened to break, and so she cleared her throat and continued walking along as though her rib cage didn't suddenly feel several sizes too tight.

"Was she always like that? Even when she was a princess?"

He turned away as she spoke--not to shut her out, but because he had to look away to take in all that she was saying without overtly breaking down. Gathering breakfast was a plausible deflection, and he focused on that instead of the tears threatening to well up. It did not help, probably, that he could feel Rey's emotion, which while a mere reflection of his own for his sister created something like a feedback loop.

"The first time I met her," he said, looking down at the cluster of eggs in his hands and smiling without realizing it, "she ordered Han and I into a garbage chute, insulted our ability to rescue her, and called Chewie a walking carpet."

She didn't look at Luke as she spoke, remembering Leia and trying to ignore how tired she'd seemed after Han had died, how much older and more frail and how much less light there had been in her eyes. Was that what happened to people when they grew to care about others? Was that why Luke had chosen to hide himself away? Because it was better never to feel that spark of hope again than it was to risk it burning you?

When Luke replied, though, she looked at him, and she could feel a small smile creeping onto her face despite where her thoughts had just been. "Well, that's where he got it from. The garbage chute bit. Han had forced someone into a trash compactor when he and Finn had come to rescue me not too long ago."

Shortly before Han was mercilessly killed in front of us, her brain cheerily reminded her, but she bit down on her tongue and reached out for a few of the eggs in Luke's hands to ease his load.

"You first met her during a rescue op?" She'd known that the pair of them hadn't been raised together, but somehow, it had just never clicked that they might have met through pure chance at some point down the line. Unless, of course, Luke had known his sister was the princess before this had happened and had opted to go save her from danger.

He let her take the eggs, and looked up in surprise as she spoke. "You really don't know this story."

He'd begun to think everyone had a direct line on everything he'd ever done, even if some of the vids and holonovels were utter trash. Not that he'd ever seen them--he'd heard enough. He shook his head. She'd won.

"I'm not going to tell it standing here in the wind," he said, and started back to his hut--and the fire. Once inside, he would find a pan and begin to fry the eggs. He was no great cook, but one could hardly be choosy. And he'd lived here long enough to know what was here, and how to stretch it.

"What do you know?" he asked, once he was standing over a nicely sizzling pan, the smell reminding him that he couldn't remember the last time he'd cooked.

"Honestly? I know a lot of stories. It's figuring out which ones of them are true and which were made up for the sake of an audience that's the trouble."

After all, those who were predisposed to telling stories had especially loved telling them to an awestruck little girl, and as she'd gotten older, she found that certain people were still willing to say whatever they thought would keep the attention of a young woman. She'd found out early on that Luke's mechanical hand didn't have built-in blasters (or if it had, he'd been very good about not showing it off), so she figured a large portion of the tales she'd heard had been wild exaggerations.

Upon following him to his hut, Rey carefully set the eggs down on the nearest table she could find, not wanting any of them to crack. Once she was sure none of them were going to fall, she looked around the place Luke called home, wondering over the fact that it somehow looked even more impersonal than the fallen AT-AT that she'd claimed as shelter on Jakku.

"I know that Leia was a princess of Alderaan, before it was destroyed. Vader destroyed it right in front of her, to prove a point. Or because she'd made him angry. Or just because he could. You weren't raised with her, though; someone once told me that the Jedi wanted to keep the two of you separated because an old prophecy told Vader that a pair of twins would be his downfall, so he searched the galaxy looking for the children in question. Of course, it wasn't revealed until much later during that whole political scandal that Vader was Leia's father. And yours, too. I don't know if you'd known that going in, or if you knew she was your sister, but I do know that at some point you found her and met up with the famous smuggler Han Solo, and the three of you became some of the most important figures in the entire galaxy."

She paused for a moment, wondering how much of that vague outline she'd gotten right before adding in a lower voice, "And I know that you redeemed Vader, proving that no one is wholly irredeemable."

It was a struggle, not interrupting at every little thing she'd gotten wrong. And there was a lot. Some of it was laughable, and some had him squeezing his eyes tight for a moment before he could turn back to her. He was holding a plate of eggs, which he held out to her. It was half of what he'd cooked up, a scrambled mess that held a few greens and herbs. The rest was still in the pan, which he picked up to serve as his own plate.

"First of all," he said, waving the large spoon he'd been using to cook the eggs for emphasis, "Han was hardly famous when I met him. He was a small-time smuggler on the run from a bounty and needed to get out of Mos Eisley as much as we did. I was the orphaned son of a navigator, or so I thought, raised on a moisture farm on Tatooine. Leia... Leia was a princess on a holo message I saw by accident, or so it seemed at the time. I had no idea who she was, or who my father really was, or even what the Force was about. And I don't know about any prophecy about twins--just that it was considered dangerous for Vader to know of the existence of any Skywalker children, in case we turned out to be as powerful as he was."

He shook his head and sighed, shouldering the door open to find a rocky perch in the open air on which to eat his eggs.

"The stories are told after what's important is known, you know. Even when they get things right, it's not at all like living it. We weren't heroes and legends. We were just... people, doing the best we could."

Rey was more than happy to be told she was wrong, especially since she hadn't been the source of any of these stories and she was instead now getting them directly from the source. Or, at least, the source of a third of the story, with many arguing that it might have been the most important part. Somehow, though, she doubted Luke would agree.

She took the plate when he offered it, giving him a nod of thanks but not wanting to interrupt him as he seemed ready to burst to tell her about how wrong she was. It was sort of nice, seeing him actually care enough about something to want to make sure it was fully understood, not just because it was a lesson that needed to be learned but because of the sheer principle of the thing. Maybe that was why she had a small smile on her face as she followed after him, listening to him as he spoke.

"Heroes and legends are people at their core," she brought up, sitting cross-legged on the rocky ground. "Or droids, though I guess some could argue that they count as people too. It might be hard to keep that in mind sometimes, but history is written with every passing day. What the Resistance is doing today, win or lose, is going to be remembered differently tomorrow by whoever hears its story."

Assuming, of course, that the First Order didn't succeed in wiping out the entire galaxy in a mad drive for power. But she pushed that thought aside, tucking into her food as she thought over what he'd said.

"So you just... accidentally saw a message from Leia, never knowing who she was other than a princess, and left your farm on Tatooine - which, by the way, is almost as bad as Jakku, so you were one to talk when you called it nowhere - to go rescue her?"

The eggs were... not great. But they were edible. They were also hot, which meant they were basically preferable to most anything Luke had eaten in months.

"Yoda or Obi-Wan would have said it was anything but an accident," Luke hedged, glossing over her talk of the First Order. "But essentially, yes. Not without some prodding. I wanted nothing more than to go. Anywhere, really. I was so eager to join the Academy, I might've just as easily been on the other side. But Uncle Owen was always trying to protect me. He couldn't keep me hidden forever, of course. But he tried."

Luke fell silent for a moment. It had gotten him and Beru killed. The first in a long list of lives taken simply because of who he was. He wondered, not for the first time, if perhaps his own mother was on that list, too.

"He killed my aunt and uncle," Luke began again, quietly, looking at the ground. "Or ordered them killed, anyway, in the search for Artoo. So you see, the whole thing would never have happened if Leia hadn't been above Tatooine, if she hadn't uploaded the plans to Artoo, if Artoo hadn't mentioned Obi-Wan Kenobi, if Ben hadn't been living close by... Before I knew it, I was orphaned again, rescuing a princess, destroying a space station. Training to be a Jedi because there simply was no one else."

The eggs were food. Rey didn't really have a lot of requirements when it came to food. So long as it didn't go back up again, she'd eat whatever was offered to her gratefully.

It was nice hearing about Luke as a young man, though she paused at the mention of an "Uncle Owen." She'd never heard of any uncle of Luke's, and she wondered if he was a biological uncle or just a man that he'd come to know as an uncle. Somehow, though, it didn't feel right to ask. Rey never was good at figuring out how to talk about family matters.

So when Luke fell silent, Rey didn't know how to respond, or whether she should respond at all. It seemed best to stay quiet, contemplatively chewing her eggs until Luke thought it fit to speak again. And when he did... well, at first she didn't know who he was talking about, but it soon became clear that this was just an even more complicated family matter than she'd anticipated.

"So... out of sheer coincidence, a princess who happened to have been your long-lost sister uploaded important war plans onto an astromech droid that found you and you somehow stumbled across a holo message from said princess and were inspired to go rescue her and destroy the Death Star. And you picked up a smuggler along the way, and ended up conducting a very poor rescue of said sister that resulted in you ending up in a garbage chute."

She was quiet for a moment, trying to digest all of that before seeming to just accept it with a small nod. The only question she had after swallowing another mouthful of eggs was, "Who are Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi and-... Ben?"

That had been the name Han had called Kylo Ren, hadn't it? Ben? It must be someone that had been important to him or Leia at some point, but while the other two names may well have been somewhat familiar in the mess of lore she'd heard over the years, she doubted she'd heard of a Ben before.

"More or less," Luke confirmed, chewing on his eggs. His gaze, set out over the ocean, got even further away than that when she asked.

"Ben Kenobi. Obi-Wan. He and Yoda were my... my teachers. The masters who taught me about the Force, and how to use it." There was a fondness in his voice, as well as sorrow. Not simply for their loss, which was long past, but for the way he'd disappointed them by failing. Not that they'd ever shown up to tell him so. He wasn't sure he could handle that. "Obi-Wan Kenobi knew my father. Trained him, fought with him. When Vader turned, he hunted down as many of the Jedi as he could. Obi-Wan and Yoda... hid. Bided their time. Until our little Artoo found me, basically brought me to Ben--that's the name he was using--and started it all."

He straightened, spine cracking just a bit, and set the pan aside.

"It all depends on whether you think it was a coincidence," he offered. "Was it chance, or the Force? They were the last of the Jedi Order. The keepers of what knowledge was left." He turned his head to face Rey, folding his hands on his lap. "And that's why the Jedi have to end, Rey. Because that way should have ended with them. Along with the idea that some old man on a deserted planet can fix everything."

"... Kylo Ren was named after the man who trained Vader."

The realization was unsettling, and it explained at least part of why he'd been so desperate to emulate his grandfather. Rey didn't think families could get this complicated, and she suddenly found herself wondering if she'd been named for someone, and what sort of intricate dramas her closest relatives may have been involved in.

She stared down at the remainder of her eggs, frowning softly as she thought over everything Luke had told her. It was a lot to take in, but as she eventually managed to bring herself to glance up at him, she wondered if he wasn't just looking at it at the entirely wrong way. Of course, the same could be said for her, but....

"But that way didn't end with them. The Jedi have done too much throughout history to simply not exist anymore. That's why you're still here. And that's why we need you."

She hesitated for a moment before setting her plate aside and reaching out, gingerly placing her hand over one of Luke's. "You aren't an easy fix to the galaxy's problems, Master Skywalker. But your legend is a beacon of hope in dark times. The Resistance might not need the Jedi, but they desperately need hope."

"Obi-Wan Kenobi trained Anakin Skywalker," he said, almost absently, but the correction was important to him.

Luke stared down at her hand on his. It seemed almost comical, her smaller, younger, but no less work-hardened hand on his, and part of him wanted to laugh. It was not, he realized before it could escape him, a sane or healthy laugh. It was the realization that it was the first human contact he'd had in longer than he could remember. Before coming here, even.

And he was starting to understand why it was dangerous for him to have it, why he'd cut himself off to begin with, long before he'd ever conceived of hiding himself away. It meant far too much for him to take for granted, and always had. It was probably why he'd been unable to make actual friends on Tatooine, why he'd latched onto the first people who'd shown an interest, why he now had to hold Rey at arm's length. He'd always wanted too much.

He neither deserved it now, nor knew what to do with it.

"You haven't listened to a word I've said," he said, but his tone was sad, not angry. "Legends are people, and people are flawed. What good is that beacon, if it's the very thing that created the problem in the first place? Do you think Vader would have existed without the Jedi? Would Kylo Ren? Seeing hope in legends is like asking a holovid to come to life. You're going to be disappointed, and it's not going to give you anything but a false understanding of what's possible."

Rey was confused for a moment before she realized that Anakin Skywalker must have been Vader's name before he'd fallen to the Dark Side. Though she'd heard whisperings of Darth Vader's name virtually her entire life, years after his death... she'd never heard of Anakin. She wondered if the same would happen to Kylo Ren, with the name Ben Solo being lost somewhere in history.

But Kylo Ren wasn't her concern, not now. Luke was, as was her mission to bring him back. Though really, if she were honest with herself, it was less about the mission at this point and more about making him understand why he was needed, even if he only thought of himself as some dour old man.

"Wanting a holovid to come to life is asking the impossible. I'm not asking you for the impossible. You're a person. And your story means something to these people. Flawed or not, just seeing you stand besides General Organa will be enough to stir something inside of them, something that will keep them fighting. And they need to keep fighting. This isn't about the Jedi or the Sith. This is about the Resistance and the First Order. And we can't continue to resist the tyranny of the First Order if we don't have a reminder of what we're fighting for."

Though she generally wasn't one for hand-holding and usually minimized physical contact whenever possible, Rey actually scooted closer to Luke, giving his hand a quick squeeze as though to emphasize her point. "I have been listening to you. You're a man; no more, and certainly no less. But don't you see that that's part of your influence? You had humble beginnings and stumbled across something far greater than yourself; these people, Leia's people, need to remember that the same can be said for them. Otherwise... we've already lost."

Luke looked at her. So close. She had freckles. Had he known that? Why did it matter? And maybe it was his imagination, or maybe it was something about the link they'd shared, but he could swear he smelled sun and sand--the fresh, clean scent of the desert.

He shook his head, as much to clear it as to negate her words.

"They don't need me for that. I'm not what they're fighting for, nor should I be." He disengaged his hand from hers, and placed it on her shoulder. "There are other men--and women. I'm not the man you need. They need to fight for themselves, for what's good and right. Not for me, or some fantasy out of a legend."

He heaved a sigh, dropping his hand. He suddenly felt tired, as if he'd fought some sort of battle. He looked away, out over the ocean.

"You mentioned... doing something."

The turn the conversation had taken was not one he welcomed, and it was either change it, or end this. And she had already voiced her objection to being left alone. Well, she'd have to compromise.

It was slightly unsettling being so close to Luke and watching him watch her. Not because she found anything unsettling about him - which was odd in itself, given that years of isolation were bound to make a person pick up habits that could unsettle others - but because she could make out just how blue his eyes still were, and if she focused on them long enough she could almost picture what he might have looked like as a young man.

Almost, but not quite. She couldn't see his worn look on a younger man, that exhaustion and nihilism in the face of someone thirty years younger. But the hope she'd envisioned on his younger self looked equally out of place on Luke's face, and that made Rey more than a little sad.

He was never going to see things her way. Not because he couldn't, but because he didn't want to. She supposed she could understand that, since she was just as willfully stubborn.

Frustrated but not entirely defeated, she sighed as well as she followed his gaze. She could continue to attempt to hammer in her point, but it she kept going at it too hard, she might just ruin whatever tenuous relationship they'd managed to build up. She'd fail Leia if she couldn't bring Luke back, but she'd fail Luke if she ended up pushing him away. And again, for all the respect she had for Leia, Luke was her immediate concern.

"What was Tatooine like?" she asked softly. "I never really got to visit other planets before finding my way to the Resistance."

Or maybe she had, but those memories have been swept away along with her parents' faces, and so she chose not to dwell on that too hard right now.

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