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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This time, Luke did laugh.

"This is the first morning in years I've woken up more worried about today than the day before," he said, shaking his head at the enormity of all that implied, simple as it sounded. "One thing at a time, all right? 'Lean into it.'"

He was barely ready to admit he didn't mind so much the feeling of being alive, let alone planning for some future he'd never wanted. What came next? Was anyone's guess, and he had no idea how to go about even starting to know.

Rey wasn't sure if it was entirely a good thing that he'd woken up worried, though she really couldn't say anything on that score; after all, she'd woken up in a panic. But that seemed so long ago now, after they'd gotten all this in the open and she knew she hadn't simply had a depraved dream.

"Lean into it," she echoed softly. Nodding gently, she managed a small smile as she decided, "I can do that."

Of course, she meant it in a slightly different way than he did, given the way she leaned forward, gingerly setting her head on Luke's shoulder.

"Oh."

He startled slightly at the touch, but did not move away or rise. Part of this was just the unfamiliarity with contact, of late. Part was the thrill of the uncertain and new, knowing this was going somewhere and feeling a little adolescent in the wonder that engendered in him. And yet, he was not nearly so impulsive as he'd once been--and he'd never been all that forward with the ladies.

But he had to do something, now that they'd danced awkwardly around this for the past several hours. His token resistance was just that, but he didn't want her to get the idea that he was holding back. He didn't think she'd like that, somehow. There had to be a sign that he was in this, too. As odd and unlike himself as he felt.

So after a moment, he shifted to wrap one arm around her shoulders, tucking her closer, willing himself to relax.

She could feel the tension in Luke's body right away, but it felt like cheating to draw back now. She'd made the first move, relatively innocent though it might be, and she was determined to commit to it. That was how normal adults did things, right? They just... did them? Without having weird shared dreams or any sort of awkward beating around the bush?

Rey might think of herself as an adult, but she was far from normal, given how far out of her depth she currently was. How far they both were, really, so that was one small bit of comfort.

His arm around her shoulders was another small bit, even if she didn't fool herself for a second into believing that he was even a little relaxed. "Is this-...?" she started, not knowing how to finish that question that wouldn't force her to back away. That was the last thing she wanted to do, though she would if it would make things easier on him.

"If you're uncomfortable with this, we could go more slowly. I don't mind."

Luke chuckled.

"Now I know something's wrong with me," he said, "when you're the one worried about taking it too fast." It was a lie--he'd known something was wrong with him before, so that wasn't exactly in question. In any society he could think of, he'd be libeled as a pervert or slapped on the back as lucky, so it was laughable that he was the one having to be coaxed. "I think it's just the way things go," he murmured. "At no point in my life has anything happened slowly. It's a snap, a flick of a switch, changing everything."

Rey looked up at him at that chuckle, managing a small smile in response. "I don't want to be a 'snap,'" she told him gently. "Snaps are over as soon as they happen. I-... don't do this sort of thing often, Luke-... all right, I've never done this, any of this - so if I'm going to start now, I'm going to invest time in it. You're worth it."

She knew that was a bit ridiculous of her to say, given that this whole conversation had started because they'd both realized they'd been fantasizing about one another in such a realistic way that only the Force can be to blame, but she meant it. With a small shrug of her shoulders, she told him, "Fast or slow, I don't mind so long as it lasts as long as we can manage it."

"That... is not what I meant," he said, shaking his head slowly. "I thought I was done with change--that's the one thing that has set apart my time here. Nothing changes. Where in my life... it's been turned on its head more times than I can count by a moment, a word."

A dream.

"The realities of that new world weren't a snap. Maybe you'll understand, one day. If you find your parents. Though I hope, for your sake, that path is different for you than for me."

Rey looked down at the mention of her parents, simultaneously feeling bad about having abandoned her post on Jakku and also feeling something strange and foreign to her. She'd wasted so much of her life waiting for them, hiding behind the idea that they would come back for her. She didn't give up the hope of being reunited with them one day, or even necessarily that they were still looking for her, but she'd been foolish not to be more proactive in trying to figure out where they'd gone after Jakku and searching for them across the galaxy. Instead, she'd allowed herself to grow stagnant, just as Luke had.

"You're breathing," she pointed out patiently, swallowing around the complicated mess of emotions that always cropped up when she thought of her parents. "You're thinking. You're living. So no, you're not done with change. And even if you are, it's clearly not done with you."

"But... I wasn't," he pointed out patiently. He still wasn't sure he had the right to, after what he'd been ready to do. "Breathing, yes. Living?" He shook his head. "If anything, this just... makes it all make sense. Because it doesn't." He chuckled again. "And this is what neither of us came here for, so it must be all right."

"I didn't know people could come back from the dead," Rey remarked wryly. She knew what he was talking about, of course, but she needed to poke fun at it, just a little.

She kept her eyes on him as she moved just a little closer to him, hugging him again. "This is all all right, Luke," she told him quietly. "We're allowed to believe that. We have to believe that, if we actually want this to work."

Did he? Want this to work?

He was quiet for a long moment, mulling that over. What did it mean, to want a future? To want a relationship? To allow his heart to beat, his spirit to rejoin the flow of the universe?

Without knowing it, at first, tears began to roll down his cheeks. It was not, exactly, despair. More an overflow of emotion he was no longer capable of dealing with.

The tears alarmed her, and without thinking she raised her hands to lightly cup his cheeks, gently wiping them away with her thumbs. "Shh," she told him softly, though she wasn't necessarily telling him to stop crying. Just the opposite, really. If he felt the need to cry, she could no more tell him to stop that than she could demand he not laugh or smile.

"It's all right. I'm here, and I won't leave you, not unless you want me to." And not even then, really, considering how stubborn she's been on that whole matter this entire time.

"I'm sorry," he says, scrubbing a rough sleeve across his face. "I'm ... a mess, Rey. I haven't allowed myself to feel in so long, I..." He shrugs helplessly, but it does not dislodge her from his side. "I've fallen so far, Rey, I... don't know that I deserve to come back."

"Of course you do," she tells him automatically, shaking her head. "Luke, we don't always have control over our feelings, so it's inevitable that everyone will be a mess at some point in their lives. We all fall. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to get back up again. Even if we need to hold on to someone on the way up. The question is whether you think it's worth it."

She didn't understand. She couldn't. She didn't know what he'd done--and what he'd not been able to prevent. She did not know how dark his soul really was.

Dark enough that he was considering letting her stay. Letting this happen.

"That isn't up to me," he said sadly. "But you say..." His brow furrows. "Leia sent you?"

She really didn't understand. She believed firmly in everyone having the freedom to make their own choices in life, and so of course this should be up to him. After all... she'd been trapped by her own choices, resigning herself to a life of unchained captivity on Jakku. She didn't want him doing the same for himself.

A little confused by the sudden mention of Leia, Rey blinked and replied, "She did, yes. She couldn't exactly come herself, since she had a Resistance to lead. And I'm... well, I'm probably the most expendable person she had."

Rey knew that wasn't entirely true, that she'd volunteered for this specifically because she wanted to learn more about the Force. But as for why Leia would agree to that otherwise, it was anyone's guess.

"That's not true," he said, and was not merely reflex. Nor was it bias--unless, perhaps, towards his sister. "Leia does nothing by half-measures. If she sent someone to find me, she meant it. If she meant it... She would send the right person for the job."

He wondered what that meant. Not only that Leia was reaching out, after those years of walling herself off to him until he stopped reaching back, but that she had sent Rey.

How would she look at Luke now, when he was continuing to fail her?

"She knows me better than anyone in the universe," he continued after a moment. "If she sent you, it was because she knew you'd be able to get through to me. That I wouldn't be able to ignore you."

And she had to have known that Rey would remind him of her.

Whether or not Luke intended his words as a reflex, that was exactly how Rey took them. At least, until he went on about his sister and how much she knew him. The faint, knowing smile that had been on her face when it had seemed as though Luke was simply jumping to her defense faded the more he spoke.

Could that have been true? Had Leia sent her because she saw something in her that would appeal to Luke? Had she even known that it would appeal to him in that sort of way?

No, she decided. Whatever reason Leia might have had for sending her beyond just the fact that she'd had to send someone, it couldn't have been because she'd foreseen the pair of them getting along quite this well. No one could have been perceptive enough to have seen that coming.

So instead of touching on any of that, Rey only looked at Luke for a moment before softly remarking, "You tried, at first. But... I guess she was right. Eventually, you just couldn't." She managed a bit of that former smile again, mentioning, "Maybe she could just tell how stubborn I can be when I want to be."

It was nice, seeing Rey smile. Luke didn't think she'd found much cause to smile, in her young life. It made him wish he was the type of person who could make people smile. He thought, perhaps, that he used to be.

"Leia's very strong with the Force in her own right," he said. "Maybe she could see as much of herself in you as I do." To someone else, that might have seemed an odd thing to say, but for Luke it just was. His crush was brief enough and long enough ago that he didn't think about it anymore, but it still remained that Leia was the most formative female presence in his life. Anyone he responded to was going to have a lot in common with her. He looked down at Rey again. As he started to get more comfortable, the tension around his eyes was starting to ease. "And she knew I could never keep myself isolated, without effort."

All things considered, she was smiling more with Luke now than she had throughout most of her life. She'd never had much reason to smile before, after all, and now....

Now it looked as though she might have a fairly big reason to smile on a regular basis, if things turned out well.

"You think I'm like Leia?" she asked, genuinely surprised. "I can't see that. But then, I suppose you know her better than me." His features were smoothing out, and Rey fancied that she could see what he might have looked like as a younger man. It wasn't his more youthful appearance that lightened her heart so much as the fact that he was showing he really was capable of levity. She couldn't help but think he needed more reasons to look like that, and it made her happy to know that he was looking at her with that sense of calm.

"Do me a favor. Don't put too much effort into that whole isolation thing. You wouldn't be the only one who would get unbearably lonely."

Luke shook his head. "You're not following," he says. "I've lost the battle already. I had to go to an abandoned island to manage it. Scuttled my ship. Cut myself ... cut myself off from the Force." From even the possibility of Leia finding him again. "I'm not saying I'm easy," he continues after a moment, eyes lowering almost modestly. "But I was once called an 'affable mynock' by someone who had reason to know how hard I was to get rid of."

Rey, for all of her talk about how Luke needed to move on from the perceived failings of his past, was incredibly hard-headed and stubborn. It was one thing for her to be embarrassed over a one-sided crush on a man who'd reluctantly agreed to be her teacher, but once she knew her feelings weren't one-sided... well, there was no real reason for her to feel embarrassed after that, was there?

But she could sense Luke's continued uneasiness and was sensitive to it, so she maintained her patience, keeping her voice soft as she stepped in closer, trying to get him to meet her eyes again. "Luckily for both of us, then, I don't want to get rid of you."

Giving his hand a gentle squeeze, she murmured, "I'm the one who came looking for you. And now that I've found you, I'm not going to give up on you so easily. If you genuinely tried your hardest not to be found, then it looks like the Force had other ideas."

It was sweet of her to say, he thought, looking up at her with a sad fondness. She had not come looking for this, and one day, she would go again. But if every moment here could be his last, then it followed that he should live each for itself.

"I'm not sure this is what the Force had in mind."

His left hand is caught in hers, and reflexively he raises his right to trace the edge of her face. It's only after he makes contact that he remembers it's not flesh, and he freezes, metal fingers clenching a little in consternation. What a time to start feeling self-conscious...

Rey found herself chuckling softly at his comment, though it might have been just slightly delayed given that she was distracted by the way he was looking at her. No one had ever looked at her that way, and she realized she had no idea what that meant. He seemed somewhat sad, but also... content? Maybe? Emotions weren't her strong point, especially not when those emotions belonged to other people.

She was instinctively tilting her face towards his hand when he seemed to suddenly freeze, and she blinked as she tired to figure out what was wrong. She eventually realized that his hand was cool and stiff against her face, and she remembered about his prosthetic. She was used to machines, more comfortable with them than people, in some ways, and so it didn't bother her at all, but she wondered if he thought it would, or even if it still bothered him after all these years.

Slowly, she brought her free hand up, lightly settling against the back of the metal one he had along her face. She made no move to keep him there, but more importantly, she made no move to pull him away, instead simply smiling up at him.

"I've heard people say the Force works in mysterious ways. Maybe they're right."

There was more where that came, if this went on. He was likely going to get self-conscious about his body, his age, her experience (or lack thereof), his own. In some ways, he was a fumbling teenager, arrested at nineteen when destiny had caught him up and finally dumped him, used up and wrung out, on this island. But he watched her touch his hand, and breathed out a sigh he hadn't been aware he was holding in. It had been a long time since he thought about anything, let alone meaningless things like how he looked or the fact he had no skin on his right hand. (It still retained enough feeling to give him some feedback, or it would be useless as a hand, but still.)

"Then again," he said softly, "one of the things I've been trying to teach you is that we shouldn't rely on the Force for everything." He wasn't ready to admit that Ben turning on him was part of some grand scheme.

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