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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Given how easy their conversation had become, Rey had sort of expected him to laugh, or to offer a sardonic comment before changing the subject. She hadn't thought he would suddenly get up and turn his back on her, and it was enough to jar her out of her own head.

"Master Skywalker?"

She got up right away, scrambling after him. She didn't follow him from the large distance she had upon her first arrival, but she hoped she wasn't interfering with his personal space. Whatever he might think of her or however he took her words, Rey wanted to think of him as a friend. She had too few of those to risk losing one.

"Did I say something offensive? I didn't mean it that way, really." She wouldn't apologize for it, not since she knew as well as he did that she had a valid point, but she could at least let him know that she hadn't meant to insult him.

He knew she didn't. He knew, and could feel it now. He could also feel her fear at losing him, and that hurt. She shouldn't fear the loss of something as broken as he was. Why work so hard to bring him back? To what end?

Luke stopped, not turning to her but letting her catch up.

"I'm sorry," he said gruffly. "I guess I don't take kindly to being reminded I'm either wrong or a liar. But you're right--I can't run from you on this island. And I can't run from... the truth inherent in the question."

He looked over at her, blue eyes sad, but warm. Not closed off, or cold.

"But you'll have to forgive an old man for not enjoying the reminder. The lesson is done for today. Not... forever."

It was just too much. She had to understand that.

She stopped when he did, still concerned that he wouldn't want her too close. But as he spoke, Rey walked over to him, a few of her defenses dropping as she moved to step besides him. Until now, she'd always thought there was something inherently mythical about him, that purposely getting too close would somehow sully his mark as a Jedi master.

But now she knew that, no matter what else Luke was, he was a person first and foremost. He deserved to have someone at his side. And he also deserved to have someone to remind him when he'd said something contradictory. She didn't know if that was what friends did for one another, but it was what she would do for her friends. She'd want them to do the same for her, after all.

"First of all? It was a joke, but thank you for acknowledging that there was some truth to it."

Her voice was soft, gentle, and she had a small smile on her face. While his constant need to run away when things got hard was frustrating, Rey could understand it. After all, the first thing she'd done upon hearing that Luke's lightsaber had "chosen" her was to do the very thing she'd been angry at Finn for and run as far away from everything that she could. It just hadn't been far enough.

Maybe that was the point: we can always choose to run, but at some point, we'll have to acknowledge that we'll never run far enough.

"And secondly... thank you for the lesson. Especially given that I'm sure it's not one of the ones you'd meant to give me. Still, just because the lesson is over, it doesn't mean we have to go our separate ways, does it?"

Unless he was so out of practice with social interaction that he needed the chance to get away from her and recharge. She didn't much like that idea, but she supposed she could understand it.

He used to know about jokes. Never very good a them, but he's pretty sure humor was something he used to understand. Han might have disagreed, but--no, he wasn't going to think about Han right now.

Still, joking about his tendency to run away wasn't funny. Then again, maybe she was just even worse at jokes than he was. That made him feel a little better.

His brow furrowed as she asked her question, a genuinely surprising one. "You must be pretty bored," he said after a moment. "Big social life on Jakku, given that an old man with no sense of humor is worth chasing after?"

It hadn't been a lesson he'd meant to teach. In fact, he'd gotten utterly derailed from his original plan, which had been to teach her every lesson he could think of to dissuade her from this path. From wanting to be anything like him.

He'd learn before too long that Rey's sense of humor was slightly skewed. After all, on Jakku, most of the jokes she'd heard were at other people's expense, so while she'd never been the mean-spirited sort, that kind of thing had just stuck with her. She'd been all too happy meeting BB-8 and Finn, given that they'd made her laugh without ever having to resort to insults... mostly.

She smirked slightly at Luke's response, giving him a small shrug. "Assuming you're claiming to be the old man in question, I wouldn't say you have no sense of humor. Just that it's a bit rusty. I don't think porgs make for a very good audience. They don't look like they understand subtlety all too well."

Rey paused for a moment, then, looking away from Luke for a moment before bringing up, "Of course, if you'd rather not hang around me any longer than absolutely necessary, I can understand that."

Luke gazed at her for a long moment, holding back another sigh. He didn't know what to do with this. He no longer knew how to just be with another person, and it hadn't started with Ahch-To--he'd been holding himself apart for years before that. Because he had to. Because his students needed that. Or so he'd thought.

Had he lost Ben not just to Snoke but because, in part, he'd been unable to let the boy in?

The silence stretched between them for an awkward length of time before he said, "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. What, ah... What did you have in mind?"

Ach-To made for a different sort of loneliness from what she'd had on Jakku. On Jakku, there'd been no one around that anyone would want to associate with, but there had still been the hustle and bustle of other people around the outpost. Here, there was nothing but the never-ending roar of the sea, a sound that was so foreign to Rey that she'd had headaches the first few days.

Maybe Luke had grown accustomed to it, even if she couldn't see how. But that was perfectly all right. She could keep to herself and try her hand at staying out of trouble until Luke sent for her again. It wasn't how she'd ideally wanted to do her part for the Resistance, but if that was the only way to accomplish her goal without totally pushing him away, she'd say her goodbyes for the moment and find a quiet place to meditate on what he'd taught her so far.

So his answer took her off-guard, and she blinked up at him before shrugging, offering him a small smile. "I'm not sure, really. What do you do for recreation?" He had to have a hobby of some sort, or else there was a good chance he'd gone absolutely mad at some point and she'd just been unable to tell this whole time.

Luke just stared at her. He had no idea how to answer that question, not only because he found the idea of recreation laughable under the circumstances but also because he honestly didn't know what he'd been doing. His days had quickly started to blur, as he lost track of the outside world and tuned himself to the rhythms of the island.

He'd tried to read those Jedi texts, more than once, and ended up falling asleep and drooling on them every time.

"I'm not here on vacation," he said finally, as if that was an answer.

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?"

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