Chapter Text
There is a known fact in Mos Eisley and the surrounding moisture farms that Old Ben was a hermit, a wizard, and more than a little crazy.
He is also, without a doubt, extremely sad.
While no one was really ready to go out of their way to help the old man, there was a unified, unspoken agreement between the better residents (with exception of the Lars’) that they would help him whenever they thought he needed it. And, boy, did he need it.
Now it wasn’t that Owen and Beru didn’t want to help the man, they just did their very best to ignore that he even existed. That the man who let Owen’s brother die and dropped off his only son into their arms not two weeks later was living no more than a league away from their small abode. That he watched over said boy from a far or that he helped the Tuscan raiders during the dry seasons despite all the people those monsters had captured, tortured, and killed. That he was never too far off from the farm when trouble came their way.
That he slowly grew thinner and thinner as the years went by. That he circled closer and closer to madness as each season came and went and returned again. That his glassy, mad, exhausted eyes held more pain and suffering than any one person they knew combined. That his pain riddled and sorrow filled cries echoed across the plains with a sadness that sometimes seemed to dim the very suns. Leaving a cloud of anguish layered overtop their world so thick and heavy that they never really manage to forget that he was out there.
And things just worked out better that way.
(Or so Owen tries to tell anyone who asks.)
So for fifteen years, they watched and pitied the poor man, wondering when he would end his own suffering. Wishing for him to find some solace in their help and small care they could provide for him. Knowing that he would never let them really get close enough to mean something more.
Then something began to change.
Now, none but young Luke Skywalker held any degree of Force sensitivity (although Old Ben was the only person who happened to know even that much) but that didn’t mean they couldn’t use their eyes. And when you live on a planet that is nothing but desert, you learn to tell a mirage from the real thing.
So, when Old Ben began visiting the town more frequently and engaging in more and more conversations with the pleasanter folk among his neighbors, they noticed it right away.
Ben was happy.
Er, well, happier.
Not just that the sadness had lifted just the littlest bit or that the guilt that constantly plagued him had lessened to something more manageable for the townsfolk to understand, but he smiled. Perhaps they were never very big smiles nor where they anything obviously noticeable, but they were something. Something that reached his eyes and shone out from his very soul. The soft, gentle places that made him human. Made him the kind and compassionate man that occasionally helped with recently freed slaves or the spacers with nowhere to go and nothing to their names.
They were something small that shone out from the warm places that had managed to grow within his broken soul and filter through his presence and create this gentle, steady place for anyone who just looked hard enough. The places that were for more than just his charge and the little family that raised the boy without him. The places where the lucky could reside if he let them; places they could rest and recover with his protection.
Sometimes they thought that they could rest there forever. Most of the time he managed to give them the strength to find their own places within. Sometimes he steered them in the right direction to find someone else to hold them upright.
None of them are ever really aware of how the Jedi has managed to find a new hope of his own out in those wastes or how those small spaces that once belonged to one ridiculous, incredible young man grew again because of the same ridiculous, incredible man he was becoming again. Because of the small, bright light of sunshine gold that man was raising. The little boy that was a part of the old wizard and who soothed wounds that never managed to heal. Who gave him strength once more.
None except, perhaps, the one within the Force who might have started the whole thing.
But he’s not telling.