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She doesn't know what she expects him to call her — ‘General,’ she supposes, or ‘Princess’ if he's feeling sentimental.
Before he can say either, she takes command. "Sister," she titles herself.
He looks at her with eyes that hold a sea of pain and loss, more than he knows how to even begin to bridge. What can he possibly say, after a decade of absence?
And so he simply hugs her. Hugs her as if — if he squeezed tight enough — perhaps he could wring out the pain.
A wrangled sob makes its way out from somewhere deep in her heart. She hugs him back, and whispers — quietly enough he wouldn't be able to hear if not for the bone-crushing hug — "Oh, I've missed you so much."
They eventually let go, although not entirely. She won't let him go — not again. For now, if that means she must literally hold onto his hand to physically keep him by her side, she'll do that. Hand in hand, they cross the ship. People step aside for them, watching silently, with wide eyes, as the two legends pass: One, their tangible general, the other, her almost mythic brother.
When they get to Leia's quarters, the first thing Luke notices is the smell of caf. The smell takes him back decades, and the memory is so intense and familiar that he actually smiles for a moment, before the pain hits.
His first morning with the Alliance.
"The Rebellion runs on caf," Leia had explained to him. He'd never smelled caf before joining — they hadn't had it back on the moisture farm. He was nineteen when he first tried the stuff.
Nineteen — had they really ever been that young?
His first morning with the Alliance, Luke found he got up earlier than most of the others. On Tatooine you wanted to rise early, to beat the heat of the day, and — for all that Uncle Owen often chided him for not waking up early enough — Luke found he still woke earlier than the other pilots.
There had only been a handful of people in the dining hall that early. Among them was Leia, drinking caf and working on something on her datapad. He remembered that when he sat down across from her, he had been amazed her hair was already braided up. Funny, the details he remembered now.
She'd offer him some caf, and laughed when he tried it and made a face. She'd said he was like a child, and he had defensively argued he was not. They'd compared birthdays and found out they had the same one. At the time they'd thought it was a charming piece of serendipity, nothing more. There were 180 billion star systems in the galaxy, but only 368 days in a standard year. Birthday overlap was bound to happen.
Morning caf had become their ritual. Luke never did develop a taste for the stuff, but he sat with her every morning as she drank hers.
Once, while he was making a supply run, he'd seen the boxes the stuff came in. On the side, it had proclaimed: The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup! He'd told Leia later — how true it was. She'd already been familiar with the slogan, but confused by his interpretation of it. "No, the best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup," he'd explained. "Not mine." She'd blushed after that, and said nothing further.
Now, the caf cups are spread across Leia's table, like they're marking the decades since then. Each mug has a brown puddle at the bottom. By way of explanation, she says, "I waited up all night for you, you know."
His first reaction to that is guilt. After everything he'd done, all the pain he'd caused her... in comparison to all that, a night of sleep is nothing, but still...
"It's a long way from Ahch-To," he murmurs, his voice heavy with regret.
It's only after he's spoken that he realizes there is no accusation in her voice. If she blames him for a good many things — and he hopes she does, for he deserves it — this, it seemed, isn't one of them. No, it is an offering. He has come — far, far too late, but he has, at last, come home. And for her. This — this wakefulness, this vigil — is her response. She knows he is trying — finally trying — and so she is trying in return.
Oh Leia.
And so, both breaking heart and in gratitude, he smiles. It doesn't really look like a smile, his face is so out of practice for that particular expression, but when he speaks the affection in his voice is plain enough. He simply says, "Ahh, real caf," and breathes in deeply.
Perhaps it was a twin telepathy thing. Perhaps it was a Force-sensitive thing. But Leia hears plainly the meaning behind his words: It smells like coming home.
His turn again; his turn to try, to take a step toward reparations. "I brought you something from far away."
"Really?" That wasn't what she'd been expecting.
From one of the pockets of his robes, he pulls out a small package: A worn wooden box, with a colorful bow stuck on top of it. The bow is almost cringingly cheery, and seeing it again now, Luke winces.
But a smile flickers in Leia's eyes as she takes it. "Aww," she says, almost reflexively.
She studies the box for a second, then pulls off the bow. She turns to her brother and sticks it on his chest.
"What are you doing?" he asks, baffled. But he's smiling now, smiling enough there could be no mistaking it.
"You're my present," she says simply.
And Luke had thought his heart couldn't break any further today.
They had met on the day her homeworld was blown to smithereens, blasted out of the sky. And yet she had hugged him and consoled him while he mourned for Ben Kenobi. And so it had become the first thing he ever learned about Leia: She knew more loss and pain more than he could possibly imagine, and responded with kindness and compassion.
Now, he stares at her again with the same wide-eyed wonder he had the first time he'd seen her in the holovid. How can she possibly call him — him who vanished on her for a decade — a present?
She keeps going, keeps fighting, even after losing one world and three families. She was only a baby the first time, when she was torn away from her mother and twin. She was taken, but also given: Given to parents, and a world — only to have that ripped away from her too. But she had kept going, this time building herself a family with her own two hands. And yet, now Han and Ben were gone as well.
When Luke was a young man, a threat against Leia had been the one thing that could provoke him to anger. Decades of meditation still hadn't been enough to change that entirely, only to distort it a little. Now, the feeling it provoked was something closer to despair. She's the best person he knows — he'd ever known — and fate seems determined to punish her for it. Will this bombardment of loss never end?
A thought catches him short. Could it be? He runs through the list of lost family members once again and... yes.
This now — him coming back to her — is this first time, as far as he knows, that one of her losses has returned.
Under those circumstances... maybe, just maybe, he really is her present.