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“Papa…I was thinking.” Rey asked one night, slowly stirring her stew with an aching hand. “You could have been bigger than royalty.” Her lightsaber arm was limp at her side from a long, rough day of practice, with her father blocking every parry and thrust she sent at him with seeming ease. He would calmly remind her that he had years of practice and two different teachers. It wasn’t much comfort when she couldn’t help but think (and resent) that so much of his skill had been self taught.
Then again, she managed the first time she even held her weapon. She reminded herself of that in moments of frustration. Sometimes so did he, when she mumbled and groaned aloud.
“Hm?” he was sitting back, sipping root tea from a stone cup. Rain poured down from the outside, roaring on the thin roof of his hut. She wished it had come sooner, but there was something especially cozy about sitting dry and protected, inside with her father. Warm. Safe. Not that she had much experience with lots of rain, but it reminded her of long nights alone curled up in a hovel with sandstorms raging outside. She liked this much better.
She watched the meat and roots twist and turn in her bowl absentmindedly. “Why didn’t you take advantage of that fame and glory?” Luke put down his tea and leaned in to place his hand on her shoulder. Rey tried to fight a smile. It was silly, she told herself, to still react this way to such small signs of affection. She still always did. “I mean, you saved the galaxy…twice. You were the last Jedi. You could have become like a god. But…you let yourself become a myth to all of us instead. Why?”
Luke sighed deeply, and began to tap his metal fingers on his knee. “I’m going to be very honest with you. I considered it.”
She raised her eyebrow pointedly, finally sipping at her stew with an expectant look. Her father chuckled, patting her back.
“Yes, yes, I’m going to tell you. After I shot down the Death Star, I got a little cocky. I hid it well and did my best to be humble, but I was a nineteen-year-old boy and, well, nineteen-year-olds are going to be a little enamored with the idea of being a war hero.”
Rey tried to picture her father at her age, blaster at his side and medal around his neck, realizing for the first time how great he could truly be. It was hard, given that she didn’t even remember too much of what he looked like when she was a child.
“After the war was won, I really did have the chance to accept all the glory that came with it. But by that time I was twenty-three, and had seen and learned so much more. Learning about your grandfather matured me more than anything else I think.” He clenched his metal hand, and Rey felt the instant urge to place her own overtop it. “And after that I started looking into why the Jedi fell.”
“Grandfather killed them,” Rey said with a frown, “Vader, I mean.”
“He was part of it. But he had to have motivation, Rey. The darkness is deceptive. I didn’t know my father very long, but he was capable of love and empathy. He saved my life in the end. That is what Ben refused to accept when he discovered the truth; he’d rather accept the lies that Snoke fed him because they helped justify his anger. But you must understand that Anakin Skywalker loved and loved deeply. He loved his master, his padawan, and his wife. He loved me. He loves you.”
Rey furrowed her brow. “He’s dead, Papa. He died long before I was born. How can he love me?”
Luke smiled gently at her, pulling her slowly into a light hug. She leaned into it, as she always did. Even now that she’d finally lost count of them, they still felt new and scarce. “He lives forever in the Force, Rey. I’ll explain it to you soon. But I digress; the point is that one of Father’s faults was his belief that he could save the world through might. He was a little too comfortable with the idea of using pure military force to make people get along. He had good intentions, but terrible ideas of execution.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
“The Jedi of the past did overstep their power. They made choices during the Clone Wars that they shouldn’t have. And that, coupled by the understanding that there is a lot of my father in me, lead me to decide that I couldn’t risk that happening again. You were right, Rey. I could have been like a god. Leia told me as much. In frustration, because she wanted me to use that power for good.”
“Aunt Leia didn’t even train as a Jedi,” Rey protested. Though she deeply respected her Aunt, there was always something that bothered her about that. Perhaps her father’s absence wouldn’t have been quite so devastating.
“You’re right. I think we both understood that Leia, well…as much as she doesn’t like to face it, she has Father’s blood too. Perhaps stronger than I do. She’s angry and impulsive. She doesn’t like to wait for bureaucracy and politics. She never said it, but I think she feared that she’d be the more likely of the two of us to go down the path of our father. Leia liked to believe I was the softer and kinder twin who could act as a balancing force. She once said I remind her of the stories that Bail Organa would tell her about our birth mother.”
Rey nodded. Padme Amidala was familiar to her, but not quite enough. Knowing that she had the blood of a strong-willed and righteous senator was comforting, after she’d seen Vader’s influence on her cousin. She craved more she could learn about the once Queen of Naboo that Luke once said she looks so much like. Only from what he’d seen in holos, for he never knew his mother either. Leia saw her in visions, but for some reason he never did. Because the Force is funny that way. Rey decided not to mention that she could tell he was only pretending not to care.
“But Leia, like our father, also sometimes forgot that putting the ‘right’ person in power isn’t necessarily a recipe for peace. I had to turn her down, because my Jedi could not be a military force, a political tool, or anything other than what we are.” Luke laughed weakly, letting go of Rey and letting her sit straight again. “And oh, she hated me for that sometimes. She wished she could get me to convince people to support her goals, being the ‘Savior of the Galaxy’ and all that. But I knew, and I think part of her did too, how dangerous that was.”
Rey wondered if Kylo thought he could be a god too. Instead he ended up a monster. Like their grandfather, but without the love that saved him. She swallowed her last bite thickly.
“So I faded into obscurity. It isn’t hard, in a universe this big, and stories get passed around so easily anyway. Those who needed to know about me did, those who didn’t could just wonder. Besides, I…” his face fell, and before she knew it he was grabbing their bowls and beginning to stand.
“Papa,” Rey said firmly. She was finally getting the courage to do things like that.
He sighed, closing his eyes and looking out the window to the sky. “I, along with your mother, didn’t want you to be a tool either. We wanted you to just see me as your father.”
Rey gripped her fist in her hand. Her whole body tensed, and anger bubbled in her, almost out of habit at this point. She didn’t blame him. But that doesn’t erase it all. “You kept me a secret.”
He was quiet.
“At least, you tried.”
“This family never seems to be good at keeping secrets,” Luke shook his head, placing their dishes in the water basin with limp limbs.
“Perhaps we aren’t meant to,” she stated plainly, “perhaps these secrets have always been the problem.”
Luke nodded into the circling water of the basin. “They always seem to come back to bite us.” Suddenly, his voice broke, quiet and timid, “Some god I would have been, someone who couldn’t even protect his own daughter.”
Rey stood, crossed the room, and threw her arms around her father’s back. Luke jumped slightly, and Rey knew why. She was never the most comfortable with initiation. But this time he was the one to lean back, placing a hand over her arm.
“You haven’t cut off any limbs yet, so you’re a step up at least,” she quipped.
He laughed. She smiled. The rain continued to patter.