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Master Yoda’s shoto lightsaber sits on the cloth opposite the little coat of beskar mail. Grogu looks between them, clearly torn.
“Which,” Luke asks him, “do you choose?”
The little being stands there for a very long time, deep in thought. He stands there, stock-still, and only after two solid minutes pass does Luke realize that something has happened. He looks past Grogu at the light streaming through one of the stone hut’s windows, at the particles of dust illuminated in its radiance.
They have come to a complete halt.
Rather than standing up, beginning to panic, Luke closes his eyes and relaxes into the Force. It surrounds him, its current rushing around and through him stronger than he has felt it since his final confrontation with his father onboard the Death Star. He realizes he is in a nexus of it, suspended in time. This choice Grogu is about to make will have monumental consequences, and the Force has responded, bringing Luke deeper into itself.
When the first of the ephemeral figures steps carefully through the door of the hut, Luke knows why.
“Father,” he says, coming to his feet.
Anakin Skywalker smiles at him, his weathered features lined with weight of years but unscarred by the flames that had consumed his physical body. “Hello, Luke,” he says. “It’s good to see you again.” He gestures behind him at the other people following him inside. “We were hoping we could talk.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda also come into the hut. They look just like Luke knew them in life; the glow of the Force around them and the ethereal nature of their bodies is all that marks them as having passed into what lies beyond.
“Ben,” Luke says. “Master Yoda.”
“Arrived just in time, I see we have,” Yoda says, walking around Grogu and inspecting the child with what seems to Luke to be a critical eye. “For Grogu to make, this choice is not.”
Luke frowns. “What?”
“You know that Grogu understands more than he seems to,” Ben says, moving to sit down to the child’s right and motioning for Luke to sit as well. As Luke complies, Yoda settles himself to Grogu’s left, and Anakin steps around the mat to sit with Luke. “But you also know that he is still a child. This is not a choice he can, or should, actually make.”
“I don’t understand,” Luke says, honestly. “Didn’t you make the same choice? All of you?”
Ben shakes his head. “The Jedi took me from my family when I was too young to understand what was happening,” he replies. “My family asked the Order to give me the life they knew they could not. But a choice? No. I made the choice to be a Jedi over and over throughout my life, but nothing like this.”
“I didn’t make this choice either,” Anakin tells Luke. “I left because I wanted to be a Jedi so I could free all the slaves on Tatooine. I never made the choice to give up my mother. It’s a false dichotomy, Luke. Grogu can choose the lightsaber, but he’ll never actually give up his love for his friend Din Djarin.”
Luke looks at Yoda, who snorts. “A lesson for your edification, my past is not, young Skywalker,” he says. “My own, my choices are. To deliver a warning, I have come.”
Unsure in which direction he should go, Luke opts to start with the one that sounds more dire. “What is the warning, Master Yoda?”
Yoda stands back up and trots over to stand in front of Luke. “Tell me what attachment is, young Skywalker.”
Doubt creeps into him. “Fear of losing what’s important to you,” Luke replies.
He winces as Yoda raps him across the knee with his gimer stick. The stick is quite solid and painful despite the fact that it should be just as ethereal as Yoda. “Taught you nothing, did I?” Yoda snaps. “Fear is fear. Attachment is attachment. Follow one, the other may, but deeper understanding than this, I expected of you!”
Luke holds up his hands in protest. “When my friends were being held captive on Bespin –”
“Sorry,” Anakin murmurs.
“You told me to let them go,” Luke continues. “To honor what they fought for, you told me to sacrifice them!” He finds himself coming to his feet, finds anger flooding through him. He should have better control than this.
“I did,” Yoda confirms. “Right, I was. In the end, nothing, your departure accomplished.” He pokes Luke’s prosthetic hand with his gimer stick. “And great, your loss was.”
“That was still my choice to make!” Luke all but snarls.
Yoda’s eyes glint. “Yes, it was.” He plants one little green hand on his hip. “Angry with me over it, are you still?”
Yes, Luke realizes. He still is. When he went back to Yoda after rescuing Han, he had been too distraught over Yoda’s condition, his imminent departure from the world, to realize it. But now that the little green Jedi is standing here in front of him, quite comfortably detached from anything as banal as mortality, Luke realizes there is a seething well of anger and resentment deep within him.
“You made me choose,” he growls, “between being a Jedi and my friends!”
Yoda sighs and shakes his head. “Nothing did I make you do,” he corrects Luke. “That choice, for yourself you made.”
“Attachment isn’t fear of loss,” Anakin says quietly. “Listen to me, Luke. You can’t lose what you don’t own. I didn’t own Padmé, your mother, but I obsessed over losing her anyway. That obsession led to fear, and the fear led to anger, and the anger led me to do terrible things, just as Master Yoda always said it would. But attachment isn’t the fear. Attachment is a lie you tell yourself that you have anything to lose.”
“You were afraid of her dying,” Luke tells him. “You were afraid of being separated from her.”
“There is no death; there is the Force,” Ben says, speaking for the first time in a few minutes. “And the Force unifies all beings. Separation is an illusion, an artifact of our limited perceptions. In the fullness of time, we are all one, all a shared breath of the universe.”
“The tragedy, my tragedy, is that I didn’t understand that until it was almost too late,” Anakin continues. He lays a hand on Luke’s shoulder, the warmth and pressure of it just as real as Yoda’s gimer stick and considerably less painful. “On the Death Star, when you refused to kill me, when you called out to me, in that moment, I didn’t just see my son, the son I loved and of whom I was proud. I saw Padmé again, living through you.
“That was when the full weight of how twisted the Emperor had made me became apparent. He had made me so obsessed with power, with what I could control, with temporal and material things, that I couldn’t see the truth: Padmé and I, and you and I, had never really been apart in any way that mattered. I had convinced myself we were.”
“Sorry I am,” Yoda says, touching a hand to Luke’s knee. “Old I was. This truth, known it I had for centuries. That I could not explain it better to you than I did, my failure was.”
Luke looks at Anakin, at Ben, down at Yoda. He feels his gaze wrenched then to Grogu, to the mat where he has laid out the beskar mail and the lightsaber.
You made me choose between being a Jedi and my friends.
He sees his own trauma looming large in this room, this hut that suddenly seems to press in on him. He sees how some part of him thought that this separation from love, this divorce from closeness, was an integral part of being a Jedi. He sees how he expected Grogu to make this same terrible choice.
This same, terrible, false choice.
“What am I about to do to him?” Luke whispers, feeling the tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.
“Nothing that cannot be corrected,” Ben says, standing and also coming to put a hand on Luke’s other shoulder. “There was no malice here, Luke. The hardest mistakes to see are the ones we make ourselves. Let go of your guilt.”
Luke draws a deep breath, then slowly expels it, letting the self-recrimination and anger depart with it.
“Good,” Yoda says. “Know what to do now, do you?”
“Yes,” Luke replies. “I do.”
“I knew you would,” Anakin tells him. “I’ll say it again, Luke. I love you, and I’m very proud of you. There’s no attachment, no danger, in that. Love is what redeemed me. Remember that.”
“I will, father,” Luke promises.
And, just like that, the dust begins drifting through the beam of light once more. Grogu takes a tottering step toward the beskar mail.
“Wait,” Luke says.
Grogu stops and looks at him, curious.
“I’m sorry, Grogu,” Luke tells the child. “I made a mistake. I made a choice, a long time ago, that hurt me, and I thought at the time I had to make it. The truth is I never did. Just like you don’t have to make this one.” He reaches out and picks up Yoda’s lightsaber in one hand and the beskar mail in the other and offers them both to Grogu. “Here. These are both yours.”
With a big smile and a happy cooing noise, Grogu takes the beskar mail first and clumsily gets it on over his head. It gets stuck on his ears and Luke has to help him get it positioned underneath his robe, but eventually it settles and looks like an excellent fit.
Once that’s done, Grogu takes Yoda’s shoto, carefully points it away from Luke, and ignites the little green blade. He squeals in delight and tries an experimental swing or two, then extinguishes the weapon and gives it back to Luke. “I understand,” Luke says with a smile. “I’ll hold onto this for you.” He clips it to a spare spot on his belt.
He expects Grogu to mentally communicate another question, or perhaps a demand for food, but the child just stands there, looking up at Luke, almost seeming expectant. Luke realizes Grogu is waiting for him to do… something.
Ordinarily, at this point Luke would tell him the point of the lesson or exercise they just conducted. But it is now clear to Luke that there was no lesson required here for Grogu. The child was confused by the choice Luke presented because, on some level, he already understood that it was a false choice.
“The lesson today,” Luke says, finally, “is that no one is ever done learning. Not you, and especially not me.”
Grogu coos and nods. He waves his little hands in the gesture Luke has come to recognize as a request for a ride.
Luke smiles and picks Grogu up. “Come on,” he says. “I think we’re overdue to see your friend Din Djarin.”