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It’s there. A small flutter, more the tickle of a burgeoning headache than an intuition. Something Luke would hardly notice, or at least dismiss as one of the dozens of natural undulations in the seething mass of the Force. But it’s different enough from the usual atmosphere to draw his focus.
Something new.
It grows, albeit to the smallest degrees, each day. Cautiously he stretches out his senses, searching for the cause, and it’s consistently emanating from Leia - not from her but within her. He presses, examines, curiosity winning out over concern of disease or injury. There’s no warning associated with this feeling. A soft, tiny ball of warmth near her abdomen, spinning out tendrils from his teeth to the back of his skull -
Life.
The potential. A microscopic promise.
Leia notices the change in his mood, innately attuned as she is to his emotional shifts. She’s told him he seeps out, staining the air around them, her, without Luke realizing. One of the multitude of ways in which they’re different, despite their twinship; Leia locks herself behind impregnable walls.
“What?” Leia asks, an edge of worry to her voice. She’s felt the child, too, flickering at her subconscious, but hasn’t assigned it understanding.
“Nothing,” Luke reassures her, then amends, “well, something. But it’s good.”
“You know I hate it when you’re cryptic.”
He offers a shrug and his most boyish smile. He feels boyish, some of that farm-child naivety he can’t seem to shake, hopeful and joyous and painfully young - remembers they are only twenty-four. They’ve saved the galaxy, and now must restore it, heal it, but perhaps not before they heal themselves.
Leia sighs and returns to work, accepting Luke’s non-answer as one of those Jedi idiosyncrasies she hasn’t mastered yet.
(Yet. One day, Luke silently hopes. He does not wish to travel this path alone.)
He knows he’s in trouble days later when Leia’s striding toward him with hard snaps of her boots, fire crackling in her eyes. (Their mother’s eyes? He wonders, wishes. It is still a revelation.) Luke stands his ground and prepares for punishment, but all she does is smack his shoulder with the strength in her balled fist. It hurts more than he expected, but it is Leia, after all. She always defies expectations.
“Ow,” he says, deliberately exaggerated.
“You knew,” Leia said, and she’s fighting hard against a crisp smile. “You knew, and you didn’t tell me.”
Luke rubs his shoulder. “I wanted you to find out on your own,” he says, sincerely. Absolutely. “I couldn’t take that moment away from you.”
Leia’s smile blooms wide, even if it’s tight with exasperation. They embrace, a cloud of peace settling over their heads, and it feels like decades, not months, they’ve been siblings.
*
A boy, healthy and screaming as the med droids clean and sterilize him. Luke missed the birth, stuck in his X-wing returning from a reconnaissance mission that, apparently, only the galaxy’s lone Jedi could oversee.
He sensed the beginnings of Leia’s birth pains sharp as a honed blade, despite the distance between them of galaxies and starlines. He rushed from the meeting as fast as diplomatic grace allowed, and still probably left the planet’s residents with the impression that Jedi are rude. He reached across the void of space to his sister and did his best to ease her hurts, offered all the comfort he could convey.
I’m here.
Leia didn’t return words, but her silent gratitude poured forth from a open dam usually stopped.
She is well, if tired. She’s happy.
Now Luke touches his nephew's newborn mind, gently, a mental caress to soothe him. Bright lights, loud sounds, a new world and frightened confusion. Luke promises safety, and softness.
The boy’s emotions shift from panic to brief, flickering confusion - his mother has communed with him often, but Luke never wanted to overstep his boundaries. Luke’s a stranger. Then the confusion unfurls into a rough, sloppy push back against Luke’s mind.
A hello.
Luke smiles. “Hello,” he greets back, out loud. Behind him, R2 beeps a tentative question. “Leia’s fine,” Luke assures the droid. “And so is their son.”
Mother and baby are resting in the medical wing when Luke touches down on Coruscant. Han’s hovering outside, looking just as worn with his bleary eyes, unshaven stubble and wrinkled clothes, as if he’d birthed the child. Wordless Luke snatches him into a quick, tight hug, and Han’s muscles loosen gratefully beneath his grip.
“Before they wake up,” Han begins, fingers jabbed awkwardly into his belt, “Leia wanted me to tell you.”
A brief examination reveals exhaustion, profound relief - a batch of tightly wound nerves, but nothing to fear. “Yes?”
“Our son.” Han smirks, a rare one devoid of mockery. “We named him Ben.”
*
Shivering beneath the joy, a snaking tendril of fear. The Force is strong with Leia's son, unequivocally, unavoidably so. Brimming to overflow, raw with untapped potential.
Luke gazes over her shoulder as Ben sleeps, albeit fitfully, in her arms. “It's not inevitable. There was a time, on Endor, that I could’ve turned. But I made a choice.” He squeezes Leia’s taut arm, the lines of muscle and sinew cradling her impossibly vulnerable child. “We can protect him. Guide him, so he knows how to make the right choice, too.”
Leia’s finger strokes a path across Ben’s cheek. His eyelids flutter at the touch. “I don’t understand the Force like you do,” she says. Wrong, Luke thinks, knows. “You’re the only one I trust to help me.”
Entrusted with his nephew’s soul. His sister, and his best friend’s, only child. Luke calms his own fluttering heart, remembering masks and metal, a tingling phantom hand, the crimson slice of a lightsaber piercing the dark.
A cave of fog and fears, his own severed head rolling at his feet.
Luke kisses her temple. “We all will.”
*
If Han and Leia settle with relative ease into domestic duties while simultaneously shaping the New Republic, Luke takes his time.
He travels. He searches the blank spaces of the galaxy for history, for knowledge and wisdom and the truth of a long dead people he is christened, destined by circumstance and birthright, to lead. Master Yoda tasked him to rebuild the Jedi Order, restore tranquility and make amends for crimes inflicted before he was born, and Luke will not fail him. Them. Their spirits, Yoda and Ben and his father (Anakin, not Vader), always watching yet hovering forever beyond his reach when he begs insight. There is so much he does not understand, is not sure he will ever be capable of understanding. Luke remains unconvinced of his own wisdom, or the ability to accomplish such a monumental task, but there’s no choice. No one else.
He can no longer wait for answers, have them delivered to him. This is the path lined out for him, that he must sculpt alone.
He breathes secrets to life, out of manuscripts and planet dust. Ferrets out lost details burned from history by the Empire; by Vader, so determined to render his own extinct. He meditates, allowing himself to be one with the Force, be led and let go. Discovers an ancient, abandoned temple on Yavin 4 and rebuilds it in the manner of the Jedi monuments of old. He welcomes the Force-sensitive who seek him out, young and eager to train, and offers his gentle, unassuming leadership to train those nearest him, like Leia.
He’s not against the idea of romance for himself, although not as ardently interested as when he imagined himself a princess-saving hero at nineteen. (Only five, six years ago. He never imagined he would change so much, at least not in the way he longed to while standing in the endless stretches of sand dunes.) But relationships require time, and patience, the latter of which Luke has schooled himself to hold in abundance, the former always fleeting.
There’re also his duties to the New Republic - diplomatic missions to consider, the peacekeeping work, the treaty-making and judgment-ruling. A galaxy in afterbirth looks to the last remnant of the mystical Jedi for justice, and who is Luke to deny them on the basis of his own wants?
He would never abandon those he loves in favor of his work, though, that is clear as breathing, not even for the Force - he rejects the old Jedi Order’s insistence on a lack of attachments. Perhaps this is why they fell, their inability to accept and channel their feelings toward a positive outcome. Luke teaches the value of love and affection to his pupils, patience and tenderness.
But everything must have balance. If he doesn’t have time to marry, to commit the proper energy and devotion a new family deserves, he doesn’t have time.
Not to mention the matter of his baggage. The leader of the new Jedi; the savior of the Republic; the war hero. Darth Vader’s son, a truth hardly known and less spoken. Luke would welcome a partner with a full heart, readily and happily, because that is how Luke loves; easily, readily, unconditionally. Luke is made of love, decisions formed and forged through it, but he is not sure how a partner would welcome him in turn.
He leaves it to destiny. He has his family already, after thinking he lost one to the ashes of a moisture farm. When the time is right.
Luke meets his future wife when she tries to kill him, and Luke does what he does best: loves her, unconditionally.
*
It’s there. The same tiny skittering sensation, only lodged tight between two ribs. The simmering energy inside Mara, expanding outward with each day, and the potential for a spark.
Until it coalesces into absolute, ground-shattering knowledge.
A daughter.
Luke can’t breathe.
Legacy. Inheritance. Can he truly, in good knowledge, task a child with the same burden he was given no choice but to uphold? Could he be a father as well as a Master, a teacher, a leader? Can he fulfill any of these things and all of them well enough when the fragility of so many lives already bends his spine?
And Ben. Ben, already so frustrated and impassioned, poison-laden shadows whispered into his ears. What if his daughter falls to the same fate as Anakin, as Ben wavers? What if he fails to protect them? If this unnamed, faceless evil comes for her, the sole heir of Luke Skywalker himself, a far preferable weapon -
Mara feels his sudden, tangled flares of emotion and turns from the table. “What’s wrong?” she says, crisp and quick, her body alight for combat. Her hair glows gold when backed by the cabin’s dim fire, too bright for him to look at directly. Just like Mara herself, a blazing sun powering his orbiting dark earth with light, and motion, and clarity.
He did not expect to find her, former assassin of the Emperor turned smuggler, turned pilot, turned Jedi in training, scrappy and fierce and heart closed tight as a beast trap. Expected even less for her to love him, to gift him with something - belonging, oneness - so precious and perilous and impossibly frail, impossibly steadfast.
The Force aligned them together for a reason.
Luke exhales. With it, his fear, an echo of Leia’s almost a decade ago, recedes into the distance. Replacing it, a sudden, paralyzing joy.
“You know,” he says. Softly. Words, sound, might shatter this semblance of perfect security.
Mara holds his stare. Recognition sparks in her irises, the final puzzle piece locking in with his confirmation.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “I...I do.”
She reaches for his hand. Luke crosses the gap between them to accept it, hardly trusting his own balance.
“You’re happy?” she demands, harsh from her own anxiety.
Again Luke thinks of Anakin’s face, sallow and sick behind the mask. Again Luke thinks of Ben, so uncertain and angry.
Mara squeezes his hand.
“I’ve never been happier,” Luke tells her. He means it.
She has no name, is barely more than matter and energy, and Luke loves his daughter. Always has. Always will, regardless. This is his charge, his mission, his truest responsibility: to be the father he never had, only had, for hardly longer than a heartbeat.
*
The birth is deja vu, except this time Luke is present. Nothing could keep him away, and thankfully, the Force wants him here. He clasps Mara’s hand and eases her discomfort to the best of his abilities; they both touch their daughter’s traumatized mind and reassure her with love.
She’s hopelessly tiny, barely bigger than the width of Luke’s hand. She’s taken a darker, dirtier shade of his hair, her mother’s cheeks. And she isn’t moving.
Luke’s throat closes with panic.
No.
Please, no. Take me instead.
He shuts his eyes. It’s impossible to achieve the tranquility he needs to wipe himself slate-clean of emotion, so he feeds off his fear. Strains himself to breaking, the threshold of his mind trembling same as his fingertips, bright lights sparking off his eyelids, heartbeat frenzied, to gather every piece of aura, twine together every power in the universe past its known limits, he fractures the galaxy’s boundaries asunder and demands them, shoves them, begs them, to breathe into his daughter’s lungs.
Mara’s hands, hot as a funeral pyre. Seizing his knuckles and squeezing iron-clad. Her power joins his, her own body shaking from exertion.
The baby twitches. Coughs unhappily, then lets out a loud, angry wail.
His emotions are many, and feverish. Gratitude, relief, empathy. His daughter’s cries thread knots around his heart, tighter than sinew, and Luke cradles her tiny skull and murmurs to her so gently.
“The Force is with you,” he whispers. “And so am I.”
From the outer room, round golden eyes peering through the one window into the bedroom, “Oh, goodness! Thank the Maker, she’s all right! Master Luke is a father!”
Unseen but surely beside Threepio, Artoo unleashes a chorus of high-pitched squeals. Luke smiles, silently agreeing. “Thanks for noticing, Threepio,” he sighs, surprised by the roughness of his voice.
Mara’s eyes are fathomless. She presses a sloppy kiss to Luke’s cheek, their daughter’s head, before accepting the hungry, crying child to her arms. Luke lies down beside her on the bed, drained to physical and emotional dregs.
He doesn’t realize he’s dozed off until a persistent, worried beeping stirs him awake. Artoo’s at the edge of the bed, fidgeting back and forth anxiously and peering up at them with his scanner extension.
“We’re all right, Artoo,” Luke soothes. “Send a message to Han and Leia, would you?” he instructs around a yawn.
Artoo trills an affirmative, the sound of his happy chirping fading as he rolls away.
*
Mara sleeps. Luke carries his newborn daughter outside. The stars are impossibly bright, hundreds of pale silver pinpoints above the high treetops, and beneath them Luke feels impossibly small.
His daughter’s eyes, matching the tuft of scattered hair, gaze up at him with fascination. Her fingers fist experimentally, her toes wiggle, and Luke doesn’t need to broach her mind with the Force - he already feels her, as if they shared the same mindspace; a flowing bridge of connected feeling. She’s calm, a sensation that reminds him of floating in open space, and she reaches a hand up to tap his cheek.
Luke didn’t know it was possible to feel this much love.
He realizes, with absolute clarity, her name.
“Ann,” he says.
She rolls her eyes to him, as if aware. She cannot be, but with each breath the cord binding them grows stronger, seals tighter.
“Ann,” Luke repeats, cementing the notion to himself. Honoring a lost memory, the life that never was, but not shouldering his daughter with the weight of expectation. He bears that enough for them all; he refuses to pass it down.
Not for the first time, Luke wishes his father were with him, but for the first time, he has all he needs.
*
Time passes. They do their best to move alongside it. The Empire’s influence, though crippled, still looms long and wide. Murmurs of forces rising, lives swallowed up by the dark. Ben trains with a handful of other apprentices, as young as eight and as old as thirty, under Luke’s careful, patient guidance.
They won a war, and soon realize it’s not enough. Keeping what they won safe, is.
Ann fits perfectly within the stretch of his arms one day, and seemingly the next she is walking. Talking, old enough to stare up at the mottled night sky and say, “Up.” Luke takes her in the X-wing to prove she has stars in her eyes and galaxies behind her smile. She wears his old helmet even on solid ground, crafts a sloppy doll out of his retired orange uniform.
He holds her cross-legged in his lap and shows her how to lift a single, small stone. She fidgets with excitement, wide watchful eyes following the stone’s suspended path.
In less than an hour she’s stacking a rock pile higher than her head.
Mara insists they keep her a secret. Luke agrees. Only five living know of Ann, for her safety. He doesn’t know if it’s his own dread or a premonition from the Force, but he feels the approach of war. A new one, for the same reasons as before. Planets will die, stars will burn, a shadow will weigh his mind and all Luke can do is try to find it, find it. Stop the evil, heal the wounded.
And whatever schemes in the encroaching shadow, if it knew, would stop at nothing to make Luke Skywalker’s daughter a soulless vacuum for the dark.
*
He has a vision.
A dream. The future. Never an image from the Force so certain and immediate and tangible since he tested his limits in Dagobah’s swamps and as reward witnessed Han and Leia’s suffering high above Bespin. Felt their pain aftershock through his bones.
Ann will die.
A man in black, behind a mask, a saber thrumming red, will kill her.
He also hears a name.
Snoke.
If Ann somehow, miraculously, does not die, if Luke can avert the future (successfully, this time, with wisdom and insight and don’t panic, don’t act desperately), Snoke will take her, claim her, twist her. The best possible leverage to wield against a father helpless to his love; a weapon to avenge the Empire’s fall. Luke would watch as her soul, pure and still forming, was consumed to ash.
Panic stains his mouth, tastes like acid. Anger flares wildfire, fear rots him open. He is twenty-three and helpless again, standing on the bridge of the Death Star as the Emperor turns his warships upon his family. Offers him a choice.
Anger, fear, hatred. They lead to the Dark Side.
It is Mara’s idea, to speed Ann away. Only for a time, until the threat is rooted out and annihilated. Somewhere familiar to Mara, where she has connections, power, favors to call in; where not even Snoke will look for the child of two Jedi.
Ann clings to Luke’s leg, trusting eyes upturned and dazed by the motion of hurried action (planning, packing, deal-making, not even Han and Leia know where. Not even Luke knows - he’d die before he willingly sacrificed his daughter’s safety, but he knows from his own power, a power he refuses to use, how easy it is to pull even the most hidden secrets from a mind). Ann has never been able to stand being parted from her father for long. Neither has he, in truth, even when teaching his pupils demanded sojourns.
Luke kisses his wife and daughter goodbye (only for now) and the fear is swallowed glass.
If Luke lives on love, he also lives by fear. The enemy, the opposite, the vines of dread that suck him bone-dry. Fear of losing, family and friends, of failure; the daily battle to tether his darker desires, suppress his temptations, keep himself on the path of light.
Help me see it, Ben. Father. Master Yoda, remind me how to fight.
If only he could rip his own skull open, tear out the insidious feeling that haunts him like the weeds he never saw in the desert.
*
Mara dies.
Somehow, somewhere, fighting to the last, and alone.
Her presence is there, existing beyond his direct reach but close if he stretches, and he does, a talisman he clutches to his heart - and then, then the sudden, merciless silence.
(Her last thought was of Ann, burned on his mind like the ash silhouettes after a detonation, protect, love, spill my own blood, and him. Luke.)
She’d want him to go on. Have strength. Fight.
Luke does not. He shatters.
Not long after, his students. Each death a scourge, tearing him apart from the inside until he’s paralyzed. He falls to his knees, his side, immobile from the agony of each loss.
Ben, he whispers, knowing who delivers the blows, the worst fear was not his own face behind that mask but Ben’s, and when he gasps the name he doesn’t know who he prays to, his mentor, his nephew.
He drags himself, knees and nails, to the temple. Sinks into the mud and rain, the bodies scattered. The temple is long burned, ash beneath his fingers.
Luke screams until he can no longer hear his own voice. Blue-white lighting fires from his fingertips, at nothing, at the ground, useless.
*
He does not know what happened to Ann.
He can’t feel her, no matter how far and desperate he presses, and presses until he fractures even smaller, passes out and can barely touch the Force for days after.
The world is as quiet as if they never existed, except for the cries of the dying in mass.
He failed.
Leia. Han. Ben. Mara. Ann.
Sister, brother, nephew, wife, daughter.
Family.
Death, and darkness, and a galaxy in ruin. An endless cycle he could not break.
He failed them all.
*
For a time, Luke hopes to die as well.
How is it possible for man who has lost so much, who has brought the deaths of all he loves best, how can his heart still beat?
It would be fitting; there’s no use for him.
The Force will not permit him this peace.
Selfish, Yoda hisses behind his eyes. Weak. Do what you must.
Luke doesn’t know what that is. Has never really known.
*
Time passes.
The island is empty of life, save the plants and local insects. The scenery calms him, most days; ocean blue didn't exist on Tatooine, or greenery. Luke does not speak aloud for years, and forgets the sound of his own voice.
He would have chosen this place for his self-imposed exile, if it hadn’t chosen him. He never thought himself a true master, and maybe at the feet of the first Jedi, breathing in the air and history of their temple, is the only chance he has to be a student of recompense.
To find redemption.
The dream spears him clear as thunder. Sand, and snow, and blood. Blue light, a familiar saber screaming power behind his eyes.
Familiar as an ache, her presence, the steady encroach, the trepidation, the irrepressible hope. The hurt, the solitude, the resolution. He feels himself, a distant echo of years long lost to memory.
Slender, quiet, guileless. His baby girl with stars in her eyes and galaxies hidden behind a smile he doesn’t see.
The Force has drawn a breath. Someone has stirred, someone he knows, and it terrifies him.
*
He does not take the lightsaber.
Luke takes her hand. His wrinkled, darkened left, the one that still has flesh and veins, encircles hers, hardened from trial, where she clutches the old, waking weapon. Something potent and sharp, a hum of energy, skims his skin where they touch. A look to her eyes (those eyes) confirms she, too, feels it.
It’s you. I’m sorry. Forgive me. By the Force, please forgive me.
Instead: “I thought you were dead,” hoarse and cracked.
Ann - Rey, a fluttering warmth of insight, the first warmth he has felt in ages - shakes her head.
“Luke,” she says, her challenging intent softened by wonder, and Luke quakes under the power of his name in her mouth.
She doesn’t remember.
A myth is all she has for a father.
He collapses. Knees break his fall. Hands, human and metal, clutching the nearest scrap of cloth, her leg. Face buried awkwardly, ungainly, in the fabric of her clothes. He can smell sand on her, stardust, the Force.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes.
A breath after that. Another.
He has no right to expect anything from her. Does not deserve.
Maybe, at her feet, he can find redemption.