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Luke is barely fifty three years old, and he feels ancient.
There is enough wide, empty space, enough water, on Ahch-To for him to breathe, to rest, to recenter himself after the massacre, enough uncomplicated life to buffer him while he struggles with his own heartbreak and grief, the waves around his more-or-less home low enough to soothe and high enough that he remembers, blood and salt-spattered hair, what a coming sandstorm feels like. The ruins are a good reminder, the few holocrons left – an even better one.
Luke chose his place of exile very, very carefully, and in exchange, Ahch-To has been kind to him. He is centered, for all that the hollow grief has yet to completely disappear in the Force; he doubts it ever will. He is tired, but feels like he should, maybe, finally rejoin the sentient living in a little while.
He feels old, yes, but not so heavy with it that he cannot act.
Then he feels the Hosnian system go. Not that he knows it's one of the capital systems of the New Republic – with its billions of sentient inhabitants – being wiped out of existence. What he knows is that there is something shattering in him, to echo the universe outside, something the Force tells him is too horrible for pain, and later, he will understand why Ben Kenobi had been so ready to die, in the aftermath of Jedha, of Alderaan. Had he been trained at the time...
Well. The young are resilient, maybe he would have made it off the Death Star anyway. Maybe. He doubts it.
Then, still reeling and shatteringly empty, he feels something tear through him, mind and heart and marrow, leaving behind empty spaces, tendrils bleeding light and hurt. Han. This was the absence of one of his best friends, the certainty that someone he'd been anchored to was gone, and that he'd been untrained enough not to leave an echo in the Force.
The pain is worse, on a personal level, than the deaths of his students, and they haunt him still, almost a decade and a half after. Then he thinks of Leia.
The sandstorm is about to hit.
Force damn it.
***
The girl shows up, in a very familiar ship. So do Chewie and Artoo. Luke has to fight to keep a steady expression. Solitude has left him unaccustomed to controlling his face - not that he's ever been anything but expressive, even at the height of his Jedi career.
Rey calls him out into the wider galaxy, and grief or no, age or no, it's time to go.
Why does he feel so ancient, anyway? He meditates on what he knows, folds into himself and the light as the familiar corridors of the Falcon echo with absences. The islands and oceans and ruins and birds of Ahch-To behind him, he puts together fact and intuition.
In the absence of any immediate violent conflict, humans in the Core can live well past a hundred years nowadays, even past a century and a half, with access to good food and decent medical care. That's the ones who are not Force sensitive. The fall of the Republic and the rule of the Empire have shortened the average human lifespan, yes, especially since it was mostly the young at the front lines, but...
Even cocooned in the Light, he misses Ben – Ben's ghost, Ben's wisdom, Ben's kind wry smile – so much it aches. Ben had been barely past sixty when he died, and looked old. Luke has been putting it down mostly to the harsh conditions on Tattoine, but legends had Force-sensitives living twice, thrice the natural lifespan of their species, and Ben... Ben was strong in the Force, pared down to a receptacle of light in the body of a higly suspect hermit. If the reason he'd aged so rapidly was not the extreme climate of Tatooine alone...
Everything, even epiphanies, is muted when one is deep in a meditative trance, but the Jedi kneeling uncomfortably on the cold metal grating of the cargo hold on a beloved, dead friend's ship is pretty sure he's experiencing one. Not the suns and sands alone, then. The grief... or rather, the broken bonds. That's why Ben had aged so rapidly. That's why Luke had to just... go away, after Kylo Ren (another Ben, little dark-haired Ben with his surly mouth and surly mind and prism-wide eyes) had killed his students. That's why he feels like like Han's death added decades to his shoulders, why Luke's beard went more salt than pepper in less than a week.
The Jedi can live long, healthy lives, cradled by the Force and the people they are tethered to. When the tethers snap, one by one – or, Force forbid, almost all at once – the recoil is deadly. If the Jedi in question is a good one, capable of releasing most of their grief? Only to them. If they aren't...
Another piece falls into place. His father, fallen, taking decades to reclaim what little goodness he could grasp at, in the hour of his death.
Luke unfolds, the grating leaving a lattice of indentations on his creaky knees. He goes to find Chewie, and they spend a good long while silent. Then Chewie howls, low and mournfufl, and Luke knows enough Shyriwook to recognize the sound for what it is. Lack of words, mostly, and an abundance of shared understanding. He sits a little longer, and then makes his way to wherever Artoo is hiding. It turns out to be under the galley table.
(Whoever insisted that droids have no Force presence – and Luke has perused a few holocrons authoritatively stating just that – has clearly never encountered Artoo. Or Threepio. Because banthashit they don't have a Force presence.)
Luke might have spent a good long while in exile, without any droids around, but he remembers enough binary to listen. Then he nods his head in commiseration, makes a general sound of agreement, and taps out against his friend's casing a litany of swear words that would have made his late friend proud.
Artoo beeps a few more times, then falls – creakily and crankily – silent. So does Luke. At least they can be old and creaky (and fine, fine, cranky too) together.
***
Rey's presence on the Falcon is a good thing. Leia's on D'Qar? Having his sister this close is incadescent and soothes some of the ragged edges left by... by his students, by the Hosnian system, by Han. He has no idea how she could have managed - past Alderaan, past... so many things after - to retain a Force presence this bright, this warm, but he'll take it and be desperately grateful.
After his sister reads him the riot act (and Luke very carefully does not point out that nobody just loses the coordinates to a known world, Jedi shenanigans had been involved, because he is a reasonably smart man and it does not take precognitive abilities to know when you are risking being strangled with someone's braid) she hugs him, close, close, closer, and they both feel, for a moment, too short.
Then there's a sensation of strong arms falling down around their shoulders, ghostly pins and needles and a rueful laugh, and they share a startled glance, starting to move apart – Chewie's enormous paws reel them in, by their shoulders, into another hug. Artoo bumps into Luke's knees (knees, not thighs, he's not that short, Forcedammit) and beeps a few times. Quietly. Luke relaxes into them and feels lighter, younger, than he has in years.
So much for Jedi situational awareness.