Chapter Text
Location: Archanis Sector - A Few Weeks Later
Tatooine announced itself before they reached it.
Luke felt the planet arrive in his awareness the same way he had felt Dagobah arrive, not as a point on a nav display but as a quality in the Force, a specific pressure behind the eyes, familiar the way a smell is familiar before the memory attached to it surfaces. The ship was still in hyperspace. The planet was still twenty minutes out. None of that mattered. He had known the way home since he was old enough to know anything, and the knowing operated on a frequency below instruments.
He pulled back on the hyperdrive lever.
The stars un-stretched. Tatooine hung in the viewport, ochre and rust and the pale brown of a world that had decided on a single, exhausted color and committed to it. The twin suns were just clearing the horizon on the day side, throwing long shadows across the dune fields from orbit, making the planet look briefly like it had depth it didn't have. Luke had seen it from space before. He had never once found it beautiful. He found it beautiful now, which told him something about the last several months that he did not have adequate language for.
"That's it?" she said.
Leia was in the co-pilot's seat with her hands in her lap and her attention on the viewport with the careful, cataloguing quality she brought to everything she hadn't decided what to feel about yet. He had been watching her do it since the medical frigate. She looked at new things the way a senator reads a bill she's been handed by someone she doesn't entirely trust , completely, without performing a reaction, holding the impression until she knows what it actually is.
"That's it," Luke said.
She was quiet for a moment. "It's very plain."
"Yes, it is."
"I wasn't going to say that."
"You were going to say something similar." She chuckled.
She did not disagree with this. Artoo chirped something from the rear hold that managed to convey, without any syntactical ambiguity, that he had opinions about this homecoming and had decided to express them at volume.
"He says the port lateral stabilizer is running warm," Threepio translated from the rear compartment, with the tone of someone who had decided to be useful rather than comment on the sand.
"On this type of ship it always runs warm," Luke told him. "Artoo's been saying it since the fleet."
"Oh my!" Threepio said.
Luke brought the ship down through the atmosphere on manual, the way he always did over Tatooine. It wasn't a habit exactly, just a specific preference of a man who had learned to fly over these formations as a teenager in a beat-up T-16. The Jundland Wastes rose up below them as the thin cloud layer broke apart. It highlighted pale rock formations like the broken teeth of something enormous, the narrow slash of canyon routes he'd navigated a hundred times before he knew what navigation was. He looked to the south and knew the way to his old homestead without looking. Ben's hut was northwest, set back from the cliff face where the rock sheltered it from the worst of the wind off the Dune Sea. He aimed for the hut.
Leia watched the terrain roll past beneath them and said nothing for a long time. Then: "You grew up here."
"Yes. Though I spent most of it trying to leave." He kept his eyes on the rock formations below. "Reckless about it, mostly. Always imagining myself somewhere else."
She absorbed this. He could feel her thinking, the Force around Leia in a thoughtful moment had a quality like deep water, still on the surface and moving steadily underneath. He was still getting used to it. He suspected he would be getting used to it for a long time.
"Despite what I see, I can still feel the life in it through the Force."
He set them down on the flat stone apron outside the hut, the U-wing's landing struts finding purchase on the rock with a complaint of hydraulics and settling dust. The hut was smaller than he remembered. That kept happening. The farm had seemed enormous when he was a child, all that flat scrubland and sky, and he had gone out into the galaxy and found something larger and come back to find that the measure had shifted permanently. The hut was a dome of pale stone with a dark entry and one small viewport, crouching against the cliff face as if it had been trying for years to make itself harder to find.
He cut the engines. The silence of the desert came in immediately, absolute and indifferent, the silence of a place that had been doing this since before anyone was there to notice.
"Stay with the ship for a while." Luke told Artoo over his shoulder. "Run the diagnostics and keep an eye on the stabilizer logs."
A single, eloquent beep. Translation: I know what diagnostics are. I've been running them since before you could walk.
"I know you do," Luke said. "Please run them anyway."
He opened the side door and stepped out. The heat hit him like an old acquaintance, neither welcome nor entirely unwelcome, just there, exactly as remembered. The heat of Tatooine held no moisture in it at all and therefore felt different from every other kind of heat he'd encountered, more total somehow, less negotiable. He stood on the stone apron and breathed it in.
Leia came down behind him, squinting at the glare, and looked around at the rock formations and the scrub and the vast, pale, indifferent sky.
"It's hot," she said.
He smiled slightly. "It is."
She looked toward the small hut sitting back against the cliff. "So that's where he lived for nineteen years?"
"Yes he did, my entire life."
She walked past him toward the entrance, ducking through the low archway. He followed.
The interior was clean in the way things are clean when they have been empty for a long time and the wind has done the work of hands. The small table was still there, the low curved bench against the wall, the shelf where Ben had kept things Luke had never examined closely enough. All of it covered in the fine pale dust that worked its way into everything on Tatooine regardless of what you did to stop it. The air smelled of old stone and mineral dryness and something underneath both of those that Luke could only identify as absence , the particular smell a space develops when whoever made it a home has been gone long enough for the space to forget them.
He moved to the shelf and ran a finger along it. The dust came away in a neat pale line.
Leia stood in the center of the room and turned slowly, taking the measure of it. She had that quality Luke had noticed in her since the frigate , the quality of a woman paying very precise attention to everything around her and processing it through a register she hadn't known she had until recently. The Force. She wasn't doing it deliberately yet. She was just doing it, the way she had always done it, the way she'd always thought was politics or intuition or the sharp edge of intelligence she'd cultivated since girlhood.
Luke had told her, on the frigate: You've been feeling it your whole life. It just has a longer name.
He watched her turn in the old man's space and felt it in her , the Force moving through her response to the room, reading the history of it in a register below sight.
"He was careful," she said. "About what he let in."
"He was."
"You can feel it. The room is very controlled. He decided exactly what this space would be and then he made it that." She frowned slightly, not in disapproval , in recognition. "I've done that. Every object chosen, every object useful."
"He was in hiding," Luke said. "He had nineteen years to make the hiding comfortable."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she crouched down near the base of the wall and touched the stone, and Luke felt the Force move through her fingertips in the specific, receptive way she was developing, not pushing, just listening.
"He was also lonely," she said.
Luke nodded, and stood with it for a moment, and felt the truth of it, and felt the complicated thing underneath the truth: that Ben had been lonely in this room for nineteen years, watching over a boy who didn't know he existed, unable to be what he was, unable to speak, measuring out the years in cautious waiting. And Luke had not thought about that, not precisely, not the specific human weight of it, until this moment.
"My uncle never wanted him around the farm. Drove him off whenever he came close. I vaguely remember him appearing once with a toy model or something, then being gone."
He found the meditation mat in the corner, almost behind the low shelf, folded once and then folded again, the fabric worn smooth at the center where hands and knees had settled into it across years of use. He picked it up. It weighed almost nothing. He carried it like it weighed something anyway.
Leia watched him.
He didn't explain. She didn't ask.
He had not planned to go to the farm.
He had told himself, on the medical frigate, that Ben's hut was the only destination , but standing in that room with the mat in his hands, some pull redirected him. He wanted to see it one final time. To look at the place his life had started and find out what it looked like now that he knew what it had been for.
He said goodbye to the homestead on the night the droids arrived, watching it burn from the ridge, and he had not looked back. He had gotten very good at not looking back. This felt different , deliberate, chosen. A last accounting rather than a flight.
Since Dantooine, the Force had changed in texture for him. Less like a tool he reached for when he needed it and more like weather he was always inside. He'd stopped noticing the moment it happened. He thought Leia should understand that before she built her own relationship with it , that the change, when it came, would be quiet and total and arrive without ceremony.
He got up carefully, moving across the room where he thought she was asleep.
"Where are you going?" Leia asked from the bench.
"Out to the farm. I want to see it."
"I'm coming with you."
He turned. "You don't have to."
"If it matters to you, it matters to me." A pause. "Also I want to see where my brother grew up."
He waited outside while she gathered herself, then led her to the U-wing to pull out the speeder bike they'd borrowed. Before starting it, he leaned back through the door and told the droids they'd be back before dark.
The path from the hut ran southwest, down the ridge line, along the old speeder track he'd worn into the dust when he was sixteen. He hadn't meant to take it; his feet decided. The homestead was two kilometers south. He could already see the collapsed dome of the main hall rising above the ridge.
They stopped on the rise and looked at it.
"That's where you grew up," Leia said.
Luke didn't answer right away. She noticed, and took his arm as they stepped off the speeder bike.
"I'm right here, Luke."
He nodded, and they walked the rest of the way together.
Location: The Lars Moisture Farm - Some hours later
The fire had done its work thoroughly. Three years and the desert had done the rest, filling in what the fire had left, the way the desert filled in everything eventually, patient and absolute. The outer walls still stood solid, built to outlast the harsh environment of Tatooine. The roof line of the main dwelling had come down at some point, inward rather than outward, the weight of its own ruin. The vaporator array was still visible, the tall struts rising from the sand at the edge of the south court, three of them still standing with the particular stubborn usefulness of equipment designed for a planet that wanted everything dead.
They stood on the rise for a long time. The twin suns were still low, throwing the long morning shadows across the ground, and the shadow of the standing vaporators stretched toward him across the rock and fell just short of where his boots were.
He felt the place in the Force. Not much , it was old damage, not fresh, and the desert had smoothed over its edges the way scar tissue smoothes over a wound, not gone but settled, incorporated. But it was there. The specific quality of a place where violent things had happened and time had not entirely finished with them.
He thought about Owen Lars, who had been a quiet man with a complicated relationship with dreams, who had taught Luke practical things with the intensity of a man who believed in practical things absolutely because he did not trust the alternative. He thought about Beru, who had made the best of whatever was given to her with a warmth that was not performed and not strategic and had simply been who she was. He thought about the last morning he had seen them both , Owen impatient over breakfast, Beru asking about the droids , and about how completely ordinary that morning had been, and how he had not known it would be the last one, and about how you never know, and about how that fact sits differently in you when you have been trained to feel the Force moving through everything that lives.
They had been alive in the Force. Warm and specific and present. And then they had not been.
He led Leia down the rise.
The graves were on the south side of the courtyard, sheltered from the worst of the wind by the standing section of the perimeter wall. Three of them. He had not known, until now, that there were three.
The markers were of simple construction , what the resources of a moisture farm allowed. They had been placed with care, aligned and spaced with a deliberateness that said someone had come here and done this with intention. Luke stood and looked at them and felt the Force move quietly through the soil beneath his boots.
Owen Lars.
Beru Lars.
And a third.
The third marker was older. The stone had a different quality of weathering, the edges softer, the inscription nearly gone. He crouched down and ran his thumb across what remained of the letters cut into it.
Shmi Skywalker.
He sat back on his heels and stayed there for a long time. Leia came up beside him. "Is that our grandmother?"
"It must be. I never met her. She died before I…we were born."
He had known she existed. Ben had told him his father's name. He had known there was a mother somewhere in history, a woman who had preceded the Jedi and the war and all of it, whose name he had never known to ask for. Owen's step-mother, who was also his own grandmother.
He put his hand flat on the ground in front of the marker. The stone was cool with morning shadow. The sand was fine and pale, gathered and still.
He did not know how to grieve someone he had never met. He didn't try to perform it. He just stayed with his hand on the ground and felt the place in the Force where they had been, all three of them, grandmother and uncle and aunt, and let that be enough.
"I'm sorry," he said, to the markers and to the empty morning. "I didn't come back. I should have come back."
Leia felt the weight of it move through him the way a change in temperature moves through a room, not sudden, just present, and impossible to ignore once you noticed it.
The desert didn't answer. It never did. But the Force moved through the moment in the way it moved through moments of honest acknowledgment, not dramatic, just present, the way the ground is present under your hand.
He stood. He looked at the three markers for a moment longer. Then he turned and walked back toward the hut.
"Are you all right?" Leia asked as they walked back from the farm.
He thought about this honestly. "I think so. I will be."
She fell into step beside him. They walked in silence for a moment, the rock underfoot pale and dry, the morning air just beginning to warm toward the heat it would be by midday. A pair of birds crossed the sky above them at altitude, small dark shapes against the pale.
Leia was quiet for a moment beside him. He felt her thinking, that deep-water quality, the current moving steadily under the still surface.
"I've been reading Senate records for fifteen years," she said carefully. "Old Republic history. Naboo. Anytime I found a thread that might have led somewhere, I pulled it." She paused. "I kept finding references to Anakin Skywalker. Young hero of the Clone Wars. But they are always dead-ended at the same place. His origins on Tatooine, slave background, no family history of record. The Empire had cleaned the files." She stopped walking for a moment. Luke stopped with her. She was looking out at the desert, not at him. "I found her name once in an Outer Rim settlement record in Mos Espa some thirty years ago. I didn't know why I kept it."
Luke thought about what he had said to her on the medical frigate, about the ways you move toward things you don't know you're missing. About a girl on Alderaan reading Senate records, reaching.
"She's buried with Owen and Beru," he said. "Someone took care of that."
He nodded. "I did that. It was after I discovered their burned bodies. I couldn't leave them like that."
She felt the sadness emanating off of him. Leia touched his arm giving him comfort. "You did well, Luke."
"Thank you, Leia. It means a lot you saying that."
Location: Ben’s Hut - That evening
The hut in daylight was warmer and smaller than it had been at dawn. Artoo had apparently decided that diagnostic routines were adequately complete and had let himself down the ramp, positioning himself outside the hut entrance with the expression of a sentry who was taking his duties seriously and would like this acknowledged.
Threepio was in the doorway.
"Ah, there you both are. I was beginning to consider sending a search party, though I acknowledge that a search party consisting of myself and Artoo presents certain tactical limitations given…"
"Good evening, Threepio," Luke said as he parked the speeder bike just outside the building.
"Yes, yes, good evening. I've taken the liberty of locating what appears to be a functioning heat coil in the rear compartment and have boiled some water, as it seemed the useful thing to do, though the local mineral content of the supply in the ship's stores is, if I may say, somewhat alarming."
Nodding, “I’ll have to check the vaporator to make sure it’s functional, but now
don't drink it straight," Luke told Leia. "Mix it with the ration concentrate."
"I grew up in a palace," Leia said. "I've consumed worse things at diplomatic functions and especially combat rations a time or two."
"Not in that proportion."
She gave him the expression she used when she was going to defer to his expertise and had decided not to say so, which he was learning to distinguish from her other expressions. He mixed the concentrate and handed her the result and she drank it without complaint, which either proved her point about diplomatic functions or said something about the last several months.
He sat down on the stone apron outside with Ben's meditation mat across his knees and the heat building steadily around them. Leia sat beside him, the cup between her hands. The vaporators on the horizon turned slowly in the rising warm air.
"Ask your questions, Leia," he said.
She looked at him. "I have quite a few."
"Ask the one you've been carrying since we left the fleet."
She was quiet for a moment trying to decide on the form of it, he thought, not whether to ask but how. Leia always decided on the form. She was the most careful speaker he'd ever met, which was not the same as being the most diplomatic one, though she was that too. Careful in the sense of precise: she did not say things by accident.
"What does the Force actually feel like?" she asked. She turned the cup slowly in her hands. "How do I feel it?"
He looked out at the desert. The question deserved a better answer than he'd been given, and a better answer than the one he'd been trying to find since Dantooine, and he found that the desert, which had never once been interested in what he needed, was nevertheless the right background for the attempt.
"It feels like hearing a room you haven't walked into yet," he said. "Like knowing the weight of an object before you touch it." He paused. "Like grief that doesn't have a specific address. You feel it, but you can’t locate the source because the source isn't a single thing. It's…" He stopped. Started again. "Revan told me it isn't a field created by living things. Or it is, but that's the mechanism, not the thing itself. The thing itself is what living things are expressions of." He looked at her. "It's underneath everything, in everything. It is the distance between me and you, and together. The Force is everywhere. When you feel it, you're not feeling something outside yourself. You're feeling what you are, and what everything else is, at the same moment."
She held the cup and looked at the desert and was quiet long enough that he thought she wasn't going to respond.
Then she said: "I've felt that. My whole life, I thought it was intuition. Reading people. Reading rooms."
"It is intuition," Luke said. "It was intuition and something more."
Something moved across her face, quiet and complicated, the expression of a woman reassessing a large number of things simultaneously and being thorough about it. Then she said, with the precision that meant she had found the right words rather than settling for the available ones: "When we were on the Falcon going to Bespin. Before all of it. I was sitting with Han in the cockpit and I told him something was wrong. Not strategically wrong. Fundamentally wrong. The kind of wrong that comes from below thinking."
"Yes," Luke said.
"And when I went back for you. When Chewie turned the ship around." She looked at him directly. "I felt you falling. Not metaphorically. I felt the fact of it, in my chest, like a sound with no frequency." She paused. "I thought I was losing my mind."
"You weren't," Luke said. "That was the Force you felt."
She looked at the desert again. He watched the Force move through her response to this statement. The sudden realization that a new world opened up to her, and how that new world created a new depth within her. She spent her entire life managing that mysterious force below the surface until now.
"Obi-Wan told me I was Force-sensitive," she said. "On the Falcon on our way to Bespin. He said the ability runs in the family by inheritance, like something clinical and scientific." She turned the empty cup in her hands. "He said a bunch of words, and not a lot of words. Kenobi omitted information that I’m still mad at him for.”
Nodding, Luke said. "Ben put a helmet on me on the Falcon and told me to stretch out with my feelings, which at the time I thought meant something fairly straightforward. It didn't. He left out quite a bit as well." He looked at the meditation mat in his lap, the smooth worn center of it, Ben's years of sitting pressed into the fabric. "Revan told me something different. He told me to stop trying to manage what I felt and start feeling it all the way down. That the wall I'd built between what I felt and what I did wasn't discipline. It was avoidance."
"And what’s that difference?” Leia said.
"Everything, since it forms the basis of the Force." Luke said.
She nodded, but he could feel her turning it over, not accepting it yet, just holding it against the light of everything she thought she already knew, looking for where the edges matched and where they didn't.
He didn't tell her about their father, yet. The decision sat in him like a stone , not unmovable but very heavy, the weight of a truth that had to be said at the right moment rather than the first available one. There were other things that needed to happen first. She needed to feel what the Force actually was before she could hold what it revealed. He had learned that much, at least, from five weeks on Dantooine with a ghost who had been dead for four thousand years and still understood better than anyone living what it cost to carry the wrong information at the wrong time.
He sat with his sister in the desert morning and let the silence do what silence did on Tatooine, which was to remind you of the exact size of the place you were in relative to yourself.
They went back inside and sat with what the day had given them.
Artoo had apparently completed his diagnostic cycle and graduated to rearranging the interior of the U-wing by preference rather than necessity, a preference that had already drawn a sustained objection from Threepio about the placement of the supply cases. The argument was ongoing. Neither of them paid any attention.
Luke sat outside on the stone apron with Ben's meditation mat folded across his knees and let the desert do what it did, work its way into the spaces between thoughts and hold them up to the light. Leia had gone inside briefly and come back with two cups of the mineral-heavy ship's water mixed with ration concentrate, and she sat beside him now on the flat rock with both hands around her cup, looking south toward the ridge where the farm was visible as a broken line against the sky.
"How long are we staying?" she asked.
"Until Lando confirms Boba Fett's arrival window at Jabba's," Luke said. "We’ll be here a few months…Maybe a little more." He looked at the horizon. "There are things I want to show you before we have to be somewhere."
She was quiet for a moment. "Things you want to teach me about the Force."
"Yes."
She turned the cup slowly in her hands, the same gesture she'd had since this morning, something she did when she was thinking carefully about how to receive something. "I'm not a soldier, though…" she said.
"I know, but you are more of a soldier than you give yourself credit for…you’re a leader in the Alliance. Your rank is General, is it not?”
She looked at him. "OK, you got me there," she smiled.
"What you did this morning at the graves," he said. "Without trying. Without doing anything except standing next to me and being present. That's what I want you to understand how to do on purpose." He set the cup down on the stone beside him. "The Force isn't a weapon. Not primarily. It's the difference between hearing a room and standing outside it trying to listen through the wall. You've been standing outside your whole life. I want to show you the door."
She held this for a moment. He felt it move through her Force-presence, that quality she had, like deep water, like something flowing steadily under a surface that showed nothing.
"And the lightsaber?" she said. He felt the precision in the question, she had noticed the one at his belt, the one she'd watched him use, the one he hadn't explained yet.
"That's for later," he said.
"How much later?"
"Much later. First you learn to stand in the same room as the Force without managing it up toward something useful." A pause. "That's harder than it sounds."
"It sounds already quite hard," Leia said.
"It is," Luke said. "It was for me. Revan used to say I was very good at using the Force and very bad at being in it." He looked out at the desert. "He wasn't far off.” He chuckled.
She set her own cup down and looked at the horizon. He could feel her settling into the decision, not performing acceptance, not managing toward it, just arriving at it with the directness that was entirely her own. This was what he meant. This was what she did naturally, without knowing she was doing it.
"All right," she said. "Show me the door, brother."
He started her with the most basic thing, which was also the hardest: stillness.
Not physical stillness, she was already good at that, the trained quality of a politician who had learned in the Senate that movement communicated before words could. He meant the other kind. The stillness beneath the surface, the place where the Force moved without being pushed.
He sat across from her on the stone apron, Ben's meditation mat between them, the desert doing what it did in the late morning , building heat with the patient commitment of something that had been doing this for a very long time and was not planning to stop.
"Close your eyes," he said.
She closed them.
"Don't try to feel anything specific. Don't look for anything. You've been looking at things your whole life. Right now, just...feel."
A long pause.
"That's harder than it sounds," she said. Her eyes were still closed.
"I know. Keep going."
She was quiet for a moment. He watched her in the Force , that deep-water quality, the current shifting, settling, settling again. Something was tightening when she tried to manage it. Something releasing, briefly, when she stopped trying.
"There," he said quietly. "Feel that?"
A pause. "I don't know what I'm feeling."
"Yes you do. You've always felt it. What does it feel like right now?"
She was quiet long enough that he thought she was going to say she felt nothing, which was what he had said to Yoda, which had been wrong.
"Like the morning before a difficult session," she said carefully. "When I've done all the preparation I can do and the outcome is still uncertain, I've stopped trying to control it." She frowned, without opening her eyes. "Just before that feeling."
"Yes," Luke said. "That's it exactly."
Something moved across her face, not surprise exactly, but recognition. The specific look of a person finding a word for something they had felt so long they had stopped questioning it.
He did not push further. He had learned from Revan that the first lesson wasn't instruction, it was permission. Permission to stop explaining the feeling to yourself and let it simply be the feeling.
They sat in the building heat for another hour. He said very little. She said less. The desert was patient with them both.
The days settled into a shape.
Mornings they worked, the word trained felt premature, too formal for what they were actually doing, which was closer to an extended act of listening. Luke would lead her through the stillness exercise first, and then, as the morning built toward the midday heat that drove everything sensible inside, he would speak, and she would ask questions, and the questions she asked were better than the ones he'd asked at the same stage because she was Leia and she had spent twenty years thinking carefully before she opened her mouth.
"Why does it feel different depending on the person?" she asked one morning. They were inside the hut, the desert sun at its peak and the stone walls doing what stone walls did on Tatooine, which was almost enough to make the heat tolerable.
Luke thought about this. "Because it's being expressed through them," he said. "Through who they are. The Force doesn't have a single quality, it has as many qualities as there are living things expressing it." He paused. "What you feel from someone is the Force moving through that particular person's particular life. Their history. What they've done with it."
She sat with this for a moment. "I've always been better with people than with rooms," she said. "Threepio thinks it's because I'm naturally diplomatic." A dry pause.
"He's not wrong," Luke said. "He's just not seeing the layer underneath."
"Which is?"
"That your natural ability in the Force runs through people. That's your door, you feel the Force as it moves through people. The shape of someone's feeling, the specific quality of their pain." He looked at her. "That's not diplomacy. Diplomacy is what you do with it."
She was quiet for a long time. Something moved through her Force-presence, deep and complicated, the current rearranging , the way a person rearranges a room they've lived in for years when they finally understand what it was for.
"All right," she said. "I want to keep going."
Lando's message came a few days later. It was brief, encoded in the protocol they'd established on Sullust, Boba Fett had not yet arrived at Mos Eisley, but Lando's source at the port had confirmed contact: a Mandalorian ship on an inbound heading, arrival estimated inside the next few months. They had time, not unlimited, but enough."
Luke encrypted his response and sent it and sat with the timeline. Enough to keep going, enough to know that the planning would need to accelerate in time. He'd already begun working through the elements, the plan was complicated in the way plans requiring multiple moving parts were always complicated, with the additional complication that one of those moving parts was getting Han Solo out of a carbonite block from the throne room of a man who had tried to have him killed.
He told Leia about Lando's message over the evening fire. She took it with the directness she brought to all tactical information, absorbing it fully, beginning to calculate, the diplomat's brain that was also and always a rebel's brain running the contingencies in parallel.
"How long do we actually need?" she asked.
"To be ready for the approach?" Luke considered. "A few more months of this, and we'll be in a very different position than if we stopped now."
She wasn't wrong about that. She was very rarely wrong about what something was, even when she didn't have the language for it yet.
"It's not a simple process, but it's achievable." he said carefully.
She looked at him with the expression that meant she had already calculated this and had questions about what he wasn't saying. "No," she said. "I imagine it isn't."
The fire moved between them. Outside, the desert wound down toward its cold version of silence, the insects going quiet, the temperature dropping with the abruptness that was the only mercy Tatooine offered. They sat with the message and the timeline and the particular quality of a plan whose next step was still weeks out and had to stay that way.
Luke looked at his sister across the fire, the woman who had turned a ship around on instinct, who had stood at the graves this morning and felt what the Force was telling her without knowing that's what she was doing and thought about how far from here they would need to go, and how much she would need to be, before that was possible.
He thought about Revan's voice in the ruins: The edge is further than you think. When you believe you've reached it, keep going.
He believed that. He just wasn't sure they had enough time to reach it.
To Be Continued…