Dead Reckoning: To find yourself bothered by someone's death more than you would have expected.
Saudade: A somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness; longing for something that might never return.
It comes to him in the dead of night, when he's on the edge of sleep. The Force tingles around the edge of his mind in his drowsy, meditative state, still new and not-entirely-familiar, and he surrenders to the flow.
A desert fortress, a holy city in ruins, full of a history and heritage about which Luke would never learn. A sad, wise old man watching it crumble around him, greeting death with courage.
A cavernous crag-filled landscape bombarded by rain, a platform punctuated by fire and rubble. A guilty old man redeemed by death in his daughter's arms.
An island paradise scattered with debris and smoke and destruction. A pack of rebel soldiers giving themselves on the field of battle, all for a task that Luke, it turns out, completed.
Faces of men his age and older. Ordinary men, extraordinary in their simplicity. The scared yet brave pilot who lost his home city and betrayed the Empire to do the right thing. The holy man who believed and his beloved companion who came to believe at the end, in the hopes they'd find each other in the beyond. Simple soldiers unwilling to retreat and compelled to fight, for hope and for the good of the galaxy, making ten feel like a hundred, like a thousand. People like Luke, like Han, like Wedge and Biggs and Leia and everyone else he knew he'd meet now that he was in the fight himself.
The brave young man they called captain, kneeling in the sand in the arms of a young woman, tears tracking down their cheeks as a wave of sand and heat overcome them.
That woman, she's beautiful - steel and strength and sensitivity. The dark-haired man in her arms was not her lover, and what they might have been to each other had they lived, Luke cannot say. Yet Luke, he's drawn to her in a way that only the Princess had done before.
A flood of lost possibility rises within him. Dark. Melancholy. Profound. Lovely. In the span of a few seconds, he feels as though he's lived a lifetime with her: flashes of soft lips against his, warm hands in his, supple skin atop his . A child with her mother's green eyes and chestnut hair, an easy, selfless kindness, a warrior forged from steel.
He comes back to himself, chest heaving, lungs gasping, hair dampening with a cold sweat at what he doesn't understand.
How could that be? How could you miss someone you never met? How could you yearn for someone you could never meet? How could you see things that never happened?
And yet, anything was possible with the Force, he supposed.
He didn't know them, any of them, but he needed to. They started what he finished, he owed it to them to understand their pain, their suffering, their struggles. No one on base speaks their names. There'd been whispers, when he'd first arrived, but he's never had the courage to ask.
His roommate stirs in the bunk on the other side of the room. Even with no light, Luke feels his friend's dark eyes on him, his brow furrowing with concern.
"You alright, Boss?"
"Yeah." Luke lets the silence fall between them as he swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He hears the other man shift to mirror his position.
Neither moves to turn on the light. "Hey, Wedge," Luke says in a voice just above a whisper. "You were at Scarif, right?"
Notes:
I was a proud member of the "Jyn Erso is Rey Skywalker's Mother" contingent on Tumblr. This is my way of letting that go, and of subtly acknowledging what could have been. Jyn would have been worthy of that title, and I'll be forever bitter that Lucasfilm denied Rey's mother to be a strong woman in her own right, independent of her lover and child. Now we'll be stuck with another dead, empty womb that someone can call "kind, beautiful, but sad."
This is un-betaed, so all mistakes are mine. If there's anything egregious, please point it out!