Tatooine is full of ghosts, but Tatooine is all he has left.
The idea that he might have gone anywhere else seems ridiculous now. Ahch-To is as much Rey's as his now, a retreat for her and her new students. There are more Jedi every year, so many now that he doesn't know them all on sight anymore.
The First Order is no more. There's peace in the galaxy again.
Ben's old home had been nearly reclaimed by the sands. It had taken him a month to dig it out, to restore any sense of order. The work was good. The work didn't give him time to think at all. He'd fallen asleep exhausted every night, with no dreams that he could remember.
But that's over now. His survival is taken care of, and all he has are his studies, and the occasional students that Rey sends his way. It's a life he never expected, but a life nonetheless.
For the first time in his long, long life, Luke Skywalker is truly alone.
Except for the ghosts.
They aren't real ghosts. It would be easier if they were.
If they were real, he'd be able to hear, after so many years, "Hey skyboy, you just gonna sit there moping all day?" and turn to see Biggs with his arms folded and one eyebrow cocked expectantly.
If they were real, he'd be able to hear Han laughing at him: "Kid, I never would've believed it, but you've got the whole galaxy believing your mumbo-jumbo."
If they were real… he'd be able to see Leia smile again.
That loss still cuts the deepest, the most recent. Lying in her bed, weaker and frailer than he could have ever imagined, she'd held onto his hand until the very end. The peace they'd won together for a second time had come at a high cost. She'd never been the same after the destruction of her son. Luke never had either.
"Look after them," she'd said, her last words. "And when you're finished, we'll be waiting for you."
If they were real ghosts, he could take comfort in their presence. Instead, they crowd his head day after day, leaving him with little room for anything else. Biggs. Han. Leia.
So many others. Ben. Who'd died cursing his name.
Obi-Wan. Yoda. Anakin. Owen. Beru. Padmé, lost to him before he could even know her.
Friends. Compatriots. He could count the losses one by one, like telling beads to a half-remembered prayer. Some nights he did; it was the only way he could fall asleep.
If he could, Luke would ask Ben Kenobi a single question, and it would be this: Do we all end this way?
Obi-Wan, in the same hut Luke now lives in. Yoda, in exile on Dagobah. His father, alone in a way that Luke still can't fully comprehend.
"It just isn't fair!" he'd complained once, a lifetime ago in a place not far from here.
Oh, he'd had no idea. Not then.
Sometimes the shadow of that callow boy comes back to him, and he wants to rail at the universe. It just isn't fair. I did everything you ever asked of me. I gave and I gave and I gave, and this is what I get? A chance to see everyone I ever loved die?
Everyone knows that the last of the old Jedi (and the first of the new) never married. Almost no one knows how he had loved, deeply and fiercely. How he had been loved in equal measure. Not just once, but three times. Enough love for three lifetimes, and yet—each night he watches the suns go down on Tatooine, alone, again and again, aching for the three who should have been by his side.
There are still people who care about him, he knows that. And he cares for them. Rey, in particular, the daughter of his heart if not his body. But all of the people who knew him, really knew him, soul-deep, are gone.
He can still feel the missing pieces inside of him where they once lived. Some mornings, when he wakes up, he marvels that there is anything left of him at all. Some mornings, he thinks, he'll soon fade away, just like Ben did, like Yoda did.
Rey still expects him to come back some day. She thinks this is just another retreat, similar to the years he spent on Ahch-To. A chance to heal, to regroup, to center himself. He doesn't have the heart to tell her that he's tired. Tatooine is where he began, and Tatooine is where he will end.
And soon, if his intuition is correct.
He has never feared death. He'd grown up with it living just over the closest ridge, coming over to rub elbows with every person who tried to survive by drawing water out of the desert. After, he'd lived with it following him like his shadow, bounty after bounty on his head, knowing he was one of the most hated men in the Empire. And even after that, he'd been a man with an impossible reputation, one that tempted others, made him an object to be challenged and defeated, although none ever had.
He has never feared death. But he never expected he'd someday welcome it.
We'll be waiting for you, she'd said. He doesn't know if she's right. If the Force will be kind to him one last time, he'll find out soon.
#
Light-years away and not long after, Rey wakes up one morning with tears on her cheeks and a sure knowledge.
"He's gone," she tells her empty room.
#
Over the years the stories grow.
On Tatooine, they say…
...they say if the wind is blowing the right way through Beggar's Canyon, you can hear the laughter of two young men as they shout taunts at one another. Sometimes, you can hear the sound of small aircraft buzzing overhead.
...they say if you visit Chalmun's in Mos Eisley, there's one table that always stays empty, no matter how full the cantina gets. No one will sit there. "Table's taken," some of the old-timers will say, but no one will say by whom. But if you get close enough, and there's a lull in the cantina's noise, you might hear two men arguing over who's a better pilot.
...they say there's a burned old homestead outside of Anchorhead, and if you visit on a moonlit night, you'll see two figures in white, a man and a woman, kneeling before a ruined gravestone, hands linked. They say the woman has eyes like the night sky and the man has eyes like the stars.
They say Tatooine is full of ghosts.