I want to be the first one then, the first to see them all. –Anakin Skywalker
Stars. There were a lot of them. From space they were cool and distant, a pin-prick of light in an inky sky. From where he sat, they were tiny lights, pretty, but not worth much.
He knew, however, that it was an illusion. Some of those stars were dead, and had died a long, long time ago. Others were too hot – hotter than Tatooine – to support life. Some were too cold, unable to support life even to the standard of the frozen Hoth.
Many – thousands upon thousands – could support life, though. These had populations that ranged from a ragged settler bands, to sprawling metropolis. On them lived beings of every shape, form and colour.
Each of those beings had a different set of beliefs, different abilities, interests, loves, hates and emotions. All of them lived their lives differently, with different results. All of them had some reason for existing – even if they weren't sure of that reason themselves.
The Empire threatened that. Maybe it wasn't noticeable to many of those beings out there, but it did. Some beings realised this. Others resented this. A few revelled in it, taking pleasure in the pain of others. Then there was the Rebellion – the ones who fought back. The ones who lived and died to give the galaxy a chance. A chance that Palpatine and Vader would deny them otherwise.
Luke wondered if his father had known this before he died. Had he wished he could prevent the coming choking sensation that would grip the galaxy as its life was sucked out through its own lungs? Was it over this that he and Darth Vader had fought?
He wished he could know. But there was no one left to ask. His aunt and uncle, impossibly tight-lipped over his parents, had been denied the right – the responsibility – to tell him the truth. Obi-Wan had been killed by the man – monster? – he had created; the same evil who had killed Luke's father – and the fathers of other children. Their mothers, too. Cousins. Brothers. Sisters. All stolen.
There were other things he wanted to know about his father. One or two of the people here had fought in the Clone Wars. He'd been lucky enough for them to tell him of his father – a well-known fighter pilot, famous for his skills in the cockpit and his bravery in the Wars. And about Obi-Wan: a brilliant General and a dedicated Jedi. Both had been heroes.
Sure, that was wonderful. Certainly, it was better than a simple navigator. Yet even these tidbits weren't enough for a child who was hungry for knowledge on a man who was barely more than a myth to him. A father whose image, blurred as it was with Luke's own, was just a hazy image of a dusty nine-year-old boy. Faded by the passage of time and the instability of memory.
Had Luke's father sat and stared at the stars the way Luke did? He would like to believe so. Uncle Owen had always called him a dreamer with bitterness lacing his tone. Luke had never understood why it was so dangerous to be a dreamer, to want to travel in the stars, to be a hero. Surely, that couldn't be wrong.
The Jedi had travelled from system to system, helping people, fighting in great wars (not unlike the Rebellion?), and saving lives. If there were beings who needed help then the Jedi had helped them. Had Luke's father ever looked up at the stars and thought about the sheer magnitude of what the Jedi had to do? Had he ever thought about all the beings, on all the planets, in all the systems that circled the stars which supported life, and about how many of them needed his help?
Of all those planets, with their billions of beings scattered from one end of the galaxy to the other, how many had his father seen? How many had he helped?
*****
Notes: Does anyone know the plural for metropolis?
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