There were legends about what a Jedi Master could do.
Reverse the night. Heal entire systems of warfare and plague. Wear the sun as their crown and the stars as their cape. Turn back time. Turn back aging. Turn back Death itself. All with no more power - and yet, no greater power - than the Force itself.
Han Solo didn’t believe those legends.
“But Luke,” people would start whenever this particular topic came up.
“Exactly,” he’d snap back. Luke was a good kid. Idealistic, kind, intensely determined and sometimes, Han had to admit, frighteningly powerful. It wasn’t natural for weapons to fly out of hands with no more than the flick of a finger.
Still, disarming opponents in the middle of battle was dead useful, and besides, it was nothing like turning back the so-called tides of eternal darkness.
Han believed in Luke. He just didn’t believe in the Jedi.
This opinion only grew more pointed as Luke started poking around at what the Old Jedi taught. (Already, they were called the Old Jedi. Luke was a Jedi - that wasn’t really a question. But everyone who knew the slightest bit about the Jedi recognized that Luke was something new, something game-changing, something fundamentally different.)
“So you’re telling me,” Han said, locking eyes with Luke and drawing out the words with deliberate slowness, “that the Old Jedi believed love would destroy the galaxy?”
“Attachment,” Luke clarified, wearily dragging a hand over his eyes. “They thought attachment had too many - too many risks, I suppose.”
“No love without attachment, kid,” Han said warningly, taking another drink.
“Yes,” Luke said, his eyes lost in shadow. “Yes, I know.”
Yes, Luke did know, Han had to admit.
“You’d better not go telling anyone that attachment is the root of all evil, Luke,” he said seriously, standing. “That sounds like something the Empire would say.”
“I told them that not controlling your feelings, especially your feelings for others, is dangerous because it can hurt those you love, and everything else, too. Not just for Jedi. For everyone. But especially for Jedi. I think that’s what the bits of old texts I found originally meant.”
“And if they didn’t?” Han asked sharply.
Luke went still. “Then that’s what they should have meant,” he said softly, and there was something in his voice that reminded Han how light and safe were not always the same word. Particularly when you were with Luke Skywalker.
“Huh,” Han said, and privately thought that Luke was already a better Jedi than the so-called Jedi Masters of Coruscant.
Still. Luke was still Luke, for all his painfully earned wisdom. Han would like to get ahold of the next person that claimed Luke was some sort of all-powerful entity and give them a good talking to, complete with anecdotes of Luke’s first few weeks in the Rebellion. If that didn’t convince them Luke was an awkward kid with a danger-prone streak, nothing would.
Leia, Han was a little more comfortable admitting, was something else. Oh, she was normal enough; well, not normal - rather commanding, a little impatient, a little - a little -
- sometimes a little turned into a lot. When Leia would march into the Council Hall with her eyes alight and the storms of war at her heels. When Leia would speak after long, unproductive hours of debate, and the whole room silenced to hear her speak, and her words spurred action where nothing else could. When Leia would sing lullabies of her childhood late into the night as Han watched her shimmer with moonlight in a room without windows.
He’d seen these things, of course, from the moment he set eyes on her, from the moment Luke had opened the door onto a young woman glowing with checked, vibrant rage in the middle of the soul-deadening Imperial Impoundment. He’d dismissed it for years as the side effect of being crushingly in love with her, but - but -
- he had also dismissed Luke’s skill with the Force, and there was only so long one could go before admitting that there did seem to be something to the supposed mystical glue of the universe. Luke, when he was particularly passionate, would shine like there was a sun inside him, and Han distantly thought that the legends had got it wrong, that the sun was never the crown of the Jedi, it was the heart of the Jedi, the blinding light that burned away darkness, and how could anyone ever compare it to something so flat and dead as a crown?
Of course, the next morning, he decided, quite firmly, that that was the last time he would ever speculate about the Force while so staggeringly drunk, and the moment was forgotten.
(So he liked to tell himself.)
Look. Han Solo had seen the underbelly of the galaxy, and with that came some truly mind-bending stuff. After a few years, he reluctantly admitted that the Force was one of those things - something to be tolerated and best avoided, something you hoped never took a personal interest in your life- but he was not too far gone to scoff at the overinflated tales of the Jedi that the galaxy amused itself with to pass the time.
Seriously, look at Luke. There was nothing more real and flawed and human than Luke. (Which only made all the stunts Luke pulled all the more terrifying and breathtaking, but his point stood.) No one was about to tell Han Solo that Luke Skywalker was light incarnate.
Except for those rare times when the galaxy looked you over and decided to prove all your notions of reality wrong. Han hated that, and was fairly good at dodging it by now - even while spending his days trailing after Luke and Leia, which was quite the accomplishment.
Now was one of those times. Luke stood balanced at the edge of the sea, utterly calm, and the second sun rose behind him as he - as he did whatever it was to “heal the rift in the balance of the Force.”
Han swallowed hard as he realized there was no second sun on Imvur.
As Luke raised his hands to the sky, the second sun burst away from Luke and exploded, hot, white power that Han could see weaving an enourmous net through the sky for the briefest of moments before it faded back into the dull, ordinary clouds.
Han hesitantly glanced at Luke, who remained quiet and unmoving. Still, there was something in his posture that spoke of violent movement clashing with utter stillness, and through it all, an utterly grounded sense of self-possession.
“Force stuff,” Han muttered, and waited for Luke to stir.
Luke finally opened his eyes as the sun - the only sun - settled across the low horizon. “It’s done,” he said with grounded finality, and Han uncomfortably, unwaveringly, believed him.
Leia came to greet them as they disembarked, her skin glowing just a little more than could be accounted for by the dull glare of the landing lights, and caught Luke up in an embrace. “How’d it go?” she murmured.
“You already know,” Luke murmured back. “But it went well.”
There were legends about what a Jedi Master could do.
Han thought, distantly, that while he had known for a while now that Luke had transcended the past, he hadn’t realized until that precise moment that the legends were about the Old Jedi.
