101 Star Wars Variations 88: A Long Time Ago

He's looking at the girl, and the emotions churning within him are threatening to swallow him whole.  He doesn't know how to proceed.

Over the past few days, he's learned a number of startling facts about her and all of it recasts everything he thought he knew from when he first met her two years ago.  He had been working on a difficult case, the riddle about who was responsible for the Hutts gaining permanent control of Tatooine, and there she was one day, randomly and quite improbably, given all that was apparent about her, offering the kind of assistance he could have only dreamed of.

Unlike the others, she lacks a basic sense of social awareness.  She doesn't wear any of the traditional garb, but rather what some of the kids model on the fringes these days.  But it's clear that she's at best a fringe member of the fringe.  She has a tattoo of a bantha on her shoulder.  He saw it when she changed positions as they poured over her notes one day, the neckline of her shirt so wide it slid easily around as she moved.

When he had tracked her down in the cave-like dwelling deep within the dunes, he had no idea what to expect.  Only hermits had ever lived in places like that, one in particular he knew to have been directly involved in the events even before the breakthroughs she helped him make.

To think, she's the daughter of the man who caused all the trouble, who thought he was going to save the whole galaxy from some great evil.

At times she seems fragile, and others more fierce than anyone else he has ever known.  As he understands it, outsiders consider all their kind to be dangerous, but not like her, not when provoked, not when...justified.  He thinks about that.  She's the most justified person he's ever known, now that he knows the whole story, what he's come to call her saga.

A long time ago, her grandfather was born.  He was a dangerous man, too, who provoked evil and caused plenty of trouble himself.  Her father tried to undo all the damage her grandfather had caused, but in the process created more of it.  Her birth was supposed to be the start of something new, but she ended up being more of a scar than a healed wound.  She picked at it constantly.  No one knew the truth.  Not even her.

He knows others refer to their kind as "Sand People," "Tusken Raiders."  What others don't know, or haven't learned yet, is that these people in the margins, they are the ones who changed everything.  In a way, she's a direct reflection of all that.

He finds her beautiful.