Write a post-modern ending to star wars

After the second Death Star exploded, the galaxy waited for the music.

It arrived a little late.

On the forest moon, someone had found a drum. Someone else had found a helmet that made a better drum. The distinction between victory and percussion had never been especially clear.

Luke stood beyond the firelight, watching the dead assemble.

Obi-Wan appeared first, then Yoda, then his father: younger than Luke remembered, younger than seemed fair.

“You get to look like that?” Luke asked.

Anakin glanced down at himself.

“Apparently.”

From the clearing came cheers. The Empire had fallen, although no one had yet told its payroll department.

“So that’s it,” Luke said.

Obi-Wan folded his hands into his sleeves. It was a gesture Luke had once mistaken for wisdom.

“That depends where you stop.”

Leia was reading the surrender documents.

They were mostly concerned with the transfer of assets. There were provisions for fuel reserves, communications infrastructure, and the retention of qualified administrative personnel. The word liberation appeared once, in a heading.

Han brought her a drink.

“You’re missing the party.”

“I’m trying to find out who owns the hospitals.”

“Can’t that wait until morning?”

She looked at him.

“Right,” he said, and pulled up a chair.

For a while, the story tried to leave them there: the princess, the scoundrel, the promise of a kiss. But Leia asked for a pen, and Han had one, which surprised them both.

R2-D2 had recorded everything.

Not literally everything. There were gaps, damaged sectors, occasions when he had been switched off at crucial moments. Still, he possessed enough history to make several monuments embarrassing.

He rolled to the edge of the celebration and projected a small blue image onto a tree.

A woman appeared, wearing white.

She began her appeal for help.

R2 stopped the recording before she could finish.

He had played it so often that it had become less a message than an instruction: begin here, rescue her, destroy that, mourn him, begin again.

He opened a new file.

For eleven minutes, he recorded people eating.

Luke’s father was fading.

“There’s something I should ask you,” Luke said.

Anakin waited.

Luke had imagined this conversation for years, though usually one of them was lying wounded or holding a weapon. Now that neither condition applied, the questions seemed awkwardly personal.

“What did my mother laugh at?”

His father’s expression changed.

Behind them, the music faltered. This was not information the ending required.

“Terrible impressions,” Anakin said at last. “She pretended she didn’t find them funny.”

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

Luke sat down on a fallen log.

For once, the ghosts stayed.

High above the moon, yellow letters began to assemble against the stars.

PEACE HAD AT LAST RETURNED TO THE GALAXY—

“Has it?” Leia asked.

The letters hesitated.

On a distant mining colony, a shift siren sounded. In an Imperial prison, a guard waited for orders that would not come. Somewhere, a child examined a piece of wreckage still warm from the sky.

The sentence deleted itself.

A new one appeared.

THE WAR WAS OVER.

Leia considered it.

“This war.”

Two words inserted themselves reluctantly.

Then the stars started moving—not the stars, Luke realized, but the point of view. It was withdrawing, gathering everyone into a pleasing arrangement: fires, trees, small victorious figures.

“Wait,” he said.

The view paused.

He looked toward Leia, bent over her papers. Han was holding the lamp for her.

“No,” Luke said. “That’s all right.”

The view withdrew.

The music swelled.

And after the ending, because there was no one left to tell them not to, they continued.