Movie Trailer Writing Prompt 1: Star Wars

Time Bomb

"We're home," the man said, and immediately felt self-conscious about having said it. He was never self-conscious in his youth, he knew that. That's what this place was: his youth personified, crystallized, trapped in amber. Here was a scorch mark from the fire fight when they were boarded. Here were scratches from when they dropped the old ionic loader, trying to get it out. There was the table where the old man sat giving history lessons, the day his life changed forever without his even knowing it.

It wasn't even a proper place, really. It was a ship. A conveyance. An old YT smuggling ship, one of literally tens of thousands built by the Blind Watchmakers, practically anonymous. He'd flown the thing for less than a decade, a third of the time he'd been a respectable politician's husband, full of good-will missions trying to patch the galaxy back together.

Those intervening years, after the fall of the Empire, felt as though a bomb had gone off in his life. A Time Bomb. An explosion of accumulated years, flashing in a bright instant so that one day he was twenty-nine laughing as he fought for his life on the Sand Pillars of Crystallion, and the next he was sixty, gone gray and slow and soft around the edges, with aches and grandchildren and a white fence around his house and a retirement plan. He toyed with the idea. It wasn't the most inconceivable thing in the world. He'd been from one side of this galaxy to the other, he'd seen a lot of strange and miraculous things. Mostly in that ship. It wasn't completely out of the question. It would certainly explain why he felt more of a connection to this dusty freighter than to all the assembled certainties of his respectable life.

The ship was in dry dock on Asteroid Indigo, a museum piece that he could never bear to see put in a museum. Likewise he couldn't have it nearby in some hangar or attached garage or something. The temptation to sit back in the pilot's chair, crack open a beer, reminisce with his companion about the moons of Delta or the Wind Pirates, would be too great. He'd never get anything done and he had a job now, putting his country back together, all very official and technical stuff.

It must be a bomb because he could no longer see the straight line leading from the man he was then to the man he was now, or how that line deviated so far from the person he thought he would become.
On the bridge they went though the preflight check, pleased that everything worked and even more pleased that it all came back so naturally to him. There was a storm ahead, he knew that. But as the lights flared to life he couldn't help but remember standing at the Sand Pillars, blaster in his hands, laughing.