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This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.
It's a sad story, and a love story. It's tale of hope, and yet a tragedy. It's the story of a girl who gained everything but her heart's desire, and a boy who gave up everything (even her) so she could live, and a love that saved the galaxy but not its lovers.
So yes, this story is very sad. But somebody’s got to tell it, whether or not it turns out well. Because here's the funny thing about stories: even though this one happened long ago, impossibly far away, it's also happening right here, right now.
As I tell it, as you hear it, the story starts again.
Who knows? Maybe it will turn out this time.
#
1. any way the wind blows
There’s a squatter in the ruins of the old Lars homestead. That’s the latest gossip in Mos Eisley.
The place has been abandoned for decades—picked clean of any valuables, but left uninhabited because the Sand People range too close, these days, for anyone to feel safe there.
But then old Miri Kalsij ambles into the cantina and says that there’s a girl staying at the Lars homestead. Young and pretty, wearing bone-white robes, accompanied only by a droid. “And she’s a Skywalker, would you believe it?”
Miri is old enough to remember the commotion when Anakin Skywalker became the first human to win a pod-race, then vanished off Tatooine before any of the Hutts could buy him. She remembers, too, when Cliegg Lars made a minor scandal by marrying Shmi Skywalker after he bought her freedom.
One of Miri’s brothers died in the same raids that killed Shmi, and she doesn’t forget that either.
“They say Anakin Skywalker became a Jedi,” says Miri, pounding her cane against the floor. “A great war hero, he was. Maybe this Rey is his granddaughter, come back to finish what he started and wipe out the Sand People once and for all!”
Rey Skywalker is indeed a Jedi, but she proves a disappointment to old Miri. Instead of wiping out the Sand People, she brokers peace treaties between them and the settlers. It means there are fewer deaths on all sides, but some people still grumble that the “murderous barbarians” are allowed to live, and even walk the streets of Mos Eisley.
Then—three years after her arrival—Rey drives the Hutts off Tatooine.
The stories are as wild as they are contradictory, but they all agree on one thing: Rey Skywalker turned up at Obbo the Hutt’s palace and demanded that he release his slaves. When he refused, she cut him down, and she cut his men down, and by the time the sun set, it was known that the last Skywalker would not allow any member of the Hutt Cartel to survive setting foot on Tatooine again.
When people thank her, she just smiles. “I’m a Jedi,” she says. “This is what we do.”
Ekta Kalsij is Miri’s great-granddaughter. She’s listened to her nana’s complaints for the past three years, but when she learns about what Rey has done to the Hutts—
Well, Ekta is only fourteen, but she’s still lost someone. Two years ago, her friend Sajja disappeared. Everyone knows she was taken to Obbo’s palace and didn’t survive it, but nobody wanted to talk about it.
Ekta is very thankful that Obbo is dead. So she packs a basket of kimka songfruits, and she goes to the old Lars—the old Skywalker homestead.
Rey is there in the central courtyard. She’s sitting with her eyes closed and her legs crossed, hovering two feet off the ground as she whispers, “Be with me. Be with me.”
But nobody is with her. Ekta can see it, and she can also hear it in Rey’s broken voice.
“Hey,” she calls out.
In one graceful flurry of movement, Rey is on her feet, lightsaber drawn. Ekta doesn’t flinch; she’s too entranced by the beautiful golden glow of the blade.
“Sorry,” says Rey after a moment, switching off her lightsaber. “Who are you?”
“I’m Ekta. My friend got taken by the Hutts.” She holds out the basket. “This is for you.”
There’s a strange eagerness in Rey’s eyes as she accepts the basket, and Ekta realizes: this woman grew up hungry.
“Thank you,” says Rey. She turns to go inside, and Ekta trails after her.
“Do you really live here all alone?” asks Ekta. They’re in the kitchen now, which doesn’t look any different from all the other homestead kitchens Ekta has seen, but none of those kitchens had Jedi in them.
“Yes,” says Rey. “I belong here. I’m a Skywalker. So I’m happy.”
Ekta thinks there is maybe something a little sad in Rey’s smile.
“Really?” she asks.
“Really,” says Rey. “And anyway, I’m waiting for somebody.”
Her gaze drifts to the side, and Ekta looks too—through the doorway, to the wall that is etched with one thousand and ninety-five little marks.
What a long wait, she thinks, but Rey still has that small, brittle smile, and so Ekta puts the thought away.
Five years pass, and ten, and twenty. Then fifty, then seventy. Rey Skywalker is brave and gentle and good. She wears white to the end of her days, and she dies alone within the bone-white walls of the old Lars house, her body melting into the Force.
For many, many years after, people say that she’s not dead, just hiding in the wind, and the Hutts don’t dare land on Tatooine.
But she is gone. Maybe, in the Force, she learns to truly smile again.
#
No. This isn't right. This can't be how it ends.
This story happened a long time ago. It is already over.
But let's tell it once again, as if it might turn out this time.
#
2. when the chips are down
They call her the Red Death.
They call her the Revenge of the Sith.
They call her Darth Kira.
She hears all those names, and she laughs at them, running her tongue over teeth she has filed down to points.
Nobody knows her (not like he did) so nobody can name her. She accepts the worship of her acolytes, she glories in the desperate prayers of her victims, but none of them can touch her.
Kylo Ren knew her. Ben Solo loved her. But he is dead, and now the girl who was once Rey from Nowhere, once Rey Palpatine, once All the Jedi—
She is hardly even a girl anymore.
She is hunger, and she is rage, and she is done with wearing a smile and dancing to the Force’s tune. What did waiting and hoping and being good ever get her? She was alone, and for a moment she was not, and then the Force made her so absolutely alone that now there’s a bleeding wound in her mind, always, always.
So now she will take everything in revenge.
Right now, what she’s taking is Coruscant: the planet that is one endless, eternal city. One hundred billion people live there, and yet not one of them is—
—Ben—
—and for that failing, she will destroy them all.
There is fire falling from the sky, as Darth Kira’s forces clash with Coruscant’s planetary defense squad. She herself has already landed with a squadron of Sith Troopers, and she admires the kindled sky as she strides down the grand avenue toward the remains of the Jedi Temple.
“REY!”
She turns and sees a man striding out of an alleyway, his green lightsaber ignited.
Once she had tried to train him. Once she had thought that his friendship was enough to fill the void in her chest.
Once, she had been wrong.
“Finn,” she says gravely, snapping her saber-staff open.
“Rey,” he says again, and he makes the name into an open wound. “Please. Come back. I can help you.”
She said something similar once, and was also completely wrong. If only she could make Finn understand that the Light is a liar and a cheat.
“Join me,” she says, “and I won’t have to kill you. We can rule together, Finn.”
His only answer is a lunge, his lightsaber swinging, and so she replies with her own parry.
Finn is strong in the Force. But he’s too simple. Too honest. As they dance through the empty street, she drives him back relentlessly, until at last she has cornered him against the wall of a building, her glowing blade held to his throat.
“Surrender,” she whispers.
Finn meets her gaze, a strange acceptance in his eyes as he switches off his lightsaber.
“Rey,” he tells her gently, “I’m sorry.”
A moment later, the bullet from Rose’s sniper rifle rips through her brain and sends her to rest.
#
But that is not how it ends.
That cannot be how it ends.
#
3. how long, how long, how long?
Rey from Nowhere became Rey of the Resistance, discovered she was Rey Palpatine, and then chose to become Rey Skywalker.
That’s the story that people tell about her, and it’s one that Rey has accepted. She waited for nobody; she was a Palpatine; she is a Skywalker.
It’s only late at night, when she’s alone in her bunk, that she can admit to herself: she wants something . . .
“More” is the wrong word. When Finn hugs her and understands without words, and Poe doesn’t understand at all but still puts his life on the line for her, and Rose is able to make her talk without feeling she’s re-gouging an open wound—
None of them are “less” than anything.
But she does want something else.
That something isn’t possible, though. So Rey puts the longing away, locks it up under a layer of smiles. She trains Finn, and laughs at Poe’s jokes, and hugs Rose when she needs it.
Late at night, she whispers to Ben, and hopes he can hear.
(I love you. I need you. I want you. What am I, without you?)
It’s not all bad. She gets to see the sunrise on a hundred planets, hear the leaves rustle in a thousand forests. As she grows older—watches Finn realize how much he loves Rose, and Zorii propose to Poe—she understands how precious it is to have somebody you hold dear. To have that person stay and build a life with you, even if it’s not the life and the person that you wanted. When Finn and Rose have their first baby, when Poe and Zorii finally get married, Rey cries happy tears.
Her friends are alive and happy. Her students are alive as well. She is no longer alone, nor is she the last Jedi. That’s a happy ending, isn’t it?
No.
But it’s close enough.
#
Almost. This is almost right.
But still: this can't be how it ends.
This story isn't about you or me. It’s about heroes long ago and far away. But it's still our story, because right now we're telling it, you and me.
And here's the secret, here's the deepest truth: a story can be happy or sad. We'll sing the tragedies too, and be thankful.
But if a story isn't right, it isn't real.
So let’s tell it again.
#
4. we raise our cups
This time, let’s look ahead. Let’s start ten years in the future, in a sunlit room where ten children sit alert, staring down one of their caretakers.
“Where’s Master Finn?” a girl demands.
“He’s resting.” Rose crosses her arms and stares down the room full of younglings. “Did you see him when he got back from his mission last night? No? He needs rest. So today, I’m your teacher.”
A boy wrinkles his nose. “You’re not a Jedi. You’re nobody.”
“Don’t say that, she’s Master Finn’s wife,” the girl next to him scolds, but Rose laughs.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m nobody. Just like Rey Skywalker. You all know who that is, right?”
Eyes go wide and wondering all around the room.
“She was the Last Jedi!”
“She defeated the Sith and brought balance to the Force!”
“She was Master Finn’s best friend!”
“She was all of that,” says Rose. “She was my friend too. And she was nobody, once. Just a scavenger, trying to survive on Jakku.”
She tells them the story: how a girl from nowhere got dragged into the Resistance, spoke with Han Solo and Leia Organa, went to train with Luke Skywalker, and—impossibly—fell in love with Kylo Ren, who was also Ben Solo. How she learned that Emperor Palpatine was her grandfather, and lost her life defeating him, but Ben Solo gave his life to bring her back.
How she trained Finn Tico in the ways of the Force, starting a new Jedi order.
And then she left.
“I bet she had a vision of even more Sith to kill,” a boy says excitedly.
Rose shakes her head. “Rey said . . . she didn’t think Ben Solo was really dead. They were a dyad in the Force, and she was still alive, so that meant some part of him was alive too. She wanted to find that part of him, and give him a chance.”
There’s a short, eager silence.
“Did she find him?” a girl asks.
Rose smiles sadly. “I don’t know. Maybe. But this is what we know for sure: Rey spent her life saving what she loved. That’s what it means to be a hero. That’s what it means to be Jedi.”
#
Maybe she found him again.
That’s almost enough: a comma, an empty space, a gap where you’re allowed to hope.
But it’s still not an ending.
A story is real when it ends, when the arc and the shape is right, every word a hymn to what came before.
Is it real now? Not quite.
So let’s try again. After all, somebody’s got to tell the tale, whether or not it turns out well.
Maybe it will turn out this time.
#
5. wait for me (i’m coming)
The ancient Jedi texts and Master Luke’s journals barely hinted at this place: the World Between Worlds.
But Rey has opened ancient holocrons that speak of it, and so many nights she has woken from dreams of a living darkness spangled with stars. When she finds the entrance on the ruins of Exogol, she doesn’t hesitate.
She walks through a low stone archway into the darkness, into the dreaming. Into the place that is and is not.
Above her is a vast, dark sky full of stars. Beneath her, an endless ocean of water only two inches deep. Each step she takes splashes and ripples, and voices whisper in the splashes.
There’s no compass and there’s no map. All she has is hope and scraps of dreams. So Rey just walks forward, every step an act of hope.
Wait for me, Ben, she thinks. Wait for me. I’m coming.
After a while, she realizes there’s somebody beside her, striding solemnly in time to her eager steps.
“Attachment is not the Jedi way,” he says to her.
“What do you know?” Rey demands. The voice is vaguely familiar, but when she looks to her left, the man she sees—a calm Jedi dressed in white, with a red beard—is nobody she has met before.
“Don’t tease her, master,” says a voice on her right, also hauntingly familiar. “You know you’re going to help her.”
Rey turns to the new voice, and sees a young man whom she does recognize, because she has dug up old holos on Naboo.
“You’re Anakin Skywalker,” she blurts out, and now there’s anger bleeding into her chest. “Why didn’t you ever talk to him?”
All Ben had ever wanted was somebody to understand him, accept him. Somebody who wasn’t afraid of the darkness in his head. He’d been so desperate for that, he’d turned to Snoke and a false phantom of Vader.
The galaxy had bled for that wound. So had Ben.
Anakin looks abashed. “I tried,” he says. “But Palpatine . . . had closed Ben away from all of us.”
“Which is why you must set things right,” says the man that she realizes must be Obi-Wan Kenobi. “Attachment isn’t the Jedi way, but compassion is. And Ben Solo needs your compassion.”
“I know that,” Rey says impatiently. “Take me to him?”
“We can only guide you part of the way,” says Obi-Wan. “But we will help you as long as we can.”
For a long while, the World Between Worlds is featureless and empty as they stride through it together. But then they begin finding wreckage in the shallow water: a speeder that makes Anakin grimace, an Old Republic fighter that Obi-Wan sighs at.
Rey doesn’t understand their reactions until suddenly they come upon the wreckage of her AT-AT, where she lived as a child. When she sees the looming hulk, it’s like there’s a hook in the back of her neck, pulling her forward.
She wants to go back. She wants to scratch off days on the wall again. She wants that easy, mindless simplicity of waiting without moving.
Anakin catches her arm.
“Don’t,” he says, his voice taut. “If you go into the past that way . . . you won’t come out.”
Rey struggles for only a moment before her brain starts working again and she stumbles back, her stomach churning in sudden revulsion and fear.
She left Jakku. She was stronger than Jakku. Why does part of her want to return to being a helpless child?
“Attachment,” says Obi-Wan, “is a powerful temptation.”
The words are strict, but his voice is not. Rey sees the sorrow in his eyes, and she wishes she had a lifetime to learn from him.
Together, they go on. They pass the wreckage of an X-Wing, a Naboo palace, a Star Destroyer, a Tatooine homestead, the Millenium Falcon.
At last they come to something like an end: a vast, round hole into which the water that sloshes around Rey’s feet rushes eagerly, chattering and echoing.
“We can guide you no further,” says Obi-Wan. “But what you seek . . . lies below.”
Rey nods, unafraid. Already she feels a call like the cave on Ach-To.
“Thank you,” she says, striding forward.
“Rey!” Anakin calls to her, and she looks back. “Tell him I’m proud of him!”
“I will,” she promises, and jumps.
She falls.
She drifts.
She sinks and she is.
At the utmost end of the World Between Worlds, at the deepest depth of nowhere-and-everywhere, Rey does not find Ben.
She finds a woman made of the Light.
“They call me the Daughter,” says the woman. “But to you, I could be a mother. If you want to stay.”
Rey doesn’t know how to respond to that. All she knows of “mother” is a hungry absence, and the hope that she was abandoned for good reasons.
“Where’s Ben?” she asks.
The glowing woman drifts closer to Rey, and touches her heart. “Here,” she says. “You are one. Did you not know?”
“Yes, but—that’s not—he isn’t with me,” Rey protests.
“You’re a dyad in the Force,” says the Daughter. “He is always with you. He lives in you.”
“He’s not alive,” says Rey. “Tell me how to make him live.”
For a long, silent moment, the Daughter regards her.
“He is not dead,” she says. “He cannot be, for he is one half of you. You have never heard his ghost because he is always with you, in you, part of you.”
“So?” Rey demands.
“If you would give him a life outside of you,” says the Daughter, “if you would draw him out of your heart, then you must walk out of here without acknowledging him, without looking back at him. Can you do that?’
Rey’s heart pounds against her chest. “I can,” she says. “I will.”
The Daughter smiles sadly. “I hope you do.”
#
6. if you wanna walk out of hell
Rey can’t remember how long she’s been walking. The reasons why are pretty vague too. All she knows is that she can’t look back, whatever she does.
She’s walking down the narrow street of a city, a dozen species thronging past her, chattering and laughing and bargaining with the vendors who line the street. But though this isn’t Jakku, Rey is wearing her old scavenger clothes; sand and dried sweat are caked onto her skin.
Rey is tired, too, with the kind bone-deep exhaustion that’s half hunger, after the hunger has become so bad you don’t feel it anymore. Worse than that, there’s a horrible feeling at the back of her head: a gap, a yawning wound, a nothingness that will swallow her whole if she doesn’t keep moving.
She knows that if she looks back, the hole in her mind will stop hurting. But there’s a reason she can’t do that.
There has to be a reason.
“Rey!” Poe calls. He steps out of a vendor’s stall, smiling that easy grin she knows so well. “Hey, what are you doing? Rey?”
“I’m busy,” she mutters, pushing past him. Poe, for all his faults, has never been that hard to ignore.
Then she sees Leia standing in the middle of the street ahead of her, and Rey’s heart contracts in her chest.
“Rey,” says Leia. “What’s wrong? Don’t you want to earn my brother’s lightsaber?”
“Master Leia,” Rey whispers. “I’m just . . .”
She can’t find the words to finish. She doesn’t fully know what she’s doing, why it’s so important. She’s just sure that she has to keep walking and not look back.
“Oh, Rey,” Leia sighs, shaking her head, and Rey feels like she’s dyng.
Leia has been so kind to her. She’s been a mother that Rey could earn, and oh, it hurts to refuse that offer, to walk motherless into the unknown.
But she does.
Darkness washes over the street, and then light. Suddenly Finn is beside her, tugging at her arm.
“Rey,” he asks. “Why do you need him? Aren’t we enough for you?”
She nearly breaks at that question from the first person who ever loved her.
But there’s somebody who needs her to keep walking. Somebody who needs her more than Finn does. She can’t remember everything, but she knows that much.
So she walks.
Now everything is dark. The city is gone. Rey is alone, alone, and she wants to stop. She wants to curl up, and carve marks on the wall, and wait.
But she knows that somebody is waiting for her. Somebody needs her to keep coming, to come back.
So she does. She walks and she walks and she walks, and she doesn’t look back until she’s stepping out into the ruins of Exogol, and somebody seizes her from behind in a firce embrace.
And then she doesn’t need to look, because she remembers now. She knows the hands squeezing her shoulders and the face pressed into her hair. She knows him, and the Force is singing between them: a dyad miraculously made whole.
“Rey,” Ben whispers. “You had a life—how could you risk it like that?”
Rey smiles up at him through sudden tears.
“Because I love you, stupid.”
#
7. if she can do it, so can we
This is the story, the real story that sings between the stars: Ben loved Rey, and he died so she could live. Rey loved Ben, and she brought him back to life.
Can you see it?
Can you hear it?
Can you feel it?
On a sunny day, there was a planet full of green: leaves singing and grass rustling in the wind. There was a small house, and a garden full of vegetables, and a field of flowers.
There was a girl who had always been alone, and a boy who had never been given a choice. Together, they found what they had always lacked.
The planet was called Mustafar. It had been (for so long) a world of pain and lava, parting and loss. But it was changed now. It was beginning to hope and to heal.
It was not yet healed; that is something different, which takes a very long time. But it had begun.
The boy and the girl, they had begun to heal too. The people who lived on Mustafar, and the friends who came to visit them, were witnesses to that. To their love, and to their hope.
Everybody looked and everybody saw that spring had come to the galaxy again.
That’s the true story, the real ending, the one that lives and breathes.
So we’re gonna tell it again.
We’re gonna tell it again and again and again.