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Ben studies the Force because it’s all he’s ever known how to do. It’s his lone source of help for every problem in life, never mind how many times it’s led him astray and left him more lost than he was before he reached out.
His studies have a new flavour now. In texts as old as time itself, in glyphs he can only half-translate, he reads about early milestones and pre-birth exercises and the cultivation of Force sensitivity in utero. The Jedi obstetricians – a specialised field, he has learned, though one that fell out of fashion by the later High Republic era – believed a mother’s diet, hormonal balance and level of spiritual contentment could shape her child’s vulnerability to dark side temptations. Some say she should avoid all social contact leading up to birth and retreat to a sacred place for intensive meditation on the balance of the Force. Others say she mustn’t eat allium vegetables in the third trimester. Ben thinks of all the onions he has been tossing through Rey’s favourite sweet and sour pork dish, the one she’s been insisting he cook for her over and over for the last three weeks straight, and he’s paralysed by fear that his culinary recklessness will doom his as-yet unborn child to a life oppressed by the same shadows that once held him in thrall.
‘You’re overthinking this,’ Rey says, when she waddles in to find him nose-deep in three dusty tomes at once. She’s been into the pork again – talking around a mouthful, cheeks bulging like her pregnant belly, and Ben’s rush of affection makes him lose his place on the page. Pregnancy glow is not just a myth. She’s beautiful. Allium be damned, she’s beautiful. ‘It’s just a kid. People have been having them forever.’
‘And it’s been going wrong forever.’ Ben is a living example of that. ‘I want to break the cycle, Rey. I don’t want our daughter to fall the way I did.’
‘You break the cycle by being there, Ben. You stop her falling by paying attention and knowing the signs and making sure she knows she’s loved. Not by memorising all three thousand pages of…’ She squints at the book in his hands. ‘Master Terrod Stibb’s Treatise on the Proper Care and Feeding of Younglings.’
‘It’s only eight hundred pages.’
‘I need you in the kitchen, anyway. I just ate the last serving of pork.’
Ben’s cooking has been getting better. There’s a new kind of satisfaction in the work he’s taken on between spiritual research sessions: perfecting flavours, balancing macronutrients, learning how to feed a family. Master Terrod Stibb recommends a gestational diet based on fish and plant proteins. But Rey’s cravings for meat are a force to be reckoned with, and nothing he’s read in any of his books is more important than keeping her happy. Each day she carries her strong, swollen body out into the world to face the exhausting daily grind of repairing the damage his old regime did. She’s the last Jedi. The legendary Skywalker. The galaxy’s saviour. He’s a disgraced ex-tyrant, better off out of sight and out of mind. But creating a comfortable home where she can rest at the end of each day’s ordeal is one small way he can contribute to the recovery effort. Stirring and chopping and serving are tasks he can trust his bloodstained hands to do.
He thinks about what he had then compared to what he has now – thinks about what’s still to come, growing inside Rey, a bright point of light in the Force – and he’s so happy and humbled and scared, he could cry.
Still. ‘I could cook something else, if you wanted to branch out. Some nutritional variety might do you good. How about lentils? I’ve been meaning to try that stew recipe I got from–’
‘No. Pork.’
Sighing, Ben sets Master Terrod Stibb aside. He’s still overwhelmed by his fears for the future and anxious to draw on as much of the ancient wisdom as he can translate. He’s still terrified of the wrong step that could make his daughter come out not enough like Rey and too much like him. He’s still less prepared to face this challenge than any battle he’s ever fought in his life. But right now, the mother of his child needs feeding.
He can handle that much.