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The X Wing touches down on the rocky surface of Exegol in the midst of a driving early morning rain. Rey stares at the water as it pelts the glass in front of her, obscuring her vision. She glances to her right, trying to see the form of the abandoned TIE fighter, but can only make out the outline of its grey hulk. The prospect of going out into the rain turns her curiosity a bit melancholic.
What am I doing here?
She’s felt a pull to this planet for months, but seen no good reason for making the dangerous journey to come here. Most of her time is spent traveling from planet to planet ensuring that their hard won victory comes with results that matter, namely the institution of a solid republic. To that end her duties are all-consuming, so an impromptu trip to an uninhabited planet makes no sense.
You have a right to take your leave from time to time. Finn’s words from yesterday play in her mind. The truth is she’s sure he knows that she hasn’t been herself lately. Or perhaps for a long time. If she’s honest with herself, Rey hasn’t been the same since the last time she was on Exegol. It is easier to be who she is for other people than it is to be what she is to herself: an orphan, abandoned for good reason, but an orphan all the same, as well as a Jedi, with no masters and no apprentice. Grief stirs in her chest as she sighs and looks out of the glass, hoping the rain has let up. But it is hopeless. The deluge is unrelenting.
She is just going to have to face the rain and enter the fortress and that is that. She opens the hatch of the X Wing and slides out of the cockpit as quickly as possible. BB-8 bursts forth with a query.
“No BB-8, I’m going in alone. Stay here,” she says firmly as she descends the ladder to the ground. “I won’t be long. Just something…” Her words trail off as she walks away. She hears the droid’s dejected sigh behind her, and she feels a twinge of guilt. She can relate to what it feels like to be left behind.
On her way she passes the remains of the Knights of Ren, scattered and skeletal. In her mind she sees the lightening flash of the saber in the dark rain and feels herself unarmored but also unencumbered as if for the first time. But it is only a memory, and not even her’s at that.
She enters the tomb-like structure and finds it ravaged beyond her memory of it. Several times she climbs over rubble or moves boulders to make her way through. It is dark and damp as water leaks down through cracks and crevices in the broken structure. She is soon soaked to the bone, her tunic sticking unpleasantly to her skin. She is aware that she is cold and yet she goes on. She’s endured far worse.
Finally she makes her way to the throne room, which is shattered almost beyond recognition. Rocks that had been statues the size of buildings lay in ruins on the ground. But the space that she needs to get to is still mostly clear and obscured by only minor debris. She seeks the piece of ground where she died, one year ago to the day, and when she reaches it, she stands at its edge as if it is a cliff.
She stares at the ground and allows the grief to rise into her throat until it becomes painful. Curiosity about the draw to this place may have gotten her out of the door, but it is this feeling that pushed her to make the journey here. She is weary of grief, and she wants to believe that there is a remedy to be found here. She allows herself to think of her parents. She focuses on what she can remember of their faces. She is left scratching at the surface of only vague human shapes that hold softness and safety. Han comes clearly into her mind and she feels the stab of regret at his being taken before his time, and the loss of potential turns like a knife in her heart. Lastly she settles on Luke and Leia, her teachers and masters. Did they also die before their time?
Of course. They died protecting her, protecting the rebellion. From Ben.
“No.”
She speaks the word aloud into the cold dark. They died to protect everyone, but most of all her, from Kylo Ren.
She catches movement from the corner of her eye, but does not move to face it. Her grief reaches an apex. Her eyes close and she is transported back to one year ago. For the space of one breath she sees him smiling. With the second breath she sees a subtle slipping in his dark eyes. With the third breath his expression slackens. With the final breath he falls backward, their dyad collapses in on itself, and she finds herself alone on the cold ground.
When she opens her eyes he is standing before her, spectral and yet solid, clothed as he was on the last day of his life, raven hair framing his pale face. They stand silently facing one another over the ground where they died. Rey’s eyes trail his, noting the unblemished skin on his face where his scar once was. He regards her soberly, but not without care. She feels a small smile form on her mouth and she takes a breath and steps into the space between them, her feet standing in the dust where they both breathed their last.
“Hello Ben,” she says lightly, wondering vaguely if this is a dream. “I’m happy to see you.”
“I’m glad to see you too, Rey,” he responds quietly, his molten voice deep and soft as ever. It took Rey a long time to understand his voice. So much about his physicality matched his energy signature; his size and strength, his darkness, his ferocity. And yet that voice was like velvet, soft and rich, even as it was tearing her to pieces. She learned to pay attention when his voice was soft. It meant danger.
But that was before.
They are silent for a while and look at one another. As she often did before their parting, Rey feels ambivalence as she looks at him, as part of her wants to reach toward him while another holds back. For his part he watches her patiently, looking for all the worlds as if he is merely waiting to board a transport. A pang of regret calls to mind something that she feels like she needs to tell him, so she swallows hard before she speaks.
“I can talk about everyone else who is gone,” she admits quietly, flashing him a guilty look. “But not about you. Even though I told them what happened.” She stops and exhales heavily, her shoulders curving inward. “I’m sorry to say that your death goes ungrieved by everyone but me,” she finishes.
He nods and opens his hands toward her. “Monster,” he says lightly, with eyebrows raised and the trace of a smirk on his mouth.
She nods her head, her brown eyes turning downward. “I know that I can’t expect them to understand,” she states, and she feels her throat constrict, swallowing thickly as it gets harder and harder to speak. She wraps an arm across her stomach and she tries not to cry, but in the end the tears come to her eyes. She looks at him imploringly before saying, “I needed to talk to someone who understands, so I guess...that’s why I’m here.”
“How did you know I’d be here?” He asks, genuine curiosity lighting his eyes.
“I didn’t,” she replies and looks at him with a small, sad smile. Her hand goes to her face, brushing a few strands of wet hair back from her eyes, and she looks around the room self consciously. “I didn’t know why I was coming here at all. It only just occurred to me this minute that this may be the reason why.”
“Hmm,” he answers in a musing tone. She waits for him to say more but he doesn’t. He just continues to regard her with the same patient look on his face.
“How did you know to come here...wait...you haven’t been here this whole time?” She looks at him with her mouth open and brows knit. She’s appalled by the idea that he could somehow be trapped here. He laughs, and the warmth of it causes her to laugh a little too. She wipes the tears from her cheeks.
“Well, in a way I have been here, but only in the way that I’m kind of everywhere now. It’s a little hard to explain,” he says, a wistful look in his eyes.
She knows enough about the Force to have some idea of what he means, even if it is beyond what she can experience during her human life. She thinks about him being everywhere, and then about the other people she’s lost, and she imagines them being everywhere too. More tears come to her eyes. While she’s shed many over the past year, they’ve gone unseen, and even with all they’ve been through, her vulnerability threatens to overwhelm her.
She wipes the tears from her face and fixes him with a sincere gaze, saying, “You know that this could have all been different.”
His eyes narrow contemplatively and he regards her as he thinks about it. “Maybe,” he says noncommittally. “There were decision points along our path.”
“Decision points?” She balks, a wry smile forming on her mouth. “That is a peculiar way of describing it.” She holds her ground in the dust, but crosses her arms to cover her heart. He takes a step forward and comes closer as if to reassure her.
If I reached out my hand, could I touch him? Rey wonders.
“I don’t mean to be peculiar,” he says, smirking at the word, “But death makes things very clear. I see all the choices that might have pushed things in one direction or the other. I could have gone to the light and you could have gone to the dark.” She makes a sound of protest and he puts up his hands and quickly adds, “But I know you never really considered darkness,” he concedes lightly. “I did consider the light from time to time.” He shrugs and blows out a breath that she swears she feels move her hair. “So really…this is on me.”
She looks at him and nods emphatically, her arms uncrossing, hands coming together in front of her. “Exactly!,” she exclaims quietly. “Why didn’t you see that while there was still time?”
He chuckles bitterly and eyes her with a raised brow. “How long do you have? Bad family dynamics, children with too much magic for their own good, falling in with a bad crowd...the list really goes on and on.”
She smiles sadly and nods, a furrow between her brows. “Right.”
He is staring off over her shoulder when he says softly, his thoughts seemingly far away, “I think killing my father was the thing that pushed me to stay on my course until it was too late.” He sighs.
“What do you mean?” She asks gently.
“If I had left the dark path, I would have killed him for nothing. I thought I hated him. Or more precisely, I thought hating him was the answer.” He is silent then for a moment and she thinks he is done speaking, but then he says gently, “It happened, and there is no way to change it. Anyway, what do you think would have happened if we had defeated the emperor together? If we could have done it and survived. Where do you think I would have gone?”
Rey looks at him and her brows furrow. She feels confused when she asks, “What do you mean? You would have returned to the republic with me. People would know that you were changed, that you were Leia and Han’s son! You would have had a place.”
He can see that her sincerity and conviction in this belief is total, and he’s had enough experience with her to know that persuading her to see otherwise is likely to fail, so he tries to be gentle when he says, “I know you have a great deal of faith in your friends, Rey, but on this we disagree. You are forgetting the things that I did. The many people who I killed...my own father being the worst crime of all. I feel certain that had I survived we would have parted ways right where we are standing and I would be living in exile out on the rim.”
He watches as her confidence wavers and as usual it makes her angry. She is reluctant to move away, but she takes a step backward, and throws out her arms in exasperation. “So it’s better that you’re dead? Is that it? It would have taken some time, yes! I’ll give you that. But better that it take a year, or even ten, than...than…,” she fumbles with the words. The pain starts to gain ground again in her chest and throat, and she wishes it would relent.
Why is everything with him always so difficult?
When he does speak, it is a quiet plea. “And then what Rey? What would have happened? You have a place in the republic. You are a leader! How would you be able to do that with a friend like me?”
She looks at him incredulously, stunned into silence. Tears begin falling down her face, borne of both anger and sadness. “They would have accepted you because I told them to do it.”
He infuses as much compassion as he can into his voice as he says, “That sounds a bit too dictatorial for a republic.”
She breaks away like she has been slapped, but she also feels the bright heat of shame jump to her face because he is right. She would have tried to force them to take him in, to accept the changes in him that she knew were real because she could feel them. “You are...you were, literally a part of me. I knew you were good. What else could I have done?”
He shrugs and looks at the ground, shaking his head. “We’ll never know Rey,” he says softly.
The sob that escapes her rips through the air. She covers her mouth with her hand and tries to back away. But he moves toward her, hands held out gently. She stops suddenly and looks at his hands, at the simple humanity in the gesture of him reaching toward her with bare and open palms. She remembers the other times he asked her to take his hand, and again she feels that strange ambivalence, a push and pull all at once. In the end, it is curiosity that pushes her to want to reach back, but she fears all she will feel is empty space. Then she remembers another time when she reached for him under somewhat similar circumstances, when they were systems apart and yet their fingers miraculously touched through their strange bond. She remembers marveling at the audacity of it, how it unmoored her concepts for what was possible and impossible, as if things with fixed trajectories like stars could go off course on a whim. Now she reaches for his hand without thinking. Her eyes flicker to his face and he is staring at her hand coming closer to his with an attitude of complete calm. Suddenly she pauses.
“You know what’s going to happen,” she whispers, and is surprised to feel a little mischievous.
He looks at her, a smirk on the corner of his mouth as he says in that velvet voice, “I do.”
She is about to ask, but on a whim decides that she already knows too. She drops her hand and steps fully forward and wraps her arms around him, drawing his solid form into her arms and resting her head on his chest. His arms settle around her. The grief swells in her chest and she allows it space to bloom and spread throughout her body. She will not hide it from him, especially now that she is convinced that this is why she’s here.
He feels her pain as if it is bleeding through her skin and into his. “I’m so sorry you hurt so much for all the people you’ve lost,” he says softly, pressing his mouth to the top of her head. The tears spill down her face and the pain still blooms, but just as she is pouring herself into him, what he has become is pouring into her.
It is the Force. Rey has the ability to feel the Force at will, mostly during training, but not like this. When she is training she feels it as a connection between things, as if it binds the in-between spaces of her being. This is a sensation that is entirely different. She no longer detects her separateness from anything. All at once she is herself and she is every other being on every planet, everywhere in the universe. She is also a part of every being that has ever lived. It is not an overwhelming feeling, but rather one of total balance and stability. It is a level of completion that she has never felt and in its face her grief holds no power.
She pulls back and opens her eyes and then lets out a little gasp of surprise. They are no longer in the throne room. Instead, they are standing in the middle of an endless forest. The trees are massive, their branches overhead locked into a thick canopy. There is bright light above the trees, but the branches are intertwined so thickly that it is dimly lit at ground level. She knows that this is not a forest that exists. It is as still and silent as star light. There are none of the usual sounds that would suggest the existence of other life; no rustling branches, chirping birds, or scurrying sounds from the underbrush. It is only the trees standing straight and impossibly tall with their interwoven branches.
“What is this place?” Rey whispers, afraid to disturb the silence lest she break the spell. They are still holding on to one another and they both tilt their heads back to look up at the trees.
“It is my impression of the Force, what it might look like, if it had form.”
Rey looks at him and says nothing, waiting for him to continue.
He looks down to meet her gaze. “It’s a total oversimplification, of course...but try to imagine that each tree is a life form, some alive now, some long gone, but all interconnected both above where there is light, and below where it is dark.” He looks looks down past her and Rey follows his gaze to the ground where she sees that there is a complex labyrinth of roots beneath their feet.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs and stares down at the ground for a time, wondering at this sense of finality. It is utter belonging on a molecular level. For a person who lacked a sense of belonging for a large portion of her life, this is a sense of peace that heretofore she never fathomed could exist. Rey thinks of Ben’s own exile and looks back to his face.
“No wonder you don’t write,” she says, a smile coming to her mouth.
He laughs gently. “Yeah...it’s enough,” he says, sighing.
She can feel his sense of completion, that there is nothing left in him that is unfinished. Rey puts her head to his chest and they stand quietly for a long time. She is mildly surprised to hear a heartbeat, but decides not to ask. Perhaps it is his choice to be as human as possible for her, and she finds the idea endearing.
After a time Rey picks up her head and asks, “Really. Why did you come here today?”
He looks down, brushing a piece of hair from her cheek. “I knew you’d be here. I knew you were suffering and that I’d be able to share this with you because you still hold the dyad. The two entities fused when I transferred my energy to you, but part of it still recognizes me as uniquely bound to you in the Force. I knew it could be used to show you this and I wanted you to feel it so that you’d know that none of us is ever really gone.”
Her face breaks into a smile and for the first time in a long time happy tears come to her eyes. He smiles down at her.
“I don’t want to let go. Seriously, I just want to stand here for the rest of my life until I die,” she says. He nods and says nothing. He doesn’t have to. She knows that her human life has meaning and that she has much more work to do. She loosens her grip and prepares to step back. He lets her go easily. The vision of the forest fades away, and they are again standing in the throne room. When the embrace finally breaks, Rey feels her fusion with the entirety of the Force end, but her singular humanity does not come crashing back all at once, rather it ebbs back slowly, like water trickling down a slow pass. She notices some unpleasant imbalances, and her grief returns, but it has lost its teeth.
“Thank you Ben. That...that will make all the difference,” she says, ducking her head. There is something else she wants to say, but the words are hard to find.
“I can’t…,” she hedges, unsure of how to go on. Finally, after a moment or two of fumbling she finally says, “What you did... giving me your life. There are no words except to say, I will try to honor it.” She looks at him guiltily.
He tilts his head to the side and frowns slightly. “There’s a lot of old Jedi wisdom that might say that it all happened exactly like it was supposed to, that it was destiny,” he says. “From this side I’d say that isn’t entirely accurate. I chose to give you my life, because I believed you would make the best use of it. And you have, so I am glad you have it. No guilt, okay?”
She smiles and for a while they just stand and look at one another.
“I should go, BB8 is probably drowning out there,” she says after a time. He nods placidly.
“I don’t think I will come back here,” she says, kicking at the dust. “It’s not a nice place.”
He laughs, nodding. “It’s terrible.”
They smile, and their eyes catch, and for a few seconds a question lingers unspoken between them. Rey’s smile widens and she feels unsure.
Again she wonders why everything with him is always so hard.
“Well...goodbye Ben. And thank you...for everything.” She backs away slowly.
“Goodbye Rey.” He remains motionless and watches as she turns and walks away. She walks some distance before she spins around on her heels and takes several steps back. Her brow knits and the maddening push-pull feeling returns. She both knows and doesn’t know what she wants to say. She reaches up to put her hand over her heart.
“Ben, I…,” she stammers, and then stops, mouth hanging partially open, searching his eyes but unable to go on.
He smiles crookedly at her and holds her gaze for a moment before saying gently, “I know.”
He chuckles to himself and then disappears.
Rey looks at the space where he was for a few more seconds before slowly turning and leaving the throne room. The way back is much simpler since she did most of the hard work on the way in. When she reaches the outside she finds that it has stopped raining and the atmosphere of Exegol is lit with a strange, ethereal light. She is reprimanded sharply by BB8, who feels she has been gone for far too long. She climbs into the cockpit as if she is in a trance. As the hatch closes, she focuses on the control panel in front of her. A smile forms on her lips.
“Let’s go home, BB8.” The X Wing fires up and in no time at all they are leaving the atmosphere and planet behind.