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This was the kind of thing Han had always warned Ben about.
"Son, don’t drink anything unfamiliar. And don’t ever get noticed i n one of these backwater cantinas. Keep your head down."
*******
Ben had only wanted to play a little sabacc to pass the time. And he hadn’t been cheating at all, even as easy as that might have been. But his hand had gotten hot. He’d won and won and won. And with winning came drinks on the house--lots of them, green and sweet and fizzy, brought to him by a beautiful Selonian with sleek, shiny fur and bright, intelligent eyes.
The first time she’d come with her tray, he’d been a little awkward. She’d been so close to him in her brief outfit. When he slipped her a generous tip from his pile of winnings and stammered his thanks, she’d smiled broadly at him with her sharp teeth and murmured something about them both being far from their sun. It took him a bit to understand her meaning before he grasped that she’d picked up on the notes of Corellia in his accent.
He was impressed and surprised at that--Ben had lived all over, and he’d been told repeatedly that his Basic was a bit of a mishmash of accents--Chandrilan from his early childhood, of course, but muddled with a little coarse Corellian from his father and aristocratic Alderaanian from his mother, sprinkled with some rude Huttese he’d learned from his uncle, all garnished with a galactic assortment of multilingual curses garnered from his travels with Han and Chewie.
He sipped the sparkling green drink and idly wondered how his Dad and his Wookiee uncle were faring with their deal. Whatever they were doing was dangerous enough that Han hadn’t wanted Ben involved. He’d been kept on a need-to-know basis, and Han had decided Ben didn’t need to know much.
This was why he had been parked in this cantina to wait. If things turned ugly, Ben would receive a “bug out” signal on his comm and prepare to fight, then flee. His lightsaber was clipped to the right side of his belt, his blaster to the left, both concealed by his cloak. The lightsaber was a weapon of last resort--it would attract far more attention than anyone wanted, so Ben had made sure that he was a crack shot with his non-dominant hand.
But, as time went on, and he won hand after hand of sabacc, and nobody seemed to be getting too mad, Ben allowed himself to relax. His relaxation was, of course, directly proportional to the number of effervescent drinks he accepted from the pretty Selonian server, tipping well each time.
Finally, when the cards started to swim before him, and he found that he needed to concentrate far too hard on every decision he made, Ben realized that his situation might not be exactly optimal. He stood, swept up his winnings, politely informed all of the gentlebeings that it had been an honor, an absolute honor to play with them, dropped a large handful of credits into the center of the table, grabbed his glass, then, with a swirl of his cloak, stalked majestically out the cantina’s back door.
Ben’s majestic stalk had, of course, been a barely-controlled stagger. When he got outside, he found himself in a field of grass. There was nothing behind the small strip near the city’s spaceport.
Well, then. He continued his regal walk several meters further into the field. But the grass was tall, and seemed to want to tangle around his boots. It wouldn’t do for him to trip in such an undignified fashion. Finally, he gave in, kneeling, then lying down, half-full drink still in his hand.
The grass was so soft. The sunlight was so warm on his face.
It wasn’t long at all until Ben passed out, the glass tipping over in his slack hand, spilling the bubbly liquid down into the soil of the field.
*******
"Rise, Ben Skywalker Organa Solo!"
Slowly, Ben did as he was commanded, rising from his prostrate position.
In front of him, a Selonian queen lounged in an intricate throne hewn from solid rock. A brilliant diadem of bright green gems rested almost casually on her head, quirking with her eyebrow as she raised it at him.
She said nothing else, and it was only after a moment of her keen gaze upon him that Ben noticed he was naked in a huge hall.
Oh, no. This was that dream, wasn’t it?
There was nothing else he could do but straighten his spine and stand proudly. He knew he had nothing to be ashamed of.
The queen chuckled a little and seemed to be looking at something behind Ben.
He turned, noticing that he could see nothing but sky out of the hall’s enormous windows. They must be on top of a mountain.
With his back to the queen, all thoughts of his location flew immediately from his mind as he realized what had been behind him. He stood nude before a small crowd of women.
They were all dressed differently. One wore a black hooded cloak and a stern expression. One was dressed in the style of Old Naboo--a fashion he recognized from holos of his Grandma Padmé. One wore a utilitarian outfit in shades of grey. One had on the same drab tunic and leggings that he, Ben, had once worn as a pupil at Luke Skywalker’s Praxeum. One billowed in flowing white linen. One was unquestionably a space pirate--raggedly clad, with a cybernetic eye that hadn’t been aesthetically normalized. One stood, ramrod-straight, in the uniform of the First Order, a gang of Imperialist fanatics determined to create havoc in the galaxy. One looked as if she might have stolen the clothes Ben currently lacked--casual, comfortable pants, shirt, vest, and boots.
Ben was so distracted by the women’s differences in garb that he hadn’t noticed that they all had the same face . And that face was beautiful in all those different iterations--lovely bone structure, expressive hazel eyes, and a mouth made for a smile.
One of the women stepped forward from the group, one he hadn’t noticed before. She’d been easy to miss, dressed slightly shabbily in the nondescript beige layers of a desert-dweller.
She walked toward him, approaching him boldly, with no acknowledgement of his nudity. When she stood before him, she looked up at him. Somehow, Ben knew she had something to tell him. He bent toward her to listen.
“You spilled the wine,” she murmured into his ear. She raised her hand, which suddenly held a beautifully ornate crystal glass, filled with a sickeningly familiar sparkling green drink.
Ben was afraid she’d offer it to him, and wasn’t sure he’d be able to articulate that he’d already had quite enough, thank you.
But she didn’t offer it to him. She raised it to her own lips and drank deeply. Her lithe body shimmied deliciously as she swallowed. He could see the viridian glint of the drink in her eyes after she’d downed it.
She addressed him again. “Find me,” she said, close enough for her warm breath to waft across his face, scented heavily by the green wine. “You have to find me, ” she reiterated, meeting Ben’s eyes and staring beseechingly into them.
He nodded, dumbstruck, unsure of anything else he could possibly do. His gaze was fixed on her, which was why he noticed the exact moment that the glass disappeared from her hand, only to be replaced by a brilliant blue crystal which she held out to him.
The light reflecting from the crystal was enough to make his head hurt.
She whispered in his ear. “This is ours, Ben.” Her hand raised the crystal toward him even as it blinded him.
Ben’s field of vision filled with incandescent blue light.
*******
“Ben! Ben! What the kriff?!” His father.
Ben sat up to find that the bright blue light had given way to a green haze and a splitting headache.
“Dad, yeah, I’m fine,” he said, his speech sounding slurred even to his own ears. He tried to get to his feet, but found that his limbs wouldn’t cooperate.
This led to Ben being unceremoniously lifted and thrown over Chewbacca’s shoulder. He felt like a sack of grain, but really wasn’t in much of a position to object to anything, so he kept his mouth shut all the way back to the ship.
But once Chewie had dumped most of Ben into a narrow bunk, Ben opened his eyes and looked blearily up at his uncle and his father.
“We have to go back to Jakku,” he croaked, then immediately closed his eyes, flipped over, and began snoring, his limbs still more off than on the bed.
Chewie huffed his disapproval.
“I know,” Han agreed. “Best let him sleep it off.”
Chewie voiced another opinion.
“Back to Jakku? That is just about where we lost the Irving boys . . . “