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His sickbed was a little too short. The feeling of not quite fitting was a familiar one and he wasn’t going to complain, but he certainly hoped no one had noticed the slightly ridiculous way his feet dangled over the end, trailing blankets like drapery. When he scrunched up towards the small pillow and bent his neck to one side, it wasn’t as obvious. Some time over the last few days he’d fallen asleep at this unnatural angle and now had a hideous tension knot in his trapezius muscle. That was familiar too.
Lying there, staring at the ceiling and trying to contend with the sensation that the room was slowly spinning around the focal point of his too-small cot, he wondered if he’d ever find stability. In either sense of the word. Reportedly, the vertigo was a side effect of the sudden stillness of being planetside and bedridden where he’d been primarily in space and deep in the depths of sleep deprivation for the past six years. He tried to take an academic interest in this point of his health in attempt to convince his stomach that it didn’t need to aggressively roll over every time he sat up.
It wasn’t working so far.
The silence was incredibly thick. His head almost seemed to echo with silence.
And he realised now that silence was perhaps the most alien part of this entire bewildering experience. When Rey wasn’t with him and her mind was focussed elsewhere, closed off from the link between them, he was really truly alone for the first time he could remember. It was strange. He’d thought he knew what alone was, he’d thought he was alone his entire life, had felt his isolation more keenly than almost anything else there was to feel, but he’d never been by himself. Left to himself.
His thoughts had never been private before.
Of course Rey was often aware of his moods since they’d embraced the empathic bond they shared, but she didn’t pry. She didn’t eavesdrop. When she was there, her presence deliberately announced itself with a sort of buzzing cordiality which called attention to the fact that she could hear his surface thoughts. A sort of greeting. Sharing his mind with her was completely unlike the apparent solitude of most of his life that wasn’t ever real, the uneasy prickle of lurking whispers, the oozing blackness which seemed to stick in the tiny crevices of his foundational memories. Like tar. Snoke’s oily, unwholesome residue was ubiquitous even when he’d been at his most beguiling and benign.
Somehow no one had noticed. The most powerful Force users in the known universe hadn’t noticed.
No one looked. No one cared.
Ben sighed and adjusted his shoulders, trying to get more comfortable. No position was fully restful because his ribcage was still a mass of burning ache, his muscles still seized and shuddered without warning as rogue electrical signals fired through them. He was trying to ignore the freakish tingle of bacta repairing the torn fibres and nerves, but he’d never got used to the sensation despite many hours spent in similar convalescence. He hated that he’d promised he wouldn’t get up until he was cleared by a medic. He was an invalid alone in his own mind and it made this bland little room feel like a prison.
Not the prison you deserve.
If the pain didn’t distract him so much, he would have had the opportunity to exhaust every self-flagellation ever conceived by man since the dawn of time. After much experimentation, challenging the thoughts had been determined to be ineffective, letting the regret wash over him had proven to be unhelpful, and doing nothing was paralysing. So he’d started responding to them by defiantly planning a future, turning his full attention towards even the most mundane details of his daydreams when the creeping doubts tried to wriggle back in, clinging to the jubilation he’d felt when he realised the path ahead really hadn’t been written.
Hope had always been a double-edged sword in his experience, but it bloomed cruelly on through his darkest days in passing fancies and secret longings he sometimes naïvely imagined he’d kept hidden from his master until the time came for Snoke to disabuse him of that notion. It was faith which had actually abandoned him, which he couldn’t even counterfeit. There was never faith in darkness for him. He was trying to have it now, to believe on an ongoing basis what he’d believed in that glorious instant when he first decided his fate was in his own hands.
His mother’s forgiveness sat like a heavy weight on his heart. It should have lifted him up, brushed off the last remnants of his burdens, but it demanded a reply in kind. And the voice from his conscience- his own voice, finally and solely his own- was asking nearly every moment: was he lying to himself when he said he could do it? Was someone like him capable of such a thing? Did he really forgive…
A subtle blue glow seemed to be drifting up the wall, a different shade than the monitors tracking his condition usually emitted, and he followed it down to its source with only vague curiosity. He expected an alert or malfunction to be lit up on the equipment. He did not expect this.
Ben blinked hard, trying to clear his vision and maybe his head, but the shimmering apparition of his uncle remained casually seated in Rey’s customary chair at his bedside.
He formed a vague intention to call out to him, mostly to convince himself he was really there, but his jaw worked indecisively over various first syllables of the collection of names or titles he could use and none properly conveyed who precisely this spectre was. Uncle, Master, betrayer, Jedi, Skywalker… Ben couldn’t bring himself to say any of it, almost ashamed that he’d ever used most of them, and he turned his face into the pillow as if the whole absurdity that was this meeting could be avoided so long as he didn’t acknowledge it.
But Ben could feel his presence in the Force now, the radiance of power and focus which emanated from what should definitely be an empty corner of the room in any sane world. Denial was futile.
Luke knew that he knew. Ben didn’t have to speak, didn’t have to decide how to address him, it wouldn’t matter if he refused to look.
“Hey, kid,” the ghost sighed, a ponderous weariness in his words not entirely masked by the habitual tone of wry self-deprecation. He always sort of sounded like that when he was serious but not angry. As if you and he were in on the mutual joke about Luke’s fitness for the part of giving advice like some wise old sage. It was the voice Ben knew second best in the world and its moods were more readily and easily comprehensible to him than his own.
Being a mentor never did come naturally to Luke, but he sure was good at an authoritative guilt trip. The insight was bitter and Ben resented the way his throat was burning and his eyes were filling right on cue. Just as well he was in the dark with a dead man, he was glad no one could see him fall at the same hurdle all over again. Luke knew his dad had called him that. He’d already thrown it in his face once, the affectionate nickname honed to a poisonous stinging sharpness like some barbed arrow shot into Ben’s heart across a field of salt ready to rub in the wound. Whether to effect a threat or a promise, it cut as deeply.
“He called me that, too, Ben.”
Ben jolted up onto his hands, the searing pain of jangling his still-healing ribs barely a flicker in his awareness as he whipped his head around to finally stare right at Luke. His uncle appeared much as he had during their last confrontation. Maybe his hair was a bit longer, his beard a little less neat. He was dressed in a simple white tunic and a scruffy brown cloak. He didn’t look like a Jedi master, he didn’t even look like a Jedi. He looked like a farmer.
“If only, right?” Luke asked dryly, his luminous blue eyes slowly rolling up to meet Ben’s as if inviting him to share in the irony. It was a bizarre sort of prostrate apology, Ben sensed, an almost total repudiation of the person who had taught him to swallow his fear and who had eventually decided that Ben needed to die for the greater good. Those nearly preternaturally clear, bright eyes which had always seemed to pierce Ben to the quick- to strip away his prevarications and defences and flay him to his inadequate, disappointing, polluted bones. Pollution Luke shared, as it turned out.
“You’d never have known or forgiven him if you’d stayed on your farm. No rescue for my mother, maybe no reprieve for the galaxy,” Ben told the wall over his uncle’s shoulder, avoiding Luke’s gaze. The rage which had threatened to flood through his body subsided just as quickly, leaving a hollow ache in its wake. It was with merely reflective bitterness that he added, “But then again, I would never have been born.”
Luke’s hand came to rest on his elbow and he flinched in shock at its firmness, its reality. The tentative touch was just as substantial as the bed beneath him or the bacta cage pressing against his injuries. It hurt as much, too, the disused senses it activated were just as tender.
His face, when Ben finally gathered the willpower to look at it, was a mask of sorrow which aged him about fifty years. Care and sympathy lined his weathered skin with deep groves and, for maybe the very first time, Ben genuinely thought of Luke Skywalker as old. As breakable.
“Ben,” he said, and he said it with such horribly painful sincerity. “I regret very near every choice I ever made about you. You’ll never know how much. But I regret what I did, what I said... how I treated you. I know this is going to be rich, but I have to tell you because it’s true and you can believe it, kid: I’ll never regret you being there. No one wants to give you up, Ben. Not for anything.”
It was rich. It was far too rich. They sat together in the awfulness of how empty that sounded when ‘giving up’ was exactly what all of them had done. The one thing no one in his family had ever failed to do was to give up on him. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to, maybe that was true as far as it went, but it had happened notwithstanding.
“I just wish I were I better teacher…” Luke muttered helplessly to end the interminable silence, perhaps unable to offer more.
“I didn’t need a better teacher!” Ben snapped with all the simmering harshness he’d been trying to dissipate. The pressure of Rey’s remembered indignation on his behalf still reverberating through his skull and focussing his long-standing anger for the first time onto this salient point instead of a formless wall of anguish. “I didn’t need you to be my master, I didn’t want a master at all! That was never… what I wanted.”
Something seemed to shatter in Luke’s aura, some last bit of resistance to the thing they were still not quite facing. Peace and purpose had been easier when they were apart. Ben glanced up warily and saw his uncle’s head hanging low and the shudder of his shoulders as he drew a few shaky breaths. Groping for composure, Luke rolled his neck and put a fist to his temple, resting his elbow on his knee. His expression was glum as he met Ben’s eyes, like he was twisting his own arm to make himself say this.
“You know, kid, I hated it too,” he said resignedly, like he was confessing a crime “What business did I ever have setting myself up as someone’s master? That was never me even when I let myself get convinced it was my destiny.” He paused, shaking his head against his supporting hand, the fist tightening. “But I did think it was the right thing, I thought that was the only way to help you. It was the training, and you needed training to give you control.”
An understanding passed between them over that. Their sentiments not so dissimilar on orthodox Jedi methodology.
“I thought…” Luke went on haltingly, “I thought then that it was best to follow the traditions. I had no idea what I was doing, how else to do it, and it meant I would have to be careful to never single you out so maybe you’d finally feel normal- like you belonged somewhere.”
“I didn’t belong.”
“And you were always singled out. I know.” Now he sounded, if possible, even more tired. “I kept you so distant and they still resented you.”
Ben felt his lip tremble and hated himself. He’d been trying to stop, really trying, but the habit of a lifetime made catching the ugly loathing before it progressed to conscious thought about as easy as shaving an angry wookiee. Often times, he didn’t catch it at all and Rey would be the first one to notice.
Luke studied him and his quiet regard seemed to pull Ben inevitably into the vortex of his searching gaze, his eyes unavoidable. “Ben, I… I know me being your master was not what you needed. I know that now. Trying to be made me think I had to… I had to take responsibility… damn it, I’m dead and it’s still hard to face it.”
Ben huffed a breath through his nose, not quite scoffing. “At least you stopped.”
The hand at his elbow was back and he looked at it instead of Luke’s face. He hadn’t realised before that it was his uncle’s right hand, the one he’d lost, but it wasn’t a prosthetic- it was real, made of living flesh. Or living spirit, whatever it was Luke was made of now.
“You can’t change the past, Ben, but you can be made whole.”
“Yeah, when you’re dead.”
Luke’s chin dipped to his chest and his sadly admonishing stare from under a staunchly disapproving brow was so profound that even seeing it from the very edge of his peripheral vision made Ben want to shrink away.
Even so, he shook his head in answer to the look. “I still think… I keep thinking, wouldn’t it be better if… wouldn’t it be better?”
“No.”
Ben nodded and tried to swallow around the lump in his throat. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now that will make you stopping worth it. My life has cost so many people so much. How am I supposed to be worth it?”
“Ben-”
There was another hot tear rolling down his cheek and he breathed out very slowly through his nose, chewing on the inside of his lower lip as he prayed for calm and balance. “I looked up to you. When I realised I couldn’t be a pilot like my dad, you were the one I wanted to be like- I never… I never thought I could, but I thought I could make you proud by trying. You were my hero. I thought if I could prove myself to you, show you I was okay and do everything you said, maybe you would convince them that I… that I would be… safe.”
Luke’s comforting grip moved to his shoulder and squeezed hard as Ben shaded his eyes with a hand across his brow and wept as quietly as he could, gasping for breath between holding back sobs. He was trying to swallow down that desperate hurt, but there was too much, he couldn’t contain it any more. He almost missed the internal numbness of physical torture, the white haze of burning nerve endings which blocked out all conscious thought. He almost missed the overwhelming mental agony and sick-making compulsion of Snoke’s thunderous telepathic commands.
“Kid, I… Ben…”
The hand squeezed again.
“Ben, I’d never be such an ass that I’d tell you I know how you feel, but know that I stranded myself on that island because I felt like a murderer. Worse than a murderer, I felt like I killed your soul. I ran away because I couldn’t imagine ever forgiving myself, I couldn’t imagine ever making anything better again. And when she found me-”
“Rey.”
“-when Rey found me, I let her paint me as the victim. I let her believe I hadn’t failed. I was a coward.” Luke sat back in his chair and stared down at his empty hands in his lap. “I was a coward to ever be hiding there in the first place and I was even more of a coward in being found. And the truth is I knew it all along, I knew exactly how I was doing the wrong thing and I just wouldn’t admit it. It’s the same wrong thing I’ve done so many times before in my life. Remember I told you about how Obi-wan first…?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled wetly, bussing his nose on his sleeve. “Million times when I was little. M'namesake.”
“Yeah,” Luke repeated, distant. “I thought I’d learned that you can't… you can’t run away from choices. Doing nothing can be as bad as doing the wrong thing- and I did both. The only mistake you can’t come back from is the one you don’t forgive yourself for.”
Ben was lost. “You forgave the scourge of the galaxy. You told us the heart of a Jedi was patience. I knew if you’d given up on me it must mean…”
“That moment I almost considered… that wasn’t the worst thing I did to you that night. I should have gone after you, Ben. I should never have let you go. None of us should have. That was the worst thing. We treated you like a threat, like we’d already written you off. And I should have talked to you about your grandfather.”
“She should have,” Ben interjected quickly. It pained him deeply to put blame on his mother, but Luke had enough without taking on what wasn’t truly his. “She never… and I always knew they were afraid.”
Luke rubbed his brow, wincing at that confirmation that their fears hadn’t been secret. “Ben, no one has ever been honest with you and I want to change that. If you can give me the chance, I want to be honest with you.”
“I don’t see what more damage it could do now,” Ben muttered. “There can’t possibly be something worse I’ve done I don’t know about, and there really can’t be that much worse than finding out your grandfather tried to conquer the galaxy. I guess I’m tempting fate, though, aren’t I?” He found himself nearly smiling, a quirk of sardonic amusement tugging up at one corner of his lips. It still felt odd. That little muscle might have atrophied.
Luke smiled back briefly, but there was no humour in it. “Maybe.”
Ben felt his face drop along with his stomach. There really couldn’t be something worse, could there?
The change in his demeanour must have been apparent because Luke immediately lifted his hands in a placating gesture. “It’s not you, Ben. None of this should have fallen on your shoulders, it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your choice. You were just an innocent kid and you deserved a chance to be that- you were owed that chance. I was supposed to be protecting you, but it became… somehow I made it about myself. I had to be what a Jedi Master was supposed to be, I had to live up to who everyone said I was. And I thought that meant… at some point, you became my crucible task. Something in my control, something I had to fix.”
The anger was still there after all. It still smouldered, almost screeched with impotent violence in the back of his mind. It didn’t rush forward and overtake his senses the way it had before, it didn’t wash away reason and cloud his vision until the world became a blur of pain and enemies. He’d mastered it enough that he could both feel it and observe it dispassionately. He’d owned this rage, acknowledged it, and now that he accepted it was an emotion not a state of being, he could make sense of it. This wasn’t the all-consuming helpless lashing rage which had nearly swallowed him whole, this wasn’t a mask concealing fear; this anger was just.
Ben did not hate his uncle. He could never have hated him, though he’d spent every waking second of all those interminable days he was locked up in his despair with Snoke’s promises of vengeance in his ears trying to convince himself that he did, to pretend the only thing he felt was anger. He didn’t hate him, but he was angry with him. It wasn’t ever vengeance he had wanted, Ben realised now, it was to take away Luke’s power over him.
I want to be free of this pain. Even he hadn’t fully appreciated how earnest a plea it was when he’d said it, didn’t know how desperately he meant it.
“I needed you to tell me I wasn’t broken,” he finally said. The admission was so heavy that it seemed to infiltrate the atmosphere of the med suite, to hang between them with irresistible gravitation, a black hole sucking away the façades of denial still separating them. “I needed you so much and it was like you were there for everyone else except me. You were out of reach, like… like an ideal. Not real, not… tangible, not for me. I thought if I could just make myself worthy, if I could just be good enough, then…”
“I’m sorry, Ben.” There were tears glittering in those ghostly eyes, a crack in the vaguely echoing ethereal voice. “I meant what I said on Crait. I failed you so badly. I lied to you all those years until nothing true was left between us. I’m sorry I tried so hard to be something other than your family.”
Ben toyed with the edge of his blanket, already ashamed. “Because you could have contained me if I’d still trusted you?”
“Because you’re my nephew and I had a duty.”
There it was. It would always come out eventually. He’d accepted it once in despair, maybe his final test was to accept it without despair. “Yeah. Yeah, I know I was a terrible obligation. They weren’t prepared for it, I understand. All those years I didn’t know why I was so much to bear, I resented being such an obvious burden. I couldn’t stop blaming them for it. Then I knew why.”
“Oh, Ben. Oh, kid. I’m so sorry.” Luke rubbed both hands over his face in apparent anguish, tugging the skin around almost violently. “I’m such a rube, I’m making a huge mess of this.”
Ben sighed, wishing he could make all this stop. Even knowing the consequences of his previous efforts to make it stop, he still wanted to do anything but stay in this purgatory. He just wanted it to be over. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” Luke roared, so abruptly that Ben jumped. “It’s not all right because you weren’t a burden, you weren’t a project, none of us should have treated you like an obligation. You were a child, Ben! Our child. I told Rey that I was worried about everything I loved, about losing it all, and how could I even for that split second have had that thought and not included…!”
“It’s all right,” he repeated, horrified, not wanting to hear any more.
“Ben, I’m begging you to understand- it was a lie to pit you against- I love you, Ben. I loved you the moment your mother introduced us when you were twenty minutes old. I held you in my arms when you were barely there you were so small, you had a wild little curl of hair already and such curious eyes, and you smiled at me- right then I wanted to protect you from everything and anything and I didn’t. I didn’t! I kept meaning to spend more time, I kept thinking I’d love to be around to help you with the Force, but Leia was always busy and you were growing up so fast. Something was wrong and she would never tell me what.
"And then you were my pupil, my problem to solve, and I put you in a box and shut you outside my heart thinking I had to be objective. I tried to be a Jedi and detach myself and it was all so stupid. I didn’t trust my feelings and I knew better than that. If I had listened to old Jedi Masters during the war, none of us would even be here because my father would never have brought down the Emperor.
"We would have lost if I’d listened. They were wrong. I don’t know when I lost faith, but I guess I was afraid. I was so afraid that I would fail you, fail your mother, and it was because I let that fear take over that I did fail. Prophecy is self-fulfilling- I knew that! The Force is always with us, Ben, there’s nothing we can do to shut it out, but when we close our eyes to the Light and turn inward to vanity- that’s when we think we’re alone. And when you’re alone, thinking you have to do everything alone, that’s when fear will win.
"Slowly, without noticing it, I became so sure I had to be perfect. I started believing my own legend, and that’s when I couldn’t forgive myself for any mistakes. That’s when I had to be in control of everything. And trying to control you instead of love you made me forget who you were.”
Ben sat in stunned silence, unable to respond.
Luke’s face was beseeching, his palms turned up in supplication, “I treated you like a tool, a dangerous weapon, not a person, and I know exactly how that feels. My teachers did that to me. My teachers lied to me. I should have told you the truth, I should have talked to you about the future, and I should have been close enough to notice. I should have protected you. Ben, we were the ones who should have protected you, it’s not your fault you didn’t know what Snoke was. You couldn’t have known. We pushed you right into his hands.
"And I know it’s a lot to ask, it’s a lot more than anyone has ever asked of me, but I need to ask you for your forgiveness. Not just for my sake, kid, but because not forgiving has… if I’d forgiven myself six years ago, I would have been there to find you. Tell you that you weren’t on your own. Help. I’d be there to try to make it up to you, and then maybe… maybe if I had, there wouldn’t have been so much more to forgive.”
Maybe Dad would still be alive, he meant. And maybe he would be. It wasn’t on Luke’s head that he wasn’t, it wasn’t on anyone’s head but Ben’s in the final reckoning, but the case remained that maybe…
“Sure,” Ben said. His voice only wobbled a little.
Uncle Luke blinked at him, shaken out of some prodigiously grim thought judging by the cut of his frown.
Ben nodded at him. He nodded again when there was no reaction. “Sure, Uncle Luke. Sure, I’ll forgive you.”
Luke’s mouth opened but no words came out.
“Probably it might take a while. I can say it right now and I mean it, but… But I’m going to work on it. I’m working on a lot.”
“I’ll bet.” There was the nascent beginnings of a twinkle in Luke's eyes and that hint of mischief stirred long-dormant memories of being at home, his parents both away, when Luke looked after him more in the spirit of a co-conspirator than a real adult. It had been rare and he’d cherished it, the memory bright and hazy with the embellishment of frequent, idealised recall. He’d reached for the Force thoughtlessly back then, just another way to play with his toys, and Luke had joined in, neither of them afraid, laughing together.
“Yeah, that doesn’t help,” Ben replied with as much sarcasm as he could rally. If his eyes were swimming and his voice was rough, that didn’t mean anything.
Luke smiled at him and it was both incredibly happy and incredibly sad. “Sorry.”
They didn’t try to make light any more. They didn’t speak for a very long time, just existing together and remembering. He wanted to memorise his uncle’s presence, his steady glow in the Force. It had been such a long time since he’d felt the warmth of it, since he could associate it with anything but terror and rage and pain.
It was like a sun. As bright and encompassing as the heat of the desert where Luke had grown up, its sparkling youthful energy matching the optimistic, playful disposition from Ben’s earliest memories of him. All that light in him, so abundant and self-giving, and he had still fallen under a shadow.
But not forever. Even the darkest night ended.
“Dad used to say he took the zig-zag path in life, never the straight path, and that it was dumb and hard and he didn’t recommend it, but he still got where he needed to be eventually. I was too little for him to explain what he meant by that, but I think I figured it out. I think… I think I remember that he told me once the hardest thing next to never screwing up at all is admitting you’ve gone the wrong way and turning back. He did it a lot.”
They sat and listened to the soft hum of outdated medical equipment while Ben collected himself to go on.
“The thing was- the proof I was going the wrong way was also the mistake that made it impossible to accept it was a wasted journey,” he continued, discreetly knocking tears off his cheeks with the back of his hand. “I couldn’t live with it being for nothing. I still can’t. I have to make it not for nothing.”
“Yeah.”
Some far away voices in the corridor drifted a little closer and then faded again. The bacta thrummed through its tubes.
“You know Rey kissed me?”
“She loves you. Pretty good for a first kiss.”
Ben did a double take and felt his cheeks heat with embarrassment. He was still adjusting to that being the case, still inclined to think it was an impossible circumstance that she could want him with no ulterior motives, no conditions- just for himself. That he could be loved without obligation. For Luke to throw it down as a casual statement of fact, for Luke to know about it, intruded violently on his already delicate grasp of its reality.
“After I caught you two together, she was on the warpath. Foolish of me not to recognise the signs of a woman who’d made up her mind and couldn’t be stopped. I’ve sure seen them before.”
He made it sound so lascivious. They’d barely touched when Luke interrupted. Yet Ben shivered down to his toes at the thought of it.
Luke shook his head at this, knowing, then smiled somewhat sheepishly. “It’s already not for nothing, even if that was all. Love is everything.”
“Mmm, Rey said she knocked you on your ass. It was noble because she did it for me, I guess, since love is everything.”
“I wasn’t fighting. I was letting her get the aggression out so I could talk sense to her.”
“Uh huh. Are you glad you died before Mom found out?”
“No comment.”