Chapter Text
“Fezzik, do you hear that? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when Count Rugen killed my father. The Man in Black makes it now.”
Rey comes unmoored. Ben is gone, and nothing tethers her to this life any longer.
She screams and fissures splinter across Exegol’s crust. Stone crashes down and dust billows up. She screams and the kyber crystals fracture in their hilts. Sound tears from the depths of her being—fear and anger sculpted from the ashes of loss and breathed to life. It shatters the planet’s foundations and uproots her very soul.
When screaming fails to vent the dark energy boiling within her veins, Force-lightning erupts from her outstretched hands and forks skyward. Power streams in a blinding current—endless power fueled by endless pain. It is the sound of ultimate suffering. She screams until the vapor of her breath empties the skies.
She claws her fingers and yanks the Force. The Citadel’s enormous monolith commences a slow collapse inward, as if it would entomb her where Ben fell. Maybe she should surrender and join him in the halls of light. Who is she fooling? The Force will never claim her charred and blackened heart. Not now. If she’s ever to reunite with his soul, it will be by the force of her will alone.
She leaps through the descending portal, bounding from boulder to boulder as they tumble, and alights on the dead surface. A thousand burning starships litter the horizon, casualties of her fury. She does not lament. First Order. Final Order. Resistance. They deserve it. Every last one of them.
For Ben. Though it is an offering far too small.
Pearl light breaks across the sky, barren save for a few Final Order destroyers. Rey pilots Ben’s TIE into the nearest hangar and faces the Sith Troopers with a hilt in each hand.
The sabers ignite and twin screams wail into the Force with unbearable sorrow—and unstoppable power. Rey staggers to one knee under the onslaught and then surges forward, a lethal blur of crimson blades. She slashes through the corridors to the bridge. Bending the crew to her will is as nothing. If they call her Empress Palpatine and kneel in obeisance, she will not argue, though that is not her role. As once they served her grandfather, now they will serve her—until her purpose is fulfilled.
The Sith wayfinder guides the ship into space. Rey observes untouched, her heart numb and senses dull, as the axial superlaser explodes the planet’s core and Exegol disintegrates. Death ravages the Force like a wildcat.
Alone in the throne room, she turns her back on the rubble drifting in vacuum and sets her face toward the Core worlds. She will end this war once and for all, beginning with the Outer Rim and Western Reaches, sweeping around the galaxy, and circling ever inward like water siphoning down a drain. Only she has the means to finish it. Then peace will reign forevermore.
“Call me the Twin Blades of Justice and the Dread Avenger Solo,” she rasps, her throat raw from screaming. From the dust and the smoke. “Call me She Who Will Not Be Stopped.”
There are none to hear.
***
Ben wakes. He saws his tongue in his mouth, desperate for enough saliva to swallow, but he’s parched. Water. He needs water.
Is this another lesson? Has his master abandoned him on a planet to survive with nothing? No, that’s not right—he killed Snoke.
Water. First, water.
His eyes crack open on darkness—and wan light somewhere behind him. Where is he?
He remembers Rey’s eyebrows pinched tight, her face fading from sight, and shards of fear spiking into him across their bond.
Rey.
The haunted chamber, the excruciating pain, that wondrous kiss—Rey! She must be here, somewhere, buried with him on Exegol. He has to reach her. Water. She’ll need water too.
Ben rolls onto his side and strains to lift his head. The muscles in his back quiver. His mortal injuries seem to have vanished, but he’s weak as a newborn. Light streams through an archway between pourstone walls. And there’s sand. Sand everywhere. He hates sand.
This isn’t Exegol. Where’s Rey?
He crawls forward on his elbows and sand scours his sensitive flesh. He’s naked as a newborn too. He’ll need protection from the elements. After he finds water. And Rey.
Ben reaches the entry and squints into the sun. Sand half-fills the sunken courtyard and a dune rises up, up, up to ground level. His heart quails. He’ll never gain the top, not without water.
He collapses onto his stomach and his cheek flops into the sand.
Rey.
He reaches into his soul, into that place where they’re always connected. The Force writhes with the dark side, darker than anything he’s ever encountered, darker than Snoke or Sidious or Mustafar. Dark as smoldering pitch, threatening to erupt into eternal flame. He curls onto his side, draws his legs toward his chest, and clutches his knees.
If Rey is there, lost in all that dark, he must find her. Save her. Who knows the dark better than he?
Ben follows the thread of their bond, wades in—a fluttering light, a match in a maelstrom—and is jettisoned from the churning void. He tries again and again. Until he sprawls, panting and gasping, his mouth drier than the sunbaked desert.
His eyesight flickers like a malfunctioning droid—once, twice, three times—and sputters out.
***
Rey watches as more systems fall to the destroyer’s superlaser. She will obliterate them all. None can withstand her rampage. Death shrieks in the Force with unbridled agony and the dark side swells, consuming and inexorable.
The galaxy will suffer as she has suffered. The Force will scream as she has screamed. They will pay the price for their betrayal. Until there is peace at last.
Yes. For Ben.
She is a warrior, her sword flashing as she lays about with vicious speed and the planets pile like spoils around her. Let them plead for clemency until their voices are silenced. Let their blood run until rivers flood with rubies, until the worlds are deluged in scarlet.
She is a gleaner swinging her scythe to harvest the skies. She will reap the stars and carry them as an offering to Ben’s feet. She will lay them like a hoard of jewels within his tomb.
Ben. Her heart wails with longing. Ben. Where are you?
And she dares to reach, as another system capitulates, for that place where he’s always been. She’s prepared for the ache of emptiness, but he’s there. The connection is faint, the merest hint, the sun peeking through thunderclouds and vanishing again. Her spirit soars for one glorious, fleeting moment.
But she witnessed him fade into the Force. He dissolved in a glimmer of blue before her eyes, and his clothes crumpled into Exegol’s dust. A puff of air and he was gone. Quick and quiet as snuffing a candle.
Ben.
It must be the dyad. Even Ben becoming one with the Force cannot divide them. The tether that unites their souls must stretch across the veil between life and death, thin and shaky but unbroken. To feel him always near and yet forever out of reach, to know the warmth of his heart but never of his arms, to see the light in his soul but never in his eyes would be a mercy most severe.
She will not concede. She will not live without him. The Force will pay. Cruel, cruel master to steal him away when he’d so recently reclaimed the light, when he’d raised her from death, when they’d stolen only one kiss from a lifetime of thousands.
Another system plummets into nothingness, and the divided Force howls in mingled protest and victory. At this rate, she will succumb to old age before she conquers the galaxy. Rey seizes the gravid dark in her fists and pitches it like a smothering blanket over entire sectors.
For Ben. Though she cannot feel him, hidden as he is somewhere beyond the storm.
“Hold on, my love. I’m coming.” She doesn’t bother to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
There are none to see.
***
Ben’s nearly to the dune’s crest. His universe has shrunk to the confines of this courtyard, to this mountain of sand. Anguish drags its bitter pall across his vision. He’s lost track how many times he’s passed out. The Force is a useless, slippery thing he cannot wield. His scorched shoulders burn even though night has fallen, and his underside is ragged from grating across the coarse grains.
He hauled himself out of Exegol’s pit when he was battered and broken. If he could crawl another meter, he could see what lies beyond. Probably just the desert’s vacant stare.
A dark egg-shape nestles at the wall’s base, and he stretches for it. The shell is hard and mottled black. Something edible? He breaks it open and gags at the reek, but the insides are wet. Slurping the liquid and gnawing the flesh from the rind soaks his mouth in moisture. He moans with pleasure.
Fetid it may be, but it gives him strength to finish the climb. Ben pulls himself over the edge and leans his sore back against the wall. He can’t see much, only flat land fading into the night.
Stars gleam like kyber in a cave. Some constellations are familiar—except for the odd missing star—but not recognizable enough to pinpoint his location. Even as he studies the firmament, more lights wink out and he bowls over with a gasp.
His lungs contract in short, sharp breaths and his vision dims before he masters it. Such anguish. The same pain that knocked him out earlier, not from exertion in his weakened state then, but in the Force. He’s felt this before. When Starkiller Base destroyed the Hosnian system in the great cataclysm. This is mass extinction, life swallowed in death.
Something’s terribly wrong. The Force is a wheel spinning out of balance, a jarring discordance in the music of the spheres. The dark side is a dread fog creeping across all existence and suffocating the light.
And Rey’s in its midst. Somewhere. What could have happened? His beautiful, bright Rey. The other half of his soul.
Rey, his heart cries. Rey, please. Wait for me.
He inhales the dry air to steady himself. Sitting here, staring at the stars, and plumbing his misery accomplishes nothing. He must reach her. He didn’t save her only to lose her again. He needs water, clothes and a means off this filthy planet.
Ben scans the gloom. There. A narrow spire silhouetted in starlight. A vaporator. If he could make it run, at least that would appease his thirst. It’s been a while, but he didn’t grow up on the Falcon without learning a thing or two about repairs.
He’s too dizzy to stand. Determination sends him scuttling across the sand like a beetle.
He grabs the vaporator’s access panel and pulls. This time the Force complies. Bolts pop free and the metal sheet shears away in his hands. Momentum shoves him onto his rear and the corner slices across his bare thigh.
Blood spurts from his femoral artery, then burning pain. He stares, transfixed, before pressing hard to staunch the flow. His pulse pounds beneath his fingers.
He’s too weak; he’ll never be able to hold it. And there’s nothing to serve as a tourniquet. He’s going to die. He’s going to bleed out in the dust.
Rey. A cool tear trails down his sun-fired cheek. He catches its salt on his tongue as he slumps sideways. Rey. You’re not alone. I am with you. Always.
***
Sectors fall one after another. Like boulders before a rockslide. Like tents before the X’us’R’iia’s mighty breath.
Rey is the bringer of death. She devours the suffering, consumes the agony, feeds the power with every life extinguished. She is the maelstrom, a Force-storm knocking planets from their axes and hurtling them into a well of oblivion.
She is consuming fire, magnificent in her rage. She will burn the galaxy to its foundations, until the ashes rain down and pile high as mountains. She will gather them into bouquets and scatter them like petals upon his grave.
He will be remembered, and they will not.
Call him The Light Bearer and Joy Giver. Call him He Who Loved and Laid Down His Life. Call him Ben.
My beautiful, beloved Ben.
Grief twists and wrings her heart like a garment soaked with tears. She screams and lightning ignites the fabric of space. She weeps and shreds the heavens.
Only one planet remains.