Chapter Text
*
Luke doesn't talk much, in Rey's first weeks with him. There's a lot of grunting involved, and rusty vocal chords, and strange, sudden intakes of breath, full of surprise, as though he still startled by her presence and what she's asked him to do.
When he does speak he asks about Kylo, mostly, though he doesn't use that name. It hadn't taken her long to figure out exactly what that fatal encounter had met – a few whispered words with Leia, long-dormant feelings of family and father bubbling up to her through the strange miasma that is the Force. She knows that that means Luke is his uncle, and that something went wrong between them, but if she's honest, she's still too raw from Han's loss (and knows that that rawness is dangerous, that these exposed, aching nerve endings need to be healed before she allows them fester) to want to know much more.
But if Luke talks, he wants to talk about Ben – and so she listens. Ben as cautionary tale, Ben as regret; Ben as hatred and failure and that last, lingering moment of hope.
“I named him, you know,” Luke says, one very early morning when the sky is still red with sunrise and she can barely see him as they meditate, or try to, on a freezing crag. “I suppose that was my fault too.”
“Han and Leia didn't – ?”
“Well,” Luke says, and it is one of the rare occasions when he has smiled, his rough face creasing into hills and valleys. “Even before their estrangement, they were rather good at arguing with each other. Leia threw up her hands and said I had the honor, since they couldn't agree.”
Rey suspects there might be more to the story than that, but she's always been good at waiting for the truth, so she decides not to ask. The question she does voice, in the end, is one she's been asking a lot since she arrived, ever-conscious of time running at her back, telling her she needs to hurry, pulling her back in reprobation if she goes too fast to understand what she's doing. “Why is it important? His name?”
Luke keeps a book in his little pile of belongings, scattered around the cave where he sleeps like the most stereotypical of hermits. It is handwritten, a roughly- but neatly-bound manuscript, and bears an embossed K on its spine.
“Oh,” Luke says, almost carelessly. “He's named after my Master. Though Ben wasn't his name, either, when it came down to it.”
It takes nearly another week for Rey to hear the full story, and it comes in fits and starts and makes her weary, so weary, like the stories she had loved as a child and had clung to during her lonely nights of dreaming on Jakku have been carefully carved apart by a lightsaber, like they have been dealt the same scars and wounds she left on Kylo himself.
“I used to tell him,” Luke says – “I used to tell him about Ben.”
I used to tell him about Ben, Luke says: Ben who suffered such great losses as would kill lesser beings. Ben who lost everything he cared about, everyone he loved, and still had the strength to smile. Ben who left behind the little book, whose hand never wavered even when he was writing of nightmares and ghosts and hauntings, about the pain, about the shame he should never have had to own. About the weight of fate, and his wondering whether, in bequeathing any part of his own quest onwards, he was doing the right thing.
Ben the best of Jedi, and one of the best of men, Luke says.
“I used to tell Ben all about him,” Luke says, and his voice goes slow and deep – and Rey wonders, when she curls into a ball and shivers into sleep, whether he had known, even at the time, the sabotage he was weaving.
She dreams of a desert that is not her own, and of a small figure standing in its dunes, upright, lonely, bereft. Grieving.
All she has is her name. It is all that she is, perhaps all she will ever be, and she is proud to own it. And so though she despises him, though she cannot find it in her heart yet, as she knows she must eventually, to accept him for what he is (but not forgive, never forgive, she will never be as selfless as that) –
She pities Kylo Ren, from her solitary bed, for the weight of history he was expected to bear.
And somewhere, she thinks – she knows – the shade of Obi-Wan Kenobi is sorry, too.
*