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The call is coming out of the Jundland Wastes.
It's a freaky, whispery sort of thing, less than the wind and more than nothing, only really half-there. It swoops through Leia like it's solid and she's the one who isn't anything, leaving her feeling hollowed out, empty.
Without thinking about it she turns her speeder towards the source of the call. It's only the third time Uncle Owen's sent her out to Tosche for some power converters, and she had to promise to check in with the Darklighters on the way there and back before she was allowed to go. He'll be pissed if she's late. But this feels Important, somehow—with a capital I and everything.
Above her, the craggy, rust-colored rocks soar up. She can hear the call of a baby krayt in the distance, not old enough yet to venture into the dune sea and build a burrow, and the whip of the wind through the honeycomb caves. It’s a different place than it was three years ago—a little smaller, a little softer, or maybe she’s just gotten bigger and sharper—but the route she’s taking is the same. It figures the call is coming from Old Ben’s house. You never know what’s going on with wizards.
She comes out onto the ridge of his house faster than she expects and stops for a moment, looking. It’s been worn down even more, cracks in the walls beginning to form, the roof bleached three shades lighter by the sun, but the vaporators are still rattling against the cliffs. The wide blue sky yawns overhead.
Leia jumps out of the speeder with a fluidity she used to have to practice in the garage, smooths back the wispy pieces of hair that have escaped from her braids, and knocks.
He’s old—that’s her first thought when he opens the door. Old and thinned, like something is eating him from the inside out. He looks more like a crumpled pile of clothes on the floor than a person, even though he feels real.
What happened to you? she wants to say. And then she thinks: hollow, and remembers what needs to happen to a cistern for it to exist. She just didn’t think the hollowing out kept happening, after.
His eyes blink slowly, glazed over and empty like Biggs’s uncle right before he took too much spice and kicked it. They’re blue—that same electric blue—but it unsettles her, somehow. It makes her think about cisterns again—about erosion, about how much of a sandstorm it takes to carve out a canyon. Suddenly, she’s sure his eyes—once, long ago—were darker, half-green.
Old Ben blinks, and then he’s There again, finally, and Leia can breathe out. He gives her that same messed up magnifying-glass gaze, and then he steps back so slowly and painfully it makes her want to shriek.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
Leia feels halfway to hurt, all of a sudden. You called me, she almost says, but that’s not true, even if it’s a little bit the truth. He was just calling, and she answered. She’s old enough to know that at least.
“I don’t know,” she says, which isn’t true and also is. But it’s close enough.
Old Ben raises an eyebrow. He seems tired about it, though, like he’s just doing it because he thinks he has to.
"I don't know," Leia repeats. There’s a waver in her voice that makes her want to throw herself over the edge of the wastes, and there’s something about him watching her that makes the whole thing worse—something about him being a million years old that means she feels like she’s ten again, and stumbling through the sand in a waking nightmare like an idiot. "I just needed to see you."
"Did you?" Old Ben looks at her like he wants that to mean something, like he thinks she should know the answer. All of a sudden, Leia feels tired and hot and sweaty, all too aware of how red her cheeks are, of how her boots are too big for her feet.
"I think I have heat stroke," she says too loudly.
I'm lying, she thinks. He knows I'm lying. But he’s a smooth lump of nothing to her, a heavy blank she can’t bite into, like the nacreous shell the dust beetles make around their egg-sacs.
"You should come in,” he says. “And sit down.”
There’s a layer of dust across his bed, she notices as she closes the door. It’s made neatly, thin brown blanket stretched across the pallet, but it hasn’t been touched. Instead, there’s a thin mat on the floor with the indent of two knees pressed into it by long use. While he’s looking the other way, she cranes her neck to see into the pantry—half-full—and into the kitchen. The dishes are out on the counter, but they’re covered in a layer of dust too. It’s been a while since the last dust storm hit. Leia wonders how long he was sitting on that floor—how long it’s been since he did anything else.
"What were you trying to do?" she asks, still standing. She’s old enough to know now what she’s saying when she asks that. She knows how much it sounds like she pities him—how much her voice makes it clear that he only seems half-human to her. But she’s not old enough to know how to stop it.
Old Ben just looks at her for a long moment, his bleached irises looking too-alive but also not alive enough—like the lightening out on the sands during the dry season, all thunder and bright blue electricity. "To be," he says quietly.
She waits for him to finish, but he doesn't say anything else—just stands there staring at her like she's not even there, like he’s looking behind and beyond, like he’s trying to figure out what she is underneath everything else.
"To be what?" she prompts.
"Nothing," he says.
Leia shifts, and his gaze flicks back to her with all the robotic precision of a homing droid. For a moment she feels pinned to the floor, terrified, a baby womp rat that knows it's about to get shot because one day it's going to grow up to be something terrible. Then Ben relaxes, and the feeling goes away.
"Or everything," he adds quietly, almost mild. "I haven't figured out which, yet. Perhaps it’s both, and only depends upon your point of view."
"Can you show me?" Leia asks.
Biggs had once dared her to go out onto the empty salt flats and chant the words to summon the possession wraiths that haunt the caves underneath it. For three weeks after she'd done it she'd been terrified every time she did something that it wasn't her—that it was the ghost, controlling her, and she didn't even know. But this is all her. She just knows.
Old Ben looks at her properly, which makes her realize this is the first time he's done it since she found him. He'd been looking ahead, or through, or somewhere there-but-not-here the whole time.
"I can try," he says, in a way that makes Leia think it's supposed to be a lesson in itself.
He has them sit cross-legged on the floor, the way Leia's heard the sand people do it. He closes his eyes, and suddenly becomes completely, utterly quiet. Leia keeps her eyes open, watching him.
She wants to say something, to ask what's happening, what she's supposed to do. It occurs to her that maybe she's doing the wrong thing—maybe she's just supposed to know what to do, maybe he's going to open his eyes and see her eyes are open and it'll be wrong, and she'll have fucked this all up again.
She closes her eyes. Then opens them. Then closes them.
Dust is floating in the air, dry and thick, and some of it gets in her throat and makes her choke. Ben doesn’t open his eyes when she coughs and tries to wet her mouth with spit. She doesn’t ask for milk—she doesn’t know if she can, after barging in here and interrupting him doing whatever wizard thing he’s doing. He must be drinking something, still, to get moisture. He must have something to drink. But this isn’t her place—it’s his.
Leia stands up quickly, suddenly. “I don’t think I know how to be,” she says, her voice still too loud, a whip crack in the air.
Old Ben opens his eyes again, slowly. Then he looks back down. “Perhaps not,” he says quietly. “Perhaps not.”
She’s angry, suddenly. She doesn’t even know why, except that maybe she does, except that she knows what he’s doing is wrong—not bad, but wrong. She’s seen holos of the huge rivers of the core worlds, the way the water splits into two different paths, falling away down, down, downstream. This is the fork, the split, the place he falls away.
“What’s gone wrong with you?” she says, her voice shattering the stillness and the silence. And then, truer, closer to her but not farther from what she’d meant, “Why even bother calling if you don’t want anyone to show up?”
Ben’s eyes fly open, wide and blue and surprised. His mouth moves, but no words come out, and he looks away from her. “Why bother calling?” he repeats in a low voice, a question he’s asking himself. “Why bother calling?” He blinks, and looks back up at her. “I was looking for someone.”
“Did you find them?” Leia asks, her voice low—lower than she knew it could be, and she knows it’s the right question, but even through the roof she can feel the wide blue sky on her shoulders pressing down, down, deep into something that isn’t her body.
Ben shakes his head.
“Show me,” she says, and reaches out a hand.
His fingers are leathery, dried, tanned and cracked from the suns and the dust and what Leia knows, somehow, are years and years and years of sitting and watching and waiting. She can feel the callouses on his palms, the tendons underneath the skin, stretched tight. And she can feel the blood in his capillaries pumping, in time with her breaths.
None of this is normal, she thinks. None of this is what a person is supposed to feel. But they’re alone in here, in a crumbling shack on a crumbling cliff, and if she’s a freak, then he’s one too.
He breathes out, and she can feel it. There’s green down her throat, so heavy and full with water that she wants to choke, and then there’s the memory of it—cleaner, maybe truer, maybe more real, but less. Then there’s Ben, and he’s the same, memory and flesh, cut clean down to essentials, down to bones, the skeleton inside a skeleton. Leia thinks of eyes that were green once, of leather tanned and shrunk and dried, and thinks Oh, I get it.
She takes back her hand. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she looks at him right in the eyes. It’s easier, now. She’s seen him for real—Ben-that-was and Ben-that-is, and that’s enough to put together a picture of all the Bens in between. He reminds her of the chrysalises left behind after the rain that comes once every three or four years, the water pouches of the pupa still swollen, left behind so a skinny stick of a bug can come out to mate and dry out and leave its husk to wither on the salt flats.
Leia wants to cry.
Ben’s eyes widen. He blinks, and something in him softens, looking at her. “Oh, Leia,” he says, but there are two more names echoing behind hers when he speaks. “My dear—” but something in him chokes off at that, and then it’s just the two of them standing in silence, looking at each other.
“What am I?” Leia asks, because it’s the only thing she can say anymore, the only thing far enough away from what actually is that she can voice it.
He looks sad, suddenly. Sad and clear, not yet boiled down to essence, to nothing, to the heart of him. “You’re Leia Skywalker.”
But Leia shakes her head.
“I’m sorry,” he says abruptly, the words coming out of him twisted, choked, like they’ve grown up around themselves inside of him and need to be forced out. “I’m sorry.”
She grabs his wrist—not his hand—and curls her fingers around it, fragile and bony and unhappy. “Stay,” she says, even though he’s only going, even though he’s not gone yet. But she thinks of the presence of him behind her, watching her, not warm and not cold. You’re the first thing I remember, she thinks, and even though it’s not true, it’s true enough. “Please.”
Ben looks at her with those too-sad eyes, face like the crags of a cliff falling down, down, down. “You should have had a kinder world,” he says, and she thinks he means you should have had a kinder life.
But Leia shakes her head again. “I know it’s cruel here,” she says, and that’s almost true, too. She thinks she can feel how cruel it is sometimes—the wind and the wide open sands, bitten, biting, the wastes and the wanderers, all of it hollowing, eating itself down to nothing. When Aunt Beru hugs her, she feels so full she could burst and then all of it is too real, too sharp, something inside her and outside her at the same time, and she wonders what it would be like to grow up beautiful and kind, on a world that knew how to be that way. “But—” she lets out a breath. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. It’s pretty alright, I guess. I think it is, anyway.”
Ben lets out a long breath. “Pretty alright,” he repeats.
Leia shrugs. “I guess.” She feels like it means something different to him. “I don’t want a kinder world.”
I want you, she means—half-whole and half-real, electric-blue eyes and crazy hair. He’s thin, worn out, worn through, so eaten away by Tatooine that there’s not a lot left—just wire, thick and tough and kind. But she could learn to love him. The boring old man, the weird wizard of the wastes, the well run dry—she could learn to love him.
Old Ben takes the fingers wrapped around his wrist and wraps his hand over them. “I can’t offer you anything,” he says, and Leia thinks, Oh, that’s what I was asking for. “There’s only memories left.”
“I want you,” she says. “I don’t need anything else.”
She can see something in his far away eyes—a temple and city, oceans and pools and streams and a galaxy full of light, the points of a thousand thousand stars in his mouth—and for a moment she thinks of a boy with pale hair and bright eyes, water running down in fountains outside his bedroom window. But she’s not him, and Ben’s not Obi-Wan and they’re on Tatooine—Tatooine, with her awful suns and her bitter roots and the hunger at the heart of her—and this is all she knows how to be, and that’s alright.
“Okay,” Ben says. “Alright.” And his hand squeezes around her fingers. He doesn’t get any more full, but he doesn’t get any more empty either, and she thinks—that’s enough. That’s enough.
Leia looks at him, tired and dusty, still a head and a half taller than her even bowed, hands wrapped tight around hers. “What am I?” she repeats.
Far away, deep in the core, in a river of light, twig swirls in a fork in the stream. It spirals, caught in the eddies of the water surrounding it, and catches on the spur of the bank. For a moment it sticks, and then a rush comes—not from upstream, but from the other side of the river—and it falls into a different current, carried downstream.
Ben breathes out. His eyes, pale and tired, are kind. “You’re a Jedi.”