Work Text:
Digital
adjective
1. (of signals or data) expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity such as voltage of magnetic polarisation.
2. relating to a finger or fingers.
“Join me. Please…”
Rey gazed into Ben’s dark, gentle eyes, welling with tears that matched her own. He dropped his saber hilt, seemingly without thought, and ungloved his hand. As he reached out to her in supplication, his pure resolve in their shared potential—their shared destiny—coursed through her own soul.
We are so opposite, she thought, a royal son and heir to the legacies of both Jedi and Sith; an unwanted daughter of the lowest dregs of the lawless Western Reaches; but for all that, somehow, we share the same pain. And the same longing.
Without fear or hesitation, she leaped towards him, her own hand outstretched.
Two immense, spectral hands, formed from swirling clouds of the luminous, many-coloured stuff of stars, emerged from the great black ocean of space. The hands—one broad with thick fingers, almost brutish, but for the smoothness of its palm and neatly rounded nails; the other fine and slender, but no less strong, the palm and fingers ridged with callouses—reached, one for the other, and between them crushed the flaming wreck of the Supremacy to nought but shining dust, as they gently clasped together.
A thousand, thousand years later—long, long after the shattered empire of Supreme Leader Snoke, the triumphant fleet of the rebels and the grand new Republic they built, the mystic arts of the Sith, and of the Jedi, had all been worn away by the inexorable march of time—on a craggy island somewhere in the Outer Rim there stood a temple with ten towering spires, chiselled out of a mountain peak by the natural currents of the Force.
In a dim, firelit chamber buried in the depths of the mountain, the lone grey-robed acolyte who had survived all ten trials of the Dyadic Order – the trials of Life, and of Death; of Fire, and of Ice; of Stone, and of Water; of Peace, and of War; and finally, of Light, and of Darkness—solemnly reached her hands towards her Master, a ritual gesture whose origin was lost to recorded history; the remnant echo of a moment that reverberated back and forth in the eternal poetry of the universe.
Breathing in his calm, she remained as still as the spires above as the black-hooded man fastened the manacles halfway up her forearms, both understanding that no acolyte who had achieved the clarity of vision and resonance with the Force required to survive the Trials, need fear either the pain of amputation nor the humiliation of rejection of the divine Hands.
The master readied his saber.