Fire when ready.
Leia Organa Solo knew how her own grief worked, although it had been difficult to learn and more difficult to make it stick in her mind. She delayed her emotions, put them aside until she could examine them. She had done this the last time anyone saw Alderaan. She had done this for Hosnian Prime. She had not done this when Han died. She thought she might be doing it now, as she looked at her son.
She had named him Ben for wonderment, and for surprise. It hadn't been the name by which she knew Obi-Wan, that wizard her adopted father told her about while they sat on the cool, rough-edged marble balconies of a dead planet, so when she had heard it, it had been a new wonder.
Kylo Ren, her son called himself. Commander of dark armies. (Well, it was in their blood, wasn't it?)
Rey was fighting her way through Snoke's fortress, with Leia in the vanguard. Poe and Finn were somewhere above them, leading their respective parts of the strike team.
Rey had Kylo Ren on the back foot, her staff lightsaber wheeling and chipping away at his defense.
She still hit with short stabs and feints; Leia remembered enough from Luke's academy to know that this wasn't quite the codified style her brother had been attempting. Rey fought the way she had always done with the staff, snapping the point of the lightsaber forward in vicious little pushes suited to something with a metal hook on the end. Over Rey's shoulder, Leia saw that Ben was forced to defend his shoulders, his forearms, his knees.
Rey fought to maim.
Rey, Leia corrected herself, fought to pity.
Someone, maybe Bail, she couldn't remember, had told her that fighter pilots had the ability to delay their own emotions while making their quick decisions. Leia had venerated this idea the way some people venerated the Force, and perhaps the ability to compartmentalize was just as natural.
She had also seen pilots screaming, crying, looking at their friends with empty eyes.
After a frenzy of tight, controlled strikes Leia couldn't see, Rey knocked Ben down.
Leia said, "Rey, go find Snoke," and the words echoed. The room was high and silver.
The Jedi looked over her shoulder, turning her back on the mess of limbs and cloak on the shining floor. Ben was stifling a scream through clenched teeth. Rey pursed her lips, then spoke, though the words were clipped and difficult. "Are you sure … "
"Go. I need to speak to him."
Rey had business, had her own losses and her own crises, but this one - this was Leia's. She had a bowcaster over her shoulder, and slipped her hands along the strap as she walked forward. Rey looked at her hard and put a hand on her shoulder, then ran for the curving stairs that surrounded the room. Maybe she would be able to see them from the top of the flight, as she looked down into the pit. Leia felt Rey's Force presence linger a little, all Jakku sun and Takodana grass.
Leia stepped forward. Ben was bleeding and reaching for the new mask he had discarded, but he had stopped with one hand outstretched, in indecision or because of the cuts on his legs. Leia's gorge rose as she felt herself spiraling. Don't think of him as your child became of course he's your child, help him, destroy him.
"You used to tell me I didn't understand you," Leia said, fighting for control. "I didn't. I suppose now you would say I was lucky."
"Shut up, mother," Ben said without looking at her.
"Come back to me."
Ben rolled onto his back, abandoning his effort toward the mask and shrugging his saber hand across his chest. "Come back? What was ever there for me? You could have made me better. Instead, you chose not to."
"What do you think I chose, Ben?"
At the sound of the name he ignited the lightsaber, the red light bouncing onto his face and highlighting the white, raised bubbles of the scar. Leia thought she smelled his hair burning, again had to keep herself back from him. "You chose not to be a Jedi. Not to train me." He was reaching, said the part of herself that could read people, could tell which way they would vote or how often they would lie. Her son was grasping for things he could hate.
Leia Organa Solo had indeed chosen not to be a Jedi.
Leia's specialty was handling small, precise things with big implications. She knew the schedule of the senate, or consulted C-3PO for it; she knew who was infatuated with whom; she knew which pilot was hiding the fact that their two TIE Fighter kills just hit them and they needed to sit down.
The arena in which she stood now was neither small nor precise.
These were the broad fates of the Jedi:
The new mask was wicked, and the fall was far, and the lights were dimming as the armies took the generators outside. The air smelled like ozone, and occasionally the metal floor shook, and that, Leia thought, was what Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala were - great shifts and electric forces.
Leia did not choose this life.
Leia was, nonetheless, very good at it.
She could give Ben one concession. "I did regret giving you to Luke, Ben. It was the only thing I ever regretted."
(She regretted Hosnian Prime, she regretted Alderaan, but she did not blame herself for them. Sometimes, she blamed Luke.)
Ben stood up, shaking, still gripping the live lightsaber as if it would comfort him. She half expected him to cut his own face in another line parallel to the scar.
"Don't do this, Ben. We'll forgive you. We'll keep you safe."
Forgiveness had been Luke's specialty once, but Leia had believed in it when Ben left, and she believed it now, too. She had hesitated before saying that the Resistance or the Republic would help Ben, because she wasn't sure about that, and because suggesting that he needed help would make him angrier. She could feel her own forgiveness overwhelming her future, though, approaching like a distant storm.
Forgiveness was coming. For now, the fight.
"No…" Ben extended the word, almost sang it, then rushed the rest until he spat on the lightsaber hilt. "My name is Kylo Ren."
"I never thought of you by that name."
"He did." Now Ben shouted, eyes wide as he looked at some point behind her. Even his branching, storming Force sense didn't reach out toward Rey, who was now long gone from the room and gathering her own storm. Instead, he looked for something Leia couldn't see, and addressed it. "You thought of me as a knight of the dark side. You gave me all of this!"
All of what? Leia thought, as more blood dripped from Ben's legs.
Ben's gaze tracked back to her, more sane than a moment before. "He told me that I could be great, if I just chose the right way. You must understand that, mother."
"Darth Vader saved Luke before he died. He understood that the dark side was his mistake." Her voice was following the same cadence as his, sweeping and then hurrying. She had given speeches in the Senate like this.
"And that was his weakness!" Ben screamed at the corner of the room over Leia's shoulder. "Tell me again! You gave me permission. You helped me."
Leia thought about a lot of things she didn't say:
You know, Ben, he talked to me too. He said my grandmother died with her wrists tied together.
You know, Ben, he said don't let that happen to anyone else I love.
He said the capacity to love is amazing when you're dead.
"Darth Vader spoke to me too," she said, and her voice cut through his. "After he died he reassured me that he wanted the Jedi Order back. He wanted it different from what he knew, and he and Luke were going to make that."
Ben tipped his head, confused. "My father was never wise in the things that mattered."
Leia realized then why she had not sensed Anakin's presence.
She said, "I wanted Han to save you, Ben, you knew that —"
"I know." He spoke it slowly.
"And you chose this … this other way, this path I couldn't follow."
"Tell me, father. I'm ready. Tell me why I can't win like you did."
Leia shivered. Leia remembered another mad man and Alderaan.
I'm surprised you had the courage to take the responsibility yourself.
Was this what being a Jedi meant? This precipice, this finger on a trigger? Luke had mourned some of his enemies, but he had destroyed the Death Star, too, and he had come back triumphant and happy and shining, fitting anew into a world that had once seemed misshapen to him.
The young Ben had wanted nothing more than to be a Jedi and feel the world fit right.
Did he feel that now?
She didn't think so. He would keep causing pain until the world matched his own broken view of himself.
"Ben," she said. "Can you hear me?"
Ren said, "Don't — don't get in my way. Father, she's even blinder than you. Grandfather, get her out of my sight! Oh Force, it hurts — "
"I love you," she said, while Ren swayed and shut his eyes. "I believed in you. It's important that I'm your mother, and it's important that terrible things don't bring about more terrible things.
But I was never a very good Jedi."
She unslung the bowcaster and felt herself pulled off balance for a moment by its weight. She pulled the trigger and held it lightly, ready either to aim and shoot again or hold it down. Ren opened his eyes very wide and deflected the first shot, but then the lightsaber kept tipping toward the floor as if it was heavy, and the next shots were truer than even Leia expected. As he fell back once, twice in the red burst she thought of Luke and Hosnian Prime and Alderaan, and wondered whether this was what revenge felt like. The Force swept into her and for a moment she was the pilot she had always imagined, all flight sticks and open air, banking around the terrible thing that killed her world.
The trail of blood lead three meters across the shining floor and when she got there Leia cradled what was left of her son and didn't think of anything at all.
For a while, the Force flowed over her and slipped back like waves on a shore, delivering and erasing the present moment over and over.
It was Rey's victory that eventually shocked her out of the stupor, pushing it aside with a cascade of other emotions and implications and a sort of fierce joy. Leia would have to carry the body. She would have to catch it under the shoulders and let the feet drag. Maybe Rey would be here soon.
Leia knew how her own grief worked.
The next step was to let go of letting go.