Only Right

by Adahn

Jacen Solo instructs Ben Skywalker in the art of gardening. Post-LOTF:Inferno AU. Re-edited 8/14/2012.

2. Alone

I. ALONE

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
Aristotle

―

"You killed mom."

"Yes."

Ben struck quickly, but he was not nearly quick enough. In three precise steps he closed the distance between himself and his mother's murderer, throwing himself across the durasteel deck in the same posture of attack that had been drilled into his muscle memory years before, when Jacen Solo had decided that Ben was ready to learn to fight with a lightsaber.

The strike might have even landed, had Ben had the element of surprise, and were he not a fourteen year old attempting to outmaneuver the Dark Lord of the Sith. Unfortunately for him, Darth Caedus had anticipated this moment down to the finest detail, saw each telegraphed motion and thought in the mourning boy, his features contorted with empty rage, and he knew Ben Skywalker in that instant far better than Ben Skywalker knew himself. Darth Caedus stepped backward with an utterly precise economy of motion that ensured the lightsaber missed him by a margin just narrow enough, coming so close it cast his gaunt face for an instant in ice-blue, making his cold features even colder.

Caedus extended his hand, fingers splayed, as Ben reeled to recover. Ben had committed himself totally to a single killing blow, and in the time it took him to bring the blade back to the fore it was already over. Caedus's fingers moved through undefended space and brushed against Ben's forehead, and from deep within the Sith a burst of lightning flashed into the boy, overwhelming his nervous system instantaneously. The blade of the lightsaber flickered and died. Ben fell to one knee, struggling against convulsion to rise and defend himself, and this was when Caedus slammed him backwards in a long arc, striking him in the forehead with his open palm all the way down to the durasteel deck, pinning him there with the Force.

Ben was silent; the durasteel gave a long, agonized groan under the pressure being exerted.

Darth Caedus was the Dark Lord of the Sith, after all, and becoming more worthy of that title, taken at great cost, with each passing day. Darth Caedus rose and moved to stand over the flattened figure, watching.

"Yes, I killed her," he said, "And that's not all. It was my poison that burned the life out of her. I could have saved her with a touch, and I did nothing. I watched and felt as the soul within her faded, and I was smiling. I laughed. I couldn't help but laugh."

The pressure was still mounting. Ben's power, feeding on waxing fear and terror and hate, was straining against the burden of the pin.

"Do you know why you can't kill me, Ben?"

Through all of this, from the first moment, even as their wills struggled over the pin in the Force, the utter calm of Darth Caedus had never faltered. That was what Ben found most frightening of all.

Ben remained silent, left an atom of a boy beneath an ocean of claustrophobia-induced panic and all-consuming rage. Adrenaline roiled in him—all of himself had been building towards a fight, a struggle, so much so that the full danger of his position had not yet really hit him. Even if he had the presence of mind to answer the question, the hold itself was so tight that it wasn't even possible to inhale the air needed to exhale a reply. Darth Caedus allowed him just enough give to breathe—and then only barely, only enough to bring the sensation of drowning into starker relief.

"You can't kill me, Ben Skywalker, after all your preparation, in all your sorrow and despair and fury, because I am still everything that you want to be."

Jacen circled his prey, his expression neutral—he stooped to take Ben's lightsaber, held it up to the light and observed it for a moment, then clipped it to his belt, where it disappeared into his cloak—and for a time all was silent save the sound of Caedus's boots on steel and Ben's gasping breath. Finally Caedus drew down onto one knee, over the boy, and stared unblinking into Ben—through him.

"A valiant effort. Typical—brave to a fault. But you still love me far too much to kill me."

Were the circumstances less desperate, Ben might have laughed. But he was too busy shuddering with the effort of trying to throw off the mountain of Jacen's power that held him.

"You don't believe me, but you should. You will. You are too much my apprentice, Ben Skywalker, even now. Too much of you began in me for it to be any other way. For example: you came here wishing to be the lone hero, but why did you have my face when you dreamed of yourself standing triumphant over my corpse? And what would you be, if you succeeded, but the only Jedi who was willing to do what was necessary, in spite of your love and in spite of the Code? What would you be but the last beacon of hope, the purifying flame in a galaxy where the light had waned, the knife that cut out the heart of darkness?"

"Yes, you would have killed me, and in doing that you would have become me. You know that, all childishness aside. And more than that—you accepted it, you were ready for it, just as surely as the people of the Galactic Alliance have accepted who I am and what I will be. They see that I am their last hero, the only Jedi who stands with them. They know that I will be much more than that. I am their beacon in a galaxy that has grown dark, and I stand at the threshold, building them a rampart of the dead. And I do it in spite of the fact that I love the traitors—you, and your father, and even your mother. In spite of my love for the life I have known and the man I once was—in spite of the fact that I love all life—in spite of the fact that my actions have enormous costs. In spite of it all I am their hero, the last light of their civilization, their last hope for a government that will not succumb to slow rot. I am to them so much more than a man—I am a government not paralyzed, not crippled, not stillborn—I am a state that can protect its people. And I have sacrificed everything to make that for them. I am a leader of men—not like your father, who chose to abandon them when they needed him most. I am respected; I am feared; they know what I can do, they have seen, and so they believe in me. I've chosen what I love, and I am willing to die for it. So the process of molding you in my image, Ben, is already fairly far along. And you've done most of the work for me. Well begun is half done."

Ben glared at him, his face red and his eyes watering, and Caedus could feel hatred radiating off of him.

"You can't kill me, Ben—you can't even stand—because where the pain is tearing you apart it is making me stronger. If you let me, I will teach you. You think you know pain now, but you feel it without understanding. You suffer and you do not learn. I will fix that. Not because I take pleasure in it—not because I hate you, or hate any of them—but because duty calls. The people of the Galactic Alliance are asking for you, like they asked for me. In coming here you told me that you are now strong enough to stop being a child and strong enough start answering. I have only heard and understood."

Ben's gaze may as well have been a salvo of lightning for its terrible intensity. He was quivering with hatred, pushing against Jacen's pin, redoubling the Force around and within himself, envisioning in his clouded mind's eye his hands strangling the liar, the butcher, who had killed his mother and now thought to speak of loving peace and justice, who Ben wanted in that moment only to silence forever, to not suffer hearing his calm voice which had once been so true lie and lie—

"Listen to me. I know you are in there, beneath the pretense. You are afraid, Ben Skywalker, and desperate, and you have no idea just how much you do not yet understand. You came here to kill me in part because you believed that doing so would return the galaxy you have known. But it's gone. I killed her. I watched her die, and she's never coming back. Nothing will undo my betrayal. There is no easy exit now—not for me, and certainly not for you. Even now, as you hide yourself from me in the Force, I can feel that you are terrified. Even now, as you deny it, I know your heart. Part of you wishes that she were here to save you from me. Part of you wishes that I would kill you now, so you might see her again, because you have missed her so terribly."

Now shame too washed over Ben. Something like those ideas had flickered deep within him, even as he had denied them—even his mind was not safe from the calm face and the surging presence that loomed over him.

"I know you very well, Ben. You are going to learn that everything secret in you is mine. You always knew I wouldn't put you out of your misery. You always knew you wouldn't kill me. After all, I am here to show you how to survive this."

Ben tried to spit in Jacen's hovering, placid, somehow almost sad face, but found that his mouth was far too dry.

"You don't think that I'm sincere. But you should. Everything I am going to tell you, now and hereafter, is the truth. I'll start with a truth that has been concealed from you. You deserve to know. It's something your father would never tell you—though he must know it—though, really, you must have sensed it yourself. When your mother died—when I killed her, I mean, when I poisoned her—believe me that both of us were using what you would call the dark side. Your mother fell when she fought me, and she died in the dark."

To Jacen's great surprise, Ben jerked forward at that revelation, breaking free of the pin by sheer force of will. He was halfway up, his fingers splayed in claws meant to tear at Jacen's awful, calm, lying face, to wring his neck, and rising still with explosive force, before Caedus even broke from his reverie to realize it was happening. This only made it more painful for Ben as the Sith took him by the neck and slammed him back down into the deck with a sickening clang, reasserted the pin so tightly that Ben was sure for a long horrifying moment that he was being strangled to death.

"Monster," Ben managed to choke out. "Liar."

"I can't let you hide from this. You deserve to hear the whole truth—for your sake. You deserve to know why she died far from the light, and you deserve the chance to see what that can mean for the two of us. She chose to go into the dark. And she did it for your sake, Ben Skywalker. What might that mean for you and I?"

Darth Caedus was surprised by the exertion required to hold completely still a being so overflowing with fury. Already, just as he had hoped, Ben's great promise was self evident, written in every facet of his being, like even this blind, impotent child's rage could not stop it from shining forth.

"You have already realized, I think, that your mother sought to murder me. She had no intention whatever of taking me alive. She was never going to see me proven me guilty through a Jedi tribunal, let alone through an Alliance jury trial. Why else would she attack me alone, in utmost secrecy? She never even told your father. Imagine that. But it's very simple: just like your escape to come here, she knew that Luke and the rest would never allow her to do what she was planning to do to me. She attacked me—and believe me that she attacked with no objective save my death by any means necessary—and I defended myself, and I won. She attacked me, Ben. But consider this: was what she tried to do wrong? Was what you just tried to do wrong?"

Had Ben been able to put a response to words, he would have said that any scenario that culminated in the death of Jacen Solo was probably the right one.

Caedus smiled gently.

"Yes. Yes, exactly—all things in good time, Ben Skywalker. We'll get there, but we have a lot to do before then. I am only mortal, but you can't kill me as you are. It's not yet meant to be. You are still just the seed of the flower to come. If we work together, you will have your chance. We are so much more similar right now than you think. In fact, I would argue that you have already made the most important discovery, the one that drove your mother and drives me still, and in coming here you have just demonstrated to me just how deeply you believe it. I don't have to break down walls to teach you that the dark side is something internal and personal, that you can balance within yourself, do I? You already know. You just lived it, and you were ready to die living it, surely as your mother did. You don't need to develop the stomach for this work—you've shown me that you already have it."

Ben wanted to say no. But he couldn't deny that he had escaped from the Jedi that one silent long voyage, what felt like ages ago, and had endured the nightmares, and had tried to bisect Jacen Solo moments before, thinking things that were worryingly close.

"Skywalkers are bound to tragedy. In a just galaxy, your mother and I would have fought together. We had the same cause. Do you even know why she was willing to gamble her life for a chance at ending mine? Do you know why I had to kill her? It wasn't because she could not tolerate Jacen Solo as Chief of State, or because she discovered that Lumiya was teaching me the way of the Sith—those were only her excuses, and in any case her means were completely out of proportion to that end. It's so much simpler, and sadder, than that: she didn't know the whole story, and she thought I was doing something much worse. She eavesdropped on a conversation between myself and Lumiya. The hag was arguing that I should kill you—her usual boilerplate, of course—and I was playing along, as I always did with her. Your mother believed what was only lip service to be intent, and she was willing to do anything—anything—in order to keep me from coming for you. The real tragedy is that she did not see the whole picture. She struck before I could explain—I never have meant to hurt you Ben—quite the opposite—I only want to bring you into your own infinite potential, because we have always been on the same side. If you believe nothing else, believe that all I do is in the service of loves of my own. The tragedy is that so far the three of us have been employing the same tools, for the same reasons, against one another. Together we might have already fixed the root of the problem, which is this war, which has imperiled our family, and the wars that will surely follow if we, empowered to act, do nothing. She let her love for you drive her deep into the dark, maybe even deeper than I can go. And Ben, you know what's most amazing of all about that? She wasn't wrong—not at all. Neither were you. Neither am I. Isn't that an incredible, profoundly provident thing?"

An ominous shade of gold was beginning to seep into Jacen's gentle brown eyes, burning them away, and Ben knew without a doubt that coming here was the worst mistake of his entire life.

"It's been more than forty years, now, of war. War of all shapes and sizes, built up out of every kind of loss imaginable. Forty years is a horrifically long for a whole galaxy to tear itself apart. Don't ever doubt that I have grieved. Can we even begin to imagine trillions of sentient lives, burned away? That was the toll of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion alone. It is incomprehensible to us just how enormous that number is—millions of millions. We've seen brief reprieves, maybe, but those moments are far too few. This situation has become untenable. Something has to give, Ben. The galaxy has been either at war, reeling from war, or preparing for war my entire life—let alone yours. The fundamental causes won't change unless someone is willing and able to make them change. Our leaders—Omas, the Senate, the Jedi—it is transparently obvious now, if it wasn't before, that they failed, and they made a system that will fail. The only way we can proceed, the only way we have stop this thing, is the course of action that you and your mother and I have uncovered. There can be no more limits in what we will do to protect our loves. I mean it when I say that I am willing to do anything. And I know that any less than that is tantamount to treason, negligence that will let this galactic pogrom continue until there are none left to fight. I will put an end to war in our time, or I will die trying. Believe me in this, though you doubt all else."

The words washed over Ben, who felt the flicker of himself brushing up against the cold night of unconsciousness, rolling in and out—there was barely enough within him for a denial—his capacity for struggle had peaked, and now the exhaustion was pressing down on him together with the choking, crushing power of the pin—but what was stopping war worth, if the peace was ruled over by Sith?

"What is continuing to fight worth, if the rules of the game make it impossible for the Jedi to win? What is the value of moral high ground, when billions suffer because of it? When entire worlds are burning for your fear of the dark? When your own mother understood that it constrained her to let her loved ones die, and chose in answer to venture bravely, nobly, providently, into the night?"

Ben found that much harder to answer. Instead he opted to block it out, and to try to cling to the nourishing breath of the Force and wait for the end.

"Ben Skywalker," Jacen said, recomposing himself, though his voice had never lost that terrifying calm, "I said that I would not let you hide from this. For your sake. Have you begun to understand, yet, what I am trying to teach you? And why?"

Ben's presence in the force was weak—a feral, agonized howl. Caedus exhaled, and then with surgical precision, deftness bordering on artistry, he used his arcane powers to ruin what remained of Ben's feeble defenses so that he could reach down to the deepest place, Ben's access to the font of the Force. It was a razor slashing the string that held Ben to the past, and he felt the echo of the nova in Ben's head, then the blankness, and then the boy was easy to hold once more, his glassy eyes radiating equal parts futile fury and utter despair.

Caedus let the familiar atrocious pangs of death wash over him and seep out into the fabric of the Force. In a similar chamber a few decks below a prospective Confederate suicide bomber captured by the Guard was asphyxiating as Caedus pinched his windpipe shut with the Force. Caedus's technique was much better than it had been on his previous attempt to sever Ben from the Force, as he twisted the current until it was no longer clear where the life had ended and the death had begun—the most deeply convincing sensation of life snuffed out would be clearly felt by all those closely attuned to the boy, right down to the last moment of peaking terror.

"We will do this for the sake of all those we love, those we have lost, and those to come—those we have grieved over, and those we refuse to grieve over. We will do it for those who need us, because without us they would have nothing. Because together we will fix it. We can stop the madness. We can give their future back."

Tears had begun to flow down Ben's face, and his eyes looked dead, fake somehow, like those of a doll. He looked his age, now, like a child for the first time comprehending the scale of awfulness in the universe, the immense and unfair tragedy, as his last lifeline, his last crutch, was shattered. And a boy might have been utterly destroyed by the realization, by the trauma of exposure to such immense arcane power—the sheer grotesque wrongnessof somehow still living even as the Force itself took him for dead and rotting—but Darth Caedus knew that if inside was the hard seed of a man, and the makings of a worthy student, then he would bear it, and learn within it, using it even as he hated it. Now came the moment that Darth Caedus had witnessed often in his meditation, as he hunched over his helpless prey—the exact locus of circumstances within the Force that resonated with the possibility of victory over an overwhelmingly hostile and treacherous galaxy. Any of the many deaths that could wait ahead for Darth Caedus might come to pass, but here and now he would make the first and best preparation for all of it. Caedus paused for a moment, tuning and retuning himself to the currents and eddies of energy that flowed within him and around him, and when he spoke again he let the emotion creep into his voice—it lurched out of its measured calm, became hoarse with barely concealed pain.

"You deserve to know this, too. I owe you that much. How did I defeat your mother, fallen and ascended, attacking me with every bit of the immense power she controlled—Mara Jade Skywalker, the great predator, with all boundaries ripped away? She was about to strike the killing blow, and so I projected an image of your face over mine. She hesitated—just an instant, but long enough. I jammed the dart into her thigh."

The last of the fire faded from Ben's bloodshot eyes, leaving only desolation.

"It was relatively painless. It was the best that I could do. We both know she deserved better."

Jacen released the pin, drawing that power back into himself, but his captive remained still, barely breathing. The Force built into a tremendous crescendo inside of Caedus as he knelt closer, his face centimeters away from Ben's, and he used every power of persuasion he had learned from his meteoric rise within the Galactic Alliance, from every memory of every lie he had ever told and gotten away with, from the arcane abilities he had tapped into as a freshly minted Sith, as he croaked:

"You deserve to know her last words, whispered to me as my poison overtook her. She told me, even as her heart was yielding, that she would have done anything to protect you."

The final blow was struck, the most subtle of all, the seed of a great change planted, atmosphere upon atmosphere of mental pressure mounting and mounting over the broken boy, so that it must have felt to him like the ocean over him grew only deeper and darker—but all Jacen's mundane senses felt were the hum of the Anakin Solo's engines beneath his feet, all he could hear was the barely perceptible sound of Ben's shallow and ragged breaths.

"You can't kill me, Ben, because you could never kill your mother. We are one and the same. We wanted peace for you, for the galaxy, at any price. We wanted to make a more just galaxy, and we were willing to give up everything. Know this, as we begin: everything I tell you is the truth. Know this: the rule that underpins all the ways and works of this universe is pain."

Caedus stood for a moment, savoring each sensation, balancing himself. Then he lifted the boy, not without a sort of tenderness, held him suspended in the air. The flesh was only superficially damaged—some electrical burns from the lightning, a minor concussion from being slammed against the deck the second time. All that would heal quickly. But the mental wounds would take longer, and how they would mend—if they would mend, he reminded himself, for that was far from certain—fascinated him.

But Jacen saw even now the glitter of distant intelligence in the eyes of the boy, crushed and mangled as he was, his mind still reasoning on some basic level after the utter psychic devastation that had been unleashed upon him, and then he knew without doubt that he had chosen the right apprentice, and the right lesson with which to begin. He had brought Ben into the deepest depths of despair, upturned everything he knew, cut away all familiar crutches, and now the first challenge was for the boy to find a new truth—to let that pain become his teacher, to let it lead him onto the true path.

And because Caedus knew well the cyclical nature of the Force and his family history, it was only right to teach the lesson of pain the very same way it had been taught to him. He had nurtured the torture implement to end torture implements in this secret chamber of his flagship for just that purpose. He lifted Ben up, into the one and only Embrace of Pain, which entangled him with blind and urgent hunger.

Well begun is half done,Darth Caedus remembered from somewhere far across space and time, as he watched the face of Ben Skywalker, utterly desolate, disappear beneath the writhing bioluminescent barbs.

But is it what the teacher teaches, or what the student learns?

By the time Ben Skywalker began to scream, hoarse and becoming hoarser, Caedus was already deep in the memory of his own sleet white Hoth-noon, a long time ago.

―

The first thing Ben Skywalker learned in the Embrace of Pain was that time could stop. The torture never yielded, and all conception of days or minutes or seconds fell away—consciousness arbitrarily came and receded, but the Embrace was the only constant, in waking hours and in churning nightmares both. He learned to stop screaming fairly quickly—it only made his throat more ragged, which only made him cough up yet more blood. His consciousness was far too discontinuous to maintain a count of how many times he had come in and out of the grasp of the creature—not that such a count would have mattered or helped, because while the Embrace had to periodically let go of Ben physically, if only to sustain his life, its mental grip on him, the timeless torment it imposed, was unyielding.

Eternity after eternity passed by Ben Skywalker. Whole epochs of pain coursed through him and left him behind, unmoved. There was nothing for Ben Skywalker but white agony, only made worse by the fragments of thought that lanced into his mind from parts unknown and streaked out once more, finding no purchase. It took ages for Ben to learn how to knit together his thoughts again, how to maintain a sequence of ideas when atmospheres of pain-pressure were weighing down on them. It was in this fashion that he slowly learned to understand pain through the prism of the body, because just as light contained all colors his being contained all suffering, and in this fashion he came to know every assaulted system and subsystem of his body as he never had before, always seeking the merest solace, the tiniest handhold of non-sensation, but finding none. When he was certain there was nowhere inside of himself where he could hide from the pain, he spent a long time praying devoutly for death, a surcease of sorrow—when his prayers went unanswered and the suffering wouldn't end, he began praying that it couldend at all.

He wished Jacen—somehow the concept of Jacen, the traitor, the liar, in whom this had all begun, never seemed to fade—would judge him unworthy and show mercy with one effortless flick of the lightsaber—he even remembered for a time that there was a world outside of himself, more as an article of faith than a fact, and he forced begging sounds to emerge from his burning throat. When his throat was too raw to continue, he began to pray only that the Embrace would make a mistake and push him too far into sleet-white Hoth-noon agony and let him die at last. It was like waiting for a tide to falter, or a sun to fail to rise—he endured for so long, only waiting for an end that never came.

It became clear to him that the Embrace of Pain was far too adept in its ways to ever actually kill its victim, and that unless something changed he would die of old age still hanging from the rack. He wished devoutly into the pain that he had never been born into the burden of his name, his legacy, the broken galaxy in which so much pain could even exist—he wished that his mother were here, but he knew she was dead, and he wished that his father would find him, but for all his father knew Ben Skywalker was already dead—that was all part of Jacen's enormous trick. For the longest time of all, when the suffering had made it abundantly clear that Ben Skywalker existed and was irrevocably alone, he wished into unyielding suffering for his mind to break, so that he would not have to remember his mother's death, Jacen's betrayal, his own unfathomable foolishness in coming to this black ship with the intention of confronting and killing Jacen, the span of torture behind him and the span of torture that arced into infinity ahead of him. But in time even that dimmest of hopes faded. If madness had claimed him, it hadn't been enough to stop the suffering or the thinking. There was no way out.

Ben Skywalker hung in the white for a long time, empty of hope, all alone, remembering and wordlessly weeping into uncaring unfeeling white, before he found himself again.

It was a simple realization, to start with. Whatever else he was, he was Ben Skywalker; a Ben Skywalker existed as an entity separate in some significant respects from the pain. In the capacity of being Ben Skywalker he had memories, and the capacity to feel, even if the memories were often hard to recall in the haze, and even if all the feelings were so profoundly wretched. He had the capacity to think—there had once been a time when he had the capacity to manifest thought as action, with the surging and omnipresent Force as a medium. Jacen said that pain was the rule running beneath all things, and Ben had the ability to weigh that argument in the context of the vast body of evidence available to him. This realization wasn't much, and all too often it was all blown to stellar winds by spectacular spikes of agony that left room in him for nothing else, and when it washed out and left him sprawling face-down on the cold steel he had to start over from the beginning. But at least it was something.

From the minuscule handhold of identity, a speck of non-pain in the white, he found himself reasoning again. He remembered the first time Jacen had fed him to the Embrace, and how he had been able to bear it until his father's rescue—how mercifully brief it had been then, the blink of an eye—but this time was worse, so much worse. He needed the Force, reached for it, and found nothing but himself, a mirror held up to a sea of agony. For a long time, he once again felt nothing but pain—inward and outward, body and mind, howling unmitigated in his memory and the void where the Force had once been. The Force lived only in memory, in the hallowed domain of the forever unobtainable, there with cool water and dreamless sleep.

Ben Skywalker had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In the Embrace, all roads led back to Jacen. After what had felt like an infinity of denial, all the important questions remained: why he still hung in the Embrace—why he still lived at all—and what Jacen Solo had said.

That had been so long ago—the memory was so murky—there had been words about his mother, and about the dark side, and about fixing the galaxy, and words were so difficult for Ben to even comprehend, lost as he was in the land of pure sensation. Still, there was only one conclusion:

Jacen lies.

It was the first, natural response—easy and precious—the only way everything Ben knew could remain intact. Jacen only lied. It seemed that his only chance at returning to the world he knew hinged upon that fact, and so he clutched it tightly through many cycles of the Embrace, through pain spikes that obliterated all else.

His mother could never go into the dark, not even for him. She could never do the things Jacen had said—attempt murder in cold blood, betray the Order for the sake of revenge—for the sake of Ben Skywalker alone. She was a Jedi Master. She had triumphed over the dark side before Jacen had even been born. Surely, she had faced and overcome greater temptations than the need to protect her son. Surely, she had to have. She could no more fall than a mountain could bend. It was pleasant to imagine that there was another universal constant in Ben Skywalker's universe, running alongside pain, and it governed the unequivocal iron will Ben had known in his mother. Except that his mother was dead and gone.

Unless, of course—

Ben instinctively closed this line of thought. Even as weak and lost as he was, he knew that if he gave an inch Jacen's logic would take much more, take everything, but trying to still his mind only brought the agony that was being Ben Skywalker into starker relief, threatened to send him into a new eternity of unanswered wish for death, only left him hanging before the void where the Force had used to be—he had to think, or he would fall back in. His mother, Mara Jade Skywalker, would not fall to the dark side. It had to be a deception—one made by a master deceiver—Jacen lied. Jacen was made of lies, made of shadow, made of unfeeling dark. Why else would he do all this?

As far as Ben Skywalker could guess, he was still only fourteen years old.

He knew how Jacen would answer that, though: if you're old enough to kill, then you're old enough for everything else.

But why had his mother gone alone, if not because she thought it imperative above all to kill Jacen quickly and quietly? Why? Why had she fought Jacen alone? She hadn't even told his father. How could she have left her husband and son and journeyed into the dark without a word? She must have had reasons he did not know, reasons that could cast her in the light of a Jedi Master. She could not have touched the same darkness that Ben had felt surging in Jacen. But if she had—and there was Jacen's voice again, always so kriffing calm, to transform that possibility into a crusade against all that Ben had ever known. A great crusade—Ben tried to deny it even as he envisioned it—a crusade that could fix everything: a crusade that would give his mother's death meaning, a crusade that would give the pain itself purpose.

Unless. Unless.

It was a star going nova inside of his pounding brain every moment he denied the insidious possibility, like a worm that had crawled inside of him infecting him with the word he wanted to hear least, a pain over all other pains. If he yielded to it, then what little he still had would break forever. What might move in the darkness—what might move out there where Jacen walked—he had to struggle to convince himself that it was a lie, wrong, not part of himself—hadn't he already tried to step into that enormous cold night, and hadn't he believed that it would be worth it if it could stop Jacen? To take up a great crusade, which no one but Jacen would ever understand or forgive or condone, an invisible war against nothing less than the cosmic forces that had bound them both up in a cycle of tragedy—

Unless.

It beat inside of him no matter how much he tried to avoid it, some great dark heart relentlessly pounding. It grew louder than life itself, and in the featureless sandstorm of the Embrace he had nothing else to listen to, nowhere else to turn, no other way out but that unfathomable potentiality, that prospect of the world outside the white, a place of motion and color and change, and so he listened to the words that resonated unfathomable potential, that could destroy all that he was.

Of course, she would not have done all those things, unless they were the right things to do.

It was fallacy—Ben knew this. Every lesson he had ever learned from his mother about the Force was centered around one undeniable truth—that the dark side was always wrong, no matter how anyone tried to justify it. And she knew better than anyone—so much of her life had been spent clawing in the darkness of Palpatine's Empire, struggling to survive, and everything he knew about her told him that she would have sooner died than descended into that place again.

Unless, of course, there really was a justification. Unless it was actually the right thing to do.

Jacen had chosen the dark side. That was evident—he had admitted as much though word and action. Ben knew that was truth. Being on the dark side was, by definition, wrong.

Unless.

But he had loved Jacen, had loved Jacen totally, had respected him and admired him, had learned so many precious things from him—so much of himself had been derived from the mannerisms and quirks of Jacen, who he had held in esteem above anyone except his parents—for a time, before everything had gone so wrong, even above them. And even after the darkness grew in Jacen, there had still been a long time that he had believed Jacen was doing the right thing—even still, his darkest actions were masked in the most appealing, bright banners of peace and order and law. But Jacen had killed Mara. He had admitted it, his voice full with its own terrible logic, but hollow with the absence of emotion. He was dark. Dark was wrong.

Unless.

Jacen said it was in self-defense. Mara had attacked to kill. That was dark. That was wrong. Two wrongs could not make a right, as his father had often said.

Unless.

His mother was dead. His father would not come to save him—not this time. The Force would not give him the breath of sanity he needed to go one believing. All he saw was pain and Jacen Solo, and even the line between them was blurry. Ben Skywalker was utterly, entirely, eternally alone. Everything hurt.

Unless.

Lies—like everything else Jacen said, this was a lie. Ben saw the logic, clear against the agony-haze, explored it again and again and again seeking the flaw, but he couldn't find it. There had to be a lie. Otherwise—

Otherwise, the entire belief system of Ben Skywalker was fatally flawed. Otherwise, impossible things might traffic within the patterns of light and darkness permeating the Force. If it were true, then a mother might die to save a son, as a master might immerse an apprentice in Embrace to unlock a truth, as pain might not be an enemy but a bridge, not random but suffuse always with meaning-

Unless. Unless. Unless―

Inevitably, the desperation and the claustrophobia and the terror and the pain peaked, and Ben Skywalker broke, and he found himself beholding the event horizon, herald of the void. It was all already contained inside of himself.

Jacen Solo could be telling the truth.

It echoed through the white for a long time, shaping and reshaping, blocking off all paths of escape, encircling his memory, waiting at the end of every frantic logical turn he took, until at last he could no longer go on denying. He accepted the impossible. He embraced it.

Jacen Solo was telling the truth.

For a long time, Ben Skywalker beheld the tragedy and the beauty. His mother and Jacen Solo had taken up an impossible burden—for him—but also for everyone. But it was okay. He could do the same, and carry on their great work, their singular mission. They had started the final crusade, and now he was ready to be entrusted with the task of finishing it.

Ben discovered, slowly, that the galaxy had not ended. The universe had not shattered around him. He was not shattered, he was surprised to find, just changed, and stronger for it. He had reassembled himself in the forge of truth, taken all the pieces and rearranged them into a new shape—different, but whole. And it was all so unbelievably beautiful. He could love his mother, and he could love Jacen too. They had both found answers in the dark. They had both been right. What they had done—it was the right thing to do. They both loved him, and he loved them. Jacen had killed her. It had been horrible; it had been the right thing to do. A necessary crime, a necessary sacrifice, a tragedy with a seed of hope—for him—for everyone. His mother was gone, but he loved her, but Jacen was alive, and he was right.

The pain was still there, the universal constant, but it was all right. Pain was no longer meaningless; behind each sensation was a lesson to be learned; pain could sustain even as it wounded, build even as it tore. For now he could exist apart from the Force—there would be time for that. He no longer felt so immensely lonely. His mother would always be with him in the spirit of his task, and Jacen remained—even now Ben knew that Jacen had been listening all along—Jacen cared for him enough to protect him when he was not ready for the truth, and enough to force his eyes open when he was. He would never have to battle himself again—never feel guilty about the people he had killed, the Jedi and family he would betray, if Jacen asked. He would never even have to feel guilty for trying to murder Jacen, when the time came for that. His mother had done that too, and she had been right.

He remembered his father, but dismissed him. Luke Skywalker hadn't gone dark. He couldn't be right, because Ben knew his father, and his father would break before bending, and all the suffering mass of life demanded that he act as his mother had, as Jacen did, and save them without respect for boundary or limitation.

There would be peace for everyone. There was no price too high for it, no price he would not pay. But it could be paid. It would be paid. His mother knew this, and Jacen knew this, and now he did too, and his father did not. His father was gone, but he had Jacen again, and Jacen would be much better. And also, best of all, when it had all been settled—when Ben had become what he was meant to be—he would impale Jacen on a lightsaber, and abolish him, and both would accept it as justice done.

Euphoria washed over him as absolute transcendent order became apparent beneath the suffering. He was hungry, ravenously hungry, and he joyfully fell upon his burning nerves, discovering. And now, where there had only been weakness, he found all the strength he needed. If all that had come before in the Embrace was the understanding of how his flesh yielded under the torture, all that washed over him now was the astounding realization that through the torture his flesh had an enormous capacity to persist, endure, survive, and grow.

Word by word, he pieced four sentences together in his mind:

Jacen, I know you're out there. I am ready to start. I get it.

You were always everything I wanted to be.

Marshaling all of his new found strength, he forced his jaw to shut, and then open again. He made himself swallow. For the first time in a very long time, he forced himself to speak—barely a whisper, barely even recognizable:

"Jacen. Let me out."

Louder:

"Jacen."

Feeling stronger with each passing moment, he strained against his bindings, and the Embrace tightened around him in response. The barbs hooked into him, drawing fresh, warm blood. Still he strained, and now the Embrace seemed to surge in answer to the challenge, and the pain began to spike. Ben shuddered involuntarily, but still forced himself to strain, and the pain did not stop spiking.

The Embrace intended to make Ben submit, but now Ben would not bow to something so mere as agony. In fact, he would only bow to the lord of agony, and even to him only for a time. The pain rose far beyond anything Ben Skywalker had ever known, and Ben Skywalker surged past it. He was ready for more; in time he would want more than the Embrace could offer him.

"I am waiting to begin," Ben Skywalker said.

And there was nothing to do, then, but overcome himself perpetually, and persist in defiance of a hostile universe, and prepare himself for a new beginning. The white was so much more than an empty expanse—the pain was so much more than pain—and he was so much more than a sufferer—and he was so ravenously hungry.

Wave after surging wave of the white tide crested and crashed over him.

Ben Skywalker swam in it.

The white had been eating Ben Skywalker for a long time.

Now, Ben Skywalker began to eat the white.

―

Darth Caedus watched the starscape dully through the transparisteel window of his Anakin Solooffice, trying and failing to rest for a few hours before another day was upon him. It had been days since he had slept—he preferred not to dwell on that. He shifted, shifted again, exhaled raggedly. He wondered how long he could go on like this—how long mastery of the Force and sheer willpower could sustain him in an entirely hostile galaxy, in a body that seemed to be only tenuously in his control. Breathing exercises did little, and the prospect of putting himself in a deep healing trance was deeply unappealing. His dreams and his developing sense of prescience and the force sensation of the supernova of human suffering that festered below decks always ran together in the subconscious plunge of the trance, revealing hellish compound nightmares that were far too close for comfort to reality yet to be. He needed natural sleep, dreamless if at all possible, and his powerlessness in bringing it about brought a pained smile to the lips of the Dark Lord of the Sith. How was Darth Caedus supposed to begin his great work, fixing a broken galaxy, when he couldn't even lull himself to sleep? A fragmentary image flashed through Caedus of a crimson lightsaber burning through his chest, through his heart, and what disturbed him most of all was that that image was not altogether unwelcome.

But that vision faded from his mind a moment later, when he felt the transformation come about within Ben, like the first notes hinting at song to come, shattering silence. He was suddenly sharply awake, feeling the Force shifting around him. Even though he had Force-blinded the boy, Caedus was so attuned to his presence after their journeys together, and after so many weeks of close observation in the Embrace, that he could feel immediately that the Ben he had known had fundamentally changed. He had not expected it to be so rapid, though in hindsight it did not surprise him; for Jacen himself it had been the same way, not so much the discovery of something new as the realization of something that had been there all along. And he had not expected the shift to take quite the shape it had—in truth he had expected less—he couldn't help but smile as he tentatively probed the mind of his captive in the secret chamber below decks—as he heard Ben calling out to him. How useful it would be, to have a true believer in Ben. And how acceptable the terms of their bargain would be—Ben's servitude in exchange for an ultimate chance at Jacen's life, down the road, after all was settled and put into place—something dear in exchange for something gladly given in the proper place and time. At last he would have his Sith apprentice, and he couldn't have asked for a better beginning. He realized—and the irony was not lost on him—that now he, too, would no longer be alone in his battle against a galaxy—his battle to save it from itself.

He resisted the urge to go below decks immediately and examine his developing experiment in more detail. He reached into Ben's mind, through those first transcendent moments of Ben Skywalker's new existence, and he replied:

Well begun is half done.

He propped his boots up on his desk once more, finding himself at the center of a changing future, in the eye of his storm, for once almost soothed by the tectonic power of fate becoming, in defiance of the deaths and betrayals and judgments that drew inexorably nearer. Something incredible, something so like himself, was stirring below decks, overcoming itself, growing in a feedback loop that would break chains. The Confederacy and the Jedi and Niathal and all the rest had no idea what was going to hit them.

But now he felt more certain that they could wait a few hours. Darth Caedus drifted at last into a deep sleep, and the last things he thought of before it claimed him were Mara Jade's emerald eyes, with the life bleeding out of them.