II. MOTHER

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.
William Makepeace Thackeray

Darth Caedus was not altogether surprised by the arrival of the ghost of Mara Jade Skywalker, a flash of light from out of nothingness, piercing the gloom of his so-called torture chamber.

But he was not altogether pleased with her timing.

He had been attending to his new student, disinfecting and bandaging the latest salvo of wounds the Embrace of Pain had inflicted upon the frame of Ben Skywalker. Gradually, with all due care, he had been upping Ben's nutritional intake, disinfecting wounds, and generally restoring Ben's strength for the coming day when he might leave this chamber and begin his formal apprenticeship in earnest. These few days since the change had been the first test of the Ben Skywalker who had been reborn in the Embrace—designed to reveal if the Ben Skywalker who had been forged in the torture device made to end all torture devices had learned all of the lessons that raw physical and mental agony had to offer, could grow even in containment, even as everything within him strained against chains.

Besides, it best served the fiction of Ben's supposed death to hide him utterly from the sight of even the crew of his own ship for a little longer. Even so, like Vergere before him, Darth Caedus liked to find spare moments to see to his ward's wounds, give him a little water, speak to him as he drifted in and out of consciousness between sessions in the Embrace. Lately Ben was sometimes even strong enough to answer.

His mind turned as he saw her, stark and painfully bright over the dim torture chamber—even the writhing barbs of the Embrace, which had begun to grope blindly towards Ben in their unceasing hunger, seemed to draw back from her. It was clear enough that she had come for Ben—as if something as perfect in potential as Darth Caedus's developing apprentice needed saving. Ever since the day Ben had called out to Jacen that he was ready, the Embrace and the boy had become more symbiotes than predator and prey—just as it had been for Jacen as a young man, pain had become teacher and not taskmaster.

Still, the progress was contingent—his breaking of Ben had depended entirely on a not entirely factual interpretation of the story of Mara Jade's death, and her arrival here could have a destabilizing effect, just when Ben was coming into his most promising. The second breaking could never be as effective as the first, and would require methods all the more cruel and exotic, most of all since Jacen's time was running out on so many fronts. The second breaking might necessitate permanent mental damage, the sort of radical and irreversible base-level mind alteration that Caedus was certainly capable of but reluctant to use on the one who was supposed to choose to become his successor freely, and would need all the brainpower he could muster in due time. The prospect of Mara Jade making any inroads now was totally unacceptable.

If this ghost knew Ben was here, tortured and sealed away from the Force but alive, what prevented her from telling Luke Skywalker that his son yet lived? So much of his plan could be broken by that possibility—a yawning void of incomplete information and ruined planning was stretching as quickly as he could think through ramifications. Luke Skywalker might already be on his way to take his son back. Distantly, he felt fury begin to well up in him—for all he had done, and all he planned to do, to be ruined like this, after the most pitch-perfect breaking—but he contained it.

The real problem was that he knew all too little about the traffic and ways of Jedi ghosts. They were so rare, so much a phenomenon beyond the understanding of the living, that even Jacen had been unable to dig up anything about them save the most rudimentary knowledge during his five year journey. Of course he had been cognizant that something like this might have been possible since her corpse had faded into nothingness at her funeral, but how could one prepare for an entity like that to intervene? There were none among the living who could even begin to speculate about the power that such a ghost, whatever it truly was, commanded. She was frustrating even in death. Evidently, even her corpse held too many tricks. Would destroying the corpse have prevented this? Something to consider in future encounters if all that he had planned was not ruined in the next few minutes.

Best to be cautious now, in this most delicate of situations. He would have to tease out the boundaries of her power. She was a creature of emotion—always had been. That was a lesson he had dearly learned when she had made her attempt on his life. In that light, he recognized that manipulating her attachment to her son was almost certainly the best way to deter her, if deterrence could still be effective. Caedus drew and ignited Ben's lightsaber, lightning beginning to crackle and snap around his other hand. The pale ghost of Mara Jade Skywalker looked back at him with disdain.

"Hello again, Jacen."

"Hello, Mara. Funny seeing you here. But you shouldn't call me that. I'm not Jacen anymore."

"A worm by any other name is still a worm."

Darth Caedus watched her evenly. Even shrouded in blue spectral glow, the green eyes pierced him. Clothed in plain brown Jedi robes, her hands were still at her sides, empty. He shrugged.

"This worm is doing fairly well so far. This worm intends to win."

"I have come here to speak to Ben. You will not stop me. I will not be stayed from seeing my son again," she said, her voice echoing unnaturally. But she was already tipping her hand—she didn't know his mind, perhaps refused to read it—perhaps she simply couldn't, as that would be an abuse of power that the will of the Force would not abide?—or else she would know that he had no intention of giving her the unfettered access she desired, ever again.

"I should have known that this would be inevitable. I won't stop you. How could I? But I do think you may find him unreceptive to your words. I think you know that your son and I have have begun to reach a mutual understanding. Your husband would probably get more use out of platitudes than Ben would right now."

"The Jedi... fall outside of my domain. I wish I could go to Luke too, but I can't. I'm here because, just like I told you the last time we met, my son will never, ever join you." The light within her pulsed, somehow dangerously, a simple reminder of the unfathomable power that she contained—it pulled his mind away from the enormous relief that Luke had evidently not been informed. "And not even death could keep me from that promise."

"That is what you think. But this," he said, gesturing to the prone figure on the deck, "This is what I know."

Mara glared back at him with all the disgust of a mother unable to stop her child's suffering. He willed his face to remain neutral with some effort. In that moment the welling up of his own hate for her and everything that she stood for surprised him.

"Answer me this: who did Ben call for, Mara Jade, in the Embrace?"

Her entire form flickered for a moment at that, and Jacen suppressed the pull of a sneer.

"You tortured a fourteen year old boy until he broke, Jacen. That's all. It took you how many months? Well done, Dark Lord."

"As if it were so simple as that. As if what I have done is anything less than art—it's not that he broke, it's how he broke, and how he has begun to rebuild himself. You still see nothing. Worse than that—you see it and still you deny it. What a waste."

"You're one to talk about seeing and denying and waste. Don't make me laugh. You can turn off his lightsaber. I have accepted certain limitations as a condition of coming here. You can't hurt me, and I won't hurt you. Much as I would like to right now."

He nodded in magnanimous assent, switched off the blade, withdrew the lightning.

His gaze flickered for an instant between Mara and Ben, who stirred on the metal deck between them. One of Ben's malarial eyes cracked open, unaccustomed to the brilliant light in the room. While the most utterly disastrous permutations of this scenario didn't seem to be actualizing, this was still very bad—possibilities flickered before his eyes of Ben dead, Ben escaping, Ben's mind broken entirely—failure now was unacceptable, even another breaking, because there really was no time left to start over with Ben. In an instant, Caedus surveyed the shifting pathways of the future, saw amidst the futures where Ben was lost to him one golden, gleaming path—victory. This ghost could not attack him and it could not reach into his mind to see the plan that had taken shape. For whatever inscrutable reason, she apparently would not reveal the situation to Luke. These were advantages enough.

Caedus knew she probably couldn't hear it in whatever circle of the Corellian hells she now called home, but he sent a silent thank you to Lumiya nonetheless.

"I'll stay my lying tongue while you have your family reunion. But even so, Aunt Mara," Caedus said, "I think you are going to see that I haven't run out of ways to hurt you just yet."

Slowly, the burden of exhaustion left Ben's mind, and he woke. He felt Jacen's presence even in his Force-blindness, all brilliant and deep, shimmering, like a moonlit ocean, felt it helping him to awaken, giving him the strength to move his battered frame. He rolled over, savoring the dimensions of aching that unfolded in the action. On his right was Jacen, a dark smear against the silvery durasteel. With effort he turned his head, blinking at the shimmering blue shapes on his left, trying to consolidate his swimming vision into one coherent image. The shadows still churned, but at the center was a brightness greater than any he had seen in months. It hurt his eyes, so accustomed to dimness; the afterimages persisted. Slowly the image focused into clarity, and the formless aching light delineated into shape and color and form, and he knew that it was time to be tested. It was time to confront the root of and reason for the choices he had made.

"We have a visitor, Ben," Jacen said.

Still, in spite of cognizance of the very real possibility of a trick, his heart jumped, and his mind went blank, for he was beholding two perfect, ghostly images of his mother—one on her knees above him and one standing beyond. Ben suspected that this, too, would hurt.

Rendering the false image of a phantom in the mind of Ben Skywalker was surprisingly simple. All Caedus had to do was reach into the highly vulnerable, still Force-blind mind of Ben and plant an image, plant its movement, plant its speech. What he put in were only crude impressions, more suggestions than pictures—little more than mind tricks, really—but the great beauty of the technique was that the mind of the victim itself shaded in the detail and accuracy to the point of nigh-perfect fidelity. It was simple, but not easy by any stretch—not while also giving Ben the strength to remain conscious, not while attempting to read the course of the future in the next pivotal minutes, not while maintaining immense mental shielding—just in case—and all this while hiding all the telltale signs of his influence from the burning beacon that was the presence of the ghost in the Force. But a Sith Lord's singular strength was his ability to make reality acquiesce to his vision.

If all that had led up to this had been Ben's introduction, the clearing and seeding of fertile ground, then this would be the first truly Sith lesson, made to impart understanding of the one fundamental thing his apprentice would need to know for what was to follow.

Ben knew pain, and ate it, and that was a very strong beginning—but it was still only the underlying assumption upon which all else was to be constructed, the underlying reality which contained all truths, but not in explicit forms. This, then, would be the first truly Sith lesson, from Darth Caedus to Ben Skywalker. It would be about sacrifice.

Ben was shuddering—he would have been convulsing, if not for the support of Caedus—but he was awake, blinking through the blinding light, eyes open, beholding, taking halting breaths that Caedus could tell were igniting little novas in his broken lungs. He also knew that Ben was savoring each and every one of them.

The ghost of Mara Jade seemed to know at least this much as well, and looked over at Caedus as though he were less than vermin. Her eyes were watery; ghostly as she was, she paled visibly. Evidently she couldn't see the identical phantom of herself that Jacen had conjured in Ben's mind, but she knew him well enough, and knew her son well enough—or knew what he used to be—that it was abundantly clear she at least realized he had done something beyond vile.

Permitting himself an errant thought, Darth Caedus wondered in that moment if even in death her place was to inadvertently serve his rise by way of opposition to him.

"Ben."

His mother was on her knees—she brought up a spectral hand to touch him, but it went through his pallid skin, marked here and there by long, puckered scars and pink wounds freshly disinfected. Tears ran down her face.

"How could he do this to you? Where will he stop?"

Above and behind her, his mother stood too. Her hands were still at her sides, and she watched him, fond but distant. "Ben. You've made me very proud. You've honored my memory."Ben smiled, his dry lips cracking. Everything Jacen did was a trick, he reminded himself. Of course, how could he be permitted to leave the Embrace until he had looked his mother in the face and told her that he understood?

"Mom," he said, gazing at her, his voice almost unrecognizable—hoarse and gasping, a croak that sounded profoundly wrong emerging from a fourteen year old throat. Impossibly, it hurt to talk even more than it hurt to breathe. The near Mara winced when she heard it.

"Listen—listen—don't talk, save your strength. I can help you. I can return the Force to you. I will help you get out of here."

"And yet, there is a sense in which learning to live without the Force is a great strength of its own. Learning to live through pain is strength. Do you really want to escape? Do you really want to emerge from the chrysalis before you are fully formed, a shadowmoth without ichor in its wings, crippled forever? Do you really want to go back to the Jedi? Do you think they will even begin to understand what you saw in the Embrace of Pain? Will you choose the easy path, when I offered my life up for you?"

"No," said Ben. He had already accepted his place here, knew firsthand that there was something to learn in the grasp of the Embrace and Jacen, a lesson his mother would want him to grasp for the good of their mission. "It's right to stay."

"You know that I haven't come here to save you, Ben. I haven't come here to provide you with a miraculous escape from the galaxy around you. I haven't come with false promises that everything will return to normal again, that you will forget all about what has happened here, that you will return to what you were. I love you too much to lie to you. I'm here to tell you that you can make it through this, and become stronger for it. We reject weakness in the service of the weak. We consume pain so we might serve the suffering. That is our place."

Ben nodded, tiredly. Among all the other pains, it also hurt him to remain awake when he was so deeply exhausted.

"Ben?" The ghost of his mother looked terrified. "Ben—whatever you see—whatever he's doing in your mind—it's wrong. You have to believe me. He's a Sith Lord. He's murdered me. He was ready to murder you, too. What he's told you, what he's trying to make you into, it's all lies."

"No, it's right. It's all right. What we are—what we do—we do for everyone. I died for you. I died to give you this chance so that you might do what I couldn't."

"Mom—why didn't you tell dad that you were going to kill him? Why didn't the Council help you?"

"It's complicated, Ben—you don't know everything I know. What Jacen is—what he wants—I had to stop him."

"Case in point."

"Ben, death is better than what he wants to turn you into—"

The near ghost kept talking, but the thunder in the voice of the second drowned her out.

"I must be your first sacrifice of many, Ben. You have to leave me behind. Where we walk, we must give up our lesser loves. I loved life, and I gave it up, for my supreme love: you. Your cousin loved me, and he offered me up for a supreme love of his own. If I am your supreme love, you can join me. If the galaxy is your supreme love, you must go with him. You know that I will understand. You know that I love you very much."

The lightsaber, Ben's own, came down, and hovered centimeters away from his neck.

Ben was no fool. He understood the trick, and the trial. It was so simple, so clear to him now, so much a test Jacen would make, and yet it would hurt to deny her just as much as it would have hurt if she were real. They looked so perfect, those fantasies of his mother that Jacen had conjured—those eyes, even through the spectral blue—perfect in fidelity, all just as he remembered her. He turned his head to Jacen, who met his stare evenly, but his eyes were alive with dancing gold.

"Choose, and act," Caedus said.

Ben did both. He didn't hesitate; as much as it would hurt, the answer to this riddle was simple. Death was tempting, escape was a pleasing fantasy—but so was the hope of ever knowing what she had really thought and done, that she approved—but all that was part of the past. Life and Jacen and the present were his duty, not death or his mother or the past. it was enough to remember her, and know what she would have wanted for him, and know that Jacen here had made another test, the first of many, in rendering her and offering him two types of temptation, and of course he knew what must be done. He had to say goodbye, and, as ever, grow stronger through the rejection.

"Son—"

He was not expected to choose one memory of his mother over the other—nothing so amateur—he was expected to choose neither. This was the trick, the sleight of hand: both visions, both the temptation of escape and the pleasure of understanding, had to be left behind, because his mother was dead and never coming back, and the best he could do for her memory was live as she would have wanted him to live, fixing what had become broken in the clockwork agony of the cosmos.

"Make it go away, Jacen," he wheezed. He would always love his mother, but he had to give her up. "Make it go away. I don't need to see her again. I don't need this."

Pain was all he knew. It was all he could ever know. He had to endure pain, take it all inside of himself, so that others did not have to. He had to sacrifice, so others did not have to. Pain was the way the galaxy told him he was doing right. Pain was a test designed to keep all but the most devoted off the path of greatness. His mother had known this, and she would have understood why he had to do this. She had known the greatest pain, laying down life for love, alone in the dark. He couldn't be a slave to the irretrievable past. The only way through was forward.

The spirit of Mara Jade flickered, like a little flame in the wind, and tears streamed down her spectral face. Her green eyes looked past Ben, at Jacen. Holding Ben's own lightsaber to the boy's neck, he gazed at her with a mild expression of calm curiosity, but from the furious churning of his golden eyes she could tell that the monster inside was sneering.

"He is worse than Palpatine. Ben, he's going to make you into something—"

"Wonderful. You will be unbound. You will be free. You will be loved by the entire galaxy. You will be right, and do right. You will make a galaxy where there can only be right. You will be a gardener. You will make a galaxy where whole worlds bloom like flowers. You will forge a peace that will never end. You will smite evil. You will be a man, and so much more than a man. You will surpass your father's legacy. You would have made your mother proud."

Ben managed against every sensation in him to stand up and face them, slowly, his entire broken body screaming as he did so. The lightsaber rose from his neck as he strained against the cold durasteel of the floor. Hands, then knees, then upright, staggering as he groped for a sense of balance that had atrophied in long disuse—and through all of it Jacen sustained him.

"I need a master. I need strength. I don't want to escape, any more. I understand why she died for me, and now I need you, not my mother. Jacen, I'm ready to begin."

His mind howled as he spoke, but the promise that sacrifice would strengthen him was like cool air in the hell that was denying the image of his mother who had laid her life down for him in the dark.

"Jacen, let me out."

The truth was a lie. That was only right. But still they hung there, limp, like puppets suspended by invisible strings.

"You don't mean it. You don't mean any of it. He's broken you. But it's not too late. I'll—I'll—"

"Jacen, you were always everything I wanted to be," Ben said.

"You must make it final. Tell me the truth. Show me that you understand."

He resisted the waxing urge to fall the floor and abandon consciousness once again.

"There's nothing more to tell. I don't talk to imaginary friends. I remember her, but she died, and nothing will bring her back. I remember her, and I will go on without her. I will follow in her footsteps, and I will finish her work, but I have you, now. That's enough. Now get these lies out of my head."

The ghost of Mara Jade Skywalker looked at her son, then her nephew, and back again, her eyes black and still like embers just snuffed out, suddenly wavering in the air as if she had only just realized she was something far less than alive. Ben couldn't help but shiver. Comprehension began to dawn inside of him. Mara Jade took a faltering lurch forward, gave her son a kiss on the forehead that he could not feel, and she fell through him, and then she was gone, like a candle blown out. Ben blinked, chest heaving, and the far Mara Jade became fuzzy and indistinct, until she was only a cold distant smile and a pair of golden eyes, and then she was nothing at all.

"Wait," Ben breathed, his eyes widening in dawning horror, as he realized that the trick had not been the trick he had thought at all. "Which—what—but, both of them—"

And Jacen Solo, all cold gold, only smiled back.

Darth Caedus and Ben Skywalker, master and apprentice, teacher and student, were once again alone as the Embrace of Pain writhed overhead.