III. EMBRACE

Let us embrace, and from this very moment vow an eternal misery together.
Thomas Otway

—

They watched each other for a long time. Caedus stood bolt upright, dark and handsome in his GAG uniform, wrapped in the shadow that had once again overtaken the chamber. His eyes, reduced to quiet seething bronze, churned within the shadows that played across his face. He was smiling.

Ben's bare chest heaved, and his fever-tinged skin was slick with sweat. He was still coming to terms with what had just happened: a lesson within a trick, which was not at all the trick he had anticipated. It had been his mother he had denied, he now knew, his real, one and only mother, returned from the dead to save him. He had just rejected her utterly, as if she had been nothing more than the crude puppet her murderer had forced into his mind. Puckered scars ran down his body, and his blue eyes were dulled with horror.

When Jacen had hung him in the Embrace, some interminable time ago, Ben had thought that it could get no worse. And when he had overcome the pain of the Embrace, he had been so certain that the agony was forever more beneath him.

How wrong he had been.

Ben staggered, but Caedus kept him from falling.

"I don't deny it. Do you hate me, Ben? Do you want to kill me?"

Caedus held the lightsaber out to Ben Skywalker, and Ben took it in his hands. It was his own, the one he had built, but it was cold, somehow heavier, more unwieldy than he remembered it. How long had it been since he had tried to use this same lightsaber to kill this same man who now stood before him, apparently defenseless? Ben had no clue—in the Embrace, time ran forever.

Ben lurched forward, and pressed the lightsaber against the chest of the man who had destroyed his world, and the man did not stop him. Jacen's wide, wolfish smile flickered—for a moment, Ben could have sworn he felt a pang of longing echo through the hollow place where the Force had once been, but it vanished instantly.

Ben loathed Jacen. Jacen had carefully and deliberately stoked the cinders of war with the Confederacy into a galaxy-consuming inferno. Jacen had made him into a murderer, an assassin, taught him all he knew about how to snuff out life. Jacen had killed Mara Jade—had just killed her twice over, he realized—had attempted to kill Luke Skywalker—Jacen had at least considered killing him too, at some point, he was certain. Jacen had tortured him, changed him, reforged him in ways he still did not fully understand. Jacen had made him fully and awfully forsake the mother he loved, without really understanding the gravity and fullness and irrevocability of it, and now he smiled in answer to the accusation. Jacen was a Sith, and somewhere abstractly he knew that word was supposed to be everything he hated—arrogant, ruthless, evil, wrong.

But for all that, part of Ben still loved Jacen. Jacen had awakened him to the Force, welcomed him into the larger galaxy, which had seemed so frightening to him when viewed through the lens of the Force. He had done it with a careful hand, with subtlety and skill and depth. Jacen had taught him so much—he could not imagine what he would be without Jacen's teaching, without the words and knowledge and skills Jacen had taught. Even if he had killed Jacen, that long time ago, he still would have heard him within his head for the rest of his life. Jacen was powerful, so powerful, and even blind to the Force he felt Jacen's inhuman mastery of the Force looming over him. Staring into his molten eyes he saw twin galaxies, turned by Sith hands. And all he wanted was peace for everyone always, all he had given up was sacrificed in the name of a coming order, fuel for his enormous crusade. Jacen had taught him in spite of his resistance—had protected him from himself. Even now, even as the full extent of Ben's unwitting betrayal of his mother buffeted him, he knew that he was becoming stronger for what had just taken place. Even now, he could anticipate what Jacen would say, in his calm, sad, wise, cruel voice: it was terrible, and it was necessary.

Ben stood, looking up at Darth Caedus, his thumb on the switch that would send a band of pure energy through the heart of the Sith. For a long moment Ben thought about turning it on himself in one smooth rapid motion and ending his own misery forever. At last, he dropped it. It hit the durasteel with an echoing harsh clang.

"Yes. But no," Ben said, "I can't kill you. I don't even want to. Not yet."

"Be certain of this, though you doubt all else: you will try, and when you do you will want it more than you have ever wanted anything," said Darth Caedus. He turned to look at the Embrace. "Ben Skywalker, I have tested you, and I have broken you, and you have done more than merely survived the onslaught—you have exceeded expectations. I am well pleased. Your time here is at an end. I want you to become my apprentice, and also my partner. But in this, I cannot force you. This must be a choice that you make of your own free will. Before you choose, I want there to be no more secrets between us. I know you, but you do not yet know me. Let me show you."

Ben felt Jacen's power, all burning in the Force and all alien and cold and smoldering all at once, moving within his mind—dark fingers twisting through his brain with a familiarity so wrong that it made his skin crawl. Jacen reached down into the defenseless stores of memory and sensation of Ben's mind, and he felt new pathways opening—no, he realized as he remembered, old pathways that he had forgotten—sealed doors inside of himself that he did not even know existed. Motion by motion, fog that had been invisible cleared inside of him cleared. Then the memories came back, all in a rush, the whole timeline of his life lurching.

Ta'a Chume. Nelani Dinn and Lumiya.

Allana.

And the recurring image of Jacen looming over him, murmuring to his apprentice to be calm, that it would not hurt, that it would only take a moment, with his eyes burning, as his memories were torn away.

Ben swam in them, first in horror, then in dawning comprehension. He wavered on emaciated legs. Revelations washed over Ben Skywalker in shades of scarlet and rust-red, and he looked upon Jacen Solo with new understanding. His master's fall was no longer something abstract and awful and absent of reason—Ben had been there for each step of the precipitous descent, each piece of the rationale for Jacen's great crusade, and had only been made to forget for a time—all the answers had been locked away inside of him all along. He knew now that Jacen's supreme love was indeed precious to him above all things. He knew the terrible symmetry of all that had happened: Mara Jade had been ready to kill for her son, and Jacen Solo was ready to kill for his daughter.

"All these things—for her. For your family. From the beginning."

Caedus nodded, looking wholly tired. "I have sacrificed a great deal for them. I am going to sacrifice much more. There is a great deal that I hope my daughter never has to know." His smile had faded; to Ben he appeared terribly and suddenly sad, as his mother's face had been, at the end. "A parent's love is a terrifying thing. I would set worlds aflame to protect her. I would fight one final war."

"You would break your apprentice, and then recruit him to your new cause."

"Yes. And that would only be the beginning. You know now that I am a Sith Lord, Ben, and you know how I fell, and you know that I am offering to teach you. You know why I must fight. You should also know my name. Jacen Solo is a shell—you have seen me change—even in your blindness, you sense that I am someone else, now."

He turned from the Embrace and stepped forward smoothly, bent to Ben's height so that they were eye to eye. The shadows of his face seemed to grow and deepen as he gazed, his eyes churning from dull, seething bronze to dancing molten gold. His voice was a croak, but all at once seductive and dripping with menace.

He was terrible and magnificent.

"I am Darth Caedus. What are you?"

"I was Ben Skywalker."

"You were. But what are you now? What will you become?"

Ben pondered this—even without the Force, he felt the significance of this moment, like the entire galaxy was balanced upon his reply. This was the point of no return. This was becoming a Sith. There was no trick to this, no sleight of hand, just the one question he never thought he would answer—at least, not like this. First the Embrace, then his mother, his true mother, now memories that swam across his vision, flickering Jacen Solo through time and space, descending into the dark.

Looking into the truth of Caedus's eyes, parsing his restored memories, he had no doubt that the wrong answer would mean swift death. Sacrifice was not a foreign concept to either of them, now. The secrets that had been entrusted to him could only belong to a willing partner or a silent corpse. But that was not the issue—he had learned there were things far worse than death. After everything that had happened to him, death was not such a terrible option—a blessed release. He was almost tempted.

But then the realization of duty hit him once more, and he felt ashamed at such a moment of weakness—he didn't want to die, yet, couldn't, not at all. There was too much he needed to do. He didn't even want to escape. Even if he did, even if he left here, things would never be the same. Ben Skywalker could never be a Jedi again, not after seeing the order within the limitless expanse of pain, not after realizing the simultaneous and tragic and necessary deaths of Mara Jade Skywalker and Jacen Solo, not without understanding the beguiling mystery of the seed of hope they had planted in him.

The change had already occurred; the scales had been shifting inside of him since the very moment he had first found truth in Caedus's words against the white storm of the Embrace.

Ben Skywalker had already betrayed the world he had known. Darth Caedus could give him the power he needed, the power he was obligated to take. It was nothing less than the very same power that Jacen—Caedus—wielded so deftly. The first pulse of excitement ran through Ben as he saw the potential, giving him strength to lift his head and meet the gaze of the Dark Lord of the Sith. He stared Jacen down, and Jacen stared back, like he was looking all through him and past him all at once with those shifting shadowed eyes. There could be no other choice. He wanted to become a Sith. And that made the answer very easy.

"I am whatever you want me to be. I am whatever you choose to teach me."

In the golden eyes, Ben saw power that could consume worlds, and fix them—unfathomable, and so lovely.

"Good answer, apprentice."

Caedus smiled again, all wolf, and then stood to his full height once more. In an instant he was composed again, with all the majesty not gone but merely withdrawn into a subtler form, the image of a tired man with nary a trace of Sithhood but with the silent surging control of someone who would change the galaxy. His eyes were brown and gentle, full of compassion and sympathy as he gave Ben's shoulder a friendly squeeze. The ligaments in Ben's shoulder were stretched raw, tender from long abuse in the bone-grinding posture of Embrace, arms outstretched far beyond what the human structure ever intended. Before, Ben would have screamed in hoarse agony. Now, he suffered in blissful silence, his eyes widening as it washed over him.

"You have made me very proud, Ben. You are going to be all I hoped for and even more. This is the hardest path, and I am honored you have chosen to walk it with me, until one of us walks no more. I am proud that you have seen beyond the veil, and that you understand our burden. " His gaze fell for a moment to his polished boots. "Everything that I've done to you—to your family. To your childhood. I have banished you from that land, and I am sorry that it was necessary at all. You won't be going back. But I do swear to you that this is a fight worth fighting. That is our truth."

The boy who had been Ben Skywalker remembered his childhood, his family, the Jedi he had been. He remembered the mother that he had denied, without even knowing that she was real, but the horror was gone. It felt cold inside of him, and he knew that he did not miss what he had been. He knew that he did not miss what could have been.

"Lieutenant Skywalker, for now I will be informally reinstating your commission with the Galactic Alliance Guard. Let's say that your desertion was a question of selling a deep cover. I will see you tomorrow morning in my office for your briefing. I expect you to be presentable by then. You were in there for three months and a day, by the way. We need to talk about what has changed politically since you went under. A uniform and a keycard are on the table. I will have bacta patches and bandages sent to your room. And a solid meal—have fun with that. The crew of this ship is of course sworn to secrecy, but still minimize your time in common areas to what is strictly necessary."

"Yes, master."

Caedus turned, and the door slid open to reveal an antiseptic white hallway. His black silhouette was framed against it, and he stopped.

"I do not need to tell you, apprentice, that there are no second chances for our kind. If you fail me, I will end you."

"Likewise. Master."

The silhouette's shoulders shook with a silent shudder of laughter.

"You will try, Ben Skywalker. You will try."

Jacen made to leave, but stopped at the threshold. He looked back.

"Satisfy my curiosity," he said. "If you had really known, then, that the ghost was actually your mother, that she could have saved you, would you have chosen differently?"

Ben rolled his shoulders. It hurt fantastically.

"I can't say," he answered. "I don't know."

"Yes. You never will. Until tomorrow, apprentice."

Darth Caedus left, and the door slid shut behind him. Alone once more, Ben bandaged the worst of the wounds that were still exposed, and he found the uniform on a table otherwise occupied by an exotic array of torture implements, and he donned it. Every step hurt, every movement made him ache, every thought was like a proton torpedo going off in his head—Jacen gave him no sustenance now. It was only by way of his own willpower that he remained conscious as he prepared himself to leave the chamber and begin a new life, unlike anything he had known.

When he had finished dressing the wounds and donning his uniform, he stepped towards the door. He looked at the door, down at his uniform, and then he hesitated. He turned back to the writhing Embrace, still reaching out in blind hunger for his flesh, ready to entangle him once more. He stepped back towards it.

He extended a single hand, palm upward, beckoning, and a bioluminescent vine tipped by a wicked barb reached out in return. Slowly, tenderly, lovingly, like a dear friend saying goodbye, it stabbed into the flesh of his hand. The tip emerged on the other side, dripping blood.

Ben's eyes rolled upwards.

What he saw there was beautiful beyond words.