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The Jedi Master - Day 19, Part 2

Thunder was crackling in the distance. Its roar echoed through the empty corridors as Luke made his way down them, robes rustling in the oppressive silence. The pleas of the long dead still echoed through the Force here, hundreds of voices crying as one for help, for mercy, still ringing through the deserted corridors. They forced him to stop and listen from time to time, simultaneously fearful that he would recognize a voice in the masses and pained that he no longer could.

"Help us!"

It had been years since he had been here, yet the wound in the Force, the rift, was still fresh enough that it felt as if it had been opened just hours before. The screaming still filled the halls, and the phantom sound of lightsabers denouncing a battle between Light and Darkness had yet to fade.

It feels as if they are still here. Still trapped.

It felt as if he had arrived just in time, as if he could still stop what had happened, but that had always been a lie, a trap of endless grief and guilt laid down by the Force. There was nothing that could be done here. He had known it then and he knew it now. It was too late. Every chance had been squandered, every warning ignored. The Force had tested him and he had failed. This desolation he was walking through was as much his doing as it had been Ben's. In some ways, it was more his doing than Ben's for he hadn't been here when he should have been. He could have stopped this if he had just listened, if he hadn't been so blind.

"I can't stay here."

Luke stopped, his nephew's voice breaking through the cacophony across the years, his image appearing in front of him—child, boy, and man.

"I trusted you," Luke told him, and darkness swelled around them both. "Why?"

The dark tendrils caught Ben, spreading over his skin, leaving him no more than a shadow amongst a thousand others.

"Help."

And Luke was moving again, walking through these corridors that had once been filled with life—that had once been his life—hands touching the scorch marks in the walls, attention going beyond the destroyed windows to look at the launching pads where he had left his X-Wing and from there to the forest. In a way, Luke felt that he had never left this place, that this was his grave as much as it was that of his students, as much as it was Ben's.

"Please—"

Luke stepped into the main hall, approaching the broken parapet overseeing the ground level of the structure. A smile passed his lips as he followed the column of light dropping from the broken skylight of the main chamber to find it touching the branches of a deeply burned but still flowering tree. Its roots were breaking out of the flowerbed it stood upon to dig between the floor tiles, crushing them as it spread across the room, searching for water. Searching for light.

It survived?

Luke made his way to the ground floor, climbing on top of the roots until he stood next to the blackened trunk, hesitating for a second and then touching it.

It happened as he knew it would. The Force trembled, then it gushed forward, going through him as if the tree had recognized him, and at that exact instant everything around him changed. The halls filled with memories, with voices and faces, with presences—only for them to fall into the same silence that had robbed him of them long ago, leaving him alone, standing among their corpses, a menacing lightsaber roar echoing in the room.

I teased Ben so much because of that saber.

It had been immature of him to do so, but Ben had made it nearly impossible to resist the temptation when he had justified his choice of hilt design.

"I would like to avoid the family tradition of losing a hand."

That had been just after the first of Ben's Jedi Trials and Luke hadn't been able to stop laughing long enough to reproach him for joking at such a serious time.

The truth was that he understood the real reason behind the choice rather well. He had been the one to train Ben, after all. Luke knew his nephew too well to deny that the threatening appearance of the blade was intentional, but the reinforced hilt, the extra potency, the over strained crystal—they were all necessities, a response to the demands of a fighting style that had been growing increasingly aggressive and would only become more so with time. He had been the only one to see it that way, though.

"A Jedi's lightsaber is a reflection of its wielder," another master had stated during the examination. "What does this say of you?"

An executioner's weapon had been what they had called it, a mockery of the Jedi tradition and mission. Nothing had been spared criticism—not its construction, nor its design, nor the crystal's blood-orange hue.

"What makes you think this is acceptable?"

In that saber Luke had only seen Ben. It was in the endless smuggling of pieces to his room, then in the secrecy with which he had treated its construction, and especially in the brashly unapologetic way he had dumped a broadsword style lightsaber in front of the examiners when he had everyone convinced, including Luke, that he was going with dual wielding—all of that was Ben being Ben. The only one anyone else seemed capable of seeing, however, was Vader.

Was I wrong even then?

Had that been another warning he had failed to heed? Another mistake?

"Why?" Luke asked the ghost in the hall, the vision of Ben standing over the dead filling his mind. "Why do this?"

Luke turned, eyes rising to meet the dark ones he had known so well. Only the person standing behind him, standing amongst the corpses, wasn't Ben. She didn't belong here; she had never been here.

Know your fears, so they may not touch you.

"What do you see?"

Luke didn't turn in the direction of the new voice, attention too set on the vision of young woman whose skin was darkened by the sun and brown eyes had captured his. She was as beautiful as she was terrible, as determined as she was cruel. She was Rey, and she wasn't.

"Luke," the voice insisted. "What do you see?"

"Only what I brought with me."

The figure collapsed at his words, leaving him to turn and find Maz Kanata a few steps away from him, studying his expression. There was nothing about her that had changed. From her weathered yellow skin to the wise eyes amplified by her lenses, she remained exactly as he remembered her.

I, on the contrary—

Luke shook his head.

"I found your message," Luke told her, looking around his Academy's destroyed hall. "Did it have to be here?"

Maz's expression grew sad at his words.

"Still hiding then. The Luke I knew was braver than this."

"You're standing on that Luke's grave," he told her quietly. "And this, Maz, is simply cruel."

"It's necessary," she replied, sitting on the roots of the Force tree, light settling around her almost like a halo. "I see the girl isn't with you. What happened?"

Luke approached her, eyes running up the walls to take in the deserted corridors and collapsed columns, stopping at the broken pieces of glass still hanging from the skylight that once shone brilliant light into the former meditation room. The weight of what he knew had happened inside these walls, in this exact place, still threatened to crush him.

"Why here?"

Maz made an uncomfortable gesture, head going to rest on one hand.

"At one time, I thought I could manage your Ben's fury," she confided, fingers dipping into a small puddle between the roots in front of her. "I underestimated Kylo Ren's wrath. It taught me to hide where he doesn't wish to search."

Luke frowned at that, confusion and then comprehension slowly hitting him as a clear image of Rey standing on Ach-Too's cliffs, her hand raised in offering came to his mind.

"You are talking about the saber? My father's saber?" he queried, shaking his head when she remained silent. "You stole it."

Maz didn't miss a beat, expression hardening.

"How had you imagined it had gotten to the girl?"

"I had hoped you had done something less extreme."

"Held a talk over tea with your nephew?"

That was another kind of extreme.

"You found it here then," Luke clarified, running his prosthetic hand through his hair. "Abandoned."

Like everything else.

Maz expression fell, eyes saddening.

"Did you even know Ben?"

He had been asking that same question to himself for years.

"I know what that saber meant to him."

"You know how much he valued it," Maz amended. "As a family heirloom. What it meant—no, Luke, you don't. Or you wouldn't think he would have willingly left it behind."

She fell silent, studying his face, whatever she meant to say after that silenced by a flower falling from one of the branches and landing in her lap. Her eyes going to the charred trunk as she picked up the pure white flower, Maz smiled.

"I do love this tree," she commented. "It has no reason left to hope and yet for all it saw, for all it suffered, it never lost sight of itself." She touched the petals gently. "Have you talked to your sister?"

Luke found himself dropping his head, eyes fleeing her scrutiny. He considered Maz to be kind, far kind than Master Yoda or even Ben Kenobi had been, but in some ways he felt she was harsh in ways they weren't. Or perhaps it was that she was a lot more unforgiving.

"I haven't had the opportunity," he lied, and in the corner of his eye he could see Maz put the flower in the small puddle, observing it as it floated.

"Where is the girl?" she asked.

"I had hoped you would know that."

"Why?"

"You knew I was coming."

"I felt a warning in the Force, a dying Knight's voice. It spoke your name."

Luke closed his eyes, shaking his head.

"You knew before that."

"I'm not a seer. In leaving that box, I took precautions. That is all." She raised her eyes from the flower, facing him. "Why isn't the girl with you?"

"She left."

"Left?"

"The Resistance Headquarters were attacked. Rey took off before I could stop her," he confided. "I haven't seen or heard from her since."

Maz chuckled at his words, a soft "I knew I liked that girl" passing her lips as her quiet laughter rippled through the Force. For a moment it was as if everything—even the ghosts—were alive and laughing alongside her.

"So you lost her."

"I didn't lose her!"

"What do you call this then?" Maz leaned forward, clearly expecting an answer. When he gave none, she got to her feet and walked towards the tree, touching it gently. Her voice had lost its amused edge when she spoke again. "You come to me like everyone else, asking for information, searching both answers and advice. You might not like what I have to say."

That made Luke frown, his next choice of words careful.

"Rey is in danger. I have to get to her. She needs—"

"I will tell to you the same I told Han." Maz said, speaking over his words. "Go home."

"I'm home, Maz." That clearly irritated her. "You have to help me."

"I just did."

"You meant for Rey to find me."

"I meant for a great many things that I thought ruined," she replied. "And that now I hope might still be salvageable. That girl—"

"Has everyone hunting her. Snoke, the Knights, Ben…"

"You?" Maz queried, softly.

It hit him like a physical blow.

"I'm trying to protect her."

"While you leave your sister standing on a battlefield alone, losing everything she holds dear to the war?" Maz shook her head. "You do a great disservice to them both by convincing yourself one is some kind of indestructible force of nature and the other a naïve maiden in need of guidance."

"I hold no such vision of them."

"Then you will listen to me, Luke, when I say Leia is the one who needs you," Maz said. "Go to her. Let the girl make her own choices. Trust her to make the right ones."

"You know where she is."

Silence, then a sigh.

"She is where she should be."

Notes:

And Maz doesn't even hit Luke with a cane. She's very kind like that.

Next up - The Scavenger.