"We may no longer stay: go, waken Eve;
Her also I with gentle Dreams have calm'd
Portending good, and all her spirits compos'd"
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
CHAPTER 65
It's always raining on Kashyyyk.
Rose finds that she loves the rain, loves the smell of it as it drips through the forest, making living things lush and wet; allowing life to beget new life. She suppresses a laugh. One should not feel so happy during times of war, especially now, with only a sliver of hope and a scrap of destiny to their names. But aren't rebellions built on hope? Isn't everything?
She reaches up to clasp Paige's pendant. A dull silver band is strung next to it; newly acquired, it has only been there since last night. She has no right to be so happy, but what is love if not for impossible times? What is happiness if not to be grasped with famished hearts and greedy fingers, for who knows when the sun will shine again?
The sun is shining now, even through the rain. Rose steps into it and laughs and the baby she holds makes a face as he considers the raindrop that has had the audacity to land on his nose. Sweet Mala, she thinks. You made a fine groomsman at my wedding. Cuddled in Selena's arms as she stood next to her own boys, the baby watched the proceedings with solemn scarlet eyes. Even weeks away from Chiss space and the awful medicine Elsa took to conceal herself, her son's pale blue skin and deep red eyes have not changed back to their original form and, at least per Dr. Kalonia's assessment, it's likely they never will. But no matter the color palette, Rose considers him quite perfect, possessing both the fine symmetry of his mother's features and the stoic nature of his father.
(Or so Rose has been told. She only met the Knight Malaak a handful of times but he always struck her as kind—in a terrifying, broody sort of way.)
Yes, the son of the princess and the knight made a fine witness to the nuptials of two who were raised little better than slaves. The stormtrooper and the mining rat. With a pirate presiding over the ceremony (that Maz had not one but two priestly ordinations in entirely conflicting faiths did not surprise Rose in the least) and for their other witness nothing less than the General herself.
Leia had watched their union with clear eyes and a mind righted after more than a year of tumult. Poe feared she would never come back to herself and Finn seemed to agree but Rose was infected with hope, and Leia's situation was no exception. She could feel the General's moods as if they were colors swirling about her—an ancient gift, Maz once told her, with knowing eyes—and she could feel the moment the awful darkness in the older woman's mind lifted and her heart was reborn. Her son was alive. Rose felt it before Leia spoke the words. She feels many things before they happen. She suspects she knows why and she thinks that sometimes Finn does too, although they never speak of it.
But Leia's son is alive and Elsa and Poe are off to find him and maybe, just maybe, they can save the whole galaxy while they're at it.
The rain is easing now. She and Mala (uncomplaining as always) wind their way through a forest of mid-morning sunshine, droplets shimmering like jewels upon the leaves. Truly, there is too much happiness in the galaxy, she thinks, and from the calm that Mala exudes, she knows the baby feels much the same. They make their way beneath an outcropping draped with gnarled vines. This is the temporary command post, at least until they find their next home. Rose nods to the man in charge.
"Commander Tico," she says in greeting. She remembers holding his face last night, whispering vows, and when it came time for the naming, her beloved, always brimming with confidence and swagger, looking, quite possibly for the first time ever, abashed.
I have no name to give you, he confessed.
Then take mine, she had told him. It has been good to me and there is enough room for two.
Or three, she thinks now, but this is something even Finn does not know. Mala shifts in her arms, leveling her with a pointed red gaze, as if to say tell him.
Sometimes the baby's perception is unnerving. "Mind your own business," she mutters.
Her husband's brow furrows at the indecipherable conversation. "Commander?" he says, acknowledging her equal rank. "You okay?"
Rose nods and smiles brightly. Right as rain, she thinks. It makes her smile more. Clearly a change of subject is in order. "Have you found us a system to hide in?" she asks.
This earns her a frown. Save for last night's festivities, he has worked on little else and she knows it. Finn crosses his arms. "Have you figured out which hunks of junk can actually get us there?"
"Mind your own business," Rose says, loudly this time, which earns an eye-roll from Kaydel and a disapproving look from Mala, who is following the conversation way too closely for a thirteen month-old. Kaydel is manning the nearby communicator, where they all wait for any kind of contact from Elsa and Poe. Rose opens her mouth to revoke both Kaydel's and the baby's invitation to the yet to be planned wedding reception when she feels… something.
"If we're looking for places to settle down," Kaydel interjects, "what about—"
"Moraband," Rose says. A forgotten word from a forgotten place. It feels dark outside, though they are standing in broad daylight. Cold, except the sunshine is all around them. Rose hears the voice again, stronger now. It is calling. Mala begins to cry.
MORABAND, it says. A clear, fine voice. COME TO ME. YOU HAVE RUN LONG ENOUGH. COME TO ME; I DO NOT WISH TO BE ALONE. YOU, WHO TRADED ME FOR YOUR FREEDOM. WHO CALLED ME TRAITOR.
Her eyes meet Finn's. A voice they know, but everything is wrong. There is only compulsion, awful and unrelenting. Poe once told her of a voice like this, of hearing it when no one else was around; a voice belonging to the one they knew and loved. Rey. But this is wrong. Something is terribly wrong.
COME TO ME, it says, and Rose is powerless; they all are. Mala screams; fat tears roll down the frightened baby's cheeks. He is the only one who can give voice to this horror.
Her feet move of their own volition. She knows what they will do. Where they will go. To the nearest ship, they will march. They will load in like minnows, like lambs to the slaughter. Her feet move but she does not want them to. They move and she knows that they must. To Moraband. To Moraband.
The happiness is gone.
There is an art to the love of destruction. Chaos is never just chaos; it is an act of creation, though few are wise enough to see it. Chaos is life: the hunger and the power and the glory and the endless consuming and consummation—feast after endless feast. Ambition is simply another word for hunger, and power is another word for food. Bane is feeding. He is growing stronger. He has dreamt of being mortal but now he is becoming something else.
The reason lies crumpled at his feet.
Curled up like a child, her pain rushes out in waves, each emotion a self-contained symphony—hate, hurt, contempt and hunger—so much hunger—this girl will devour the galaxy. Let her, Bane thinks. There will be more. She can eat until there is nothing left, until it is just them. Beyond these stars exist other realms. They can experience or ignore them as they please. Spend forever trying on new forms only to discard them like so many fine-spun shirts. And when the last living thing in existence dies, they will rest and wait for it all to begin again. Vitiate was the first, but his effort was incomplete; Bane had always been a good student, as all great Sith must be—but even the Emperor of the ancients never dreamed of this. A million souls sacrificed on Nathema to chase immortality—it is merely a grain of sand. There is so much more; Bane knows that now.
Numbers spiral into reductive exponents, and he can see them all in his mind. One million stretches into two, then ten, then a hundred. She will bring every life in the galaxy to heel and she will eat them all. He savors particular Force signatures—the rebel friends who traded her for their safety, only to call her whore upon doing exactly as she was asked; the tyrannical army with its orange despot; the filth-ridden junk trader who was only too happy to take and use her for the right price. She summons entire planets; he loses count after five. (If there is any molecule of Vitiate left in the cosmos, it is crying in despair. He consumed, but she does it better. She is remaking existence just by being alive.)
His beautiful girl. His perfect, unparalleled creature of Light.
"That's it," he whispers, not meaning to but the words pour out. Would she like a sonnet? He would write them. He would debase himself before her very shadow. He—
Lust surges through him and the idea is made real: he is now in possession of a body. And he is hungry too.
"Feed," he urges, the confession of a madman and a poet. Feed on them. On me. Let me feed on you.
A slight realignment of her cells, and he feels the life-force of countless beings begin to drain away. The very essence of life. He is drunk.
The tally in his head climbs until numbers have no meaning. And still, there are those who are not present. He cannot recall them at first—so intoxicating is her presence—but after a heartbeat (for his heart truly beats now), Bane recovers.
Ah yes, the husband. And his band of merry men.
Bane searches through the fog of battle meditation and, for a split second, he finds them before they disappear. It is strange, he thinks, but everything about this is strange. He does not trust that they have ceased; he would not have survived all these centuries by merely assuming the deaths of those he finds inconvenient. No, he will make sure. Perhaps he will feast on their actual flesh. In addition to a good fuck, he could use a proper meal.
He summons the Sith Lord spirits from where they have fled in the wreckage of his tomb and directs them to where they should go. They listen and obey. He tries using his hands to manipulate the Force (how he has missed having them), and blue lightning shoots from his fingers. A child's trick. Pathetic. The go-to of every tiresome charlatan. Real power lies elsewhere.
Real power lies with the dead.
The ones he murdered. The ones he tortured. Centuries of Jedi put to death for amusement and fun. He owns their souls like so much chattel and now he is come to call. Rise, you cockroaches. Foul in life so shall you be slaves after dying. Kill my enemies. Destroy the one who calls himself Death.
He feels them rise up, like so much unsightly trash. He waves them off with a flick of the wrist. Now he can focus on important matters.
"Bane."
The word is spoken with a feminine voice, but what gives it breath is no girl.
She stands naked and glowing, her pale skin unmarred and free from every drop of blood and speck of dirt. Her form is a series of undulating lines that give wing to unimagined fantasies. He was made for her. To copulate and satisfy. Feed me, he thinks. Let me feed you.
In a blink, she transforms again, wrapping herself in shimmering light the same shade of gold as her eyes. It covers the most distracting parts and weaves a kind of gown from which her skin offers glimpses. It is not actual fabric, merely the illusion cast by thousands of particles that she chooses to move and bend at will. Garbed thus, she moves toward him like the first being who ever lived.
"Bane," she says again and her voice…
"Tell me," she commands.
"Tell you what, my Lady?" He does not mean to apply the title but it seems his larynx gives him no choice.
Tell me everything, she says silently; he can feel her irritation of having to spell it out.
"I have waited so long for you," he confesses. He would wait a thousand years more.
"Platitudes," she says with disdain. "And while you have waited, I have not bothered to mark your presence at all."
Will you? he thinks. He would beg for the honor.
She tilts her head, dark hair floating as if submerged. "You mean to use me."
"I have—" her tells her. "I did—I am sorry—beautiful—Sith—" his mind is running too fast and the words trip over themselves.
Her voice cracks like a whip. "Speak when you can collect yourself."
Bane takes a deep breath; he has not had to work this hard to master himself since his own apprentice initiation.
"You are Light," he says, and his voice keeps miraculously still. "You consume at will and by your nature. Does one use the sun?"
This earns a slight quirk of her mouth; he feels as if he's won a battle of ages. "I see you haven't lost all reason." Her shoulders shift, and she looks away. "They are dying," she says. He doesn't have to ask who. Her words are calm, but he can feel a struggle behind them.
"All things die," he tells her. "If grass is scorched, we do not blame the sun."
"But I—"
"Consume," he finishes. "You are Life. Immortal. We are not human, we never were. We are gods, you and I." He feels her shift. "You have found your belonging."
Her eyes lift to his, swirling liquid of molten gold. "Belonging," she says. She searches his face, lost and hungering and he hungers still. He reaches out to touch her perfect mouth.
"Yes," he says, and leans down for a kiss.
No.
The voice is not his, and it is not hers.
No, it says again. Our blood is one.
Rey steps back, the ethereal gown trailing behind. She looks around for something she cannot see.
Say it, the voice says. Our blood is one.
It is a memory Bane does not recall, but his goddess does. She shakes her head as if muttering to a demon. That's when Bane realizes; it is.
"Kill him!" Bane shouts and the order reverberates through stone. He searches wildly, frantically, for the source as Rey becomes more distressed. There is a conflict building inside her, two spirits waging war. The dead arise, unseeing; behemoth statues stand poised to strike, animated by long-dead Lords. A host of sentient vines rise up, seeking to destroy but finding no target.
Then, not ten feet away, the emptiness flickers. Bane blinks. Slowly, as if out of a mirage, three figures appear.
The first is a slight man with pale hair, crouched down with one hand resting on the ground. Even from this distance, Bane can feel a blunting of the Force around them, as if it were falling into a void.
The second man is golden-haired and handsome. The sorry excuse for a Sith that Bane should have killed long ago.
And in between them stands the Abomination himself, come to claim his bride. His saber is not drawn; he merely holds a dagger. He wears no armor. Not even a wrapping to cover his bare forearms.
Rey shrinks back and, for the first time, Bane can feel her fear. Her eyes are locked on Death. She is begging, pleading, engaged in a conversation that he cannot hear.
"Kill him," Bane hisses, but his army stands deaf and dumb. It is as if they cannot see what is right in front of them. Perfectly on cue, Alec winks and dissolves back into nothing, taking the smaller man with him. Only Ben Solo is left.
Their wordless conversation is reaching a fever pitch, and Rey's mouth opens to unleash a terrifying sound. She clutches her right arm.
"I'm sorry, my love," Ben says. "But our blood is one." With one swipe of his dagger, he slashes his arm open from elbow to wrist. Rey screams.
And, in the space of a single heartbeat, Life and Death disappear.
"I need you to buy me some time."
"Time?"
"Assuming this works. He's going to search for her. If her power fails, he's going to tear the place apart trying to get back to her."
"You always give me the very best jobs."
"You're going to need backup."
"Obviously. And thanks for assuming I'm a moron."
" You've always been a moron."
Alec makes a rude gesture at the former Emperor of the Known Galaxy. "What's your plan?"
Ben shows him.
"Idiot."
"Pretty much."
"How do you know that you won't die?"
"I'm not sure I was ever alive to begin with."
"Now you get philosophical?"
"Only because it annoys you."
"Asshole."
"Stop flirting," Pular's voice is a mixture of boredom and annoyance. "Ersn says the charges are set. Twenty minutes."
Alec frowns. "This better work. I'm not sure—"
"You can," Ben says. "You were never meant to be a Sith."
"I suppose you're going to tell me that I would have made a great Jedi."
"No." Ben's voice harbors no mockery, only truth. "You are meant to be something far better."
Tears sting Alec's eyes. An unfamiliar emotion, and one he can scarcely afford. Instead he tells his brother, "You better not fail."
"Then don't fuck this up."
Right. Alec works to focus his power, to do something that he has never read about, that he has never even dreamt about. It is madness, but madness is all they have left. There's just one more thing.
"Ben." His brother stills. He has not called him by his given name since they were children. "If you succeed, tell her—" Alec works to control body and breath. "Tell her…" Fuck it, he thinks, there are no words for this. "Just help her."
Ben nods. It seems the words have left him too. Alec closes his eyes. He has always been able to cloak things. To conceal. An assassin's perfect gift, Ben once called it. Now it is more. Now he blocks Rey's power, the compulsion she wields over every living thing and to that he adds something more. Not just the ability to cloak—hiding is for children. This is the ability to disappear altogether. To vanish and reappear. The power it requires is exhausting; he feels his heart strain and his bones begin to crack. Lungs struggle to draw air. Just when he thinks he's about to disintegrate, a hand grips his wrist. Alec feels the Force flow into him with a jolt as strong as lightning. He finds Pular by his side, reversing that extraordinary gift of his, filling him with power instead of taking it away.
The younger man smiles. "I would have kissed you again, but I figure that would be too distracting."
Alec wants to laugh; he wants to cry. He looks to both of his brothers. "Hold on," he tells them. The world begins to dissolve.
Invisible once more, Alec watches Ben and Rey disappear. That was not his own doing but something far more dangerous. Bane looks around uselessly, a blind rat searching its way through a maze. A youngling who has lost its favorite toy.
He hears Ersn's voice inside his head. We're here.
He knows. He's been hiding them from view ever since they made their way back into the great chamber. Slowly, Alec releases his power and, one by one, the Knights of Ren materialize. Ersn. Vadanav. Malaak. All armed to the teeth and begging for a fight. Pular crouches a few feet away, one hand on the ground and draining the Force from everything in fifty-yard radius. Paralyzing the Sith Lord's army so the real battle can begin.
Alec's voice breaks the silence of the chamber. Bane's eyes fix upon him. "Sorry to steal your date." He gestures to the empty space that, until moments ago, Ben occupied. "There's no teaching that one manners, I'm afraid. Guess you'll have to make do with us."
Bane pulls a branch from the gargantuan tree Rey has grown in the center of the chamber and transforms it into a double-bladed lightsaber.
Well shit. As if to prove the point, Bane takes another branch and does it again.
Alec ignites his own blade; his brothers do the same.
Time to unleash hell, he thinks.
Rey thrashes on the ground, clutching her right arm tightly to her chest. There is no blood, no visible wound, but the pain is as real as if he's slit her arm open instead of his own.
Fucking Jedi rituals, the monster inside her hisses. It's so angry right now, angry with her, with the pain, with the temporary disruption of all that glorious life. But there's something more, something worse. A pricking of something else. Of a heart buried deep in her chest. A conscience blinking back at her with frightened eyes.
You once cared for such things. The voice is her husband's.
"Shut up!" she screams. Her voice is a banshee's wail. Her senses come alive. Her cheek is pressed to cool grass; blue sky stretches overhead with no clouds in sight. Moraband has vanished. Where they are, she does not know.
He sits little more than a saber's length away. Kneeling, with palms up and wrists crossed in a lesser-used form of the traditional Jedi meditative pose. Blood runs from his wounded arm to make a black pool before him.
"You'll die," she tells him. There is victory in her words.
"Perhaps," he agrees.
"Send me back."
"I will," he promises. "But first you must remember who you are."
"I know who I am!" she screams at him. "You would take it away from me, but I've remembered. You cannot change me ever again!"
"This is not all of you," he tells her. The calm of his voice is like fresh embers heaped on her soul. She leaps to her feet and runs at him, pouncing upon his chest and winding herself in the process. He tumbles backwards with her on top; she wraps her hands around his throat and begins to squeeze. The monster roars inside her, egging her on.
"Everything I am is your fault!" she cries. "You created me." She squeezes with every last bit of strength. The lust for his blood is beyond imagining. She wants to watch him die. She can feel the strength of taut tendons and ligaments, the ramrod of a spine, but it only makes her more determined. He doesn't fight back. She's doing her best to crush his windpipe but he is able to speak as if nothing is wrong.
"You don't think I would change that if I could?" He sits up easily with her still on him, with her hands still wrapped around his too-large neck and her thighs straddling his own. Everything about him is massive and impenetrable and it only fuels her rage.
"I am sorry," her husband tells her. The gentleness of his voice is a sharp contrast to all the strength beneath her. "I don't think you can kill me. No matter how much you might want to." She tries harder but there is an icy coldness to his skin. It rises to the surface and the cold turns to burning—an unbearable pain that makes her let go and scramble backwards.
"Bastard." She cradles scorched hands to her chest. "If I can't kill you, then that means you can't kill me either. If indeed we are some kind of balance."
He nods. "Not that I would ever want to."
"Spare me," she says. The pain howls inside her; she feels as if she is being torn apart.
"You've got to stop this," Ben tells her. "Please. I'll leave if you want me to. I'll go and you'll never see me again. But you must stop this."
He doesn't have to say what. She can feel it. Millions of souls emptying themselves at her command. Millions upon millions dying. She can feel a thousand ships break into the planet's atmosphere, heeding her call. The Resistance. The First Order. All of them to die. No, she thinks. But they must. She cannot bear to be alone.
"You're not alone," he tells her.
But she is. Those words are a lifetime away. Before all this damage. Before all her pain.
"I can't stop," she confesses. There are things inside her that are breaking. Things that are too strong, screeching monsters she cannot keep locked away. This is who she is. She will burn like a star, consuming everything and collapsing in on herself until there is nothing left to burn.
You're not alone.
She is looking into Ben's eyes, dark and steady and peaceful as the dead. She wants to believe him.
You. Are. Not. Alone.
Ben's eyes hold hers, but these words… they do not belong to him. Then who? Rey startles, searching for the source. The monster sniffs hungrily; ready to devour.
You're not alone, it says again. You're not, mama. I'm here.
A light flickers deep inside her. Something else lives. Not her, and not the monster, but something else. Something wondrously tiny and strong. A child. Their child. A precious life knitted to her very being. Rey begins to cry.
Don't be sad, mama. I'll help you. I can help.
She is crying more now. Ben is looking at her in amazement; he can hear the voice too. The monster as well; she sniffs and paws at the ground. She will devour this one just like all the others. What is life except to be consumed? Rey places a hand on her belly.
No.
The monster growls; its face takes the shape of Bane's. We are gods, you and I. No other can matter. No other can be allowed to live.
The little light is frightened. Mama, help me!
No, she thinks. NO.
"Ben," she is sobbing. "Ben—"
Strong hands grip hers. Black blood mars her skin. His power mixes with hers until something new forms. Something that is more than the both of them. It shields the little light from the monster who would threaten it.
"You must do the rest," he tells her. "You are strong, so strong, Rey. You are the best of both of us. I love you." He is crying now. "I was wrong before. So wrong. I had no idea with Hosna. If I had, I never would have done it. You should never have been alone." His grip tightens. "You are not wrong to hunger for these things. They are yours already, my love. They will come without asking; they will lay themselves at your feet."
The monster roars in response, and Rey is afraid. She cannot do this. "You can," Ben says. A surge of peaceful Dark washes over her. "You can," he says again. "Save us, Rey."
The little light glows inside her. She can do this, she thinks. Stop holding on. Let go and trust that something will stay. The monster opens her mouth, and Rey silences her with a single thought:
No more.
And then, she does that which she has never done before. She lets go of every last thing. Every soul, every creature, every bit of hurt and pain and loneliness she's saved up inside. She lets it all go. The souls she's been grasping so tightly she turns loose with the gentlest touch. I'm sorry, she thinks. Forgive me. Find peace; go home. Hobbled by muteness, the monster thrashes about, and she holds it still and soothes it, pulling it close until she can whisper in its ear.
"Time to die, old friend." And with that, she consumes it. She watches it burn until there is nothing left.
It is the last thing she will ever destroy.
She feels its death in every cell, in the space between every atom. The loss of something she has held so long and so dear. A horrible but necessary pain. The monster is gone, but she remains.
Rey opens her eyes.
There is blue sky above her, and a face she knows better than her own. Strong arms hold her; she reaches up to touch her husband's face.
"You did it," he tells her.
"We did." She feels peace, unimaginable peace, but something else too. Something is ebbing away. Blood. His blood.
She sits up. "Your arm!" she chides, angry now and searching for a way to fix him. "Idiot."
"That seems to be the general consensus."
She's searching for something she can use to heal him when she remembers that she has the most valuable resource in the galaxy at her command. She presses her uninjured arm to his bleeding one. She fixes the insensate particles of her gown into something more solid and begins binding their arms together in a crude facsimile of their wedding ceremony. At last, she begins to feel his blood loss slowing, the extended contact with her skin reversing the injury and knitting the torn flesh back together.
"Rey?" Ben says.
"Hush," she tells him, concentrating all her energy on fixing him like he has fixed her.
"I love you."
She looks up at him and she cannot stop the tears. She is drowning in them. "Ben," she cries, "I'm so sorry. Everything I did. It was unforgivable. And I hurt you. And I almost hurt—"
He silences her with a kiss, the longest and purest she has ever received. A kiss that wipes away all doubt, that makes her believe in herself almost as much as she believes in him.
He ends it, ages later it seems, but still he holds her close. He looks at her with more love, more breathtaking devotion than she dreamed could exist. Her heart is filled with his love, but it doesn't stop the ache. She speaks to the bond that bridges their minds; a bond that neither time, nor motive—that not even the Force itself—can sever.
Oh Ben, she tells him. I have broken things so.
He raises their joined arms until he can press his lips to her hand, like he did so long ago.
Then we will mend them together.
