Chapter 20

An End and a Beginning

They were falling out of the sky.

Hux's final move was now fully apparent. He had hit some kind of switch under his table that would send his flagship careening towards the surface of Raspitar. Alarms blared and hot steam hissed out of the ventilation shafts around them. Any minute now they'd smash headfirst into the battle below before the troops would have time to get a safe distance away.

That bastard. Despite all of Ben's gifts, all of his training, that slimy cur had managed to seal their fate in a giant metal coffin right when they had almost claimed victory.

Ben looked towards Rey, whose eyes were as wide as saucers. He bolted to the end of the table where Hux had doomed them all, scrabbling under the wood with his gloved hand to find something, anything that could reverse this whole thing. Finding nothing, he swore loudly and leapt to another control panel, where he pushed every button in sequence.

A grinding noise and a desperate shout caught his attention. From the other side of the room Rey had stabbed one end of her lightsaber staff into a supercomputer and was running the plasma from side to side. Terrified whimpers escaped her mouth with each slash.

"Nothing's working!" She cried at him, her words cut off by a surprised shriek. A blast of steam had just erupted just inches from her arm.

"We have to warn them. Everyone down there. They have to have some comms system up here…" Ben muttered, dancing from monitor to monitor.

No matter how hard he pressed each command into the keypads or how hard he hoped to the Force above, the screens remained as deathly black as they had been since the shut-down.

"This is working!" Rey waved him over and slid her finger over a small holopad and yelled into the microphone. "It broadcasts to the main bay!"

She took the thin microphone in one hand and yelled, "Everyone, if you haven't already, leave this ship now! Get to your comrades below on the planet's surface and warn them before it's too late!"

"How do you know they won't just save their own skins?" Ben shouted to her over the din. His hair whipped across his eyes.

She remembered back to the group of stormtroopers they had captured down below. How they had cooperated with Rose and the others.

"They'll pass the message along if they want everyone to get to safety in time."

Ben couldn't see into the inky blackness past the window but nodded his head trustingly. The floor under their boots began to tilt obscenely under the entire ship was at a thirty-degree angle.

Out of a small window by the computer stations, Rey watched in silent horror as the stars outside slipped past them. The edge of the green jungle planet was now coming up, closer than ever.

"We should get down there! Take an escape pod and get who we can out!" She started to dash towards the doors they had entered in from.

Ben dashed from his spot and threw his arm out in front of her, nearly clotheslining her. His heart sank lower and lower into his diaphragm as he tumbled their situation over and over in his mind.

"We won't make it down there in time," he told her, barely managing to keep his voice steady. "We should leave now and guarantee ourselves an escape pod out of here."

"But my friends are down there!" Rey threw her arms about wildly, tears brimming in her eyes. She clamped down on his outstretched arm with enough force to clench his teeth.

"So are mine! But there's nothing we can do!" he retorted, emotion running his voice ragged.

They stared at each other desperately, as if one could simply find and pluck a solution out of the other. Ben's arm still remained in Rey's vice-like grip, his fingers trembling.

As they stood, various holopads and stylus containers scraped down their tables and slid off onto the tilting floor. A faint rumbling sounded around them over the shrieking of the alarms. They had just entered Raspitar's outer atmosphere.

Rey loosened her grip and let her arms fall to sides. The wrappings of her robes dangled at the angle of the falling star destroyer, and the loose pieces of her hair hung around her pale face. Even though Ben's heart couldn't take much more, it twinged painfully at her crumpled, defeated look.

"So, what can we do?" she muttered through choked-back tears.

Ben screwed up his face and grabbed her shoulders, pulling her into a tight hug. She squeezed back with her palms flat against his shoulder blades and her head buried in the crook of his neck.

Around them, wires sprang out of their computers and sparks flew into the smoke-laden air. Distant shrieks of collapsing metal indicated that the structural integrity of the ship was now compromised.

"I don't want us to fight. If we can do something, I want us to decide together."

He felt Rey sigh into his tunic.

"I might have an idea."

Her voice barely carried over the noise, but Ben heard her as clear as day.

"What is it?" he asked, his embrace slipping.

Suddenly she rushed forward to the widow above the table, careful to jump over Hux's still form. She pressed a button on the sill of the window and the lush, tree-carpeted surface of Raspitar approached them at a frightening velocity. The planet almost took up the entire pane of glass.

She pointed a shaking finger at the view outside. "We don't want that coming any closer."

"Rey, what—" Ben stopped himself as she ran back to him and promptly sat down at his feet, her gaze locked onto the window. The Finalizer gave a bone-crackling lurch that almost topple them both to the ground, but they managed to stay upright.

"We can stop this thing." Her voice rang out hopefully. She was talking faster and faster. "Maybe not forever, but at least for enough time so that everyone down there can get away."

"Rey, this isn't a bunch of rocks! This is billions of tons of steel flying towards the ground!"

"I know!" She crossed her legs and reached up to him. Her fingers slipped around his. He could pick out the scars he loved so much on each of her digits. "But we need to try."

Her brown eyes gazed up at him. Hope, confidence, and determination radiated off of her like a heat, things he was not at all feeling in this moment.

But he swallowed his fear and doubt. Without letting go of her hand, he sank down to the floor and shook his hair out of his eyes.

"If we survive this, we're going back to Nov Sensum to take a vacation," he murmured, planting a quick kiss on her cheek.

"I'll hold you to that," she replied. A ghost of a smile rippled across her stern features, but she quickly got a hold of herself again. "Ready when you are."

"Ready."

The moment he closed his eyes against the flashing sirens, silence swarmed around him until he was swallowed whole. It was as if he had sealed himself in a padded, pitch-black room. No longer could he sense the floor underneath him, or the smoke filling his lungs, or Rey's presence beside him. He sat alone, only his deep breathes pushing back against the overwhelming lack of sound.

Then the pressure hit. A pressure so intense it threatened to crush his bones to dust inside his body. He clenched his teeth or at least tried to, but he couldn't feel any sensation in his mouth, or anywhere. Only that pain.

It was the Finalizer. It was doing this to them.

As the weight continued to push down, a picture flickered to life in front of his eyes like the sputtering of a match. On one side there was green. So much green. The other side was dominated by metal and smoke. The sinking form of the Finalizer moved steadily towards the planet. Its nose dipped down to the trees and trails of black smoke were lost to the vacuum of space behind it.

Raspitar. His guards were down there. Joran, Ames, Eloisa, Sestro, Edric, and Sal. Finn, Rose, and Poe were also fighting for their lives down there, the people Rey cared about most in the world. Both of them, right here and right now, could save them, could save everyone down there.

With a grunt of effort that vibrated in his throat but didn't reach his ears, Ben leaned forward into the darkness and focused with all of his might against the force pressing down upon him.

But with each passing second, the hulking gray starship sank lower and lower into the jungle planet's atmosphere. The edges of the hull were now painted with fire, screaming shrilly as it cut through the air like a massive knife. Ben could only imagine the panicked screams from down below, everyone sprinting towards the safety of their transports. But if they didn't Force this thing back, none of them, whether Resistance or First Order, stood a chance.

Again, he fought back against the pain, now so fierce that it took all of his willpower not to completely shut down. Don't come closer, he repeated over and over in his head like a religious chant. Don't come closer, don't come closer, don't come closer.

But it was all too much. The Finalizer still tumbled down and down. The pain, the inky blackness around him, the hopelessness seeping into his heart. All of this had been for nothing, after all. Bonding with Rey, killing Snoke, leaving the First Order, joining the Resistance, none of it was going to mean anything. The galaxy would lose so many more people, included himself and Rey, and the cycle of violence would continue somehow.

Through the mind-numbing heaviness of the star destroyer, Ben felt a light, gentle touch on his forearm.

Immediately the pain lessened a bit. Of course, she was here to help. This strong, talented, incredible force of nature he had fallen madly in love with. They were going to stop this ship, end this war, help the galaxy finally mend itself, and they were going to do it together.

And if they died here, how could he hold her again? Take her out in their freighter to see the stars? Spar with her in the chill of the crisp morning air? See her smile again, as bright as desert sands at noon? How would they begin to build something even better than what they had already?

Even though the force of the ship slowly increased, he held on within an inch of his life. Rey's touch was so hot it almost burned. He pulled back on the collapsing hull of the Finalizer.

As he watched through the Force, Raspitar's surface began to slow its path towards them. Even as chunks of burning shrapnel and glass rained down into the forests, the main body of the ship remained intact, slowing down just marginally.

The clearing. The battle. It was directly below them. The ship had now gotten close enough to the ground that Ben could pick out individual shuttles.

"Keep going!" he shouted to Rey, despite not being able to hear himself. Her hand on his arm gripped tighter, and a warmth filled his chest. A confidence like never before filled him up to the brim. They could do this. They had to.

The ships began to slow even more, the trees didn't blow up in size as quickly. Their speed was dropping, finally. But how slow was enough?

"We're almost there!" Ben yelled over to Rey, but it felt like the breath was sucked out of his lungs. The smoke filling the deck was stifling. If they didn't die in a crash, the fumes would.

The weight from before had almost doubled, but Ben gritted his teeth and fought through the pain. They finally had a handle on the falling Finalizer. Ben could see through his cloudy vision that the nose of the star destroyer now hovered above the clearing where the battle was taking place, as is the ship were dangled on a string.

"Now keep holding it!" Rey shouted through his haze. "Wait until they're cleared of the debris!"

Squinting through the pain, Ben could pick out soldiers sprinting towards their shuttles. Even the First Order ships had remained in the air away from the battle had dipped down to pull every last troop they could out of the warzone. One by one the shuttles loaded up their people and took off as fast as they could. From this height they looked like insects taking flight, leaving small contrails in their wake.

Just a little more, just a little more. This mantra cycled through Ben's desperate mind. Every nerve in his body was alight with fire and his chest felt fit to bursting. Never had he tried to Force back something so massive before, and he'd be glad just to escape with he and Rey's lives.

Each second a minute, each minute and hour. One by one the transports scurried through the air over the jungle, the Resistance forces retreating the east, the First Order to the west. Soon there was no sign of life left in the war-torn forest clearing.

As their concentration began to crack, the creaks and metallic groans of the collapsing deck reached Ben's ears. This bird wasn't going to hold for too much longer.

"We need to go!" he shouted to Rey. Leaping to his feet as best as he could, he brushed little chunks of debris out of his hair and lifted Rey up from her spot. With strict nods, they turned tail and bolted out of the deck area and into the control center outside. The long metal rods reaching out between data towers were breaking apart like toothpicks and falling into the abyss below.

Thoroughly worn out from holding the ship up, Ben could barely send out enough Force to bolt his feet to the floor, which had tilted to almost a forty-five-degree angle.

Alarms screamed, smoke billowed from the vents, and lights flashed on and of as the Finalizer began her final death throws. The walkways the sprinted across sagged under their weight and broke out behind them.

"Just a little more!" he yelled over his shoulder to Rey, who nodded while shielding her mouth from the noxious smoke.

They made their way out of the control room and turned down a long steep corridor. Sticking out of the walls were familiar, circular doors equipped with metal plating and control panels. They had made it.

There couldn't be more than a minute before impact. Slamming his fist on the largest red button in sight didn't seem to work, so he ignited his lightsaber and stabbed the panel in a fir of rage. Amazingly, the doors slid open and they both jumped inside the cool confines of the escape pod. Rey turned around to glance back at the hallway they had just ran down. A billow of flames erupted from behind them, sending a frightening wave of heat over their faces.

"Punch it!" Rey screeched, slamming the doors behind them and leaping towards the miniscule cockpit. Ben stumbled into the pilot's seat and flicked the controls on. The pod shuddered to life around them. Ben whipped his head around to take one last good at the inside of the Finalizer. It was the end of Hux, the end of the First Order, the end of an era.

Their escape pod shot forward with such a velocity that Rey was thrown backwards off of her feet. They soon emerged into a sea of blue, white whisps of clouds swirling all around as they somersaulted through the air. Ben bit his lip and took the joystick controls in hand and shuttled their ship in the perpendicular direction of the sinking ship's path.

"We did it," Rey breathed, her face smooshed against the thick glass of the escape pod window. The hilt of her lightsaber staff rattled against her belt. A surge of panic speared Ben in the heart and he reached impulsively to his own belt. To his relief, his new lightsaber was still secured there.

Once they had gotten a safe distance away, Ben adjusted the pod to face the crashing ship. He and Rey both watched in exhausted awe as the disintegrating star destroyer hurtled towards the clearing. When the tip of the hull touched down in the clearing, the whole body broke in half across the hull with a crack that Ben was sure the whole planet could hear. The two pieces crashed together and one of the biggest explosions Ben had ever seen in his life rocked the surface below; trees were blown from their roots, shrapnel ricocheted and shot into the clear blue sky. Plumes of fiery orange and a veil of acrid black smoke reached into the clouds like demonic hands grasping for the suns above.

"We did it," Rey sighed weakly. She stumbled onto a padded bench and rested her head in her hands.

Ben set the coordinates for due east and wandered over to Rey, a tired smile slowly weaving its way over his face. He dropped to his knees and front of her and gazed up into her beautiful brown eyes through his dirty tendrils of dark hair.

"We did it," he repeated hoarsely.

She let out a choked laugh and took his large, awkward hands into her smaller, daintier ones. With some difficulty, seeing as they were both wrecked from their biggest Force stunt yet, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead. Relishing the feeling, Ben snuggled closer until his head was on her lap and her fingers twirled gently through his hair, the scent of her easing him back down. The escape pod soared over the jungle, continuing its path towards the Resistance.

Sunlight crept through the windows of the pod and alighted on the pair of them. For what seemed like an eternity they sat there, holding one another. It was an eternity Ben would have liked to occupy forever.

…

Canaan's attendents had outdone themselves with the decorations. The jungle castle's great hall seemed to exude life from every corner and crevice. Vines woven from gold climbed the carved stone pillars holding up the vast ceiling, which was painted with eye-catching reds and greens and yellows. Exotic flowers of every color and petal orientation burst from the walls, drizzling scented pollen over everyone's heads and mixing delightfully with the aromas of the massive banquet the king had thrown for the entire Resistance fleet. Platters upon platters of roasted meats and vegetables graced every inch of the numerous stone tables lined up across the floor, and every seat at those tables were occupied with either Resistance soldiers or defected stormtroopers. On opposite sides just days ago, they now chatted amongst themselves and boisterously sang out war tunes while arm in arm.

Ben had his eyes on Finn and a pale stormtrooper Rey had identified as the one from their battle in the clearing. The pair were talking up a storm, gesticulating wildly and Rose watched eagerly next to her boyfriend and clutched at her hair.

Poe was at another table with his pilot friends, apparently telling a joke to the whole table, his tousled hair bobbing with each eager nod.

Another row down were his former personal guards, all huddled together as Ben fully expected them to be. To his surprise, though, Sestro looked up from his comrades to flashed him a devilish smile and a thumbs up in Rey's direction. Ben smirked ruefully and with a flick of his finger, Sestro's chair was yanked out from under him and he fell to the floor with a clatter. The laugher rising up from the rest of his friends almost drowned out his whining.

He and Rey ate their meal at a table closest to the main doors. With all of their travels to some of the seediest places in the galaxy, positioning themselves by an exit had become instinct. His mother Leia sat across from them, making amorous conversation with Rey.

Leia ran a hand through her graying hair, which she had worn down this evening, and gave Ben a good-natured wink. The two women had been discussing how things would fall into place after Leia and her generals would restore order among the galaxy, Sure, they would need soldiers to enforce the new peace, and many of the Resistance troops had decided to stay on permanently. But what lay in store for Finn and Poe and Rose?

"Finn and Rose are staying behind to stick with the stormtroopers. Help them find a place in this huge world. I asked Poe if he would still lead our aerial forces, and he agreed to take a higher command for me," the old general explained. She folded her hands together on the table, a content expression on her face. She looked once more toward her son, and then to Rey, and posed the questioned that had been on all of their minds: "What are you two going to do?"

He and Rey had talked things over on their new freighter for a few days now. The Resistance had practically begged them to stay, having recounted their heroic stabilization of the Finalizer many a time as a reminder of what they could do for them.

But there was always a time and a place for galactic peacekeeping. After hours of discussion while lounging in the pilot's seat in the cockpit, they had reached their verdict.

"We're going to go back to Nov Sensum," Ben told his mother, smiling briefly over at Rey. "Just for a time, not forever. We're going to practice with the village elder there and leave when we're ready. Then we'll be back."

Something like sadness seeped into Leia's usually warm gaze. She reached her hand across the table to Ben and he took it gingerly. There, pulsing through her fingertips, were her true feelings: relief for her soldiers and for her cause, elation at the festivities around her, a twinge of grief for her husband, and an overarching melancholy at seeing her son leave her again so soon.

"I will miss you two," she sighed, the rings on her fingers glinting under the light of the great hall. "But while you're away, you won't truly be gone. You're in all of our hearts, and we'll await your return."

After the feast had concluded and King Canaan made his final statements to Leia and her troops, Ben and Rey left the great hall and advanced through the massive wooden doors that lead to the landing platform. All around them Resistance troops and retired stormtroopers flowed down the wooden ramps like fish spawning upstream. Tall solar-powered torches lit a warm, orange path back to the sanctuary of their ships.

Ben felt Rey's small, deft hand grab him gently by the tunic and stop him in his tracks. At first he was confused, but as he took in the forest around them he understood why she had stopped them. One of the most glorious nights had taken over the jungle skies as they had celebrated inside. A full blue moon threatened to dim the already brilliant stars around it. Cool, fresh air swirled past his fingertips. The stark difference against the suffocating, humid heat of the day and the cool caress of the night was, well, night and day.

Ben hardly noticed the curious gazes the rest of their comrades gave them, or the knocking of their heavy boots on wood. It was just him, and her, and the night air.

"Hey, you two."

Joran, Ames, Edric, Sestro, Eloisa, and Sal had all strutted up behind them. Rey let out a small gasp of surprise as Finn, Rose, and Poe walked around the squad of guards. They had been following Ben's friends as one gigantic group.

"We're were looking for you guys. Any chance you'd be able to give us a little lightsaber demonstration?" Poe asked, eyeing the weapon hanging from Ben's belt.

"We heard about the new hardware, Solo," Finn told Ben, swinging an arm over Rose's shoulder playfully. "Any chance of a nighttime show for the lady?"

"Honestly, it's not that impressive," Eloisa laughed sarcastically. "What's new about it, that it's purple?"

Rey playfully nudged his ribs and Ben rolled his eyes with a slight smile.

"Sure, why not?" he asked them all, and they all responded with little cheers and whoops.

"Everyone, to the docks!" Poe announced, stomping off before the other could respond.

"But we were already going there, you nerfherder!" Rose called after him, but the entire group chuckled with her and they descended to the landing platform. Rey threw an arm around Ben's waist, he threw an arm over her shoulders and they set out through the cool Raspitar night, surrounded by friends.

After so much time, too much time, every missing piece had fallen perfectly back into place. He wouldn't trade any moment that brought him closer to this for any world in the galaxy, any second of their interplanetary journey.

Ben and Rey hung a little behind the others, listening to their friends chatter back and forth. He couldn't help but sneak glances at her as they walked. How her robes swirled about her ankles. How her fingers fidgeted with the belt encircling her hip. How her honey brown eyes reflected the torchlight oh so beautifully.

"What?" she asked him, finally catching him in the act.

"I love you," he answered simply.

She stumbled a bit as she reached up to tuck a spare lock of his dark hair behind his ear and run a finger down his healing scar. Her smile lit up this already bright night.

"I love you," she whispered back.

Author's Note: Just an epilogue after this chapter. We're SO close to the end! Thank you all for your stunning patience and support. I appreciate every single one of you who stopped by and decided to check the story out. :)