Author's note:
Again, I'm so sorry for taking so long to update! Anyway, here's chapter 8, hoorayyyy :D
As always, thank you so much, my beta readers, for helping me with this chapter:
- hellostarlight (AO3)
- Megara09 (AO3)
- Everren (AO3) or Everren327 (Twitter)
- asongstress1422 (AO3)
I hope you enjoy this chapter!
The fireplace turned cold a long time ago. It's been a year since Luke stepped into his hut for the last time, but it feels much longer to Rey after everything that's happened. She'd never have guessed she would set foot on this island again when she'd left it to bring back Ben Solo. But instead of saving Ben, she'd almost killed him, and returned to Ahch-To to retreat in shame, like Luke had done almost a decade ago. Though the horrors of yesterday still sit deep in her bones, her talk with Luke and Anakin grounded her and allowed her to hope again.
Rey reverently attaches Leia's lightsaber to her hip, Luke's words still echoing in her head. 'It was the last night of her training. Leia told me that she had sensed the death of her son at the end of her Jedi path. She surrendered her saber to me, so she would never pick it up again. No one ever touched that lightsaber since then, but I have the feeling you could still have use of it.'
Rey touches the metal lightly, then takes one last look at Luke's old hut. The whole place has been kept clean by the Lanais, leaving not a single trace of the famed Jedi. But they hadn't found the hiding space behind the brick where the lightsaber had rested. Now, Rey will take away the final piece of Luke from Ahch-To, just as she had taken the Jedi texts before, but this time, she will not be going to Ben.
She shudders at the thought of confronting Palpatine, of the whole universe once more resting on her shoulders. She grabs the loose brick and slides it back into the wall before she steps out of the hut, where Luke is waiting for her. They walk to the site where Rey crash-landed the TIE-fighter just the day before. It's nothing more than a skeleton now, scorched pitch-black. Rey sighs. That's the second of Ben's ships she's destroyed. Hopefully it won't become a pattern.
That's when another thought crosses her mind, stopping her in her tracks. Luke turns to her and gives her a quizzical look. She curses under her breath.
"I destroyed Ben's ship… How am I supposed to get to Exegol now?" she asks, her heart sinking, but Luke only chuckles.
"Don't worry, you're not condemned to stay on this island forever," he says as if reading her mind. "Watch."
He walks to the edge of the cliff, then stops to look down. Curious, Rey joins him at the edge and follows his gaze to the waves of the ocean licking the foot of the island. Not far beneath the surface of the water, the X-Wing is still where Luke had abandoned it so many years ago, with the intention of never leaving the island again. To think that Rey was about to follow his example, even though she had criticized him hotly for it once, now seems very foolish of her.
A sudden urge to leave immediately grips her, to leave this place behind and never come back. Ahch-To is filled with too many memories, most of them tainted with frustration, confusion, and dread.
Rey furrows her brows and throws Luke a look. "How am I supposed to get to that ship, let alone get it out of the water?"
"Patience," Luke says, smirking slightly before he closes his eyes and stretches one arm out. For a moment nothing happens, and Rey begins to wonder if this is another one of his strange ways to teach her a lesson, but then the X-Wing begins to rise.
The water bubbles when the ship breaks its surface, and Rey watches in awe as it slowly moves towards them. She had no idea that Force ghosts were capable of wielding such power. Then again, she doesn't know much about Force ghosts at all, besides some lines in the old Jedi texts and the notes from Luke's journals.
If she hardly knows a shred of how the Force works, how is she supposed to confront Palpatine and survive? So far, she had mostly relied on instinct to guide her, but will that be enough against the knowledge of a century-old Sith Lord? How is she, merely an apprentice for a year, supposed to save herself, let alone the entire Galaxy?
Ben would know more about the Force, about the Sith. When she had asked Leia about his past, she'd told her how fascinated with history Ben was as a teenager, how good and hardworking of a student he was. Rey remembers how eager he seemed to be to find out how their bond works, even though she'd just cut his face open a week before. If she talked to him, she could— No, she can't possibly ask him anything, not after what she's done to him.
Luke safely lands the ship on a flat area behind them, the hull dripping sea water and leaving a growing puddle beneath it.
He opens his eyes to smirk at her. "Lifting rocks."
Rey resists the urge to roll her eyes but can't suppress a smile. '...make things float.' Oh, well, she hadn't been entirely wrong about that.
Eyeing the X-Wing, another problem occurs to her. "I don't know how to find Exegol…" She sighs and rubs her face. "Ben destroyed the wayfinder I found on Kef Bir."
Luke clicks his tongue. "My naughty nephew…" He shakes his head and looks at the wreckage that had cooled down during the night's rain. "Lucky for us that he had his own wayfinder."
"What?" she gasps and runs to the TIE-fighter. Reaching through the cracked windows, careful to not cut herself on the glass, she rummages through the ashes. Her fingers close around a pyramid and, with a triumphant shout, she pulls it out. In her misery, Rey had totally overlooked it. The pyramid glows green and its glass surface is smooth, without a single scratch.
So there had been two wayfinders. It's almost as if she's meant to go to Exegol. But...alone?
Drawing a deep breath, she walks back to Luke, who is waiting next to the X-Wing. She lets her eyes wander over the old ship, amazed that it still looks functional, despite—or perhaps because of—the many obstacles Luke had overcome with it. If she's lucky, she will continue that tradition, keeping the stories alive.
If she's lucky...Her stomach clenches and she hugs herself, suppressing a shiver. "What if I fail? What if I'm not strong enough to resist Palpatine? I'm so afraid."
Luke turns to her, blue eyes sympathetic and calm. "It's your destiny to confront that fear, Rey. Everything that led you away from Jakku happened for a reason." He puts a hand on her shoulder. "Of course you're afraid. I was a naive child from a desert, too, once. But I was forced to confront my father, Darth Vader. I was scared, and I didn't stop being afraid of things when I grew older. Hell, I was too afraid to face my nephew and my sister for nearly a decade! But there's no courage without fear." He pats her shoulder in a fatherly gesture that feels alien to her even as it brings comfort. "I have done everything I can to help you. But this is your fight, Rey."
Rey climbs into Luke's X-Wing and dons the helmet with the red sigil of the Rebel Alliance. Its weight on her head and the view through the yellow visor feel so familiar to her. Back on Jakku, when she sat in front of the AT-AT, her old home, she used to stare into the sky, watching ships leave the planet's atmosphere. She loved to imagine herself becoming a pilot, dreamed of traveling the boundless vastness of the galaxy and beyond. Then, she'd only had to survive and wait for her parents. Everything was much simpler.
So much has happened since then. She had left Jakku and her childhood behind, only to be thrown into a galactic war. A war between light and dark, good and evil. Even then, her path had been clear. Fight for the Resistance, for the light side of the Force. Be one of the good guys.
Now, everything seems far more complex.
After connecting the wayfinder to the ship, Rey waits until the binary signals are translated into coordinates. She thinks back to the battle with Ben, how frustrated she'd been that he was still fighting her. Of course, she hadn't forgotten that they were on opposite sides of a war, that they were supposed to be enemies.
But, despite everything, she had hoped that he wouldn't want to fight her. Even though he'd made sure to put obstacles in her way at every turn, she'd still held on to that foolish hope. She refuses to call it denial — that would be too easy. She knows exactly what Ben is capable of, how ambitiously he has been building his First Order, how sure he is of his ways.
Or at least, he pretends to be. It's useless to try to hide it from her, the conflict that's constantly tearing him apart, and the light inside him. She can see right through him, and she had wanted him to see it, too, to realize that he's wrong. He's supposed to help her, not fight her. He's supposed to support her, not throw obstacles in her way. He's meant to be by her side, to be her ally, her friend...hers.
Because there is that connection between them, bonding them across lightyears. They know about each other's pasts, their thoughts and feelings, the fears and hopes they didn't dare to share with anyone else. In just a matter of days, before everything had fallen apart, they had grown so close. Rey couldn't help but feel drawn to him, to his velvety voice, to his dark eyes and the vulnerability behind them.
And Ben was drawn to her, too, wasn't he? She remembers the way he looks at her, the way his voice lowers, so irresistibly gentle, whenever he talks to her.
The tears in his eyes.
'You're not alone.'
He'd killed Snoke for her, saved her life. And then they'd joined forces, fought together as one, in perfect synchrony, invincible. Like they were meant to be together. So why had he turned on her? Why had he continued the war against the Resistance, against his mother, against her?
Now, she understands why. In truth, she had known it for a while. But her hopes and her black-and-white views had blinded her. Killing Snoke hadn't erased the damage of a lifetime of manipulation and lies. She was naive to have thought it would be an easy choice for him. It never had been. But she hadn't been ready to accept it then because it would have meant admitting she was wrong.
And so was Ben. He'd been wrong, thinking it was power she wanted, that she would leave her friends behind.
"Rey, I want you to join me," he said, stretching out his hand beseechingly, "We can rule together and bring a new order to the Galaxy."
"Don't do this Ben," Rey whispered, her heart sinking, "Please don't go this way."
It had broken her heart, looking on as her dreams and hopes shattered, revealing how naive she'd been all this time.
And when the Force had connected them for the first time after Crait, it was like someone had replaced him for a different person.
Wearing his mask, he was back to being a faceless monster again, and his words only reflected that.
"I don't want to have to kill you," he said, his distorted voice revealing nothing, "I'm going to find you and turn you to the Dark Side."
He had spoken to her as if he hadn't known her at all.
The Ben she knows would never have tried to turn her into something else, regardless of his own beliefs. It was almost as if something were still possessing him and whispering things into his mind.
And yet, he'd never attacked her, never attempted to hurt her. She was the one who'd stabbed him.
Rey shivers. The control panel blurs in front of her eyes and she puts her fist into her mouth to stifle a sob. How could she have let it go so far? Her skin stings where her teeth sink deep into her knuckles. Will he ever be able to forgive her, to trust her again?
His face is still clear in her mind. The look in his eyes holds no hostility or hate. Without the scar, he looks just like the first time she'd seen his face, back on Starkiller Base, when he'd removed his mask for her. But his hair is dripping wet in this memory, flattened to his head and falling around his face, and there are dark circles under his eyes.
There, when he was at his most vulnerable, Rey had finally managed to say what she should have said all along, her darkest secret that she'd kept from everyone and even tried to hide from herself. 'I did want to take your hand. Ben's hand.'
And before she could see his reaction, she'd fled. She had been running away from herself, from responsibility, and from hurt. But most of all, she'd been running from him, the man she has fallen in love with.
Blinking away the moisture in her eyes and focusing herself back into the present, Rey takes a breath and punches a few buttons. The engines come to life with a high-pitched whistling. Then the system beeps, indicating that the coordinates are integrated. Her eyes jump to one of the displays, and she frowns. An error message blinks at her, telling her that it can't estimate the travel time. She's never encountered something like that before.
Well, she'll just have to see how long it takes her then. Hopefully, she won't be too late. If she ever wants to see her friends again, if she wants a chance at a world not controlled by a ruthless regime, she will have to risk everything.
Her hand closes around the two lightsabers at her hip. The cool metal feels reassuring and calming against her skin. There is still hope. She refuses to think that she and Ben are doomed. Should she survive this fight, she will look for him.
She broadcasts the coordinates to an open channel, so that the Resistance can follow her to Exegol, then grabs the center stick and pulls. The engines vibrate under her and, with a long whine, the ship takes off into the sky.
Author's note:
I hope you liked this chapter! :3 If you'd like to give feedback or share your thoughts, don't hesitate to comment! See you in the reviews or in the next chapter !