He feels her body hit the ground through the rock wall he clings to and the dyad collapses into him.
Must go faster.
Handhold over handhold he climbs to the surface to find it is shattered into dust and darkness.
He trip-crawls to her side, broken bones be damned.
Once black and white, they've both turned grey in this ruined place.
Strength draining, he clutches her, drawing her to his body.
He looks down into a face he knows as well as his own and he finds her blankly staring.
Panic rises, sapping him further, and he looks around.
For what?
Enemies?
Help?
Someone to tell him what to do?
Holding her, imagining what the galaxy will be like without her, and not just for him.
Oh, but he knows what to do.
He settles his hand against her and directs the dyad energy into her.
An energy that has a power over life itself, Palpatine said.
And he gives it all, holding nothing back. He gives himself no quarter.
He feels himself fading, death dragging him to an edge he can't escape.
But she is not waking.
It is as if he is pouring himself into an empty vessel that is bottomless.
With his last bit of strength, he clutches her to him, and then collapses into darkness.
-Finn-
Rey.
Rey.
Rey.
It is a mantra I repeat again and again as I try desperately to find the ember I know is here in the wreckage. Chewbacca trails me closely even though I told him to stay with the Falcon. I know why he's here.
He can't lose anyone else.
"Is she alive?" He barks, and the break at the end of it strengthens my resolve.
I'm not leaving here without her.
"Chewie, I'm trying," I say through gritted teeth. Gritted with cold and hatred of this place, as debris from fallen ships still rains down from the sky, the air filled with ash and smoke.
I know I'm Force sensitive, but it just isn't enough. I know she is here, but this place is huge and broken.
The comm static startles me. It has to be Lando checking in.
"Yeah," I answer blankly, not willing to be called back to the ship. I know it is dangerous here and I know the sky is falling, but I'll be damned if I leave Rey in this place when I can feel the barest sliver of her light.
"Finn, it's Jannah," she states and then says nothing.
Lando obviously thinks this tactic will work. Have the woman ask...she'll be able to talk some sense into me. But neither of them has any idea. They have no idea what Rey means to me or how far I will go. I will excavate this entire planet to find her if I have to -
And then she is here.
I round a corner, entering a strange chamber that is both massive and demolished as if something detonated within its walls. The place has an evil feeling to it. Cold things with clawing fingers lived and plotted and took and died here. I shudder, but then my eyes trip over a pair of feet on the ground and I shout.
"Chewie!"
He is at my side before I can take another step. I suddenly feel immobilized. What if I walk around that corner and find her dead? Part of me knows she's not because I can kriffing feel her. But I am still very afraid.
Chewie nudges me from behind.
"We have to help Rey. No matter what," he says in a melancholic purr and I know exactly what he means. If she's alive we save her. If not…we take her home.
I step around the corner, steeling myself for the worst...and come up short so fast that Chewie walks into the back of me. The sight before me is...so...very...strange. And wrong. So wrong.
Because I haven't just found Rey. I have also found Kylo Ren.
-Rey-
She wakes up on the ground surrounded by mist that is so dense she can barely see a few inches in front of her. Slowly she raises her upper body off the ground using her hands for support. She looks around, trying to ascertain where she is but she sees nothing, and as if to prove that point to herself she waves her hand about six inches away in front of her face and can barely make out her own fingers.
"Great," she sighs heavily, getting to her feet. She looks around, taking a few steps in each direction, trying to get a feel for where to go, but she can't even see her feet for goodness sake. How is she supposed to go anywhere?
"Hello?" She calls, having no idea if she will be answered. She is unsurprised by the resounding silence.
She stands still for several minutes gathering all her other sense powers in addition to the Force to try to push through and reach out. As she stands there doing this she is suddenly struck by a thought and it stops her cold.
This isn't where I was.
She was in a throne room. She was in a battle with Palpatine. And she'd won! She feels a jolt of exhilaration at that realization, but it is quickly undermined by her very clear memory of dying. She remembers the sensation of the Force leaving her body. Her last memory is of the dyad being ripped away and then all was darkness. She looks down at her body. From what she can make out she is completely whole and unmarked. Her clothes aren't even wrinkled or dirty from laying on the ground. She places her hands on her chest, but finds no injuries. No scorching, no pain. Nothing. But she had been burned there by Palpatine's lightning as he ripped the dyad energy from her and -
"Ben!" She cries, spinning around in the fog, suddenly feeling very much afraid.
She is met with silence.
"Ben! Are you here?" She calls out, wanting to move around to look for him, but also afraid to move away from the spot where she had awoken. She has an odd feeling that she is supposed to wait here for some reason, but for what she doesn't know.
She tries to still herself. Closing her eyes, she takes several calming breaths.
Be with me.
When she feels her panic recede, she starts to think about what she thinks she knows. She knows she is almost definitely dead. She knows she is someplace that is not the throne room and that she's never been here before. She has a nagging feeling that she shouldn't leave the spot she is in.
What she does not know is whether Ben is alive or dead. She had not felt him die when he fell. She also recalls the sensation of the dyad being pulled away from her at the moment of her death, so she assumes that it either disintegrated or returned fully to him. If it returned to him, he might still be alive.
This thought makes her feel oddly ambivalent. If he lived that was a good thing, right? So why did it make her feel lonely and a little bit jealous?
She sighs, chalking it up to the dyad and to their intense and contentious relationship.
But he stood by my side at the end. We were...friends, maybe. Maybe more? She shakes her head. It doesn't matter now.
"I'm alone," she whispers, and the first cracks in her armor start to appear as she gives in a little to her growing sense of despair.
"No. You're not," says a warm voice.
-Ben-
Ben wakes up with his back against a tree. He sits blinking for a full minute trying very hard to remember where he is or how he got here. He looks around at his surroundings and finds himself to be very confused. He is in a forest of enormous trees that stretches high into the air and is surrounding him for as far as his eyes can see. There is something comforting about it and yet also unnatural. It is completely silent. No rustling breeze or creak of branches. The place is utterly devoid of sound. That is until he hears his mother's voice.
"Hello Ben." Her voice is every bit as dry and reticent as it's always been.
She walks out from behind a tree, wrapped in white robes that trail her, and he sees her as he never had in life.
She is still very much his mother, but she has aged. It has the effect of softening her and making her seem somehow less than who she was the last time he saw her.
But Ben knows his mother. If anything, she has grown more formidable as she's aged. Which is saying something. He quickly gets to his feet, not wanting to seem rude and provoke a fight.
If fighting is even allowed here, he thinks to himself vaguely.
"Mother," he says quietly, his voice cautiously neutral.
She approaches him slowly but ends up standing very near to him, so that she must look straight up into his face. He gets a better look at her and he can see that he was right. Her eyes are burning just like they always had.
She surprises him when her lips hitch into a small smile.
"Your hair had gotten very long," she says soberly. "I always liked it when you wore it more like your father's."
He must suppress a gasp.
Can't think about that now.
"Yes, well I've been busy," he stutters with the sudden feeling that he is forgetting something very important.
"I know you have," she chuckles, "Ruling the galaxy for a minute there. And then…" She trails off and looks at him pointedly.
"Yes...yes...and then," he falters, looking away from her and finding himself at a total loss for words as he struggles to remember the very important thing. That was very important.
Kriff, what was I doing?
"I was on Kef Bir. And I saw dad." His voice hitches but he doesn't stop. There is something more important he has to get to. "I left there and went to Exegol...to find Rey...to help her kill Palpatine!"
His eyes widen in panic. His mother merely nods. The rest comes out of him in a rush.
"Palpatine used us to regain his strength and he threw me into a ravine. Rey fought him and she won. But she died!" He feels a sob rise in his chest as tears run down his face. "And I tried to save her...I tried so hard to use the dyad's Force energy to heal her and bring her back. Because the galaxy needs her! But I wasn't strong enough...I couldn't give it all to her. I died. I failed."
His mother comes closer still and reaches up to cradle his cheek, so much in the same way that his father had that Ben's heart breaks in his chest.
"No son," she says gently, rubbing a tear away from his check with her thumb. "You didn't fail. Rey isn't dead."
He gasps and the tightness in his chest lessens considerably.
Leia's momentarily soft gaze changes. She looks dryly bewildered when she says,
"And guess what kiddo. Neither are you."
-Finn-
Chewy and I have gone over the problem in every way we can.
The comm has been buzzing on my shoulder for over an hour with everyone first asking and then telling me to return to the Falcon.
But I can't. This situation is nuts and it is totally beyond me.
When I found them, they appeared to be holding onto one another which was unsettling on multiple levels. Chewbacca seemed equally unnerved. My first instinct was to separate them, to take Rey and leave Kylo behind like the space trash that he is.
And that is when things got really messed up.
Because when I tried to separate them, the tiny ember of light I'd been picking up on from Rey started to go out. And the little bit of life that I was able to ascertain still existed in her using my med pack analyzer took a plunge into darkness.
On a total whim I pushed them back together again, and amazingly the light came back and she stabilized to her previous near-death state as opposed to the hairsbreadth she had been from actually dying only moments before. Chewy and I tried separating them one more time just to be sure, but to the same effect.
After much deliberation and literal hand wringing, we decide we have only one course of action. I get on the comm.
"Lando," I say, sounding much calmer than I actually feel. He responds almost instantaneously.
"Finally, kid! Did you find her? I want to get off this planet right now. We've got to regroup with the fleet on Ajan Kloss."
"Yeah...about that. We may need to put that off for a bit until we can figure some stuff out," I answer heavily. "Can you and Jannah come out here? We are going to need help. And can you bring two stretchers?"
"Two? What's going on kid?" Lando asks.
"I really don't know," I answer quietly. "But it's not good."