Let the past die. All too vividly he remembered growling the words across their bond. Kill it, if you have to. And he had. His father. Snoke. Luke. All his would-be fathers, everyone who'd ever tried to master him. They were all dead, all but her – them. His mother, the only part of his past he hadn't been able to destroy outright, and the girl whose touch had showed him the future. And they wanted to surrender.
He stood at a viewport aboard his ship. Shoulders square, back straight and rigid, hands clasped behind him. His stance was powerful, but purely performative, as though he were trying to convince himself. He was; in truth, he'd never felt less sure of himself. He'd managed to answer some of the questions that had choked his consciousness in the cave. It wasn't difficult; the truth was obvious. What he hadn't known instantly, Rey had simply stated for him. His mother was done. The war was over.
That the war could be over – this is where his mind stuck, now. He couldn't conceive of it. The war had been going on forever. This was not an overstatement. Light and Dark had warred for generations. His grandfather had fought the war on one side, loved and lost his grandmother, and joined the other . His mother and uncle had been born because of it. His father and mother had met fighting it. What ought to have been his own happy childhood was deformed by it. His parents had struggled to love one another – to love him – in spite of it. Because of the war, his sensitivity toward the Force, once perceived, had instantly become a source of fear for everyone around him. The war itself had made him a liability. He had grown up with the contours of his world entirely determined by it. He ought to hate the war more than any of them. And he did. But at the same time…it had brought him into being, given him an identity, a purpose. How could it end? Who would he be without it?
Let the past die. His words returned to him, inflected differently now. Was this what he had meant? Was this the logical conclusion of his own desires? What did that mean – for him, for any and all of them? If the war were truly over, what was his duty to the First Order? What could he – they – make of it, now? How could it be made to serve them all? How might it, his government, his power, the Force, be made to serve a higher purpose? Could he find peace here? Balance?
Balance – something hung there around that word as it sat in his mind. Light and Dark, Peace and Struggle. The tension between them, his desire to serve only one, had been tearing him apart all his life. He had been un-balanced, Snoke had snarled endlessly. All his violence had been an attempt to restore balance within himself by exterminating the Light. But now, he wondered, could Light and Dark be meant to live within him? For a moment, he wished it might be simple. He was ashamed of the thought, resented it. Resented how simple it had seemed, in spite of everything, for the girl.
Rey, Rey of Light, whose power and purpose had been apparent nearly from the start. The droid had found her, or she it, against all odds, as though her path had been determined from the outset. She'd literally been handed a map, he thought despairingly. It had drawn her into a conflict in which, for her, the right choices had all seemed obvious. Protect the droid. Follow the map. Find Skywalker. Win the war. But this wasn't what perplexed him, he realized. That was far more difficult to understand, to explain to himself. He had felt both Dark and Light within her, but no conflict between them. Her anger with him – it was Darkness. But it had never occurred to her to use it for any purpose other than the protection of the Light. As though it hadn't been a choice at all.
Perhaps it hadn't been, he thought. She hadn't been born into this conflict. She hadn't been told, growing up, that the Force was divided into positively- or negatively-charged fields that were, somehow, automatically right and wrong. The distinction had no meaning to her outside the war. It was a false distinction, no choice at all. For her the Force was just… there, present for her, all of it, indivisible. What Luke had considered the call of the Dark side – the call of the cave on that unknown island – had turned out to be the vehicle of truth for both of them. It had shown Rey herself – that she was what mattered – and, although it had made her feel alone, that loneliness had led her to him and to a truth she wouldn't have been able to see otherwise. She'd used the Dark to follow the Light. No, he thought, the distinction dissolving in his mind. She'd used the Force to follow the Force. The Force was there to serve the Force, and so was she.
The tautology maddened him. Again, as in the cave, he felt himself confronted with a totally transparent non-problem. What she felt, what she did – it was an extension of the way the Force was meant to be used. He felt the anger he'd felt at their last meeting start to rise again within him. The fury he'd felt at being handed such a simple solution. He felt cornered and it incensed him. Their surrender was what he'd wanted, but it threatened to strip him of everything that had given his life meaning. The past did have to die, and with it – his rage became horror – him. Like the war, the false segregation of the paths of Light and Dark had given him his identity. Everything he was depended on it. How could he give it up? He'd thought his way in a circle. He was back to the most terrifying question of all: Who would he be without it? His expressive face had fallen slack. His shoulders sagged. His limbs felt empty, his chest sickeningly hollow. He stared blankly out the viewport, feeling betrayed by his own mind, abandoned by illusions, left only with a truth he could not bear. Their surrender would require his own.
Four days had passed on the island. Rey's emotions shifted from moment to moment in ways she had given up trying to track or make sense of. They were many and disordered, flickering one into the other uncontrollably.
Not that she wanted to control them. In meditation, she was learning to watch them from a distance, to feel them and their power without letting them tug at her. It was not a matter of stifling them, she'd quickly learned. To shush them only made them louder. No, she needed to see and feel them, thank them for the wisdom that they'd offered her. They were, it turned out, very wise. She'd meditated on the stone promontory where she'd first reached out into the Force, with Luke at her side. She'd meditated in her hut, every evening. For hours, as she waited for him. She'd even thought of meditating in the cave, but two things occurred to her. First, that there was nothing the cave could give her that she couldn't find anywhere – literally everywhere – else. Second, that in doing so she was only trying to provoke a confrontation with Ben Solo. She needed to feel the Force for its own sake and not for his. She needed to cultivate her connection to it for herself, not for him and not as a doorway to him.
Rey's clarity, her understanding that her path was leading her toward him but was still her path, had come on that first day on the island. It had started with the realization that Luke's books had become hers. It had solidified as, in the aftermath of her connection to Ben, she had started to see the cave as an utterly un-magical place. What had transpired there was a result of her desire, not some mystical hold placed on her by the Dark Side. She'd called out into the Force, and it had offered her what she needed. Not what she wanted – neither time had it supplied that. Not the names of her parents, not answers of any kind. Like this "Master Yoda" Luke had described, it spoke in riddles – and she had solved them. She had done the next right thing, and then the next. This was the third part of her realization. That evening in Leia's hut, she'd seen it. That, in spite of her mistakes, she was doing it right. As she'd watched Luke and Leia talk, joining and falling out of their conversation easily, she'd seen the depth of their love for one another and the Light. Even more profoundly, she'd sensed how much each had given up in order to follow their own unique path. Each had served the Light in the way they knew best. Leia was a leader and a warrior; Luke was a tender-hearted mystic and teacher. Their triumphs were legend, and their missteps equally impactful. Their errors had led them directly to this moment. And yet, no matter their consequences, at the time they had seemed like the only choices worth making. The obvious choices, the right choices. Self-recrimination had only held them hostage. Faith in themselves and each other was what had set them free. The way she could best honor these two was by following her own heart as they had followed theirs. She had herself, and she had the Force. That was all she needed to do this right. Maybe this was what Maz had meant when she'd described the belonging Rey desired as lying ahead of her rather than in her past. Even though she had not seen it at the time, that belonging had come when she'd joined the Resistance, and later when she'd felt the Force. The memory of Leia's words brought a faint smile to her lips: We have everything we need.
Another phrase subdued that smile: My son is not mine to save, and he's not coming home. It felt more true every time Rey thought about it, and she was beginning to see how she might use this lesson. She knew she'd been foolish to think she could "turn" Kylo Ren, but she had no wish to punish herself for trying. What she did want was to clear the way for him to accept what they were offering. As Luke and Leia discussed what lay before them, she realized that it would not be easy.
Diplomatically and economically, war's end was a dangerous prospect. War organized people and things, Leia pointed out. It required discipline and austerity. It was a good way – the way – to keep people in line, keep them from asking for more, for a better life. It also kept the rich and powerful, well, rich and powerful – which was the only way to secure the favor of people who could afford to replace governments whenever it suited them. Leia knew the fickleness of such groups well and felt that Kylo Ren could thrive as a leader – the Supreme Leader – only in a regime conditioned by and for war. For this reason, he would view surrender as a threat. Her concession and the disappearance of the Resistance would procure a symbolic victory, to be sure, but it could not meaningfully increase the fear that already kept half the galaxy enslaved. And Leia was only half of the problem, now that Rey had realized that her path was leading her in the same direction. She was going, too. Rey would not rule with him, and he could not make her. If he accepted their surrender and put them on trial or to death, he risked a resurgence of the Resistance in the quarters of the galaxy that lay quiet only because they thought that someone else was out there fighting their battles for them. Executing them as war criminals might silence some, but others would not tolerate it. They'd rise up. She and Leia would be replaced by people who had no reason not to wage all out war against him and his regime. Killing them – harming them at all – would be too great a risk. If he couldn't kill them… what could he do with them? Indeed, they reflected grimly, Leia's strategy was marvelous. By laying down arms, she might win the war after all.
And what of Ben Solo? This had occupied her mind late into the night, after she'd left them. Returning to her own hut, to her own fire, she'd lay down to sleep. But the memory of his face in the cave – receiving her offer, hating her for making it – remained bright behind her closed eyes. The political consequences of their surrender were nothing compared to the personal ones that he might face. As Snoke's grip on his mind continued to recede, he'd have to confront his own desires, make his own choice about the future. Was he really ready to let the past die? What would it mean for him? If he and Leia were to meet again, even under the circumstance of her concession, how would he face her? The profound extent to which he'd hated her compassion, in the cave, was the extent to which he was going to need it. His silence across the bond – four days a lifetime, given how many times they'd connected in the few days that had preceded them – spoke of a new torment for him. Drifting off to sleep, she thought of the certainty she had achieved during those days. She reached out into the Force, sending something of her own softness, and comfort.