Wow another awesome batch of reviews! Thank you guys so, so much. I hope you know what every single one means to me. This next chapter happened because of all of you, but you can thank IronManSaidPinata because it was their final push that gave me the spark to write this even though it's late and I should be sleeping. Please enjoy, and I promise we will be getting back to Rey and the others in the next chapter.
Leia was alone with her son in a locked room, and all she could do was weep. Weep with grief for what had happened to him during his fall into the dark. Weep for what the dark had done to him in the end, weep for the pain and the loss he had inflicted, and weep for the raw joy that he was home. The expressions she'd gotten when she'd brought him inside were varied and none of them were positive, but those present didn't dare oppose her either.
"We can't have him in the medbay," the medic on duty had said, a look of hardness in his eyes as he watched Kylo as though he was faking and would rise any moment to strike them all down.
"Then we will move a bed to my quarters, and we will lock him there. I am to be his sole guard and caretaker until he is well enough to stand on his own and face whatever trial the council decides on," she said, and through her reserved nature and commanding posture her authority left no room for argument.
The medic seemed reluctant to even give up the supplies necessary, so it was Leia with the help of a mute medical droid that took Ben down halls until they reached her quarters. Ben would need to remain in the medical bed for his rib cage to repair properly, so she placed the berth right next to her own bed.
She switched on the scanner and focused on the calibrations, taking a prick of Ben's blood and setting it in a tray. The bed accepted the blood and began scanning him, using his undamaged DNA and crosschecking it with the current state his body was in. Its soft, blue diagnostic glowed up from beneath Ben's back, making it look like he was resting on a chip of light. Leia slipped an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, securing the strap and refusing to let herself linger in his soft hair.
The droid hovered over him, doing its own calculations and communicating with the bed in a silent exchange, a whir of needles and measurements working to stabilize Ben's weakened body and lend strength to his tired heart.
It would take nearly an hour for the bed to determine the proper course of action so Leia busied herself by clearing anything that wasn't completely necessary for Ben's care out of the room. She would entrust the items to Rey later, but for now she locked them in the closet, knowing Ben was too weak to get at or use any of it.
That done, she changed out of her more military clothing and into robes she hadn't worn in public in a long time, robes that she'd first begun to wear when she was pregnant with Ben. They were soft and comfortable, a drape of hushed colors that helped calm her. She wrapped the sash and tucked it with care, an unsteady breath leaving her as she reached up and pressed at her hair, making sure it wouldn't come lose.
The droid was reaching for Ben's tunic with its knife arm when Leia approached, but she held a hand up, waving it away. "I will undress him. Work on figuring out what he needs," she said. The droid backed up and obeyed.
Leia settled her hands on Ben's chest, pulling gently at his robes and unfastening them layer by layer. His chest pressed weakly against her fingers as she worked with every breath he took, and she knew she hadn't loved a sound or a feeling more since the day she'd first heard him cry and held him in her arms. With great care she took away each layer of dark cloth until he was bare to the hip, the ghastly damage around his throat and deep in his chest all too apparent.
She did not look at it and continued to work, folding the dark robes that were stiff in places with his blood and setting them aside with care. If he wanted them back he would have them. She would stitch them back together in the places she'd cut to remove them without hurting him further, and she would let him have them. She wasn't going to send any part of him away ever again.
She did the same with his belt, his boots, and his trousers, keeping him covered as she changed him into the soft medical pants not for her sake but for his. She could see nothing but her little boy as she dressed him, but she knew he would feel the deepest shame to know that she'd stripped away the dark that he wore like armor. She was grateful he didn't have his helmet with him. She wouldn't have discarded it, but it would have haunted her all the same.
She took a basin of warm water and a fresh cloth from her private bathroom and set the bowl near his shoulder, taking her time to wring the water and make sure it was a comfortable temperature. She began at his head, tenderly wiping away the blood smearing his forehead and tangling his hair. She combed her fingers through his hair and worked out the knots, supporting his head like she had when he was an infant, careful not to move his neck as the droid lay down a cooling gel to ease the swelling and stop the terrible rasp that came with every breath. Gradually, as she continued to bathe him stroke by careful stroke, his breathing quieted and some of the tension Leia wouldn't acknowledge eased in her back. She gave him the smallest of smiles and stroked his cheekbone.
"That's my Ben," she whispered.
She turned with a lump in her throat to dab at the cut crossing his chest, blinking through a fog of tears as she saw what a ruin Ben's attacker had made of his body. Parts of his ribs sunk unnaturally and there was hardly a place on his torso not discolored by internal bleeding or severe bruising. The droid had administered several clotting agents and other intravenous therapies, but Ben had a long road ahead if he was going to heal completely. Still Leia kept working until he was free from the grime of battle, and when he was clean she adjusted the temperature in the room so that he'd be warm. The bed was heated by she could feel the chill threatening over his skin.
Finally, having done all she could for the moment, she sat next to him and tried to see who he'd become while he was away. His dominant hand was slathered in burn gel, so she lay a hand over his undamaged one, picking it up and studying the slender, finely strung lines of it. His skin was warm and soft despite his age, and that only made it harder for her to see him as the fully fledged creature he'd chosen to become. He looked so very young and honest in his vulnerability, something he'd worked hard to bury every conscious moment since he'd left home.
She turned his hand over and spread her own against it, marveling how the last time she'd done that he'd been barely able to fit his fingertips half way to hers. Now she was much smaller, and the callouses that marked the places he held his saber too tightly (she had a brief flashback to his early training, when he'd learned to fight with either hand. Clearly he'd kept that skill) rubbed against her skin. She closed her fingers to fit in the gaps between his and rubbed her thumb back and forth.
He had Han's strength and her elegance, and he'd grown into a powerful figure that could be beautiful if he'd only let the light touch him again. She looked at his face, at the slope in his nose he'd inherited from Han, at the long, thick lashes he'd inherited from her, and at the lightsaber scar he'd gotten from Rey. His hair, damp though it was from her ministrations, lay feathered and thick against his cheek and the table, and she let herself stroke it back this time, remembering countless nights she'd done the same to ease him from nightmares made too strong and too terrible by his force sensitivity. It was those nights she'd felt so out of her depth, those nights she'd come closer and closer to her decision to send him to Luke.
She swallowed and her eyes misted again, the light dying to a softer glow underneath him as the bed finished its scan. It gave a quiet hum and then the hairs on her arm prickled as the bed put up a field that would begin the process of putting Ben Solo back together. The droid had been monitoring its patient's brain waves and heartbeat the entire time it had been hovering around him, but only when the bed switched to actual healing did it begin transmitting sound.
Most droids were programmed to record the heart the same way most standard equipment did, with the peaking line of an EKG and the quiet beep. This droid had been left in an alternate setting, the sensor it had attached to Ben's chest looping back with the bed and providing a much more thorough reading of his vitals. Instead of a line, the droid was displaying a detailed ultrasound of Ben's heart in real time, the flashing indicating where the assailant had bruised so deep he had damaged the precious muscle.
Leia covered her mouth at the damage, but she was even more overwhelmed when the sound clicked and she realized that she was hearing her son's heartbeat for the first time since she'd carried him in the womb. In an instant she was back in her room with Han, clinging to his hand with nervousness as the droid put a sensor to her stomach and let her hear her baby's fluttering heartbeat for the first time. She'd cried then too, overwhelmed with the entire concept of being a mother, of holding a life inside herself that was her and Han and someone new all at once.
She felt weak all over as she finally succumbed to the emotion and she wept, clinging to Ben's hand and listening to the slow, matured thump of his life, wondering what his heart had sounded like at each stage in his growth, wondering why that hadn't seemed important while he'd been with her.
She felt suddenly that something had been lost, that if only she'd known his heart at every age, if only she'd seen him grow up then things would be different. He'd skipped from that hummingbird rhythm at his beginning to this broken tempo so many years later and all she could do was plead with the light that this not be his end. She had missed so many heartbeats, so many moments, so many smiles and tears and scrapes and accomplishments. The thought that she might never hear what his heart sounded like when healed and whole, that she might never get to see the beauty of his talents in the force and as a warrior, broke the last of her resolve and she leaned against the bed, clinging to his hand like he might vanish at any moment. She sobbed softly, and for the first time since his death she felt a longing for Han so great it ached.
"You should be here," she whispered. "He can't come back on his own. He needs both of us." She looked up at Ben's face through her tears and ran her free hand across his hair. It curled against her the way Han's had when she used to bury her fingers for a kiss and she drew a shaky breath. "I need both of us."