Act Three

Chapter Twenty One – The Illumination of Ben Solo

Above the cavern where Rey was losing herself, the Millennium Falcon flew into Theed, landing next to the TIE-Fighter Rey had stolen from Ben, placing the TIE between the Falcon and Theed Palace. Inside the cockpit R2-D2 chirped and beeped.

"Sir, I am afraid R2 says there is significant interference of an unknown source on the surface. Scans and communications will not work," C-3PO said.

"Both of you stay here, see if you can get through it. If you can, get in touch," Ben said, holding up the communicator on his wrist. Ben grabbed his lightsaber but did not ignite it as he walked through the Falcon's corridors to the exit. Finn grabbed a blaster and Chewie his bowcaster, and the three of them walked down the ramp into the night air, Ben in the lead.

Finn looked around at the ruined buildings and rubble strewn streets and asked, "What happened here?"

Ben looked around, taking in the state of the plaza and answered, "The First Order attacked, on Snoke's orders. Around 25 years ago. Killed almost everyone in the city. The rest of the human population of the planet fled. Some probably still live in the woods. Most ended up on other worlds.

As the three of them walked towards TIE Fighter in the center of the plaza, Finn asked, "Why did he order the attack?"

"I don't know," Ben said, thinking it over. "I don't think anyone at the time knew. Naboo had only ever been important during the Separatist crisis, when my Grandmother ruled it."

"Your grandmother ruled a planet?" Finn asked incredulously.

Ben shrugged and said, "She was the Queen. Then she was the Senator." Seeing Finn shake his head Ben asked, "What?"

"I'm just thinking of the very different lives we have led," Finn said as they reached the TIE Fighter. Finn looked around the interior of the ship and said, "Well she's not in there."

"She's been on Naboo for the better part of a day. Did you think she was going to stay in the ship?" Ben asked dismissively.

"Do you have any ideas?" was Finn's annoyed response.

"No," Ben said, clearly unconcerned with Finn's annoyance. Leaving the TIE behind they started walking towards the palace when Ben stopped and looked to his left, noticing the same building and island that had drawn Rey's attention. "What is it? Do you see her?" Finn asked.

"No," Ben said as he began to walk to his left.

"What are you, sight-seeing?" Finn asked.

"We have no idea where she is," Ben said. "One direction is as good as another."

"I think she's in the palace," Finn said.

"Then check the palace," Ben said dismissively as he walked off alone.

Finn shook his head and walked towards the palace. Chewie watched for a moment as Ben walked away, then followed Finn into the darkness of the palace.

Ben made his way through the streets of Theed and found the bridge to the island. As he walked across the bridge and got a better view of the building and recognized it for what it was. It was a single story dome and surrounded by columns. This is where they had moved her after the public viewing, he thought to himself. He wondered why he had never visited this place. As a boy he would not have been permitted to do so, but in all the years of chasing Darth Vader, somehow it had never occurred to him to visit this place. As he entered the building, which consisted of a single room, the first thing he saw was the stained glass window and its depiction of Padme Amidala, his grandmother. When he looked down from the window he saw her sarcophagus, on which was a raised carven image of her. There were benches built into the walls of the room and sitting on one of them, to Ben's right, was the ghost of Anakin Skywalker, looking on his wife's resting place.

"So here you are," Ben said, a touch of hurt leaking into his voice.

Anakin did not speak immediately, nor look up at his grandson, but when he did speak, Ben's hurt was matched by Anakin's frustration. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for the girl," Ben said.

"You know she isn't here," Anakin said, still without looking at Ben. "Why did you leave the other two behind?"

"Why not use their names? You seem to know both of them," Ben said bitterly.

"I do," Anakin said.

"In fact you have seen more of them than of me," Ben said as he circled around the sarcophagus to stand opposite Anakin, who merely shook his head at Ben's comment. "Finn, the Ewoks, Rey too, right? All of them and who knows who else. Not me, never me."

"The Ewoks saved your mother's life once upon a time. I felt I owed them something," Anakin said, still gazing upon Padme's carven image.

"And Finn?" Ben asked angrily.

"He needed help," Anakin said.

"To do what?" Ben snapped.

"Save you," Anakin said coldly.

"Nice of you to show some interest," Ben said. "Wasn't much of that before today, when I was a child. Rey, you showed a lot of interest in her. That was you right? In her dreams?"

"She was alone. We didn't want her to be alone," Anakin said sadly.

"We?" Ben asked.

"We," Anakin said, smiling softly.

"And what about me?" Ben asked.

For the first time Anakin looked up at his grandson, and said, angrily, "You were never alone, until you chose to be."

"You gave so much to others. Nothing to me!" Ben said, his volume rising and tone hardening until at the end he was shouting.

"You had my daughter, and my son!" Anakin responded in kind, and for the first time Ben heard the hint of Vader's voice in the ghost's words. "You had everything you needed, and you threw it away."

"He tricked me. Palpatine…," Ben started to say.

"You were a fool," Anakin interrupted.

Ben clenched his jaw and said, "I was a child."

"At the beginning, not when you fell," Anakin said. "Don't try to lie to me. There is no part of your life we have not seen. No failure of which we are unaware."

"I am trying to set things right," Ben said, choking up somewhat as he did so.

"No you aren't," Anakin said. "You are here, demanding my attention."

"I destroyed the First Order!" Ben yelled.

Anakin sat back and considered Ben for a while before asking, "Why?"

"What?" Ben asked.

"Why did you do it? Why destroy them? Was your reason for destroying them any different than your reason for joining them?" Anakin asked. Seeing Ben's confusion Anakin continued while looking at the sarcophagus, "I loved her. I could not face losing her. So I destroyed the Jedi, and the Republic. I loved Luke. I could not watch him die. So I destroyed the Sith, and the Empire. I didn't change, not really. Have you?"

"I joined the First Order because Luke tried to kill me!" Ben shouted.

"A lie!" Anakin shouted back. "I wonder is it yours, or did Palpatine teach that lie to you?"

"He was standing over me with a lightsaber!" Ben said.

"If my son had wanted to kill you, you would be dead," Anakin said with a touch of pride. "What brought him to your room that night?"

"He had us at the edge of the galaxy!" Ben said. "My mother was fighting fools in the Senate, and he had us reading old books and doing calisthenics."

"Us? Don't pretend you cared about your fellow students," Anakin said dismissively. Ben opened his mouth to speak but could find nothing to say, so Anakin expressed his thought for him, saying in a mocking tone, "You weren't like them, you didn't need to train, you had a destiny."

"Yes," Ben said after a moment's hesitation.

"And what destiny was that?" Anakin asked. "Not the one your mother and your uncle had in mind. No. It had to be your own."

"And why not? You made your own destiny, didn't you?" Ben asked.

"No, not really. But why would you want to be like me Ben?" Anakin said sadly. Ben, obviously taken aback by hearing his grandfather say his name for the first time said nothing, so Anakin continued, "You had your mother, your father, your uncle, so many others that you could look up to. Why me?"

"You made us great," Ben said after a while.

"Ah yes, greatness. Great men, they make everyone else live in their story. My children spent the first half of their lives living in my story, making up for my mistakes. And then they spent the second half making up for yours. We used them up, you and I. We great men," Anakin said bitterly.

"I never meant to hurt her," Ben said, tears in his eyes.

"I know, Ben," Anakin said. "But your mother isn't the reason you killed Snoke was it?"

Ben walked to the window, looking at his grandmother's image. He turned back to his grandfather and said, "He told me to kill Rey."

Anakin shook his head and said, "That's not it. I know you didn't want to kill her, but that wasn't your real objection, was it? That's the reason you have given to yourself since, I know. It became especially easy to believe it as you came to care more and more for her, as you came to long more and more for those late night talks, just the two of you. But I think you know it wasn't the real reason."

In response Ben just shook his head and said, "You don't know."

"Don't I?" Anakin asked.

"No!" Ben shouted. "How could you?"

"As I said, Ben, there is no part of your life we did not see," Anakin said. "And of course we are not so different, you and I."

"He manipulated me! He thought he could control me! That I was some puppet!" Ben shouted.

Anakin nodded and said, "He thought he could make you part of his story, the way he did with me. That bothered me I suppose. Never the way it bothered you. Not enough to kill him. I did that to save my son. What was your reason, Ben?

Ben leaned back against the wall and slid down until he too was seated on a bench, "So my life would be mine."

"The same reason you drifted from your uncle and your parents. That night in your cottage, with Luke, that just gave you the excuse to do what you already wanted to," Anakin said.

"Snoke…Palpatine put those ideas in my head, he…," Ben said, stumbling over his words.

"He saw the weakness and exploited it Ben," Anakin said, "he didn't put it there."

Ben stood up angrily and said, "Wanting to be my own man is a weakness?"

Anakin looked Ben in the eye and said, "Maybe. But that isn't what you were doing. All around you, you saw greatness. Luke, your mother, me. You didn't want to follow because we hadn't. You wanted to be your own man, because that was the only way to be as good as those who came before. All your life, you have just been trying to be worthy of your family. And you have failed."

Ben put two hands on the sarcophagus and looked down at it, absorbing what Anakin had said. Then, without looking up, he said, "Just tell me how to beat him. Tell me how to end it."

"You can't," Anakin said.

Ben stood up straight and shouted, "I can! I will! It's my destiny, what I have to do!"

"The Skywalker destiny is used up Ben, just like my children. My life was a failure. Your life has been a failure. The day when the galaxy turned on our decisions is over. It turns on Rey's now. You had your chance. You could have been the one to lead the galaxy into the light. You chose the darkness. Like I did," Anakin said.

"Why is she so important?" Ben said bitterly. "Why did you seek her out?"

"I didn't," Anakin said.

Ben, remembering Anakin's repeated use of the word 'we', looked down at the sarcophagus and then back up at Anakin, who nodded. "But that's impossible," Ben said. "She wasn't a Jedi. Even most Jedi hadn't learned the secret when she died."

Anakin simply looked at Ben, who looked back down at the image of Padme's face. She had been very beautiful, he thought, and for a second, he found it remarkable how much emotion the sculptor had put into her face. He could see the sadness. And the kindness. Then he remembered Rey's words in the apartment.

"Beautiful, kind and sad," he said softly

"Yeah," Anakin said. "The beauty and the kindness, they were always hers. The sadness, the sadness she got from me."

"How?" Ben said. "She died."

The shame stood out on Anakin's ghostly face as he answered, "Life creates the Force, and into the Force all life goes. All life. The Force is all the life that is, and all the life that ever was. Every living being feels it. Every living being is guided by it. But some of us, we can control it. I could always control it more than others. Even when I was young. When Qui-Gon was dying, I held on, without even knowing I was doing it. Didn't let him become one with the Force. I had left my mother behind. I was so far from home. He was all I had left, and I was so scared."

"The ghosts," Ben said, "it was you all along."

"It started with me. But Qui-Gon was clever. He figured out what I had done, taught others to do it for themselves. But with your grandmother," Anakin said, "…I was in agony. I could barely think for all the pain. The rage at Obi-Won. I knew I had hurt her. I was worried, about her, about the baby. So I held on. I pulled her to me, thinking I was saving her."

The two of them sat there in silence for a time, Ben thinking about what Anakin had said, and Anakin trying to work up the courage to say more. Eventually he continued, saying, "It is different for those who can't control the force. She couldn't appear, except one way."

"In dreams," Ben said. Anakin could not bring himself to say more, and so Ben thought for a moment before saying, "Mom said she remembered her mother. Then she learned when her mother died, knew she couldn't have. But it was her…wasn't it?"

"Yes," Anakin said softly, his voice full of regret and shame. "She was alone, but she did it."

For a moment Ben thought about his father, back on Endor. He had told himself it had just been a dream, that he had blacked out from the pain and that some wave hitting him had woken him up. His father, he had thought was just some expression of his own unconscious desire to leave the First Order, to put Kylo Ren behind him. But now, as he wondered, his hand went to his face where his father's hand had before. He closed his eyes and his hand dropped. "What about Rey?" he finally asked.

"I don't know how she found Rey. She let the Force guide her I suppose. And she guided me," Anakin said. "We found her when she was young. We knew what she was though."

"What was she?" Ben asked, though he thought he knew the answer.

"What I had been once. A vergence, a nexus, a potential weapon. Most importantly, she was a little girl, scared and alone. Even I had Shmi. Her parents, well, you saw what they were like," Anakin said. "You have failed everyone Ben. Luke, your mother, your father. Even yourself. You wanted to be great, but you have spent your whole life as his pawn. It's too late to change what has happened. The past, our family, its destiny, it's all gone. There is one last person you haven't failed. Yet. He almost has her Ben. She will fight him, and she can beat him, but she will need help. You have spent your whole life saying you know what you have to do. So go do it."

Ben thought for a moment, then looked his grandfather straight in the eyes before walking out of the tomb. When he had left Anakin closed his eyes and lifted his head before saying, "The time has come, they will both need us. All of us."

He opened his eyes and looked down at the sarcophagus, "Just a little while longer, my love."