Chapter Summary:

Rey visits the local cemetery in Hanna City, Chandrila, to check if Ben Solo is truly alive or not.

- PREVIOUSLY-

Rey had no other logical choice but to visit the cemetery and check what version of reality was the true one. And albeit she had been recommended to do so by Maz and urged to make it snappy by Plutt because 'she knew very well what kind of person Snoke was and she did not want to be responsible for his foul mood', she felt almost revolted by the disturbance of peace she was about to commit.

Chapter 2 – Chandrila, Part 2

She had to admit that the last resting place of Chandrila's elite actually had its charm. Framed by the most beautiful flowers, plants and trees she had ever seen, and elegantly interwoven with gritty paths, most of the tombs and gravestones were made out of limestone that beautifully contrasted with the white buildings all around. If it wasn't for the typical headstones, Rey would have easily mistaken it for a common garden.

While she had first expected that the tomb of the Skywalker-Organa-Solo family would have been hard to find, she had actually managed to identify it in an instant. It didn't particularly stand out and yet, its features obviously meant to draw the interest of any visitor of the cemetery.

The individual families were represented with a symbol unmistakeably connected with their legacy. The Skywalker family's sign which resembled a symbol of the Jedi Order was engraved on the right while the sign of the Solo family – a pair of dice – was engraved on the left. Both were connected to the logo of Organa Engineering Company at the top with decorative lines.

Rey hesitated at first but eventually lifted her hand towards the door that yielded to her demand and opened. Inside, she found a staircase down to the underground crypt that was embellished with wall paintings of the individual members of the families. These were paired either with a built-in vault that protected the coffin holding the body of the deceased or the with a memory placard honouring the lives of those whose bodies were irretrievable.

Circling the crypt from left to right, Rey silently read the names of the dead and inspected their portrayals on the paintings to both pay her respects and to find the one she was looking for. The moment she came across it, she sighed in disappointment. Nothing resembling an image or a portrait that would reveal how the boy looked like while he was still alive was there. Only his name and the dates of his birth and death.

Ben Solo

9 ABY – 24 ABY

In a way, the sentiment to keep the built-in vault so plain was understandable. Leia's son hadn't lived long enough to reach adulthood and experience at least a bit of the forming history of the Galaxy unlike all the others who had left the world prematurely. Coming down here to pay respects to her beloveds and see the face of her son on the vault could have been too painful to process.

But Rey needed to know whether his body was indeed inside so she batted down the hatches, reached for the handle and pulled the closed coffin out, grunting with the effort. Afterwards, she approached the wooden casket etched with the symbols of all three families, found the hand and closed her eyes tightly before promptly lifting the lid.

She stayed in such a spasmodic position for a few more minutes, too afraid to open her eyes. She neither wanted to see a still putrefying body, nor a skeleton. But when the anticipated smell of decay didn't start tickling her nose, she actually dared to raise one of her eyelids to check what exactly was in front of her. And the sight made both her eyes to snap open.

The coffin was empty.

Well, not entirely empty. Two objects were lying on the cushions inside but it was still short of the body of the deceased. If Ben Solo was truly dead, then his body wasn't certainly where it was supposed to be.

Frowning, Rey started at the holochip placed on the white fabric before her gaze landed on the cylindrical metal object with black grips and some switches on the side. Albeit she had never seen one in real life, she recognized that she was looking at a lightsaber hilt because she had heard and read about them in stories and seen them in documentaries on HoloNet.

To be in the sudden presence of such a hallowed thing she personally considered a myth was incredible. The Jedi, the Sith, the Force… All were part of one big fairytale Rey knew was real but so distant and enigmatic that it felt as a work of fiction.

She had never met anyone familiar with either of the orders or the Force users in general, albeit rumours had it that Snoke used to work for the Emperor himself but he had declared it untrue on multiple occasions. Her first acquaintance of such a kind was supposed to be Leia but since she had passed away, the lightsaber hilt in front of her was the closest thing now.

The more Rey stared at it, the more she was tempted to pick it up and heft it – just because she wanted and because it seemed as an alluring idea. Some voice inside her head she didn't recognize even tempted her to do it. And because she knew that there was no one with her inside the tomb, she decided to listen to it.

Up to this day, she wasn't sure whether touching the lightsaber had been a good idea or not, and whether she would do it again if she had known what would have followed afterwards.

Darkness swallowed her and before she could adjust her eyes to it as she tried to find out what was happening, suddenly she was blinded by bright light. Forcing her eyelids to open because she heard some distant voices, she realized that she was no longer inside the crypt but in the middle of a modern-looking office.

An elegantly dressed woman was sitting behind the desk with her back to a large viewport that provided the view on the whole city full of skyscrapers and flying spaceships. She was just standing up to face a young man next to her, apparently trying to explain something to him, but all Rey heard was an unintelligible murmur.

Once the scene in front of her crystallized, though, she could finally hear what the couple was saying, making her feel as if she had interrupted a very intimate moment.

"This weapon is my life." The young man stated earnestly while offering the lightsaber hilt to the beautiful woman, his eyes full of undying affection.

But the lady refused him with a simple gesture of her hands and reasonable choice of words. "No, Anakin, I can't. A Jedi lightsaber is—"

He interrupted her by taking her right hand and placing the hilt inside her palm, symbolically putting his life in her hands. If Rey hadn't been rooted to the ground with shock, she would have 'awed' at the romantic gesture.

"Wow. It's heavier than I thought." The lady, who apparently held a lightsaber for the first time in her life, assessed with a smile on her face.

The man leaned towards her. "It's yours." He told her, his eyes shining with love.

However, his expression drastically changed in an instant – his face framed by a dark cape was suddenly distorted with anger, hate and disdain. But he wasn't looking at the elegant lady anymore, and neither was his piercing look aimed at Rey. Instead, it belonged to the small, fair-haired boy and the group of younglings dressed in Jedi robes.

The boy winced when the blue plasma blade came alive in the hands of the man he thought of as a protector and the subsequent betrayal filled his eyes with horror. Rey had heard enough about the execution of Order 66 and had no desire to experience it personally, so she closed her eyes tightly, and wished to go back to the tomb and leave this horrid memory of the past behind.

For a very excruciating moment, she heard nothing. No screams. No begging for mercy. It was almost... too quiet.

Then, the air was cut through by an unexpected mechanical sound that resembled nothing of the massacre she had heard so much about. Carefully, she opened one of her eyes only to see herself standing in a spaceship next to an old, white-haired man who observed the movements of someone who had to be young Luke Skywalker, if the portrait on his built-in vault was any indication.

Luke stood with the ignited lightsaber at the ready, defending himself against the bolts coming from the training remote that floated through the air. The intensity of his concentration reflected in the expression on his face but at the same time, Rey could tell that he was nervous and insecure.

"Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him." The old man counselled his young apprentice knowingly, yet without a hint of patronizing tone that would suggest that he was losing his patience.

Repeating the very same words and relaxing his posture, Luke lowered and subsequently disengaged the weapon in his hands. His features started to change – his hair grew longer but lost their blonde shade, turning to light brown and almost grey. A beard framed his chin and his complexion darkened under the amount of wrinkles that were etched in his face.

The only thing that remained the same was the pair of big blue eyes that were looking at the dark-haired boy in front of him as he knelt down to draw himself on the same level of height. The boy outstretched his hands and Luke placed the lightsaber hilt into his hands with an encouraging smile.

With that, Luke disappeared and Rey was left alone with the boy sitting on a bed in – judging by the decor and the belongings – his bedroom. The abundance of his hair obstructed her view so she couldn't tell how he looked like or what he was thinking but it was clear that he was toying with the lightsaber hilt in his hands, studying its components one by one.

Then he stood up and crossed the bedroom to his desk full of drawing equipment and blueprints, discarding the hilt with an offhand throw over his shoulder. The weapon missed its intended target, hit the frame of the bed instead and fell on the ground, its cylindrical shape sending it rolling across the floor towards Rey's feet.

This time, she didn't hesitate to pick it up because for the first time since she had started to have this weird vision, or whatever she was supposed to call it, Rey felt that she was to be directly involved in the incoming scene. Yet, when the environment around her shifted, she was nothing but part of the audience once again.

She watched the vision version of herself brushing the thumb over the switch to ignite the plasma blade that illuminated the darkened room of some spaceship, quite similar to the one she had seen earlier.

"How could you?" She heard her own voice snarl at someone in the room.

Turning around to see who the object of her wrath was, she spotted a tall, dark-haired man dressed in black, kneeling a few feet away from them. He was hunched over an astromech droid who had definitely seen better times since his white, blue and silver plating was dirtier than hands of a spice trafficker, both literally and figuratively.

When he patted the domed head of the droid and straightened up, the room suddenly got lit up by a star map projected by the astromech. Then the man turned around to face her vision version, his features blurry as if Rey wasn't supposed to know what he looked like. However, she was practically one hundred percent sure that he was the dark-haired boy from the previous scene. The hair was unmistakably characteristic.

"Rey." He said her name softly as if he sought to calm her down. Considering that she pointed the lightsaber in his direction angrily, it wasn't an unreasonable request.

The vision version of Rey didn't seem to be pacified by his tone, though. In the next second, she let out a fierce shout as she charged at the man, frightening the real Rey much more than him. Stumbling backwards in order to prevent herself from being injured, she landed on her buttocks and found herself flying through the air.

Actually, she couldn't say that flying was the right word for what was happening. Her third-person perspective was simply very high up in the sky, rapidly coming closer to a green island in the middle of a raging ocean. After a while, she could even make out the two figures – one male and one female – climbing a set of stairs up towards a building of some sorts sculpted into the rock formations on the island.

She didn't even need to get a nearer look at the couple to know that the female figure was her. Her movements as she walked. The determination in her steps. Rey had no idea why she would ever visit such an island, let alone in the company of some man she apparently trusted, but the woman was her.

The speed of her perspective accelerated and Rey closed her eyes tightly once more. She didn't want to see the inevitable collision with the vision version of herself and being flooded by sudden nausea wasn't pleasant, either. Her stomach swung, almost making her vomit before she realized that she was back in the crypt, sprawled on the ground as if she fell down from the sky.

Groaning, she shook her head to disperse the buzz pressing the insides of her brain together while she was lifting her body up on her palms. Then she drew her legs forward to support herself further on her knees, as well. And when she felt confident enough to try, she pushed herself up and rose to her feet.

To her surprise, she felt incredibly well and somewhat energized as if the whole experience charged her with something her body needed to absorb first which was the reason was why she had felt so horrible. Either way, the queasiness was gone, her instincts kicking right back in.

And her first one was to run. If she understood the vision correctly, it had showed her the past and the future of the lightsaber that, for some inexplicable reason, included her. And to be honest, she wasn't sure if she wanted to become the person from her vision because she seemed to be everything the current Rey wasn't.

In the vision, she had been angry and violent. These immediate emotions and feelings Rey harboured like any other being in the Galaxy but she barely let them loose. In the vision, she had also been spontaneous, adventurous and trusting. Current Rey preferred adventures with determined schedules without any unexpected abrupt changes like travelling to an island she had never seen with a man who was a total stranger to her.

However, she halted after a couple of steps she had taken in the direction of the exit because the rationalizing instinct managed to subdue the primal one.

She had nowhere to go.

She was a lawyer with unclosed case and returning home without doing the bare minimum to resolve it was out of the question. She would get fired at best and that meant that she would lose everything – her job, the money she earned to live a relatively comfortable life and with that, the roof over her head.

And even if none of it bothered her, she had no idea what else to do with her life. As an orphan, she had no family that would take care of her and all her friends worked for Plutt, so...

She had nowhere to go.

Maybe she had just proved that Ben Solo was actually alive as Leia had claimed. But there was still the woman's house and her office to search for evidence that it was the other way around, and Ben's body had just been simply buried elsewhere or irretrievably lost. She shouldn't – and couldn't – give up so easily because of some stupid vision that didn't even have to come true.

Soothed by the analysis she had just performed, she chose to stay and do her best to close this case or at least to gather as much information as she could. Being shiftless wasn't in her nature, after all, and Plutt would have never chosen her to carry out this solo assignment if he had thought so.

With such a resolve, she approached the coffin. Hoping that it contained some valuable information, she picked up the holochip placed on the cushion and slipped it inside her satchel. Then she resolutely closed the wooden casket and shut the built-in vault with the help of the handle to return the crypt back to its original state before she had arrived.

When she turned around in order to leave this gloomy place, her gaze landed on the lightsaber hilt lying on the ground not even a foot away from her. To tell the truth, she entirely forgot about its existence, too overwhelmed with the vision it had caused but seeing it now, she wished to scoop it up and throw it away or destroy it in some effective way.

But she couldn't because she naturally respected the relics of history and this hilt was no exception. However, she felt revolted by the idea of opening the vault again so she could place it back inside the coffin. But she couldn't leave it there on the floor, either, because the thing was dangerous. Anyone could find it and wreak havoc with it just like the vision had shown.

No, she had to swallow the fear of having another vision and rather take it with her, although she had no explanation for this urge. Lifting her right leg, she inched the tip of her foot towards the hilt, lightly tapping it to test it out. When nothing happened, she dared to crouch down and carefully poke the object several times before wrapping her fingers around the hilt to pick it up.

Maybe the vision was a one-time thing that was triggered whenever someone new touched the lightsaber or something because she saw nothing unusual. Shrugging her shoulders, she left the place to continue in her investigation by paying a visit to the seat of Organa Engineering Company that house the factory, the hangar with spaceships and the mansion.

The End of Chapter 2

The chapter is a bit short for my standards but I didn't want to make two way too large ones and rather cut this one as Chapter 2.

Flashbacks from Rey's vision that shows the past and the future of the lightsaber in her hands are taken from:

- Anakin and Padmé – Star Wars: Clone Wars, Season 1, Episode 22 "Hostage Crisis"

- Order 66 Anakin – Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

- Luke training with a lightsaber – Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope

The rest is fabricated for the purpose of the story.

Updates will come as I will progress in writing future chapters of the story as this is not my only WIP.

Thank you for your attention!