Prologue

At some point in his wilding years, he had learned that life was nothing but a series of random events that simply ranked at different degrees of pain.

The events themselves didn't matter. Credits came and went. People came and went. Trouble and illness and love and loss: all of it was temporary.

The pain, though… The pain was eternal: the crux of all sentience, the price of awareness. And that was what had saved him, time after time after time: not the hair-trigger reflexes or the critical ingenuity for which he was known. Not the quick thinking or the luck that he wore on his hip like his trusty DL-44. It was his understanding of the fundamental principle of pain as cosmic ruler. Pain as god.

He knew the truth, and that knowledge had always protected him.

It had protected him, that is, until the very minute that it wasn't his pain to bear.

Leia.

Her face was a testament to the tragedy of one heart breaking so many times that it could barely hold its shape anymore. Again and again, she had been torn apart, and it was true horror: pangs of heat running through his chest like molten rock.

Big, brown eyes rimmed with tears. High cheekbones and a belying softness to her face. Ferocity in every line, in every slope and plane, of features that used to haunt him at night. Lips pressed tightly against the platitudes she wouldn't dare say. She could tell him that she loved him, sure, but that wasn't important right now. What did it mean in this moment, when he was about to die?

Love. As if love could save him.

No. He didn't need to hear kindness from her. Right now, his pain—her pain—required justification. A reason. Validity, because life was pain, but they clung to it anyway, desperate for it to bring meaning to their existence. Something had to be worth it all. Something had to be won for all of this to mean any goddamn thing, for the struggle and the betrayal and the pain to continue.

And she … she knew. It was worth it, she said instead, and wasn't that something to hold onto? That to her, to her, this pain was defensible, that she could look at the score and call it a win, even if her mountain of pain rose so high above her small body now that she could never hope to summit it?

It was something to die for, and he believed her.

He bore witness to her testimony until he couldn't anymore. The lift took him down down down and he clung to those beautiful brown eyes until there was suddenly, blissfully

Nothing.

No pain. No worries. Not a thought in his head, not a sense of time progressing. A big, bald, gaping nothingness where his usual jaded insouciance used to live. There was nothing to protect because there was nothing here, and there was nothing to comment on the nothingness, either.

It was quiet.

The only perception he had was of a slight, faraway roar of waves breaking on a shoreline and the faint taste of salt on his tongue. And, sometimes, the whisper of a single, soft, heartbroken voice.

Stay here.

It wasn't enough to count as existence—he didn't exist—but it filtered through the nothingness now and then. Brushes of reality, while he was outside of such things.

He didn't find it bothersome. He didn't find anything bothersome. But something outside of his body felt a sense of peace when these sensations brushed by him.

Stay here.

He couldn't think of a name, because he didn't think at all. No memory. No credits or trouble or love or loss. No pain.

But.

Someone existed outside of this nothing. Something held sway over the timelessness of this space. And there was a part of his past-self that would recognize her voice anywhere. He didn't have a name, but she did. He wasn't living, but she was. And even if he couldn't acknowledge that fact, it was indeed fact.

Stay here, she said.

And he stayed. He waited in this nothingness, tasting the salt air and hearing the crashing waves, because he would do anything for her.

Anything.

Author's Note: Welcome, friends! I've been a busy chef in this AU kitchen of mine, and I am so very excited for this journey we are about to undertake. I have written 32k words of this monstrosity already, so I am ready to begin posting. I'm aiming for a new chapter to drop each Friday. Weekly updates! Let's go! -KR