Chapter Two – The Jedi and the Ghost
"It has occurred to you, I hope, that the fact that you found this in one of the ancient texts means the Old Jedi Masters were aware of this idea and chose never to attempt it," Anakin said to Rey.
It had been several days since Poe and Finn had left. They had been days of feverish study and excited discussion. Or at least Rey had been excited. The ghost of Anakin Skywalker had been trying to rein her in.
"How do you know they didn't try it?" Rey asked, looking up from her books.
"I think we would have heard about something like that," Anakin said.
"I don't know," Rey said, looking back down at the brittle pages of the ancient Jedi texts, "seems to me that maybe someone who did this probably wouldn't be in a hurry to tell people."
"You aren't taking this seriously," Anakin said in reaction to her relatively jaunty tone. Ever since deciding on her course of action after Finn and Poe left Tatooine, Rey had been filled with energy. She raced through the chores of the moisture farm, a drudgery that normally took her many more hours to complete, so that she could get back to her precious Jedi texts.
"I am taking the problem very seriously," she said without looking back up. "You're angry because I am not taking you quite so seriously as you would like."
"It is certainly true that you are not taking my advice as seriously as you should," Anakin said stiffly. "I have lingered here these many years to provide you with my assistance, and you have so rarely done as I have suggested."
"Well most of the time I was trying to train young Jedi, wasn't I?" Rey said while pulling some nuts from a bag. "And forgive me for pointing this out yet again, you aren't exactly a poster child for effective Jedi training." After saying this she tossed the nuts in her mouth and crunched on them loudly while looking Anakin's way.
"If there was a failure in training, I would not blame the student," Anakin retorted.
"I don't know, Obi-Wan seemed to do well for Luke," Rey said disinterestedly.
"Did he?" Anakin said.
"Leia told me that you told him that Obi-Wan taught him well," Rey said while leafing through the book again, searching for a passage she dimly remembered seeing years before.
"Obi-Wan did teach him well, when it came to fighting. He taught me well when it came to that too. But resisting the lure of the dark side? Luke almost fell that day on the Death Star," Anakin responded.
"Almost," Rey said while grabbing another handful of nuts without looking up from the book, where she seemed to have found something interesting.
"And Luke's instruction could not stop Kylo from falling to the dark side…," Anakin began.
"Ben," Rey said sharply.
"What?" Anakin asked.
"Your grandson's name was Ben. It was Ben who fell. Kylo was someone he made up to hide from his feelings," Rey said, her annoyance having taken her away from the book she was reading.
"You speak of something you do not understand," Anakin said.
"And what is that?" Rey asked, closing the book.
"The Dark Side. What it does to you," he answered.
"Excuses," Rey said angrily.
"What?"
"The pair of you, making excuses. You did things. You did terrible things, so terrible you couldn't face them. You couldn't face yourself if you did them, so you made up Darth Vader. Darth Vader did those things, not Anakin. How could Anakin have done them when Darth Vader killed Anakin? Anakin couldn't have done those things, not to those children, not to his Master, not to his wife. It was Vader," Rey said heatedly. "Except it was always Anakin. Vader was like that mask you used to wear, just a way you showed yourself to the world. Just like Ben. And if either one of you had just had the courage to face yourself, to face what you did and try to make amends…well, we wouldn't have to do what we are about to."
Anakin sat there for a long time in silence as Rey stared at him, or rather at the spot where he chose to manifest his presence. Finally he said, "There is some truth to what you say, but only some. I pray you never have to learn what it is like."
"What it is like to what?" Rey asked.
"To be consumed," Anakin said.
Rey turned back to her book, in part to escape the sadness on Anakin's face. Or his representation of a face, she could never quite decide how to think of her long time ethereal companion. A few years after her arrival on Tatooine, after Ben's death saving her, he had appeared. Unlike the other spirits of fallen Jedi his awareness had not been absorbed into the Force after aiding Rey against Palpatine. He could not say why, only that he felt that whatever the reason it would have something to do with Rey. He had been there with her during the years she had trained students, providing an invaluable guide to the methods of the Jedi during the Republic. But he only ever appeared to her. Had it not been for the fact that she had been able to independently verify some of the claims he had made, Rey might have become convinced that he was a figment of her imagination. When she had students, he would appear intermittently and irregularly, but after the last of her students had left Tatooine he had come to be a more and more common presence. For the last year he had been there almost every day. Where was he when he wasn't with her? What was he when he wasn't taking the form of his young self, the image of the Jedi who had not fallen, the general who had not betrayed the Republic, the man who had not killed his wife? These were questions she did not know the answer to, because he could not find a way to put the answers into words.
It had not been, on the whole, an easy relationship. Rey knew of Anakin only from public records, mostly from the during the Clone Wars, and from the stories Leia told her. Of course Leia's stories were mostly secondhand. Her own experience with Anakin was only with Vader, and those were disturbing stories of torture, of the man forcing her to watch as everyone she cared about was killed. Rey had spent years trying to find some way of explaining his behavior, a way to square the courageous leader of the Clone Wars with the sadistic monster of the Empire. Here again Anakin was little help. It seemed sometimes as though he had no explanation for his behavior after the death of his wife. Rey had thought at first that he had some deep bond with Palpatine, a loyalty which blinded him to what the Empire truly was. But then one day he had told her that he had intended to kill Palpatine from the beginning, that from the moment Palpatine had revealed himself, Anakin had held a deep hate for him. As far as Anakin had been concerned Palpatine was nothing more than the man who had tried more than once to kill Padme, who had sunk Anakin into the horrors of war. He had needed him in the beginning to save Padme, and then after her death and his disfigurement, he had been left with nowhere to go.
Anakin's own explanations made little sense to Rey. He spoke often of his hatred for Obi-Wan in the years after Padme's death, of the sense of betrayal by the Jedi, but these reasons did not make sense. Obi-Wan was, as far as Anakin was concerned, gone for almost the entirety of his time as Palpatine's henchman, and the Jedi hadn't betrayed Anakin, they had been betrayed by him. Anakin did not respond well to Rey pointing these facts out and she sometimes wondered if the explanation for why his spirit was still present after all the other Jedi had become one with the Force, was his failure to understand and accept what he had done. Anakin insisted there was work left for him to do. He wanted to make up for what he had done, not analyze it.
Eventually though Rey had gotten used to his presence. It certainly made her time on Tatooine less lonely. One of the consequences of the breakdown of the New Republic had been a decrease in trade. This had less of an effect on Tatooine than on some other worlds, since Tatooine had not had a significant economic presence to start with, but it still had some effect. Mos Eisley was still going strong, but several other settlements had dwindled. Anchorhead had never been a large city, but it was now barely a town. Mining activity had come to a standstill, and after the miners left many of the moisture farmers packed it in as well. Those who could afford to left the planet entirely, while others just migrated to one of the larger cities. The deserts around Rey were empty, except for the Sand People, who steered very clear of her farm. After her last student had left to return to Onderon, Anakin had been Rey's only company. As time went on they came to an unspoken agreement to stop talking about his past sins, but recent events, and Rey's plan to deal with them, had led to that agreement being broken.
But their latest disagreement, tinged as it was with Rey's own complicated feelings about Ben Solo, had led to an evening of silence. Rey continued to read the ancient Jedi texts, searching for some clue. Her plan was based on a hypothesis based on a single obscure line of text, and she needed more detail to fill the idea out. She had not yet fleshed her idea out entirely, but Anakin could tell the direction she was headed, and he was deeply skeptical. This skepticism about a plan to fix the very problems he himself had created made rankled Rey.
She worked through the night, wanting to find the answers before she went to sleep. She felt herself in possession of rare clarity, as though her mind and the mind or minds that wrote the texts were at that moment one. She worried that if she slept she would wake up and the words of the texts would confront her as mysteries, half explained notes from thousands of years in the past. That of course is what they were. Someone living on Ahch-To or Tython or some other ancient Jedi world, in the days before the Republic was first founded, when most hyperspace routes had yet to be discovered, had written these words, and done so by hand. The gap between Rey's life, even far as she was from the galactic center, and this ancient Jedi's life, was immense. What unspoken assumptions guided the writing of this text that Rey could not hope to understand from her position tens of thousands of years later?
Rey was aware of all that, but nonetheless felt sure she was on the right track. Whether it was her own sense of intuition, or the Force guiding her, she felt as though she understood not just the words on the pages, but the way of looking at the world that lay behind them. And that way of looking at the world illuminated not just what was on the pages, but what was being left off. There was a secret in those books, a secret the ancient Jedi were aware of but did not wish to be widely known. But they had left clues, maddeningly obscure and abstruse clues, but clues nonetheless. She would find them.
"I wish they hadn't needed to be so damned coy about everything," she said out loud. It was the first thing she had said in hours.
"The ancient Jedi?" Anakin asked, his ghostly form manifesting as he did so.
"Yes," Rey answered while yawning.
"Some information is dangerous to share widely," he said.
"Did they have to write them in these obscure books?" Rey said jokingly.
"No," Anakin answered.
Rey smiled and then thought for a moment before asking, "What do you mean?"
"They had the Great Holocron," he said.
"The what?" Rey asked.
"You have never heard of the Great Holocron?" Anakin said, vaguely surprised.
"Have you ever mentioned the Great Holocron?" Rey replied.
"I suppose not," Anakin said.
"Then how would I have heard of it? You are literally the only person I have ever spoken to who went through the whole Jedi…thing!" Rey said animatedly.
"You understand the nature of a holocron, correct?" Anakin said.
"Yes," Rey answered impatiently. "I mean, it's in the books."
"Well, the Great Holocron is just a very old holocron. The Jedi have been maintaining it and adding to it for a very long time. Some theorize it is the first holocron, and that all subsequent holocrons were based on that one," Anakin said.
"The Sith have holocrons too though, right?" Rey asked.
"Yes, though it is likely the knowledge of how to make them came from the Jedi ultimately, through the Jedi who broke away to join the Sith early in the order's history," Anakin said.
"Then what was the point of these books?" Rey asked.
"Perhaps they came from a time before holocron technology existed," Anakin said.
"Perhaps?" Rey asked. "Don't you know?"
"This kind of history was not something I was interested in, as a Jedi. Most of what I know now I learned later, and much of that was conjectural," Anakin answered.
"Because the people you might have asked were all dead," Rey said.
"Because I killed them," Anakin said.
"Right, well, do you have any idea where it is?" Rey asked.
"I think it would be best to put this idea aside Rey," Anakin said. "Accept what has come to pass and work to rebuild."
"Easy for you to say, when you aren't the one who has to live with this, with what you did. It isn't fair, to anyone. Everyone in the galaxy deserves peace, the kind of peace that you were born into," Rey said.
"I was born into slavery, Rey," Anakin said sadly.
"The peace the galaxy had then," Rey shot back. "Are you going to pretend that somehow now isn't worse than then."
"No," Anakin said. "But I am going to remind you that now could get much worse. The Sith are gone. For the first time in tens of thousands of years, they are gone."
"And the Jedi with them," Rey said.
"Perhaps that is what the balance consists in," Anakin said.
"No," Rey said wearily. "There's no Sith, ok. But what's to stop someone with the Force from going to the Dark Side? What's to stop them from wreaking havoc once they have? The Jedi keep the balance. Maybe they did a bad job when you were alive. Maybe we need a better Jedi order. But we do need them. And I am going to get them back. And you can help me or you can watch, but I am not letting this go. Now do you know where the Great Holocron is?" Rey said.
Anakin nodded slowly.
"Well, where is it?" Rey asked, once again impatient with Anakin's sometimes ponderous contributions to their discussions.
"Mustafar."
