"Nothing will stop the return of the Sith!" Palpatine shouted, his voice full of a crackling energy that spoke of raw triumph, and raised his hands.
Rey rolled over, and watched as Palpatine shot a blaze of lightning into the air. It stabbed outwards, like a tree, and the branches struck fighters and cruisers out of the air.
"Oh," she said. "So that's allowed, is it?"
Palpatine stopped shooting force lightning into the air, and turned to her. "What do you want?"
"I want to understand what's going on, exactly," Rey replied, picking herself up, and leaned on her staff for a long moment before remembering that she didn't actually have it.
She stumbled slightly, then recovered and shook herself. "Because you're not exactly making the case that I shouldn't kill you, here."
"Oh, of course you can kill me!" Palpatine laughed. "But if you strike me down, you will become me!"
"No I won't," Rey replied.
Palpatine blinked.
"...what are you talking about?"
"I realized, just now," Rey explained, waving her hand vaguely at the sky, where the Resistance ships were recovering from their tailspins now the electrical blast had halted. "When you did that."
"Are you trying to tell me that my demonstration of my unlimited power has led you to decide that I cannot do something?" Palpatine said, frowning at her like she was a particularly stupid child. "If you wish to fight me, whoever wins, the Sith will rise and rule the galaxy. The only difference is, if you choose to obey me, you will still survive."
"That's really how you do it, isn't it," Rey replied. "That's how you defeated all those Jedi. That's how Luke defeated you."
She touched the lightsaber at her side, then moved her hand away from it. "It's because Luke was the only person to have more conviction than you."
Turbolaser fire flashed overhead, and Rey glanced up.
"Excuse me a moment, grandfather," she said. "I need to deal with this."
She reached up, and clenched her fist. Then she brought it down, and all the ships of the Final Order bar one abruptly fell out of the sky.
They crashed to the ground like hailstones the size of cities, a multiple crash of explosions that trembled through the bedrock of Exegol and made the ground jump and splinters fall from the ceiling, and Palpatine stared at where his fleet had been before turning a baleful gaze on her.
"How did you just do that?" he demanded.
"Excuse me?" Rey replied. "You literally just shot out bolts of lightning that filled the sky from horizon to horizon, and with such precise targeting that you could target specific starfighters. All I did was pull things downwards."
She shrugged. "If you're going to keep going on and on and on about how I'm your granddaughter, then you've got to expect that I'm going to take what you can do as a baseline for what I can do. And size matters not to the Force."
Palpatine fired a burst of lightning at her, this time, and Rey held out her hand to deflect it.
When the sparks stopped, Palpatine stared at her, then a smirk crossed his face.
"Kill me, then," he said. "And take your place as my heir. As my successor – as my vessel, inheritor of all the Sith!"
"We already went over this, didn't we?" Rey asked. "You're literally just saying that. It's never happened before, and I refuse to accept it's possible. So it won't happen."
"Do you really think I'm going to just sit back and decide you've won?" Palpatine asked, sounding honestly curious. "Do you even know what happened on the Death Star? When your precious Luke Skywalker faced me?"
"Yes, I do," Rey replied, calmly. "And you're going back and forth a lot between saying you're going to kill me and saying I should kill you."
"That is because I will win in both cases!" Palpatine insisted. "Let me remind you what happened in my throne room. Luke Skywalker was too weak to fight me, and I electrocuted him until his father intervened!"
"Luke Skywalker struggled with whether he should kill you," Rey amended. "But he didn't go there to kill you, not at all. He went there to save his father – and he did. His conviction that he could do that was stronger than everything you could ever do."
Palpatine's eye twitched with rage.
"Jedi masters could not stop me," he said. "And there are none here now. The Sith are eternal, and we will always triumph!"
"The Jedi are eternal, and we will always triumph," Rey countered. "I can say things too, you know."
"What's going on?" Ben asked, finally managing to clamber out of the hole in the ground. "Why is there so much smoke in the air?"
"We're talking philosophy," Rey explained. "My grandfather here said that it's impossible for him to lose. I said that it's impossible for me to lose, and now he's essentially complaining that he has dibs on saying it so I can't."
"The Dark Side is eternal!" Palpatine snapped.
"So?" Rey asked. "The Light Side is eternal as well. You aren't."
"I came back from the dead!" Palpatine replied.
"I haven't had to yet," Rey countered. "Besides, if you're a Light Side Jedi then being dead only seems to be a minor inconvenience."
"It doesn't even take being a Jedi," Ben volunteered. "My father appeared to me to help me return to the light."
"Your father?" Palpatine repeated. "Han Solo, that ridiculous scoundrel? He's not even Force-sensitive! He's nothing! That's not possible!"
"Like coming back from the dead?" Rey asked. "It sounds like your idea of what's possible or impossible is very focused on what you want to happen."
"That's different!" Palpatine said. "Because I'm right!"
"You're clearly not," Rey declared.
"I am all the Sith!" Palpatine roared, standing up, and lightning fizzed around his hands.
Then Ben Solo shot him.
"...huh," he said, as Palpatine fell over backwards with a crater in his chest, and the old man's oppressive Force presence faded. "Dad was right, sometimes that does just work if you catch them by surprise."
AN:
Force Calvinball.