The end comes in sunlight.
Rey with her lightsaber at her side, Kylo Ren a quivering puddle of shadow at her feet. The shadow has lost its arm, and it pleads and swears and promises under its breath, I know the secret to eternity, I can show you the way—I have seen time fray and fall apart, I have risen the dead to life—
Rey only sees the boy. Ben Solo. She sheathes her weapon and falls to her knees and waits as his face upturns toward hers, and the sunlight graces his black eyes gold; and all around them, a field of weta sways in soft goldspun stalks, and the shadow begins to forget its old name.
"I…" Ben Solo's eyes stray up to the heavy, angled shapes of the Resistance cruisers drawing lower, bringing great gusts of wind with the flare of their engines. "I never thought…"
No. She nods in agreement, and he coughs a red splatter of blood and smiles through the mess of his teeth. He starts to cry.
The daughter in her womb lifts her delicate head.
Ben slumps forward. The wound is a perfect circle in his stomach, red and gaping and they both know that it'll kill him, soon enough. But they're holding off, waiting, and Rey extends her hand for him to take, to cling to in sweat and love and overwhelming joy, overspilling.
"We… She's ours?" he croaks.
"Yes." Rey nods. She kisses his fingertips, each one.
They had met only in dreams over the course of the past few years, always in this spot, among the weta, sometimes in rain; sometimes in storms that they had to shout over, and at first they'd fought and flung up mental boundaries to ward the other away, and other times, Rey had sunk into the cold pit of his despair and he had burrowed deep into her and found her longing—for her parents, for their touch, and the meeting had melded the two of them together until they were very much the same.
The two of them, they longed. Kylo had carved himself away like an infection from his family, and Rey had stayed put and spent most of her life staring up at the stars, waiting for a ship to appear; waiting for the rise and fall of her mother's voice, her father's hands.
(He'd been a mechanic. She remembered the smell of grease on him, the calluses of his touch on her cheek. Rough, but refined.)
(Stay put. Stay. We love you so much but we have to go—)
"There was no have to about it," Kylo had said as they lay together, stunned by the pull of the Force between them. "They left because they chose it. There's always a choice."
The first time that Kylo had touched her, the both of them had shuddered under the weight of how right it had felt. It had been an accident—a blow to her arm, though his hand had lingered and neither of them had strayed.
Despite the cold of his Dark, Rey had stayed, had felt compelled to. Heat in her cheeks, a strange tension, and there had been a terrible hot coiling in her stomach until she'd bent up to kiss him. Sudden, bizarre. Perfect.
I don't understand, he'd said against her lips. I don't even like you—
Stay, the Force had hummed around them. Stay. The two of them a universe in balance, Kylo laying her down against the warm dirt and cupping her face in his hands and humming, too; a low, satisfied note.
"There's always a choice," Rey said back to him, opening up her longing to him. "Wrong ones, right ones. Not everything has to be leaving, or cutting lives short."
Between them floated the trails of blood, the boy Kylo remained, even at his age, searching for belonging in a string of pink guts; Grandfather's leather fists, the terrible stark black-white sigil of the Empire and the monster Kylo had become to swear to it again, expecting some kind of honor from the straight, unwavering discipline of it all.
Kylo had run his blade through his father's chest on a thin metal platform at the heart of a kyber crystal-fueled reactor like the core of a star, and the planet had cracked itself apart with the pleasure of its burning—
Anger is misplaced fear, Rey whispers in the Force to Ben now, as he stares up at her in his dying seconds and blinks, wondering why in his past he had felt so angry. He knows next to nothing of Kylo Ren. He's as unfamiliar as a foreign galaxy to Ben Solo.
You were terrified.
"Of what?" he manages.
"Of yourself." Of love, she adds.
Then, as a swell of wind bends them narrower and the life leaks out from between his twitching hands (and a reflection of the blue sky gleams in his crown, and the god-Emperor falls—)
"Me, too," Rey says. "I was scared to love you, too."
—
The daughter that Rey holds in her womb knows nothing of funerals.
She only knows that her mother is crying, and that Father is dead. If she peers far enough into the Past (her Force-powers already Light and Dark and the million shades of color that construe the atoms of stars, far past the spiraling parent-arms of the universe), she can see the two of them lying together, clinging to each other for comfort as if for dear life. Around them had floated the fates of ten trillion souls, war and famine and grief as a galaxy out of balance had warred with itself, again and again, forever.
The daughter feels pity. And this is what she shows to her mother, who gives the swell of her stomach a condescending rub.
What could you know of loss, Rey asks sharply, and the sting of it cuts deep enough into the two of them to force tears, and she sucks the question back. I'm sorry—
Before he died, Father almost found the secret to life without end, is the daughter's stiff reply. An old man that should have died in a nuclear reactor stretched himself past the veil and showed pieces of it to him. It was an old trick; it had worked on his grandfather, and it worked on him, too, and he went mad after seeing it.
Rey feels a sick, slippery dread wind through her as she remembers those months before Kylo had met her in that field, calling out for her to end his life: the First Order frothing with white-shelled troopers that had burned villages and killed children in untold millions. Finn, refusing to speak for the terror of those he'd grown up shooting alongside, Poe pulling him gently by the hand away from his grief back into the false sunlight of the cockpit of the Falcon, lit up in strips of white and glowing, shrieking blips of red from the control panel.
Kylo's orders to the troopers had been nonsensical: Burn, and kill whatever you can, and Emperor Snoke had died suddenly with a blade in his side and a curse on his lips, and Kylo Ren had crowned himself and ruled in madness from his great seat.
(The Emperor is dead. All Hail the Emperor.)
All throughout the stain of his insanity, Rey had felt the pull, again, to the golden field. She hadn't been able to bear it; she'd turned away until the toll became too much, until her grief for the parentless children of the ten billion souls the Emperor had collected with a flap of his leather-gloved hand had bent her toward surrender.
When they'd finally met, Kylo had rambled about midichlorians. About a man named Plagueis, and the Rule of Two, and the genius of the Sith. All life is suffering, Rey, and I have seen the secret—
And then he'd paused, his silver crown tangled in the greasy mess of his hair; and between them, the longing, still. Deeper, now, as the chasm between them grew.
(They were reminded of Starkiller—earthquakes upending their feet, jostling gravity, red lines streaking into the sky to tear up the stars—)
In the present, Rey's crying is what smears the sky into colorless streaks, and she leans on Poe for support. Her daughter kicks uselessly inside her; she doesn't know anything of funerals, and she's confused as the living offer all of their words for Leia and none for the son that lies beside her.
(The same day that Ben had died, Rey had returned to Takodana to find tears running down Finn and Poe's faces and the general dead from a sudden stroke.)
(She'd hardly sensed it in the Force; the pull of her grief had already been so great, and she'd been trying to shield her daughter from any memories of suffering like what she'd gone through in her youth, waiting for a ship that never appeared.)
Mother, what are they doing, speaking to her? Don't they know that she's already dead? She can't hear them.
My love, Rey thinks, offering a slight pulse of amusement despite the day, despite everything—They speak because they heard her when she was living, and they want to keep hearing her voice, still.
Is that why no one's telling stories about Father? Because they don't want to hear him, anymore?
Yes. Rey closes her eyes and wishes to melt away, to forget it all. Like Ben had for such a brief, shining moment, all light and forgiveness. He did one great thing, in coming back to us. But so many terrible things, besides. He caused so much suffering.
Then why did you stay with him?
Dear one, Rey thinks gently, It was the best decision that I could make.
—
Now, Ben Solo burns alongside his mother in a grand funeral pyre of heaped sticks, and after the funeral, wine is served and the soldiers dance, clumsiness in the rhythm of their steps.
They're not used to celebrating. The years have been hard, but the Mad Emperor is dead. Across the galaxy, everyone rejoices, and Rey's daughter finally decides that she's had enough; she kicks hard against her mother and forces herself outward, and Rey gives birth in a labor that lasts a mere two hours before she's screaming into the world.
The little girl names herself Kira.
Rey nestles her close and wonders what kind of empire she will make. She senses in the child a future bright and splintering and endless as the Force demands from her. She is balance: perfect, shining. She is longing fulfilled, she is love beyond love pulled loose from her mother, and Rey grips her tight and fills the galaxy with the ecstasy of her joy.
There is always a choice. Now, all the little girl has to do is choose.
Rey places a kiss against her daughter's wet, slimed head (covered in her mother's blood, ripped from safety). And she knows that her daughter will choose well.