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She emerges from hyperspace with her hands on the weapon controls, insignificant as the Mirrorbright's defenses must be against what awaits her. But there's no attack, no imminent danger. Just a benighted blue-gray planet, cloud-cover shrouding what the sensors tell her is a world of stone and water and ice.
One surrounded by Star Destroyers. Familiar ones, and strange ones with great gaping cannon mounted on their bellies. Troop transports bustle from one to the other – the First Order surrendering its personnel to the True Contingency fleet, as Rose's source had said. She's barely had time to wonder how she'll make it past the de facto blockade when the comm pings.
“Rey of Jakku.” A woman's voice, disturbingly far too bland and pleasant. “This is Allegiant General Nadejda Pryde of the True Contingency. You have clearance to land at the Temple. Transmitting coordinates now.”
The comm goes silent. Neither the woman, nor anyone else, responds to her requests for further explanation.
The ship's sensors tell her the world below is nearly barren. Aerial photography displays the remnants of settlements, steely and impersonal and bereft of life-forms – all gone, she supposes, to the vessels above. Gaping holes in the glacier reveal the twisted scaffolding of what might once have been shipyards, and she’s struck by visions of the Destroyers rising from the depths, shattering the metallic cradles that had birthed them.
The “temple” turns out to be a vast, asymmetrical block of stone rising from a craggy plain of ice. To the eye it appears as empty as the rest of the planet, but in the Force she can feel the undeniable presence of life.
It doesn't feel benevolent.
***
She parks the ship on a patch of flat ground near a yawning, triangular opening. The entrance opens onto a broad corridor of rough-hewn stone, lit by torches – not electronic or chemical lights, but actual fire – set in sconces at intervals. There are no living beings in sight.
She takes out her sabers, one in each hand, but does not activate the white blades. She walks for what seems like hours – although she knows it to be only minutes – before she feels the tentative brush of a familiar presence.
You're here. Not within her line of sight, but near: on Exogol, in the temple.
I'm here.
For the right reasons?
For you.
It could have seemed evasive, or wrong-headed: after all, when he'd offered to let her friends burn with everything else, that they might rule the ashes of the galaxy together; when he'd thought to surrender himself alone in this very place – that too had been, in his mind, for her. But she senses no misguided intentions now, only a deep weariness in the face of the question, as if it’s far too vast to answer.
Hold still, he projects instead. I'll find you.
She comes to rest in the flickering light of a torch. For a while she feels him drawing nearer, until--
What's wrong?
Nothing I can't take care of. Wait for me. But the emotions transmitted through the bond don't match the words.
He seems to try to close the bond, but she won't be excluded, and anyway it passed beyond their control long ago.
He's fighting – unarmed and unarmored – against parodies, travesties of himself: big men in dark and weighty raiment and dully gleaming masks. Big in all dimensions, lacking that specific disproportionate grace. Brutes without subtlety, relentlessly efficient with their weapons, but mechanical, artless. Horrifyingly wrong.
She tries to join the battle, but in the flurry of skirmishing she can't concentrate sufficiently to step through the bond to his location. One heartbeat her sabers seem to strike metal or flesh; the next she's alone, overbalancing as she swings against nothing. She feels blows and isn't sure if they're landing on her, or on him.
Finally the nightmare-figures pause, surrounding their hunched and panting target, as if to savor their victory – and she has a moment to remember another encounter, a red ribbon passing from hand to hand. A moment to meet his eyes across the bond, to see them widen in understanding.
To let the weight of her heavier saber pass from her left hand.
She steps through after it, the transition sure and complete now, but the fight is over almost before she can join it. There's such joyful defiance in his beckoning gesture to his opponents. Her own blood sings with it, as her saber shears through the air.
***
When the last of the uncanny warriors has fallen, she has time to take in her surroundings: a corridor much like the one she entered by, though her spatial sense tells her it's on a different face of the structure. She inventories him with her eyes and the Force. He’s taken a beating she suspects would leave most people curled whimpering on the ground, but he’s on his feet. He’s lost most of his clothes somewhere, got down to a single lightweight layer, albeit still black and full-coverage from the collarbones down – except for his hands, which are bare. (Echoes of memory: the bare hand extended to her in the firelight on Ahch-To, the removal of the glove far more significant than the earlier, accidental absence of his shirt.)
“You came here unarmed?”
“Getting armed would’ve taken longer. I didn’t think you’d wait.”
She grimaces in annoyance at the inarguableness of this: after all, she hadn’t waited. And she had been the one to disarm him. But still. She recites the promise she’d extracted when last they met, on that great hulk in the sea: “You. Alive. Until further notice.”
“I remember. I swear I’m not … trying to make it otherwise.”
Not trying. Just … expecting. She can't tell if the thought originates with her, or with him. It frightens her, pains her. But this is hardly the time to stop and talk about their feelings.
She toes at a hulking corpse with her boot. “Do you know who they were?”
“The Knights of Ren.”
Of course they were.
“He ordered you to come here, then sent them against you?”
“I think they sent themselves. They … aren't my friends. Weren't.”
“But why would he allow that, if he wants you for himself?”
“If they kill me, by definition they're worthier servants to him than I could have been. That’s how Sith Lords work.”
Without having to discuss it, they've begun walking inward, sabers deactivated but ready in their hands. The stone corridor curves on, gradually narrowing.
“You came here alone?” he asks.
“I left a copy of the map with the Resistance fleet.” A scheduled message, to be delivered when it was too late for her friends to interfere with her own, solitary departure. “No doubt they'll do something rash and heroic. But they can't do anything about him.” The ancient evil. “They're not Force-users. It has to be me.”
“Us,” he corrects softly.
They round a bend, and stop.
Just ahead the path narrows further, transitioning abruptly from rough black stone to a paneled hallway such as one might find on a Star Destroyer – but enameled all in brightest white. Some twenty paces away stands a column of darkness.
She remembers glimpsing this place, when they’d seemed to come unstuck in space, dueling on the ruins of Kef Bir. She'd seen in the obscure object the benighted, hulking monsters-in-the-corner of childhood imagination; had glimpsed, for a moment, a dark pillar with some black and twisted object displayed on top. Now, though, she can tell that it's a droid, vaguely humanoid, shrouded in black draperies save for its disturbingly blank holoscreen of a face.
His bare hand reaches for hers, also bare. But she pulls her own away.
“No. We can’t risk losing ourselves in each other. It’d be too much of a distraction.”
Very softly: “Or everything else is the distraction.”
“What?”
“Something my grandfather said.”
She blinks at the seeming absurdity. But before she can ask him to elaborate, the droid lifts a mechanical limb and beckons, then rolls away down the white corridor.
They follow it only a short distance before the way is barred by a white-enameled blast door. The droid inserts its manipulator, twists an arcane sequence until the panels slide apart.
They step through.
***
“So, you both come to me at last. As you must. As I have foreseen and foreordained.”
The voice is cracked and desiccated, but magnified by microphones and acoustics until it seems to assault her from all sides. The room is still white-paneled, but much vaster than the corridor; the bulky medical machines, softly whirring and blinking with indicator lights, take up only a fraction of its space. The apparatus is all gray steel and black enamel and transparent tubes flowing with red and amber liquids, intertwined with irregular chunks of what looks like dull red glass. Bled kyber, she realizes.
She forces herself to look upon the thing that hangs strapped and suspended from the vertical bed: a human body, surely, but aged and decayed as a long-buried corpse, clinging to life beyond all nature or reason. The Force abhors it, she thinks – but that isn't what she's feeling, not really. She abhors it.
“I gave you a chance to come to me in a spirit of cooperation. It would have been more pleasant for you, if you had. Now, I fear I cannot trust you to act as my worldly servants. You will instead serve me in other ways.”
Images hang before her eyes as if holoprojected: herself – him – similarly suspended from devices of medical torture. Drained, dismembered, destroyed, resurrected, again and again, in service to this creature's quest for immortality.
The horrors nearly paralyze her. But she remembers another moment of seeming hopelessness, at the edge of a crevasse on a disintegrating planetoid. She closes her eyes, seeks the still pool of the Force within her. Ignites her saber.
“Rey, no!”
She screams with the agony, eyes flying open to find the source of it. But it doesn't last long: he's thrown himself in front of her, taking the brunt of the coruscating blue lightning that emerges from the thing’s half-rotted hands. For a moment she sees him on his knees, forehead nearly touching the floor as he curls over himself, body racked as if by seizures. Then the Force-lightning seems to lift him and fling him away, sending him crashing against the far wall, where he slides meters to the floor. He doesn't move.
He might be dead. She might be dead. She isn't, in that moment, capable of grasping the difference. The bond – or perhaps her mind itself – has become a howling maelstrom, uninterpretable.
The thing is still laughing hideously, still lecturing her on the horrors that await her. When its fingers curl to release another barrage of blue fire, she's able to get her saber into its path, to deflect the energy back from whence it came – but it seems to scatter before it reaches its source. The attack has a physical weight to it, and in seconds her muscles are screaming under the strain of holding it back.
“...can you not see that you only bring more torment upon yourself, with this pathetic effort? Surrender now, and things may go better for you...”
Howling, barely hearing herself, she struggles to take a step forward, but finds her knees beginning to buckle instead. The point of her saber gradually sinks toward the floor.
A hand clutches at her fabric-wrapped forearm.
From the blood streaking the floor-panels, he must have crawled to her. He's on his knees beside her, back bent, face inches from the floor, shoulders shaking. But one of his bare hands still clutches the saber she'd given him; and the other reaches upward, fumbling for her own.
No, she thinks automatically, knowing that if they touch skin-to-skin they'll sink into one another, as on Ahch-To, as on Kef Bir. That she’ll lose her awareness of her surroundings, her ability to fight.
As if she isn't already losing that fight irrevocably. As if anything she did now could make the situation worse.
She releases one hand from her saber's hilt, twines her fingers in his.
***
Her eyes squeeze shut against the blinding flare of her white blade, against the matching blaze in the corner of her eye where he crouches at her feet. Her ears are deafened by the roaring vibrations of the crystal in her hand, and in his. But she barely registers the assault on her earthly senses.
She can sense, can comprehend, only the Force.
Not Light and Dark as separate, diametrically opposed streams; but that-which-is, at once singular and multiplicitous, ever seeking to preserve the full spectrum of its aspects, all its permutations, in an eternal blossoming throughout their (minuscule, in the grand scheme of things) galaxy, and all that lay beyond.
(Good and evil – no, care and harm – are sentient concepts, to which that-which-is is indifferent; or no less indifferent than it is to any other manifestation of itself. But only the most cynical, the most despairing, could therefore decree they didn't matter. No, it was for that very reason that they mattered more than anything: it was up to each being, and each alone, what they made of their existence.)
Somewhere nearby, red crystals glow white-hot and burst into shards like microscopic daggers. Medical devices beep frantically before falling silent. Demonic laughter turns to screams.
And high in the upper atmosphere, the great kyber hearts of the miniature Death Star cannon shatter on the bellies of the Destroyers – splintered in the screaming resonance between the two white blades, as the red core of Kylo Ren's lightsaber had gone to dust between her hands on Kef Bir. She feels – with no triumph, but a distant sadness – the existential terror of the True Contingency crews, as the only truth they've ever known comes apart beneath them.
Now, Finn, she thinks – without urgency, because the machinations that were all-important not so long ago, seem so minuscule and fleeting against the incomprehensible ancientness pouring through her. Now's the time for your stormtrooper rebellion. Now's the time, Rose, for your Force-sensitive Canto Bight stable boys, your galactic youth insurgency. Now's the time, Poe, to play hero with the fleet. She doesn't expect them to hear her, but it doesn't matter. They are who they are, her friends; they'll see the opportunity before them.
Something hurts, but as pressure on a shallow wound through a thick layer of bandaging: not her pain. Literal, bodily pain; but more urgently the figurative pain, the screams of the tormented souls above. He'd always been too open, too sensitive; had never really been able to shield himself – so much might have been different, otherwise. She finds her way back into her body enough to squeeze his hand, thinks she feels him squeeze back.
(Years from now, she secures her sabers outside the door (what door? where?) when she comes home, because he still associates the presence of the kyber with the agony of this moment. He only ever sparred with wooden weapons again. But he doesn't seem to mourn that particular loss, and in his presence she has no need of such defenses for herself.
And if the students (!) with their first sabers scoff at those wooden staves, their tunes change when they're inevitably disarmed...)
The vision drains away like water, a dream lost in the moment of waking, as the last of the corrupted crystals shatter around and above her; and the one in her hand grows quiescent, becomes just the mechanism of her saber again.
***
She wakes to the crashing sounds and psychic echoes of the waning space battle above; knows, without having to consciously think about it, that her friends are winning. She doesn't look at the crumpled, smoking thing hanging from the half-melted apparatus; she can feel there's nothing left to fear there.
One of her hands is still half-curled around her saber; the other rests loosely in his. He lies limp and ashen-faced, half underneath her; but when she shifts he sits up in one panicked motion. She releases her saber to caress his cheek, projecting as gently yet assertively as she can, I'm here.
Then, because she wants to, she slides her body closer, leans in until she feels his mouth open under hers. Time seems to suspend itself for a while, until the need for oxygen requires them to separate.
She's never seen him smile before. It's singular, remarkable. She wants never to stop seeing it.
But when their bodies yearn instinctively toward each other again, a spasm of pain crosses his face. Horrified at her own obliviousness – of course he was hurt, badly – she reaches for the power she'd known on Kef Bir, though she hadn't called it consciously then and has no real idea how to do so now; reaches until she forgets to exhale and the edges of her vision go white. But there's nothing there. Skywalker's books were clear enough about Force-healing: a once-in-a-lifetime miracle, outside of its conduits' control.
“Rey, stop. You're just hurting yourself. It's okay. Really.”
It's not. But the earth is rumbling ominously beneath them. She sighs, calls both sabers to her, clips them to her belt.
“All right. But we have to get out of here. I saw a future for us.” She had, hadn't she? “I can't remember now, but I'm sure I did. Did you …?”
“I … I don't know what I saw. Rey – please – you need to get away –”
“Ben! I'm not leaving you. Don't even think it.”
And though it's a dirty trick, she leans into him, strokes his scarred cheek as she kisses him again, until his words and his thoughts stop altogether.
“Okay,” he whispers, when she gives him the breath. “Rey … I …”
“I know, love. Let's go.”
And he lets her get her shoulder under his, manages to only gasp in pain as she hauls him up, out of the reach of merciful oblivion.
I'll make it worthwhile. We will, for each other. I promise.